BinaryHobo
8mo ago
It’s just reminds me of killer king hospital where they tried to get “representatives” of the community working there but then a lot of bad care happened. Perhaps, policing isn’t as complicated as medicine.
I don't think how complicated it is matters as much as you're thinking here. I think the difference is subjectivity. The right way to police a community, fundamentally depends on the community. The point of policing is to have safe, happy communities. And if you don't, it doesn't matter how much objective criteria you've ticked off a list, you've failed. It's a very soft-skill heavy, squishy job. Or, as I've heard it said: "The most important thing for a police officer to know, is which laws not to enforce."
Medicine, on the other-hand, has a very obvious objective pass/fail standard. Did the patient live or die? This lends itself more readily toward standardization and academic knowledge. Biology works pretty similar within most bodies, and if it's not working that way, it's often the thing you're supposed to diagnose.
There's just hopping to the other side of the old schism.
With the pope losing legitimacy in the eyes of the conservative catholics, presumably papal primacy is out the window, what's separating them still?
The teachings on original sin are a little bit different?
filioque? I would be surprised if the average catholic was aware of that particular controversy.
There's precedent for western-rite orthodoxy, albeit limited.
Edit: And how much are those disagreements worth against direct apostolic succession connecting you to your savior? You really only have two options for that, and if you've already ruled out catholicism, you're kinda down to one.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
More and less in different ways.
There's no way to actually stop someone from speaking (including "dangerous" speech), but they can choose to be on instances that are not federated with instances that tolerate this speech (more power within their fiefdom).
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
I don't want to comment on the neo-pronouns, but I have a question about this bit:
That one offends me more on grammatical grounds than any feelings I have about gender identities.
The singular they goes back to at least the 1300s, at least according to Merriam-Webster. What kind of pedigree are you looking for in your english words above and beyond a word usage that literally predates modern english? Is it just that the same word can refer to singular and plural? Does the word "deer" bother you in the same way?
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Sure, but they're talking about a technology change.
Before the internal combustion engine, the maximum human travel speed hadn't changed in centuries either.
Not to say that it's likely, but I think you're ignoring the essence of the argument.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
war isn't positive and beautiful
That's entirely fair, but for most of human history, the rhetoric around it was. So was the vision. War was painted as glorious.
Obviously war and the culture war are different, If we're going to compare them, why are they different in this particular manner?
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
That only seems to present a problem if we assume all labor is the same value.
If we assume some labor can be more scarce than others, say an expert or those with exceptional natural talent, the situation resolves itself.
But, what is scarcity, but a description of how much effort (labor) is required to obtain something? The record companies probably do put in 1000x the effort to recruit someone like Taylor Swift. Talent scouts, marketers, etc. Of course the LTV requires people be willing to expend labor in exchange for the product. But, the record companies only expend the labor cultivating talent because they expect to receive value in return. The labor required to create a talent acts more like a price of production on a standard economic graph. Products that return less value than required to create simply flop and don't stay on the market very long.
If we've described scarcity in terms of labor, I think the labor theory of value holds together, although I think it does become one of those equations where you can solve for any of the variables.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
I think people are using support for the death penalty as a proxy for various "tough on crime" measures.
BinaryHobo
19d ago
I think you're ignoring that video games are big business these days, with large staffs. You're going to have a lot of people just phoning it in, along with a general regression to the mean. It's possible for a single person operation to knock it out of the park (or completely bomb, but you're probably not going to hear about that game). It's really hard for a 1000 person operation do do anything that far above average (average for a professional).
BinaryHobo
1mo ago
But, where are you seeing this idea the Democratic ground game in shambles? In reality, in basically every special election for the past few years, plus the midterms, the Democrat's have run past their prior margins, including just this past week, winning a Trump +1 state legislative seat in suburban Huntsville by twenty five points.
With the shift of college educated voters to the democrats, I expect this to be more common. The highly educated are much more likely to turn out for non-presidential elections (republicans benefited from this in previous elections as well). But there's a ton of voters that only show up every 4 years, and only vote for president, and those demographics seem to be sliding towards the GOP.
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
I believe HBD is a worse explanation for persistent black underachievement than the lingering effect of centuries of cultural disruption under slavery combined with decades of further disruption under racist post-Civil-War legislation
I know this wasn't the point of your post, but the way you sorta phrased this as a binary made something click in my mind. I'm gonna be honest, I can't buy either of these explanations. And both, oddly enough, for the same reason, the Greenwood District in Tulsa (site of the famous race riot). Ok, so not just Greenwood, but there's plenty of examples of functioning black communities from that era.
Modern society is just straight up not as racist as 1920s Oklahoma. And black people were able to build functioning communities within 60 years of gaining their freedom. And by all accounts, communities that worked quite well. I'm aware of the highway system disrupting black communities, but it's been 60 years since that happened, and that can't be as big of a disruption as being enslaved. There has to be, at the very least, a confounding factor.
At the same HBD makes no sense. The argument is generally that black people have too low of an average IQ to succeed, but we have examples of functioning communities. Even if it were true, the most extreme claims of the HBD groups tend to put the average IQ at around 70, and that's roughly where the US as a whole was circa 1900, and there's plenty of examples from that time of people with this average IQ forming perfectly functional communities. That can't be the entire explanation either.
BinaryHobo
6mo ago
But yes, words can certainly be used to intimidate, threaten, or encourage violence.
Those first two are fair, but silencing someone to prevent that last one is, generally speaking, beyond the pale in the US.
The right to advocate for violence, in the abstract, especially at a later date, has been ruled to be constitutionally protected speech in both Brandenburg v Ohio and Hess v Indiana.
And all of those things can make it quite difficult to run a trial.
I mean, yeah? But we, as a country, haven't generally been optimizing for ease of running a trial. We have, generally, been optimizing for not allowing speech to be suppressed. Do you have an argument for why now is the time to pivot?
BinaryHobo
7mo ago
A plausible consequence of increased tax would be for landlords to sell up and the available housing stock to rise, thus lowering house prices.
This is explicitly what the OP said was happening several times during their post, except according to them it makes the shortage worse because the former renters buy more rooms than they were previously renting.
This may lower housing prices, but it seems like it would, paradoxically, raise rental prices for those that can't buy for some reason (don't make enough money/make money irregularly, can't get a loan, lack of documentation, need to move frequently, etc).
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
The essence of that argument is usually something like "look how much the mean (or median even) lifespan has gone up over the years -- surely people will soon live to be 200".
You can't take the average argument for a position, you have to engage with the argument in play, because it only takes one good argument for something to be right. I can generate several hundred bad arguments for any position you want right now.
Even further, that wasn't the case this time. TheDag explicitly called out a technology change.
Quoting them:
I think the most likely path is that the current elite (or the elite of the next generation) will create life extension technology and effectively rule forever...
And when talking about what science is coming, they don't talk about past medical advances, but reference AI, presumably some sort of intelligence explosion.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
Seems like exactly how twitter was before the Elon takeover, except you can't get kicked out of the entire network, you might just have to make an account on a different instance.
Though I doubt you could get a small number of instances. That would require a lot of computing power, and mastodon is hard to monetize.
That last bit is the real reason I don't see mastodon taking over. No ads means you'd have to charge up front, or a subscription, or something. Normies seem willing to endure leftist signaling, but we've never seen them chomping at the bit to pay for it.
I suppose someone could fork the client and change the protocol, but it's not really a mastodon instance at the at point.
BinaryHobo
1mo ago
Sure, but there's a limit to that. McDonalds is available everywhere in the country.
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
Or rather, there is high demand for her labor in particular, meaning labor alone is not just a source of value, but depends on other factors such as skill, and consumer demand.
I'm not sure you can separate it quite like that. You can boil the current demand for Taylor's labor down to the results of the previous labor (voice training, practice, focus groups, marketing, etc). Or, really, the 3 hours spent at a concert isn't the only labor being sold, it's the cumulative labor that was required to create that concert.
Which would explain why skilled labor pays off so much more than unskilled labor. A skilled laborer is selling the labor they spent training over and over again, whereas the unskilled laborer only sells the labor they are currently preforming.
Once you introduce enough of these factors and mutate your "labor theory of value" to be robust and accurate and account for all of this and related factors... you just have normal economic beliefs
This is kind of what I was trying to get at towards the end of my post. It really feels like you could boil down all of economics to any of the inputs, as you can generally convert them to each other (if nothing else, then by converting to money first). Not entirely sure how useful it is at that point though.
and aren't a Marxist anymore
It's possible I should have been more clear and direct, but I was talking about LTV in the abstract, not specifically about marxist principals. LTV is also associated with Adam Smith.
I, personally, think Marx's ideas were disastrous, but not really because of LTV. I think they were disastrous because they tend to destroy very important incentive structures which end up destroying most of the value in a society.
LTV, on the other hand, seems like not that bad of a take for someone operating in the mid 19th century (and a pretty good take for someone operating in the late 18th century like Smith was).
BinaryHobo
8mo ago
I don’t think any of that disagrees with my point.
My point was that you can't objectively say that policing failed without consulting the local community, unlike with healthcare. Which makes the comparison you were trying to make really squishy and not very useful.
BinaryHobo
9mo ago
Sure, but that's not... exactly my point.
Why is the current aristocracy behaving differently than past ones?
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
or is there some logic here that I'm not seeing
Best guess I've got is that it will last exactly until a deal is signed with some big AI company for access to the dataset.
BinaryHobo
10mo ago
This is just the populist / democratic "the real people are behind our niche ideas!" thing, which is dumb when a leftist does it, but especially dumb when someone who claims to be anti-democracy does it.
I read this as claiming that the people aren't invested enough in democracy to defend it, that is to say, concerned about the practicality of overthrowing a democratic government. Not about the people actually supporting the ideas, but anti-democratics not caring about the people supporting ideas seems reasonably consistent.
Military coups in less-developed countries are ... not unfamiliar for westerners, and are well considered as 'political forces'.
While political coups are quite understood, that a single private actor can become a sufficiently powerful political force is a bit jarring to some.
I heartily disagree that the latter is true, with my argument being simply, just look at that cursed continent.
I don't think this necessarily follows, unless you want to look at Europe after Rome left, and declare the Europeans must have naturally crazy low intelligence as well (or, I suppose you could argue that the difference can be made up in 1000 years).
Based on the my observation of the middle-ages, it seems pretty reasonable that the former territories to struggle amongst themselves in a series of constantly escalating conflicts until a distaste for war is (quite literally) beat into the local culture enough to outweigh the natural human drive to see your out-group killed (at least enough to stop fighting with people within a few hundred km). This seems to take several hundred years (it could possibly be faster with increased communication speed, but the power vacuum in Africa is only 60-80 years old, so I'm not willing to write off the theory yet).
It's only at that point that you can build infrastructure and complicated supply lines that complex societies are built on. Before that, I would only expect high-intelligence to result in more efficient killing.
Alternatively a single victor/foreign power can come in and dominate (your classic pax X-ana period). The point is more that stability seems to come from either subjugation or deep cultural changes that seem to be orthogonal to intelligence.
To be clear, I'm not arguing that you're entirely wrong, but I think looking at the state of an area for a single 50-100 year period is a horrible argument about the IQ of the humans that live there.
BinaryHobo
1yr ago
The new usage, where it's used to refer to individuals even when their gender is known (see what I did there?) is both awkward and frequently unclear.
Could you expand a little on this? I'm not sure how, once you've accepted the singular they for a person of unknown gender or perhaps an abstract person without gender, applying it to different individuals causes more ambiguity.
Or is it just that this previously rage edge-case is becoming more common which is leading to problems?
BinaryHobo
7d ago
but the anti-semitic right arguably includes people like Elon Musk and has far more access to the corridors of power than the Columbia protestors do.
On one hand this is fair. Elon definitely has more strings to pull than the protestors right now, but that's a pretty short-sighted view. In 20 years, the current class of Columbia isn't going to have access to the corridors of power, they're going to occupy them. The attitudes at Columbia are going to be beltway consensus in 20 years. That's a much bigger issue than people mouthing off on twitter.
You're modeling the entire right here as a completely cynical enterprise with no goals beyond hurting their outgroup. I think perhaps you could make some sort of case for an individual, such as Elon himself, but to model the entire right that way is missing the point. And worse, it is inaccurate.
I think you're underestimating the sincerity of the believe that the right has, that ruin and destruction will come from the left gaining unchecked power. Be it the economic conservatives who think a command economy will result in famines and shortages, or the religious factions that tend to believe in literal divine retribution, the beliefs held are sincere.
Now, are there cynical and petty people on the right? Absolutely. There are. But, taking the most cynical interpretation of the right, and comparing it to the left's most noble intentions is not a fair starting point.
More options
Context Copy link