Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
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User ID: 80
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Interestingly, the 2021 numbers broke the 2000 record, though NPR gives some estimation caveats. There's some fun questions about how comparable these numbers are -- NPR's waffling about gotaways applies as easily in the opposite direction, not just for this year but also for large parts of the lulls. But more interestingly, the surge had resulted in a large number of policy changes to discourage unlawful immigration, most notably the 1996 IIRIRA.
Maybe so, but the people ranted about how soft Obama was on the border and how much better Republicans would do if we enacted their policies. Well, Trump got elected and not much changed; the trend towards increasing numbers of migrants potentially started in 2018 before being masked (heh) by COVID or not. I don't have a counterfactual world where Trump won reelection in 2020 to see what the numbers would be today, but I think there's a pretty good argument that even if we gave repubs everything they asked for (at least mainstream repubs, defined as a majority) the numbers would still be relatively high. I'm not convinced by the folks saying the entirety of the crisis is due to the fact that we wouldn't build the wall and improve morale among Border Patrol agents.
The media doing so, alone, doesn't particularly control. The President of the United States, in response to the media outrage, informed the country that " promise you, those people will pay. There is an investigation underway right now and there will be consequences," while the Vice President said "it evoked images of some of the worst moments of our history where that kind of behavior has been used against the indigenous people of our country, has been used against African Americans during times of slavery"... still doesn't exactly control, but it has a lot of impact on the day-to-day operations. Not because that particular sort of behavior was especially common, or even because horseback operations, but because Tall Poppy.
I agree with what you say here, but your original claim was that federal ICE policies have hobbled border patrol. Whatever, forget it.
No, my argument being that "treating them as nothing more than chattel to score political points" has been a common practice, and there's been crickets, at length.
Your contention here being that the current administration was under fire for the bad conditions at their border facilities, so they shrugged and started bussing all the people to random cities rather than where the people actually wanted to go? And your claim is that, in the article you cited, the relatives they are supposedly being bussed to do not exist and were fabricated? Before you accuse me of strawmanning I'm just trying to fill in the gaps here, I genuinely don't see how the evidence you cited is equivalent to Desantis or how ostensibly bussing children in border facilities to relatives is treating them as chattel.
But there was also a contemporaneous leak describing the White House's perspective. Maybe that leak was wrong! Maybe Trump somehow -- unusually -- managed to pull the vast majority of Republican politicians to his whims, and trick the Democratic Senators. But it's strange how the writer here can't even seem to imagine the possibility that a 'compromise' bill is actually not giving much to the other side, while demanding a lot.
So is your argument that Senate Republicans would, in fact, accept a compromise?
The bill that you linked seems to be healthcare-related, not immigration, or else I'm just unfamiliar with the arcana of congress.
Can you make any deep guesses about why DeSantis wants to do this, or why he -- and several other states, many of whom have been running similar operations -- believe that it makes effective political points? Was he born wicked, or was wickedness thrust upon him?
Neither; I suspect he wants to do this to amass political power and support a 2024 presidential bid. In the same way I don't think that Biden really cares about student loans or a lot of the diversity stuff, I think he does those things for his partisans. Doing what your constituents want isn't a bad thing, the real problem is when politicians of all stripes do things to hurt the outgroup and we cheer them for it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It’s this kind of ultra-smarmy response that makes people laugh at you and dismiss you.
It's not smarmy, it's genuine. I'm genuinely sorry that my ethos, policy preferences, whatever it is, infuriate you. I'm sorry that you believe our worldviews are irreconcilable, and we're headed towards whatever conclusion you think that leads us to.
You’re openly advocating and voting for policies
I can't vote.
An uncharitable interpretation of your post is that your main goal here was to “trigger the Cons” and to push OUR buttons, using a conversational tactic that was guaranteed to provoke a hostile response that you could pre-emptively forecast to make yourself look virtuous and us look unreasonable.
Alright. How could I rewrite my post in such a way that wouldn't provoke such a response from you, while keeping the same general point intact?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
That wasn't my take, and I'm not sure whether you'd count me as an activist or not. But if you're going to tally up my score, I may as well set the record straight, no?
Not to mention I can see someone accusing me of voting illegally down the line or something if I'm unclear about it.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I'd like a better plan than "let's find out what happens". I'd like that parents have better oversight and control over what's going on in the schools, and I'm happy to nuke private schools, but I think homeschooling needs to stay.
If you want a better plan you'd need to hire me; at the moment I'm but a poor scientist spouting ignorant ideas outside of their field.
I like: Small families who want more control over their child's education and decide to homeschool them a certain way. Talented individuals receiving tutoring from experts.
Dislike: Rich families paying money to tutor undeserving children.
What do you have in mind? What would the substack be about?
Partisan hackery. The substack was a bit of a joke since I don't have the requisite time to really focus on it, but I do have lots of questions I'd be open to doing the old adversarial collaboration style for questions like: What happened to the Obamacare death spiral we were panicking about, and what's happening to it now? What were the ultimate effects of the Trump tax cuts (I heard apocalyptic warnings from the left about rich oligarchs raking in billions and excitement from the right about worker's wages)? In short, revisiting policy items from years ago that the media was hyping as apocalyptic and seem to...not have done a whole lot in the end, or at least not that overtly.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
For one, I actively advocate for little beyond treating each other better and sometimes I wade into debates on COVID. It's quite rare that I write about culture war topics. I don't consider myself particularly knowledgeable about the border or immigration.
If you're just asking what policy I would support, then no, I don't agree with letting anyone into the country. It seems like there was some agreement that border security was necessary as recently as the Clinton years, and I suspect that if you pressed the median democratic voter rather than the serially online or activist class most would say as much. While expressing some sympathy for the plight of migrants. I'd personally support increased efforts towards developing and stabilizing the countries these people are coming from, but this could either have been shown to be ineffective or is already happening and I'm ignorant of it.
I have a more favorable view towards skilled immigrants legally applying for citizenship, as well as refugee programs.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Let's pretend for a moment that we respect the sovereignty of other nations, and aren't going to colonize them for their own sake.
Economic aid and whatnot may be helpful. Illegal immigration is less and less appealing to Mexicans as their country has developed. Complicated by obvious problems, corruption, unwilling local governments, etc.
I'd love to hear what you're cool with us doing to remove these people and keep them out.
That's difficult for me to answer without knowing the efficacy of any given policy relative to the harm/brutality involved. For example, you want ICE agents to hunt down and smash open the doors of every illegal immigrant in America. Well:
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With 20,000 ICE agents they'd have to deport 550 illegal immigrants each, not counting the time to track them down, not counting another 0.5-2 million per year. Yes, you could hire more agents, deputize other enforcement agencies, etc, although that all costs money. At a certain point, would it just be cheaper to pay people living on the border a stipend?
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After apprehending them, do you just drop them off across the border only to have them walk across it again? I assume this would be paired with other policies.
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Would this harm the economy, and particularly the food supply (I assume you'll forgive me stereotyping) if they're integral to harvesting produce? Would this drive inflation, and/or would you have a plan in place to give them more legal, temporary work visas? If you gave out those visas, would the same people be in the same border-ish towns making you angry? Would red tribers approve of this policy if it meant their produce bill doubled?
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Probably other externalities I'm not even thinking of at the moment, not to mention the suffering imposed on the people being apprehended, the ICE agents/illegal immigrants that would inevitably get shot, etc.
I'm strongly against anything that explicitly causes bodily harm or deprivation to migrants; i.e. anything with border agents shooting them on sight or something, however effective at Bringing Number Down that may be.
If you could make a case for the efficacy of any given policy, or show me someone who has done this kind of data-driven analysis, I could probably be persuaded one way or the other.
I'd apologize for giving a potentially unsatisfactory answer, but I suppose I'd be accused of feminine concern trolling so.../shrug. That's the best I've got for you at the moment my man. I should also warn you that that's my answer for most things outside of the niche subjects I consider myself somewhat knowledgeable about.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Trumpist policies -- regardless, or because of -- their (lack of) merits, did not spend a lot of time being actually applied. Most famously the DACA stuff, which not only was blocked at length, not only was eventually turned back at SCOTUS under iffy legal reasoning, but also just took until June 2020 just to finish the court cases that eventually told Trump to try again.
DACA is irrelevant in a conversation about how many illegal immigrants cross the southern border in a given year, short of some laughably tenuous argument about making a 'favorable environment.'
I don't think it's very useful to try to extrapolate from the 2016-2020 to what would happen if "we gave repubs everything they asked for"
He built the wall which was his signature campaign promise on immigration. ICE was kicking in the doors of illegal immigrants who hadn't committed crimes (aside from being in the country illegally) at a higher rate. He slashed the number of refugees accepted. All much more relevant than DACA, and the former was his signature immigration campaign promise. I think it's quite useful to extrapolate from the Trump presidency, actually.
I don't know for certain whether ICE gave them a big list of options to pick, just really hates that one bus stop in El Paso specifically, or if they give each immigrant or asylum-seeker a spin on an oversized wheel of fortune. Presumably someone actually wants to live in the Bronx, so it's possible that the immigrants getting bused there requested it specifically.
Your link itself says the children were being released to relatives or sponsors. Desantis obviously didn't manage to find migrants with relatives or sponsors in Martha's vineyard. The fact that you're desperately trying to find some equivalence here to convince me that I'm being unfair in calling this out...bah. I'm done.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Interesting to see what gets downvoted. Parent comment sitting at -5 as I write this.
On the subreddit where scores were hidden, negative scores were very rare. I wonder if it's a difference in the audience or the system.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Send your kid to an all black school in Baltimore or a suburb of Paris then and then report back to me if your opinion has changed.
So what? Send a black kid from a nice family to an all white school in a trailer park in West Virginia, middle of nowhere Quebec, a shitty part of Ohio. They're going to have a bad time.
You're right: Poverty is bad. A relative lack of morality or culture or whatever you want to call it is bad. Crime is bad. Drugs are bad. African Americans don't have a monopoly on any of these things, but we have double standards for crack-dealing superpredators/innocent white victims of opioid overdoses. Unemployed whites in the midwest are innocent victims of globalization who had their jobs ripped away from them, while blacks living in deprecated inner-city slums are shiftless, lazy and sucking at the welfare teat.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do we? Does the rap sheet of the mean or median "crack dealing superpredator" actually resemble that of the average "opioid overdose?" If it doesn't, if the behavior of these two groups is actually significantly different, why should we assess them identically?
I wouldn't ask you to assess them identically. But one is viewed as a threat to society, whereas the other is a victim. The crack-dealing superpredator was born wicked, while the opiate-addicted had wickedness thrust upon them by their opiate-happy doctors and the globalists.
There must be 'opiate dealing suprepredators' profiting from the decay of society in the white areas too, no? Overdoses from prescription drugs have been more or less flat since ~2006 (figure 4) so someone is dealing street drugs. Why don't we talk about them?
Progressives sympathize with blacks and sneer at rural whites. Conservatives...sneer? look down on? I don't want to put words in your mouth, but my impression is that they look down on poor black communities and sympathize with rural whites. I don't think their plights are identical, but I'd argue that there are significant parallels and that should be reflected in our discussions about them.
I'm pretty sure most or all the murder-capitol-area contenders are majority-black. Most of the current massive spike in the murder rate is black-on-black.
Watched this the other day and it was wild. It's remarkable how much better substack and randos on youtube have become at informing us about the world relative to the MSM. I feel better informed about the violence in Chicago after 20 minutes watching that than years reading bullshit takes from both sides of the aisle.
Suppose you had solid evidence that the former communities were once flourishing, and then decayed into hellholes, while the later communities were hell-holes from the start. Would this not, again, be valid grounds to assess them differently?
That first sentence contains multitudes. You say Appalachian whites were flourishing and had it snatched away by the globalists, progressives would say that in the era Appalachian whites were flourishing, Blacks were still overtly being discriminated against. Each of those arguments deserves an essay that I probably couldn't do justice.
That being said, there were significant numbers of black workers in the auto industry, the other big employment opportunity often brought up in the context of globalism destroying American middle-class communities. 20% of Ford's workforce between 1920 and 1950 according to this source, although it seems too high and I can't really find a corroborating one (this article cites the same number).
The Projects were a project, an intentional expenditure of vast resources and effort in an attempt to ameliorate the evident social problems of the Black community. Did Appalachia get Projects? Did the Midwest? These questions aren't purely rhetorical, but the evidence I'm aware of leans pretty heavily in one direction.
I don't know, nor would I even be sure how to answer that question. Do massive farming subsidies to the Midwest count as equivalent to the projects? What about the fact that, ironically, roughly a third of the State budgets of Kentucky, Tennessee and West Virginia are federal aid? It's not clear to me if your point was that America invests more in the rehabilitation of poor inner cities relative to the rust belt or coal mining regions or something else.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Someone is dealing opioids, and that someone elides the calls for law and order most of the time. Whether those neighborhoods are peaceful, orderly idylls where now and then someone dies quietly in a bedroom is a question that I can't answer without trying to dig into county-by-county crime statistics. I doubt it's as bad as inner cities, but I'm also skeptical of the rosy picture you're painting.
Most of them are white, and their deaths were largely ignored for, what, the better part of a decade before people started actually talking about the problem?
You frequently make unsupported arguments and force me to do the legwork for you.
I'm far from an expert, but Google trends shows that discussion about the opioid epidemic really took off around 2016 when fentanyl started flooding the market; this tracks pretty well with figures 2, 3 and 5 that I linked you previously. It seems like overdoses caused by prescription opioids don't elicit much discussion, but they also don't contribute much to the overall toll of overdoses in the US, so...maybe that makes sense?
Of course this ignores regional trends in overdoses, socially erosive drug habits that didn't end in overdoses until fentanyl hit the scene, etc etc but it seems to me that you've overfitted on 'nobody cares about white people problems.'
And since most of the victims of this violence are themselves black, people actually care when they die, and are willing to expend significant resources to try to solve the problem!
The feds spent $3.3B and $7.4B on the opioid crisis in 2017 and 2018 respectively (table 2). It disproportionately went to red states (Figure 5 and 6) outside of Vermont, NH and Maine for some reason. It's confusing to me why the south was ignored, and I'm too lazy to try and overlay it with overdoses per capita to see if it matches the funding levels. Looks like $7.6B in spending in 2019. I can't find data on how much the government spends on crack cocaine which makes me think it isn't much. The majority of federal spending seems to go towards dealing with the health consequences of drug abuse. Untangling whether there's bias in that system towards black people at the expense of rural whites is, I think, a bit beyond what I can be expected to do.
Blacks are fucked. They are fucked because, in the main, Blues fucked them. Nothing we Reds can possibly do will help them, because they'd rather blame us for the harm Blues have done them, and the harm they do themselves, than cooperate with any of the steps necessary to prevent those harms. They don't want police and prisons, which do in fact help at least a little. They want education and rehabilitation and restorative justice and equity and economic revitalization, which have all failed with absolute, flawless monotony for decades, and none of which are even slightly likely to work better in the future.
They did want police and prisons back in the 80s and 90s, no? The law and order approach didn't seem to work out that great either.
Poverty rates have more or less steadily improved since the 1960s and throughout the civil rights era. Maybe you could attribute the drop from 1994-2000 to this, but it seems like that argument would take a lot more support than anything you provided.
But what do you mean, nothing reds can do will help them? You've split control of the federal government for about as long as I've been alive. You control the governorships of places like Mississippi, Iowa and Arkansas which have some of the worst poverty rates among blacks even after normalizing for the slightly higher white poverty levels. Maryland, Washington, Virginia and New Jersey have some of the lowest (intentionally omitting states like Vermont and Utah which have negligible black populations). Your best argument is that local government is the most important for combating poverty, which is an argument of the gaps that you failed to proactively provide evidence for, and is incongruent with conventionally blue states having lower poverty rates.
This argument of Dems as neo-plantation owners is largely bullshit. There are ugly things like white elites who lecture us on multiculturalism, equity and climate change while flying their children to the Alps on private jets while on holiday from their boarding schools. I get that. But extrapolating that to the median Democrat is just as silly as assuming that you're anything like Lindsay Graham or the Koch brothers or something. If you're going to tell me that Republicans have this One Neat Trick to address poverty and social ills that the wicked Democrats don't want you to know about, tell me what that is and provide some data showing me that it works when the data I've seen largely points towards the opposite.
Perhaps the above is pessimistic. Call me when the Black Community is willing to admit that a black person going to jail for killing another black person over contested narcotics profits might perhaps not be the fault of white people neither have met or interacted with in any way, and that such a murderer being apprehended and sent to jail is a benefit to black people generally.
It's not pessimistic, but it's fundamentally an emotional argument. You're angry, because you feel like you and your tribe aren't in control but you're being blamed for problems you haven't created and you feel like you don't have much of a say in addressing. I don't think it's entirely false, but it does seem to be far from the truth in places. But I also don't think pointing out the ways in which you're wrong is the goal, nor is it likely to be productive, is it?
At some point I feel like people around here want 1) affirmation of their feelings of alienation and frustration by ingroupers with similar biases to them, 2) a free therapy session or 3) a chance to rail against what they see as their oppressor (me?). Usually I just say I'm sorry you feel that way man, I can commiserate, I think we have more in common than the media would have us believe. Indeed, that would normally be my response to your post rather than picking holes in it, but lately I've been accused of being smarmy, concern trolling and disingenuous. Asking how I'm supposed to converse with You (not you personally, the royal You) is often ignored. So tell me, how do you want me to reply to what you've written? I could easily write such a screed with the script flipped about how the Evil Republicans block all our bills that would have led to a post-scarcity utopia with equality between the races and sexes, we could both get angry at each other and move on with our lives hating the outgroup a little bit more, but that strikes me as the worst outcome.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I'm certainly emotional about it, furious, in fact, but that does not make it an emotional argument. It is the bare facts, as best as I understand them, based on a considerable amount of evidence assessed over decades. This is my best understanding of a particular slice of the reality we all live in, as best as I can express it in a short post at 3am.
Most of what you write doesn't register to me as 'facts,' particularly if you're drawing on personal experience. When you say things like so-and-so was involved in a leftist terrorist group in the 70s and is now a university professor it comes across as an unsupported fact but one that I can easily check by wikipedia. When you say Blues are responsible for the plight of black Americans with no supporting data, it strikes me as an opinion that may or may not be true and is complex enough that even if superficially true is the tip of an iceberg. It contains about as much information as me saying that Reds are responsible for the plight of black Americans, no? My response could easily have been that, we both likely would have been wrong and could have gone in circles eating our own tails. It reminds me of mock debates in high school classes where nobody could ever win and indeed determining the truth of the matter wasn't even the point.
But then, maybe that's just my pathological obsession with data.
Over time, it has grown increasingly difficult for me to take conversations across the isle at all seriously. The "national conversation" about race, like most culture war issues, necessarily involves a number of fairly nebulous ideas, like "white supremacy" and "implicit bias" and "structural racism" and so on. These terms frequently have uncertain and changeable definitions, weak supporting evidence, extremely poor predictive value, and a considerable history of falsification, but any conversation more or less demands that I accept them as the null hypothesis unless I can marshal strong evidence to the contrary.
And I could point out sacred cows on the right that are just as nebulous. You talk to me about the value of "Christian Morals," "patriotism," "respect for the military." Yet I try to take you seriously nonetheless, and avoid things that I know would trigger you.
And blues, you among them, appear to me to be completely blind to this momentous event, and seem to expect us to all go back to discussing theories about implicit bias from names on resumes. It's as though we're expected to simply grant a mulligan, and pretend the awkward events of the last two years didn't happen. But then, what's the point in any of this? Why go on pretending we're even attempting to engage with reality?
I think you're right about the BLM protests. As far as I can tell, the consequences have not been good. The crime wave in America, although still historically not that bad (things were worse in the 80s and early 90s), was not shared by Canada, Mexico or the EU as far as I can tell. I'm fairly confident I've said as much to you before, although maybe it was gattsuru or someone else, I'm not sure. From my perspective, every debate inevitably makes it way to the BLM protests because the easily available evidence around increases in crime is on your side and you want to just keep scoring the same point over and over again.
So, at least so far as your conversations with me go, how do you want to handle that? I can sympathize with your perspective and it seems like it has been self-destructive.
That being said, there are some problems with your narrative. Namely, the increase in violent crime and murders weren't restricted to black or urban neighborhoods. How do you draw a line between urban BLM protests and people in almost completely white rural counties murdering each other more often? I don't think the data is available yet, but I'm curious to see if there was a proportional increase in white and black perpetrators, suggesting some other factor.
Insofar as you insinuate that the BLM protests were orchestrated by democrats, I'm less on board. They were certainly involved, white liberals were definitely present at the riots, democratic politicians sympathized with the protesters. At the same time, I'm skeptical that a counterfactual world where white liberals said 'Hey, I know that cop killed your boy but he was on drugs and actually police help you on net' or facebook, twitter and the NYT actively censored stories about George Floyd would have stopped black Americans from rioting.
On the other hand, and I say this with what I sincerely hope is all possible charity, you seem to want to talk about the Culture War, but only from a perspective where conflict is simply ruled irrational as an axiom. That is not a perspective that I, or indeed many reds here, can actually share in good faith.
It's not clear to me hat you mean by this. Are you suggesting that from your perspective, conflict is rational and desirable? And what do you mean by conflict?
I don't want to paint a rosy picture, but I think we can at least agree that this is a factual question where the evidence should be reasonably clear, yes? If one looks at the data and rural/white/opioid areas see significantly less violent crime than the inner-city/black/crack areas per-capita, then it seems that the disparity in treatment is founded on factual differences rather than bias, yes? If they're pretty similar per-capita, then I'd happily stand corrected, withdraw my claims, and endeavor to modify my understanding of the world to match the available evidence.
I agreed that the inner cities were likely worse, but I disagree with your characterization of opioid addicts peacefully dying in their bedrooms without any crime or damage to society. That's largely based on discussions I've had with friends from these areas, although I can't find any actual data supporting that, so who knows. Maybe you're right and these people studiously follow the law and are good members of society right up until they overdose on fentanyl. Maybe their drug dealers scrupulously stop at red lights, and people suffering withdrawal who can't afford a score are too morally righteous to rob that house down the road to buy more drugs.
Where are you getting the conclusion that they didn't contribute much to the overall toll? The orange line in fig 2 appears to diverge rapidly and significantly, and between '99 and '07 the OD rates roughly double. "Significant" is a nebulous term, but unless I'm reading the charts wrong, it looks like by 2009 prescription opioids are killing more people than all other drugs combined. Am I missing something?
From 1999-2006 prescription ODs went up 3x (3500-10,000) while total ODs slightly less than doubled (19k-30k). From 2014-2016 synthetic ODs went up 5x (4000-20,000) while total ODs went from 52,000-60,000. I'm not surprised that the latter got more attention.
Whether the former got any attention I suppose is hard to say since google trends only goes back to 2004, and is unfortunately relative. I could search for news articles from the time, but that's not very quantitative either. I'm not sure how we'd settle that question.
You're right that prescription opioids were a big issue in the mid 2000s though, I was thrown by the different y-axis scales.
On the one hand, this indicates that closing the gap completely might in fact be possible, perhaps even in less than a century. On the other hand, Blacks and Blues don't seem to see this as acceptable progress, and are evidently willing to flip the table if a better deal is not offered.
There's a reason China affirmative actions the fuck out of their minorities. Having a permanent underclass, along racial lines or otherwise, does not seem like a particularly stable social structure to me. Nor a desirable one. I'm willing to trade some inefficiencies in the economy for welfare.
That isn't my argument; I have no idea where you're even getting it from.
You said:
Blacks are fucked. They are fucked because, in the main, Blues fucked them.
You also go on to say:
The people who speak for them blame Reds for their misfortunes, and those among them who can vote reliably vote blue. The misfortunes don't change, the resentments don't change, and the political allegiances don't change. How are these facts "largely bullshit"?
I pointed out that black Americans are doing better in states with blue governance than red governance. So relatively speaking, if Blues fucked the Blacks, did Red politicians in Mississippi and Arkansas and Missouri double fuck the Blacks? You're not responsible for Chicago, but it's also pretty clear that if we elected Republican leaders in Illinois and they enacted similar policies to other Red states the outcomes for Blacks would get worse. So...the conditions are not good on an absolute scale, but it's rich to criticize Chicago when states that you control are doing significantly worse. You skated past this argument in your response.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Joe Biden is clearly the greatest president of our era. America's enemies (and allies!) tremble before the might of Dark Brandon.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Wait I thought you were JB?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
It's interesting; I finally met, in the wild, a woman who claimed there were no biological differences in terms of strength, agility, speed, etc. between men and women. I had thought they were just caricatures on the internet, but I guess they really exist. She was in the army and claimed to have 'outperformed' 90% of the men there before she was injured. She was about 5'6 and maybe 120 pounds, so while I'm not too familiar with the army, I'm a bit skeptical of that one. She claimed testosterone had no effect on athletic performance and that literally the only difference physically between men and women is that men have a wider pelvis. Scientific papers describing any effects of testosterone are just transphobic.
This all grew out of the casual [sport] league I played in over the summer that went out of it's way to encourage inclusion of trans players. Man/lady were replaced with 'female-matching' and 'male-matching.' Traditionally, we played co-ed and matched genders on the field, and trans players (100% trans women in this league at least) would match with the gender they identify as. The women on the field were getting absolutely wrecked. Like, every now and then someone would absolutely blast by me uncovered before I realized it was a trans woman and her defender was struggling 10-15 feet behind her before I'd peel off and try to salvage the situation.
It honestly doesn't affect me and all the most strident pro-trans commissioners in the league are female, so I don't particularly care, but this is just...a step too far. There's no way this can be covered up in smokescreens about hormones or whatever else, it's just an immediately obvious fact that this is true. You just need some video footage of trans women absolutely destroying people at [sport] and it's not really sustainable.
I tried the same argument you just brought up as it seemed the most likely to elicit sympathy from a strident feminist, i.e. that it cheapens the accomplishments of female athletes, but she would just say that those female athletes would be as good as the men if it weren't for the patriarchy. Thankfully, people with that point of view are a vanishingly small minority - on my team of very left-leaning players, it was about 13 people arguing with her and her reluctant boyfriend trying to mediate.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Alas, I've been doxxed. Time to delete my account.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I don't think there's any impetus in my league; if anything, it's the reverse. Nobody is conservative, if they are they're closeted big city conservatives who still like most of the conveniences of blue tribe society, have a distaste for the homeless/wokeness and hide their power level to get laid. The men in my league don't really care and would probably be happy playing without the women if it weren't for the sizable fraction who want to play with their girlfriends. The women are broadly and emphatically pro-trans and diversity.
Moreover, there's such a broad range of skills at this level that it doesn't matter all that much and the highlight for many people is hitting the bar after the game. I've at times been matched up with players who are as far below me as the women on my team are below the trans women. Amusingly, trans women are the new ringers and I suspect a quietly sought after prize for many a captain; everyone wins!
I don't know where the professional leagues are headed.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
So what specifically does the sneer about efficiency mean here?
Damnit Spock, I'm a doctor, not a statistician!
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
I'm not claiming anything of the kind. My understanding is that the mainly-white opioid epidemic areas have all sorts of crime problems, theft, burglary, property crime, assaults, public intoxication, DUIs, fraud, looting, and so on. What they don't have is anywhere near the same level of violent crime, and especially murder. Like it or not, the evidence is quite clear.
And I'm claiming that there are double standards regarding how we discuss and treat drug offenders. By your own admission, opiate users are just less violent criminals, though I can attest that I've never once heard a red triber refer to them as anything other than victims. The party of law and order likes to talk about Chicago because they can blame the democrats; I guess they still like to talk about the opioid crisis because they can blame the globalist-China-sellout-democrats for those problems as well, but they sure don't like to talk about any of the crime you're referring to. Are you truly going to refuse to see any parallels between democrats telling impoverished communities of color that their problems are the fault of racist white nationalists without admitting that the Red tribe has their own victim mythos that they prefer to tell rather than taking responsibility and improving their lots?
There's a kernel of truth in the globalist narrative buried in heaps of salt, just as there is a kernel of truth to the fact that most social programs and redistributionist policies that would alleviate poverty are stymied by republicans in congress (and by extension, republican voters). Moreover, 'free trade' and laissez-faire economics have been the domain of Republicans from the 80s through what, the mid 2000s? Many of the people most upset about globalization happily voted for it for decades. At least on the free trade side, who can even guess at a counterfactual world where America turned inwards after WWII, and condemned condemned as damaging to the middle class and pursued protectionism? For all we know we lost the Cold War, sparked WWIII, or got wrecked economically by an ascendant mercantile Japan. What I am pretty confident in, though, is that TheMotte exists in this world, and it's populated by people absolutely convinced that our government is headed by some of the laziest, most corrupt and least competent politicians in history. Except for the few locals they voted for.
Start with blind axioms: Progressivism as an ideology aims to transform our society and culture. Progressivism as an ideology has succeeded in this aim to a considerable extent over the last fifty years. If I asked you which of those large-scale changes Progressives generally believe to have been net-negative with the benefit of hindsight, could you confidently name even a single one?
Quite the jump from a nihilistic 'human societies gonna society, the good life comes from God' worldview. But regardless, I'm sure you've gotten the same pushback that 1960s (or whenever the idyllic golden era you long for was) America is an arbitrary date to freeze in amber, and no doubt people have longed to do so in a recognizable way since the French Revolution if not the Greeks if not whatever proto-civilization we lack records of.
I hear replacing Christmas was poorly received, and not even the orgies were enough to keep heads on shoulders. More seriously, there's a reckoning coming for the NIMBY policies that wrecked the housing markets. A true reckoning would probably be someone sitting down and saying 'huh, those libertarians and conservatives might have been onto something 15 years ago...' rather than rebranding free market capitalism (red coded) as YIMBYism.
But then, do you think the modern right have major examples of policies they espoused that they believe have been net-negative, besides allowing the existence of the democratic party? That people and movements are both bad at admitting fault is not a particularly striking criticism.
Moreover, the idea that desiring to transform our society and culture is unique to progressives seems patently false. Was Reagan transforming our polity by espousing free trade rather than the rampant protectionism that carried the day in the 18th and 19th centuries, whereas pro-union democrats were conserving it? Is Moldbug the true conservative because he wants a neo-monarchic-corpo-state? Enough of that, I'm sure you're familiar with the argument.
From my perspective, serious conflict exists. Sometimes prosecuting conflicts is desirable, whether with words or nukes, because the point of contention really is worth it. Sometimes it's not, but while an assumption of the possibility of compromise is a reasonable first-resort, it's not useful as an axiom.
You know how my answer to that goes.
I'd agree that this is at least potentially a problem for my narrative, if the increase were fairly uniform. On the one hand, I think there was a significant disparity of how Red and Blue areas handled the riots, and assumably a difference in the general attitudes of their populations before the riots, so I'd expect blue areas to see a disproportionate amount of the increased crime.
You neglect to consider widespread unemployment, breakdown of routine and social ties due to the pandemic, so on and so forth. I would push it harder, but it's not clear to me why this pattern didn't hold true in other countries. Too many variables and too many superficial news articles, not really a satisfying answer.
In the first place, it mostly wasn't black people rioting this last time. The racial resentments of the Black community were employed as a pretext by mostly-white rioters, often over the explicit objection of local blacks, who were then left to deal with the long-term consequences.
I'm not sure I believe this, or how you would prove it. Say 20% of the black population of LA rioted in the 90s, and the same fraction of black people turned out after George Floyd joined by, say, 5% of the white population that made the protest 50-50. Would you characterize that as a pretext for mostly-white rioters to burn black neighborhoods to the ground, when the same fraction of the black community was turning out? Moreover, any counterfactuals would support your argument in other ways; all black rioters, black people perpetuate violent crime, if they burned white neighborhoods instead of black neighborhoods, blue tribe wants to burn down innocent red tribe homes, etc.
83% of black Americans express some support for BLM. I expect the views you'd get from people living in those neighborhoods would be a bit more nuanced than white rioters just looking to cause trouble burned down my house, we're all living on Joe Biden's plantations as neo-slaves.
Blacks should believe that police help them on net because that is the straight, utterly inescapable truth. Black criminals harm innocent blacks directly and at staggering scale.
There's probably a tradeoff between 'X will grow up fatherless because his dad is serving life in prison for petty theft' and police turning a blind eye towards rampant gang violence. I don't know where the sweet spot is, but blindly optimizing for line goes down for violent crime probably does hit a point of doing more harm than good, which has been the argument of the criminal justice reformers.
I don't think the evidence supports a claim that either party is actually better at managing the general economy,
Fox news has entered the chat.
Blue States and areas are, in general, significantly wealthier than Red states. If this were down to policy, though, if Blue policies lead to wealth and Red policies lead to impoverishment, then you need to explain why Blue cities and states contain areas that have been very poor for a very long time. If Blue policies actually eliminate poverty, why is there so much poverty in Blue areas?
Looks like I was poorly informed on this front. I'd always seen stats on the welfare systems being more robust and generous in blue states, which is true, but it's more than [eaten up by the cost of living(https://www.americanactionforum.org/research/measuring-poverty-in-the-united-states-comparing-measurement-methods/) (states colored in red actually have higher poverty levels after accounting for federal programs and some CoL adjustments). It's interesting that welfare is so much more effective at reducing poverty in red states than in blue states (see, for example, the impact of SNAP on poverty is mostly felt in red states, although I can imagine the outcry if they tried to peg aid to the CoL in some way. Debatably, these social programs are largely supported by democrats at the federal level, and 80% of the welfare budget is spent by the feds. Welfare spending at the state level per capita is a bit more varied, although probably less consequential relative to the feds. I'd need to read more, but maybe I should limit the amount of time I waste on things without clear answers...
Mississippi also just kind of sucks.
The better deal they're demanding isn't "some economic inefficiencies", it's unlimited, unquestioned power for Blue Tribe, with zero responsibility for any actual improvement of outcomes. That is unacceptable.
I think they'd actually be pretty happy with similar representation in congress and some lucrative occupations, along with middle-class opportunities. Maybe some respect too. Sounds a bit like what people around here demand for the rust belt whites, a
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Half the reason I'm writing these is so I have something legible to gesture to next time someone brings the topic up. In general, though, I guess I'd ask that you understand that we really have some very significant differences in perspective, and it it isn't just invective
And since I ran out of characters:
What makes you think that I don't understand that we have different perspectives? I've been reading what you and others write for something like 4 years now. I regularly do the Fox news/breitbart/OANN circuit to see what you're exposed to. I read your substacks and whatever pieces the conservative users here link. I don't do the youtube/facebook/telegram/talk radio rabbit holes so maybe I'm missing the true, authentic conservative experience, but based on what little I've heard, that's probably for the best.
Your whole goal is to show that our worldviews are irreconcilable, that the die is cast and that our conflict is written in the stars. This is trivially true, in that you can unilaterally refuse to compromise or budge an inch no matter what I tell you and either force me to agree with you or just use that to support your position. Regardless what happens in the wider world, it's wide enough for you to find Bad Things happening, even more so given the incentives of for-profit media. You devote a lot of exposition to how the BLM protests prove that we're incompatible and out to get you, but you blackpilled before BLM, just like you were blackpilled before Trump just like (I presume) you were blackpilled before Iraq.
Differences in perspective are either due to misinformation, or it's a value judgment and one of us values x more than y. Frankly, our world is so staggeringly complex that we're all helplessly ignorant; some few people can specialize in a tiny sliver of one field among many, yet invariably, any given event draws an avalanche of takes from individuals whose conviction massively outstrips their knowledge.
Like, do either of us honestly believe we're experts on poverty rates in the US? Cherry picking some figures from a paper which probably cherry picked some figures in turn doesn't make either of us qualified to draw any kind of conclusion. The true 'perspective' we should be uniting behind is epistemic humility and calling out people who pretend otherwise.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
This is probably old news to most of you better-rounded individuals, but read this the other day about the Roman Senate and was tickled. Transcribed from 'A Day in Old Rome':
Opening the session: Taking the Auspices
Gravely this official company seats itself in the curule chairs; gravely Varus casts a handful of incense upon the altar before the Victory, and a cloud of fragrance fills the hall. Then Varus, a tall and very majestic figure, signs to the senators; "Bring forth the chickens!"
Not a lip twitches in all that sedate audience as two attendants appear upon the platform setting down a small coop containing a few barnyard fowls. The consul rises and stands beside them next to him takes station an elderly senator also wearing the praetexta and holding a staff with a peculiarly shaped spiral head, a lituus -- the badge of office of an augur, lawfully entitled to proclaim the will of the gods. In a dead hush the servitors pass a small dish of grain to the consul who carefully scatters the grain within easy reach of the chickens. The latter, carefully starved since yesterday, snap up the grains eagerly. The even devour so fast that the wheat drops from their bills, a most excellent sign. The augur bends forward intently, watching their action, the motions with his staff: "There is no evil sight nor sound!" he announces in solemn formula.
A mutter of relaxation passes around the Senate. The servitors carry out the chicken coop. The consul shakes his great draperies around him with studied dignity and turns to the waiting assembly. "Affairs divine have been attended to; affairs human can now begin."
So, say I were a chariot mogul being coerced by the courts into buying a carrier pigeon business. Could I hire a catspaw to sneak in and feed the senatorial augur-chickens the morning of the trial such that they aren't interested in the grain, or even poison them to delay my trial?
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Do you have any recommendations for getting into it later in life?
I messed around with Java, html and linux in high school, then got funneled into a pure bio track for about a decade for my career. At one point I went back to learning some R and python without having the fundamentals (I guess the academic version of a script kiddie) purely for doing genome sequencing/scRNA-seq work. Now I'm trying to learn some fundamentals; I've been working through the Harvard Edx CS50 class, with hopes of trying the machine learning class next.
Any thoughts? Keep in mind I'm probably limited to 1-2 hours per day with maybe a bit more flex on the weekend.
Chrisprattalpharaptor
Ave Imperaptor
1yr ago
Thanks for the reply! Sorry, I was away all weekend. I'll take a crack at it.
So firstly, be clear in what you want to learn. Do you want to learn only programming? Or programming for some kind application?
Unfortunately, I think my final goals will be determined more by how much time I can carve out of the rest of my life for it rather than starting with some endpoint in mind. I'm fairly confident I never want to actually be writing the nitty-gritty code that analyzes bio data, but rather am looking for synergy with what I already know. I think at the far end if I ever end up running a bio startup incorporating machine learning it might be fun to mess around with in the beginning stages, or at the very least, be able to converse intelligently with the engineers involved. Bootstrapping a bio startup in my basement is much harder; you can do some bacterial and yeast work (probably illegally in a few different ways) for something in the range of thousands of dollars, but doing anything with mammalian cells would probably be in the 100k range just for capital costs and be more or less impossible to hide.
Anyways, that's where I'm at. I'll give those resources a try and maybe recalibrate my goals over the next few months.
Did I miss something in the last 2 years? Why did they declare the "vaccines" to be 100% effective if they were never tested for transmission reduction? (and yes I am putting the term into quotation marks because they don't appear to be what is commonly thought of as vaccines, instead working as a kind of therapeutic with alleged short term effectiveness that must be dosed in advance.)
How, exactly, would you propose to measure transmission reduction in the context of a clinical trial? You enroll a thousand people, 500 vaccine, 500 placebo. 50 in each group get COVID. What next? Do you test whether their cohabitants get sick? Couldn't those people have gotten it somewhere else? You'd have to massively increase your study size to find a signal in the noise, or else try some kind of challenge study.
When you run a clinical trial, to my knowledge (and to be fair I'm not exposed to many infectious disease/vaccine style trials) you need endpoints that focus on the people you actually enrolled. Other papers will try to measure spread at a more macro scale.
And indeed, this is false - the vaccines did reduce spread (I linked 6 studies there with varying effect sizes) early in the pandemic, back when the vaccine actually matched the virus in circulation and (speculatively) the variant in question was much less infectious and more severe. I'd hazard a guess that the updated boosters could also reduce spread, although this might prove to be false given the characteristics of omicron plus some fringe possibilities like original antigenic sin.
What does "vaccine efficacy" mean?
You run into some weird semantic problems trying to strictly define it, and other problems disseminating information to the public through media outlets rather than directly from ID docs. As far back as February 2021, people were saying reducing symptomatic disease. You can also read how the Pfizer group defined vaccine efficacy in their original clinical trial paper, and it's not related to transmission.
Why did some countries roll out a vaccine passport?
It might have made sense very early on. I'd agree that it rapidly became counterproductive and foolish as new variants emerged and the vaccines certainly did not prevent spread. You could maybe make an argument that in some places like Canada the healthcare system was truly getting fucked at some points by COVID patients, although by then the data wasn't even clear that the vaccines had a strong effect against severe COVID anymore as far as I'm aware. Whether these policies persisted due to incompetence, bureaucratic inertia, malice or something else - who knows. You'll find plenty of folks here convinced that they know the answer to that question, so I'll leave it to them.
But if they didn't substantially stop the spread then why are we firing people from their jobs? For their own health?
We probably shouldn't be.
There was also the weird never-before-tried bookkeeping where nobody was considered vaccinated until two weeks AFTER the second dose.
Can you cite the study you're referring to?
Geert Vanden Bossche claims that you should never ever vaccinate during a pandemic, especially with a leaky vaccine because very bad things happen. I don't pretend to know the science but he also claims that this was generally accepted knowledge up until 2020.
How would you know that? The only real comparator that makes sense is Flu, and we vaccinate for that every year; regardless of whether we did or not, annual flu strains have emerged for much longer than we've vaccinated. HIV was a pandemic, but has no vaccine regardless and is a very poor comparator. SARS, MERS, etc never really took off. So we have no empirical data to support that argument.
But, assuming you're referring to this page (since you didn't actually link to anything), what do you want to do in this counterfactual world? Let everyone get COVID and then his hope is that children generate sterilizing immunity? Moreover, why wouldn't a population where 50% have natural immunity and the other 50% are spreading the virus behave any differently compared to a population where 50% have vaccine immunity and the other 50% are spreading in terms of variants emerging? His argument would hinge on natural immunity restricting transmission whereas vaccination did not, which as far as I'm aware, is not the case.
Children have an amazing innate immune capacity to generate sterilizing immunity. From a public health viewpoint (herd immunity!), it is therefore critical that we leave the children alone. But protecting our children from C-19 vaccination is also critical from an individual health viewpoint as vaccination with these non-replicating vaccines will prevent adequate education of their immune system. This is because spike (S)-specific, non-neutralizing antibodies (Abs) that are continuously recalled by the circulating Omicron (sub)variants will steadily outcompete their innate Abs and thereby prevent the child’s innate Abs to instruct the immune system on how to discriminate ‘self’ from ‘self-like’
It's just false; the half-life of antibody titers for both natural immunity and vaccinations is much too short for anyone to maintain sterilizing immunity for long. For a while, the antivaxx crowd latched onto original antigenic sin (OAS) and argued that natural immunity would be better, but the last time I looked at the data coming out, OAS was a larger problem for people who were naturally infected with the alpha variant as opposed to vaccination, with T cell responses being the wild card. We don't have a counterfactual world where we tried Geert's approach so he can claim he was right until the end of time, but most of the evidence points away from his model.
It feels like the push for the vaccines was a huge motte and bailey. They never really prevented transmission, that was the bailey. And the motte is that they make the infection less severe, which in theory is a falsifiable hypothesis, but I'm not convinced.
The rationalization for vaccines was a huge mess of idealogues on twitter, the media and talking heads on TV pushing their favored ideas with about as much exposure to scientific data and literature as the two sources you give.
Meanwhile, Florida's AG is fearmongering about vaccine side effects (scroll down to 'Florida man' section. I think Zvi is a bit dismissive of myocarditis because other papers have shown it is a side effect, but why Florida tried to do this...I don't know) and it seems like significantly more Republicans died of COVID (although I'm a bit leery of politically-charged population scale studies like this). Even John Nolte repeatedly argued that the mRNA vaccines were a triumph, and the anti-vaxx movement was orchestrated by the left to try and kill old Republican voters.
On the contrary. I'm fine with his proposal, and given free rein, I'd go a step further. I absolutely disagree that it's 'self-evidently monstrous' to mix students together regardless of their class and I'm baffled why you would think so. You might disagree, but it seems absurd to call someone monstrous for suggesting that a wealthy student may have to rub shoulders with an impoverished one.
It's also absolutely not within my power to achieve as I'm not a citizen and currently have no children. The only realistic way I can see to take personal responsibility is either volunteering my time or money, which I suggested. I suppose I could run for office, but either way, we're not talking about realistic proposals, yeah?
Oh, I absolutely support taxing the fuck out of the people who live on Martha's Vineyard and breaking up their elitist private schools. Crank that marginal tax rate, baby. Send their kids to public schools. No more private jets, no more helicopters, no more yachts. No more generational wealth and trust fund kiddies. Raise my tax bracket too, although I'm light years away from buying a house in Martha's Vineyard. What else do you want to do?
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