ApplesauceIrishCream
No bio...
User ID: 882
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Not DC Sniper, that's off by a decade (2002). The bombings might be a wash; in the wake of Dobbs, there were a number of arson attacks on churches and crisis pregnancy centers by pro-abortion radicals. Did the 90s bombings have higher body count? Unabomber killed two people in the early-mid 90s.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Because settlements are agreed to by both parties--a compromise. There would be no point for Nick and his attorneys to agree to a trivial settlement when they could go to trial instead and potentially win big. If the case was easily dismissible, CNN and WaPo would not have settled for any amount; they would have just filed a motion to dismiss and moved on.
Nick undoubtedly got a fair bit less than he was suing for, but still a substantial amount of money. That's how settlements work.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Smirkgate kid got all his cases dismissed for being "objectively unverifiable" so the media's response was just non-actionable opinions. Which means they're broad or vague enough that you can't objectively say they're false. Though he did settle with CNN and The Washington Post before the trial was dismissed so he got something.
Source? This is internally inconsistent. Yes, CNN and WaPo settled--which means, they gave Nick some substantial amount of money, amount not publicly known. They would not have done so if his cases were dismissible.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
From your post on pluralist civility, linked above:
Here, then, is my (local) pluralist manifesto.
- Respect that discussion norms are local. Don't try to make them universal.
- Be part of the overlap. Belong to more than one community.
- Encourage other people to recognise that discussion norms can and should differ from place to place.
- Encourage other people to recognise that broad discussion norms are incredibly valuable and should be nurtured wherever they are compatible with community aims.
I endorse this unreservedly. Thank you for your contributions.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I'll give it a shot at the mistake-theory explanation, and it's pretty simple: it is a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy.
Conflict explanation--it's malice for the outgroup. Mistake explanation--it's at best thoughtlessness; "a combination of virtue-signaling and innumeracy" isn't a position that I'd describe as...intellectually respectable?
This is where I'm confused--I thought that Scott's advocacy for viewing disagreements as mistakes was at least partially rooted in charity: let's assume the best of those we disagree with. But in this case, it sounds like the mistake version rounds to some version of "just dumb," and it's not obvious to me that this is a more charitable explanation than malice. Both are bad; is anti-intellectual thoughtlessness clearly better than hatred?
Does a steelman exist? Is there an answer that would reflect well on progressives? If yes, what is it? If no, what's the point in picking dumb vs. evil?
ApplesauceIrishCream
9mo ago
On the topic of American exceptionalism, I found Bret Devereaux's analysis last year to be quite compelling. The linked post is also one of the most emphatic exceptions to Betteridge's Law of Headlines that I've ever seen.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Better to lose while being moral than to win while being immoral.
I despise this phrase, and I think its central error is presenting a false dichotomy. There are third options, and this phrase is used to deflect responsibility for avoiding costly actions that are moral while simply taking the L with an air of smug self-righteousness. Your character is not just determined by your actions: refusing to act can negatively reflect on your character when you are shirking obligations that are your proper responsibility--to yourself, your kin, the Truth, etc.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Yes, I'm familiar with the "set rules, draw by algorithm" method. (And there are rules that people find generally agreeable for this process; compactness and existing political/geological boundaries are good examples.) One issue is that when you make a list of popular and well-justified rules, it becomes hard to simultaneously satisfy them. The bigger deal is that someone has to code the setup, and someone has to approve the result, and these are capturable positions. Unfortunately, it is very very hard to make a job "apolitical" and also retain accountability in cases where a partisan sneaks in--Madison et al. tried their best at this exact problem with judges, and various controversies with the judiciary only emphasize the limited success you can have.
...There's another, and much bigger problem, though. If you district by naive algorithm like this, Republicans win the districting process an overwhelming majority of the time. The reason is the actual, on-the-ground political map--Democrats tend to cluster in cities, Republicans dominate the towns and rural areas. The goals with political gerrymandering are sometimes known as "packing and cracking"--pack one district with all the opponent voters you can stuff in, 90%+ if you can get it, and crack other concentrations between districts, with no more than 40-45% opposition. If your opposition is already clustered, packing and cracking are much easier to accomplish using inoffensively shaped districts.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Is there a term that combines motte-and-bailey with the sort of three-card-monte shuffle you're talking about?
ApplesauceIrishCream
9mo ago
How about "questgiver sends PC on a mission to pick up a collection of several different drugs, some already familiar to the character, some not, and later on the character can find out more info about the drugs, a few of which are sex-linked hormones"?
This premise could spiderweb into several plotlines (someone later gets poisoned by an overdose of one of the other drugs--did questgiver do it?), most of which shouldn't be linked to trans-ness. Both of the fictional series that I can think of that handled trans-ish characters well gave the characters a whole lot more plot and drama to focus on that wasn't just one-note trans angst (Safehold series by David Weber; TWI by pirateaba).
ApplesauceIrishCream
10mo ago
Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines and Neverwinter Nights, respectively.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
That would be the same ICJ that has no jurisdiction over Americans, as the US is not a party to the Rome Statute.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I would say the difference is how far you extend the concept of original sin into its Christian context before applying the analogy.
Let's say you describe original sin narrowly as follows: "When you first came into being, the weight of original sin was already upon you. It exists both prior to and independent of any moral choices that you might make."
I think that definition works in both a Christian context and a woke context. But if you broaden the scope of discussion to things like "where did original sin come from," "is there a solution to original sin," "is original sin something that is universal among humanity, or only a subset thereof," etc., then you start getting severe divergences between the two contexts, and the analogy quickly breaks down.
That said, I believe that the analogy based on the narrow definition is on point, and the surrounding differences may also be usefully contrasted.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Would you call yourself a minarchist?
If any government is to do anything, it generally needs to pay for it. If it's going to have the money to pay out, it needs to have some method of collecting money. What would you define as the valid parameters around "government collecting money"?
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Surely that's only true until the next election? If an elected representative makes a decision, and his electorate decide to re-elect him, that looks to me like ratification of his decision.
Sure, representatives make a lot of decisions, so re-electing them is more aggregate approval than specific approval, and then there's the factor of "is he better than the alternatives," but at some point, accountability has to go back to the electorate. It's the people who are sovereign, and responsibility comes with that.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Younger republicans have turned even more sharply against Israel, considering the baseline.
Evidence? Yes, the baseline support for Israel in the Republican party is very high, but in terms of policy, Trump was a move towards Israel, not away, and I believe he's been reasonably popular among "younger Republicans." BDS isn't a party plank for the Democrats yet, but it has become a non-fringe (and growing) position within the party.
democrats have been getting further in bed with centrist neoliberal parties that usually want the middle eastern Cold War to end.
Wanting isn't having; policies matter. In any case, Democrats have also been getting further in bed with the Iranian regime, and while you could fairly say that the mullahs also want the Middle Eastern Cold War to end, they consider a glowing crater where Tel Aviv used to be as a valid means to that end.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Most people (and the law) consider it meaningfully different to use a nail gun on a cabinet as opposed to a person. Yes, you can describe "killing a person" and "remodeling a cabinet" as both "tasks that may be more efficiently performed by an expert," but I don't think it takes "political correctness" to say that collapsing the two acts elides an important distinction.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
I think it's amusing that some of the kids say they weren't going there to TP but only to look at how bad the house had been "got", and another kid is like, "Man, it happened so fast we hadn't even opened our toilet paper yet!"
@Gdanning Please do not injure yourself when you facepalm; I'm sure this brings back memories of the thousand-yard stare variety.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
One bit of irony is that it's pretty common for conservative speakers in the US to use properly metaphorical dogwhistles, with the following significant caveats:
-
the statement isn't racist, sexist, or whatever -ist is popular; and
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the statement isn't actually picked up by liberals except sometimes as "what could he have meant by that weird statement?"
It's usually a Biblical reference, used as shorthand to describe something. Both speaker and audience have enough shared understanding that a casual reference suffices to communicate, while the liberal commentariat has no idea. It may not even be intended as covert, just efficient, and yet the intended audience understands while the outside audience has no clue which is exactly the situation a dogwhistle claims to describe.
(Also, I am protected at the bottom of the stairs. You cannot shove me!)
ApplesauceIrishCream
3mo ago
Have you tried the "save comment/post" functionality? That seems like the logical place to hang a notification flag, if one isn't already there.
ApplesauceIrishCream
4mo ago
I've generally heard it described as "imperial units are superior for human-scale measurement; metric is superior for much larger or much smaller scales."
ApplesauceIrishCream
6mo ago
I don't think this is an example of progressives holding on to a particular Christian value arbitrarily; rather, I think it's the case that rape-as-a-major-bad-thing fits particularly cleanly into a philosophy organized around an oppressor/oppressed dynamic coupled with avoidance-of-harm as a major value. A Christian who retains the values of his heritage would agree that rape is a particularly bad thing, but his philosophical basis is different (e.g. the strong should protect the weak and sex is sacred).
ApplesauceIrishCream
8mo ago
MIT isn't full of socially astute individuals, but it's not short of them either. Essentially, MIT filters for high-IQ (though to be more precise, its filter is a high baseline requirement for math aptitude and prior education--if you're not ready for a hardcore dive into calculus when you show up, you're in the wrong place).
There isn't much of a filter for social competence. You'll get stereotypical nerds who have issues with interpersonal obliviousness or maturity, but you'll also get cheerful, outgoing cheerleader-types who happen to like tutoring statistics and casually nailing at least a standard deviation above class average on their upper-division chemical engineering exams.
ApplesauceIrishCream
1yr ago
Another complication is that this right vs. left judgment is context-dependent, based on the particular society you're looking at. In a lot of cases, each individual judgment may be more directional than absolute--for example, a rightist might say "our society is too error-prone in judging individual rich people guilty of exploitation; it should do that less," while a leftist in the same society might draw the opposite conclusion. Move the same people to a different society, and they may both find themselves on the same side of a relative center that is positioned differently.
(Also, the leftist critique here is a classical Marxist economic-centered view; the woke left seems to have no particularly strong view of wealth per se, as their societal critique is identity-centered. ...I admit, I'm amused by the the potential question of whether someone identifies as a rich person.)
I don't think there is a plausible strategy that Israel could pursue that would result in a friendly response from the Palestinians.
However, given a sufficiently militarized incentive structure, one might be able to proceed from "negative response" to "no response." If the Palestinians are moral agents, this incentive structure could be described as the just deserts of their previous actions.
I agree that Israel is stuck with an unfortunate hand; I do not agree that they are left without effective strategies.
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