ControlsFreak
No bio...
User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Good news! The price system has your back! As we continue using up all these finite resources, prices will rise, and people will naturally shift to alternatives out of their own self-interest. The bonus is that you don't even need to do anything. You don't need to say anything; you don't need to argue online for a position; you don't need to ban/subsidize anything; you don't need to organize any rallies or political movements. You can just be happy in your own personal knowledge that the future will give you your preferred reality and your own personal confidence that the prices of your selected set of finite resources will certainly rise in the future. You might even make some speculative wagers in futures markets that could make you a bundle of money with which you can extra enjoy the future world. After all, that's why prices of hydrocarbons just kept ramping up from the early 2000s and there was no technology change whatsoever that reversed that trend. One thing is for sure; we're absolutely not heading to a world where we get more value out of using less stuff (on an absolute scale, not marginal).
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Do we have to convert every fucking thing in the world into dollars and cents? "Oh, you like looking at the sunset, well now that'll cost you!"
Most of the time, sunsets are public goods, because it is extremely difficult to generally prevent people from observing them and your observing it does not impinge on my ability to observe it. Obviously, if people think there is a One True Best Location for observing a sunset, but like only ten people can fit there, then it becomes rivalrous and probably excludable, too. At that point, there's going to be some mechanism that meters who can use that particular location at sunset, whether it's people having to spend time by showing up two hours before sunset to grab one of the ten spots or people having to spend money to grab one.
It is also very common in development disputes to contest visual obstructions. If someone wants to build a high rise, but it will block the view of the sunset for a group of folks who used to be able to see it, the building will be contested. Here, the traditional solution is to, again, convert the dispute into dollars and cents, having the developer pay the obstructees to compensate them for their loss. In this case, they're getting a monetary benefit for their loss, rather than having to pay for their privilege, but it's relatively similar.
On a similar note, I just recently listed to this old old podcast, which raised several reasonable sounding concerns about things like National Park schemes for nature preservation. Worth a listen.
That said, this effort is likely as dumb as most carbon offset schemes, which Matt Levine routinely (and hilariously) lambastes. Definitely worth the read regularly if you're not already.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Thank you for your honesty. I have to ask, though, do you worry at all about any future backlash? That if people realize that the whole thing was a lie, an intentional one, purely for convenience sake to win a political battle, and that they were the dupes who fell for it... they might get angry and start not believing the other things you say in the public discourse?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
My wife's family is from a more rural part of Canada. We went back to visit not too long ago. They're building apartments everywhere out there, all for the immigrants. All sorts of pockets that used to be empty now have a bunch of big apartment buildings and a small number of shops that are popping up nearby to serve them. Most of the people I talked to were natives, friends of the family. Everyone is definitely too polite blue to say anything outright negative, but in nearly every single conversation I had, it came up at some point. I wasn't bringing it up. But there would almost always be a moment where they'd kinda hesitate, think about what they're saying, give a little breath almost as if, "I'm not sure I'm quite allowed to say this, but I'm going to word it this way, and maybe it'll be okay," followed by some form of, "There are a lot of immigrants now. Especially since COVID. The local culture is changing. It's not the way it used to be anymore." They're not saying the follow-up, "...and I think that's bad," but I repeatedly got the impression that they sure were thinking something like that.
ControlsFreak
10mo ago
This comment made me realize that we really are moving to a world where, in order to decide whether some action is bad or not, you have to first figure out whether the victim is "good" or "bad". I noticed this a while back in prominent hacking cases. If the victim was sympathetic to the current political fashions, it's a horrible crime. If the victim, for any reason at all, might not be the most shining example of idealism, at best indifference, at worst "fuck 'em". For example, the discussion around the Ashley Madison hack wasn't, "Hacking is bad, end of story." It was, "Ha! Fuckin' cheaters get hacked. Plus, some of them were government employees, so extra fuck 'em!" "...Uh, hello! Some good, brave, possible minorities, might have good reasons to use a site like Ashley Madison. Maybe hacking is not so good." And so on.
There is likely some amount of pre-judging the alleged perpetrator, too, but I first noticed it in hacking crimes with mostly faceless/unknown perpetrators.
I guess, weirdly, I had previously thought, "Hacking/digital stuff is still a new area; we don't have developed norms yet; given that, there's going to be more 'who, whom' than normal, but once we flesh out some norms, we should head toward more consistency." And now, I, uh, probably think that less. Not sure it makes me more conflict theory-y, but at the very least, I feel more inclined to think that many other people are, in a deeply rooted way, more conflict theory-y than I had previously hoped.
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
Nah, we've got plenty of laws. Especially when people are pushing ideas like, "Campaign finance laws make it illegal to talk to foreigners," trying to resurrect the Logan Act, etc.
blatant procedure prosecutions
Can I introduce you to an indictment from New York County?
Through the last eight years or so, with the left-leaning friends I have in the real world, I've had discussions about this possible politician crime or that possible politician crime. There have been many such times where they were wound up about how you could totally plausibly read the law in a way that totally plausibly gets at so-and-so. Often, I just poke at the implications of their broad reading, especially given the reality of political life. When they start to see just how broadly this shit could be construed if we walk down that path, then I drop, "Is this something that you really value enough to 'let justice reign' equally on both sides' politicians?" And some issues might actually be. Most of them have not been. Most of the time, they realize, "Actually, that would probably have some pretty bad effects and barely bring any real benefit to society."
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
I find that looking at these aggregate numbers to be fascinating, and also difficult to really understand, especially because I really get the feeling that it's tough to understand without really digging in to the data sources, seeing if there are discrepancies between sources and how they choose to do their groupings. For example see the wiki article, which has different tables that are listed from the 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 ACS.
Especially the "detailed ancestry" section. Median Indian household income is $152k?! That's wild and dwarfs the top line white/black gap. Makes me wonder if composition effects are significant. That is, are Indian "households" just bigger? Like, more people, plausibly more working people, living in the same house? Conversely, many articles have been written claiming that poor family relations and divorce have plagued black communities more. If Indian households have 2-3 individuals earning incomes on average, while white households have 1.5-2, while black households have 1-1.5, could that be a huge effect? I do recall EconTalk mentioning household composition effects being rather important when talking just about the country-wide median household income statistics, and I wonder how much of a story they tell here.
Additionally, in the detailed ancestry section, they don't have a category for "African Americans (Black Americans)" at all, like they do in the top line chart. So, how are they actually describing these group boundaries? The number from the top chart for this category would be at the absolute bottom of the bottom chart (coming in just below Appalachian), and that's kind of wild to me, too. Even the "Subsaharan African" number is substantially higher. Is the general African American number being pulled down specifically by people who don't identify with any other ancestry, even if they have some sense of where their family came from? It would have to be a pretty strong pull, and I don't have a sense for how relatively big these groups are.
What about self-identification issues? If Cletus decides that Appalachia sucks and that you can't make a living there, so he moves out, finds a job in the fancy city, meets someone there, marries her, makes a family there, etc., how many years will it be until he stops identifying as Appalachian? He thought Appalachia sucked! "Nah; I'm just American." Possible analog to an evaporative cooling mechanism.
I don't think today will be the day that I have time to pour through all the details, but thanks for another reminder that I really need to sometime.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Do you mean "not regulated at all" or "not regulated by a federal bureaucracy"? ... The latter statement is what is at stake
I mean, not even that is at stake. Congress could still give agencies pretty broad authorities and pretty broad discretion. It would only be that, given the particular wording the statute uses, if there is an ambiguity, the gov't wouldn't auto-win every time. They'd have to cry a little tear for the poor federal agencies out there make their case in court for their reading of the statute.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
What number of states removing Trump from the primary ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice? What number of states removing Trump from the general ballot will count for you as being larger than losing a Supreme Court Justice? Set a goal post in the here and now, before we get to the culmination of this trend, so that we can look back and gauge whether they ended up escalating or not.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
The current contours, given existing statutory law for material support, were outlined in last year's case Twitter v. Taamneh. Worth a read. Of course, if you listened to oral arguments there, they did try to grapple with whether they could say something about 230 or about Constitutional limits, but the opinion they converged on dodged all of that and focused purely on statutory interpretation, making their job a lot easier and kicking the can down the road a bit. The upshot, at least for folks who want to impose some sort of legal liability on these companies is that, since this was purely about statutory interpretation, it's entirely possible that they could just pass a different statute that can provide a different standard. It will likely only be when more statutes are passed that pull that line closer and closer to Constitutional/230 limits that we'll really see where the boundaries are.
As an aside, in that case last year, these companies were all swearing up and down that their algorithms are totally passive, agnostic to the nature of the content, and that they are indifferent to the customers who use them. Compare to this week's arguments, where many of those same companies were all swearing up and down that they expend significant time, money, and effort to carefully curate a newspaper-like editorial product that reflects the company's desired expression, and that being able to prohibit Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow from using GMail just because they don't like their politics is just a regular part of their editorial discretion. This massive hypocrisy was pointed out multiple times, and we'll see if it matters in the final decision. There have been times before that the Court has been pissed off by repeat litigants who appear to make a mockery of the Court's standards and processes by making contradictory claims about the same underlying facts in different cases at different times to achieve the results they want.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
I think the intersection between the set of people who adopt natural law and the set of people who adopt a consent-only sexual ethic is possibly the empty set.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
That’s why the Trump administration briefly floated the idea of relocating headquarter offices outside the DC beltway.
This has long been one of my favorite reform proposal, but it's hard to make it stick. Every agency out there feels like their highest imperative is to ensure that their overlords "understand" what they're trying to do, finds value in their organization, and keeps the resource train flowing. So it is not uncommon that even when the bulk of an agency is actually located elsewhere, their leadership either all have offices in DC or spend significant amounts of time "traveling" there. So, one likely immediate consequence is that this "travel" to DC will ramp up even more, such that agency leadership essentially all have "temporary offices" there that become less and less temporary. They'll delegate more internal power down the chain as their jobs become more "externally-focused". The result may be a bit of a rift between agency upper/lower-upper management. In the balance, how does this actually affect the day-to-day operation of the agency? It probably depends a lot on agency specifics and how much their upper/upper-middle layers cohere through the process.
In sum, I sort of thing that just firing and turning management into political appointees accomplishes a certain amount, while relocation sort of severs upper management from agency operations, which may actually reduce the effectiveness of turning those folks into political appointees. The permanent bureaucracy already does a lot to isolate political appointees to make sure they can't "stir up too much trouble", and that may actually be a bit easier to do if they can just ship them all off to DC all the time, while they take the real reins of power over day-to-day agency operations.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Regardless of what happens in the legal case, that BBC article is a prime example of how the propaganda machine rolls. "A man has been arrested..." Literally no other references to this man. You can't make this stuff up.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
Romney's one of the last Republican's who have actual ideas.
Your chauvinism is showing. What makes an idea "actual", besides it "actually" being a Dem policy position?
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
"Picking up pennies in front of a bulldozer," is the phrase that came to mind when reading your comment.
ControlsFreak
8mo ago
I have posted about secrecy in voting here before, and I included a discussion of the historical reason for adopting the "Australian ballot". This iswas a hugely important issue for a very long time, not in the sense that it was an important and controversial issue. No, it was hugely important and not controversial, at least among generally free countries.
Unlike how organizations like the ACLU officially changed course and explicitly disclaimed their prior views on vaccine mandates, my sense is that most organizations still overtly claim to value secrecy. Just a casual web search provides things from IPU:
Acknowledging and endorsing the fundamental principles relating to periodic free and fair elections that have been recognized by States in universal and regional human rights instruments, including the right of everyone to take part in the government of his or her country directly or indirectly through freely chosen representatives, to vote in such elections by secret ballot, to have an equal opportunity to become a candidate for election, and to put forward his or her political views, individually or in association with others,
From the Bureau of International Information Programs (IIP), U.S. Department of State:
Free and fair elections require:
...
Secret ballots — voting by secret ballot ensures that an individual's choice of party or candidate cannot be used against him or her.
USAID helpfully cites the Universal Declaration of Human Rights Article 21.3:
The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures
and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights Article 25:
Every citizen shall have the right and the opportunity, without any of the distinctions mentioned in article 231 and without unreasonable restrictions... To vote and to be elected at genuine periodic elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret ballot, guaranteeing the free expression of the will of the electors.
They call "secrecy of the ballot" a "core election-related international obligation" and define it in the annex as:
Secret ballot: Voters should be able to cast their ballot in secret without fear of intimidation. Ballots should not be able to be linked with individual voters.
If those organizations are a little too America-linked, here's OSCE, circa 2010:
Voting by secret ballot Voters should mark their ballots alone, in the privacy of a voting booth, and in such a way that the marked ballot cannot be seen before it is cast and cannot be later connected with a particular voter. Exceptions can be made only under specified conditions, such as at the request of voters who require assistance, e.g., disabled or illiterate voters. Any voting outside of a voting booth compromises the secrecy of the vote. The presence of more than one person in a voting booth should not be permitted, as it compromises the secrecy of the vote. Open voting or unlawful voting by proxies are violations of the secrecy principle. Arrangements for voting by members of the military and by prisoners should ensure their votes are secret and not subject to coercion.
Reading their COVID-era publication sheds some light on the difficulty:
The right to cast vote by secret ballot is another cornerstone of a democratic electoral process, enshrined in:
1990 OSCE Copenhagen Document, paragraphs 5.1 and 7.4;
1948 UDHR, Article 21;
1966 ICCPR, Article 25;
1996 UN HRC General Comment No. 25, paragraph 20;
1953 ECHR, Additional Protocol, Article 3; and
2002 VC Code of Good Practice, sections I.3.2 and I.4.
Effective protection of secrecy of the vote is one of the key challenges posed by some alternative voting methods, particularly when voting takes place outside the controlled environment of polling stations, such as postal or Internet voting, or when voters' choices are revealed to their appointed representatives, as in the case of proxy voting. Secrecy should therefore be at the forefront of decision-making when introducing or expanding the use of alternative voting methods. It requires safeguards in law and regulations, as well as due care and proactive steps by polling staff to protect it and to prevent any breaches. The importance of the secrecy of the vote, as well as measures taken to protect it should be addressed in civic and voter education programmes, as well as through prompt investigation by law enforcement bodies of its potential violation.
Secrecy considerations are also central in the context of polling station layout and set-up, equipment used, as well as in voter processing and flow management. They need to remain as one of the priorities when considering adjustments to polling station arrangements, including any special measures to mitigate public health risks
They continue in detail:
The secrecy of the vote may also be challenged by remote voting systems like postal voting, as it takes place without the presence of election officials or observers. Postal voting also provides for less oversight of certain behaviours, like influencing the vote of others and family voting. States, nevertheless, have an obligation to take measures to ensure that the principle of secrecy is maintained.
Ballot delivery, marking, and counting systems used in postal voting present considerable and unique challenges to the integrity of elections. There are several commonly used procedural safeguards for voting by mail, such as ballot secrecy envelopes, witness requirements and signature verification. However, these technical solutions may not be enough to instill confidence in postal voting if there is diminished public trust in electoral processes and administration.
You can just tell that they know that this is a problem. They know that their 2010 position was widely considered to be the correct position for good reasons. They even point out some of those good reasons. But what can be done about it? "Eh." Probably nothing. Why yes, everyone must obviously agree with the position that ensuring strict voter secrecy is, in principle, an obligation of States holding free and fair elections, but it just doesn't seem like we can figure out any specific advice to make it actually work, since it's, like, not 2010 anymore. So, well, if we can't come up with any good ideas to actually implement the principle in the face of the concrete thing that we want to do right now, the "principle" will just be attested to verbally, as a signalling mechanism, while we proceed in just trodding all over it.
It's absolutely maddening from a historical and theoretical perspective. What's worse is that it threatens to be yet another issue where we had broad consensus across essentially the entire free world, but now could end up being another issue associated with "loony Trumpists", making it ripe for the chopping block. The impact may not be felt today, or even in the next decade... but I cannot imagine what the long-term consequences could be of simply jettisoning this principle for the rest of time.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I think Alito is pretty obviously right to make comparisons to print media, though even with that, there's still plenty of tricky. In fact, I think that we really shouldn't even speak the words "social media" or "internet" in this discussion. Instead, from a historical perspective, this really seems like a core freedom of the press issue. That is, for centuries after the printing press was created, governments around the world went to great lengths to control its use. Examples are found in Acemoğlu and Robinson. Private entities or companies would operate a printing press, and regular people could go interact with these operators in sort of a regular way; say, if they wanted to print up a pamphlet to hand out about their views or a newspaper or something, they would go to the printer, submit what they wanted to have printed, pay them however much money, then come back and receive their product after it was printed. Much the same as today, you could say that those private entities had some rights of their own to do business, and they might refuse to print something if they really disagreed with it (they didn't have to bake the cake or make the website; could ban the local Alex Jones, or whatever analogy you want). So what did governments do? They pressured press operators to adopt criteria that the government found favorable. Maybe they'd even issue local monopolies and say that only so-and-so had the right to run a press in a particular area. Of course, the guys they picked always somehow knew what sets of views they needed to have (and which they needed to reject to print) in order to keep their license and continue making bank.
As countries became more liberal democratic, they realized that this was a problem. Some countries kept the monopolies, but passed pretty strict non-discrimination laws, saying that they had to just print whatever the customers wanted; no letting pro-monarchists print their pamphlets and rejecting revolutionary pamphlets. Others, like the US, passed freedom of the press provisions, simply saying that the government needed to stay TF away from press operators; no monopolies, no threats of shutting them down if they don't toe the party like, just leave Britney press operators alone. All of them. Whoever wanted to just buy a press and print.
As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press. It's not an institutional press, like NYT/CBS/whatever. It's literally anybody who waltzes down to their press company and wants to use the press. And I think the underlying motivation, while not putting in words that it's effectively a non-discrimination law, was understood to have a non-discrimination effect. Whether or not there could be enough history here to make a legal determination given our current laws, just from a 'theory of good institutions in the vein of Why Nations Fail', it would be a pretty rough outcome for countries that went down the "freedom of the press" route rather than the non-discrimination route to discover that natural monopolies might arise to make this whole branch of the endeavor ultimately fruitless, if governments could just discreetly threaten the natural monopolists. I just hope we don't have to see a nation or three literally fail from going down this route before we either rekindle the non-discrimination-type theoretical roots of the freedom of the press or we explicitly adopt something that is a standalone non-discrimination provision.
Some additional nice things that this view captures: The third-party business is important and captured here. Old school printing presses were also third parties. It doesn't matter whether the guy who is asking the printer to print the thing is the NYT or Joe from across the street; if the government doesn't have a reason that is compelling enough to overcome 1A speech scrutiny, so that they can go directly to NYT/Joe and directly tell him that he can't say that, then they should be prohibited by 1A press scrutiny from going down the street to the local print shop or the commercial entity that actually does the physical printing for NYT and telling them that they shouldn't print it.
I think this distinction also captures some of the "government need" doctrine, as well. I accept that there are some genuine government needs that can overcome 1A speech scrutiny. For example, they can legitimately tell folks who have security clearances that they're not allowed to just write a book blowing a bunch of classified information. Of course, how is this balanced with things like the Pentagon Papers precedent? Well, in my view, the Pentagon Papers precedent is quite strong - if someone who didn't agree to keep classified information secret gets that classified information, for the most part, the government can't prohibit them from publishing it. There is some obvious danger here, but it's actually not all that far off from the tradeoffs we make in cybersecurity all over the place. If Party A discovers a flaw in Party B's software, even if Party B is a sensitive government function, the sort of accepted solution is that they tell Party B that they'll only have X days to implement a fix, to do what they can to protect some equities, and then they're going public. Yet, at the same time, some flaws are viewed as soooooo potentially damaging, that even Google's vulnerability team has failed to follow through on the threat to go public when the company with the flaw didn't bother repairing it. We basically let that decision be up to the Googles/Party A's.
Similarly, when the Intercept/Guardian got the Snowden files, they met with the NSA. The NSA did try to express the government's perspective on the matter. They asked the journalists to withhold some things from publication, arguing that some of the items were completely noncontroversial, directly within the government's known mission, were of extremely little "news value", and would cause significant damage to national security and/or sources/methods. I'm mostly fine with this, even though there is a lot of conversation here about government discussions being inherently coercive. It is genuinely difficult to draw lines here, and it's hard to come up with a good limit that prevents the Intercept/Guardian from getting the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment.
That said, I think it is infinitely preferable to the option of going to third parties. The Intercept/Guardian definitely have to weigh a lot of things, including the possibility of the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment, but at least they're the ones with skin in the game and the ability to actually weigh them. Whoever it is that prints their physical copies or hosts their website may have some skin in the game, just because it is possible for people to flee to other printers/hosters out of fear of being censored, themselves, but that skin is wayyyyyyy thinner than the actual party who wants to publish the information/opinion that they have.
Of course, this would make it much harder for the government to do what they want to do. There are lots of bozos on twitter spouting bullshit that the government would like to get rid of. If they actually had to go through the bozos rather than twitter, there would be substantial refocusing of efforts towards things that actually matter for national security, not bozos spouting off about their personal beliefs on COVID or whatever.
ControlsFreak
3mo ago
Because far more prominent individuals who encouraged others to go [in]to the Capitol and were not even charged
First off, I think you mean "into" here. But anyway, complete side track, but it's sort of hilarious watching this regularly-scheduled program on a completely different screen than watching the Section 3 disqualification program. Like, here, the fact that someone just encouraged others to go into the Capitol is good reason to not charge them. But ya know, with Trump, he didn't even do that, yet it is clearly and obviously "engaging in insurrection".
The ruling is absurd, but the Constitution is pretty clear that states get to decide how their elections are run, including their national elections.
That's not really the way "judicial federalism" works, though. Yes, states have a lot of leeway in how they run elections, but this state is specifically appealing to the text of the federal Constitution in order to rule that he is ineligible. The fun history here to really drive the point home is that there are a lot of state Constitutions that have clauses that are word-for-word identical to the federal Constitution. Suppose that for some clause (not necessarily the one here), State A has a word-for-word identical clause in its state Constitution, but State B does not. Perhaps both states' Supreme Courts rule that that clause means X. Now, SCOTUS jumps in and says, "No no no, in the federal Constitution, that clause does not mean X." Well, State A's Supreme Court can (and some have in various cases) go back to the same issue and say, "Well, even if that clause in the federal Constitution doesn't mean X, we think that the same clause in the state Constitution means X." This has happened plenty of times. State B, on the other hand, has no such luck. The only thing they had to appeal to in this extremely sanitized hypothetical was the federal Constitution, and SCOTUS simply outranks them when it comes to interpreting what the federal Constitution means. [EDIT: Right after submitting, I realized that linking to this book is a good cite for an example of how this has definitely happened, concretely.]
"Judicial federalism" can work the other way, too. There are sometimes cases in the federal courts that turn on an interpretation of state law (or state Constitution). There have also definitely been examples where the federal courts essentially punt the question back over to the state Supreme Court, saying, "Yo! You guys need to tell us what your law means."
In this case, I don't believe Colorado has an equivalent-to-Section-3-of-14A in their state Constitution; they are purely interpreting the federal Constitution. As such, I don't think there's any reason why an appeal can't be made in the federal courts. There is a substantial federal question here, specifically that of interpreting the meaning of Section 3 of 14A of the federal Constitution.
[EDIT EDIT: Realize now that I should have read further in the comments; I was totally scooped. Oops.]
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
Christianity is life-denying to the core: man is fallen, the world profane and corrupt, and the only refuge is the kingdom of heaven which only God can bring about.
Like, maybe your Christianity, but I feel like there are tons of others out there. The ones where man is made in God's image, told to be fruitful and multiply to fill the earth with little beings that are meant to "graduate" by resurrection into basically being God. Where the God man came to let himself be killed, apparently "so that you can have life more abundantly". As KnotGodel points out, many of your intermediate claims are pretty debatable (and debated by different groups of Christians), which likely means that your personal view is not necessarily that authoritative concerning Christianity's "core", at least not to the point that one should fail to understand how other interpretations could exist.
ControlsFreak
5mo ago
trump has an EO ready to go to reclass a huge percentage of federal enployees as contractors, making them much easier to fire
ROFL at "huge percentage". The article says like 50k positions. There's close to 2M federal employees. And they wouldn't become "contractors"; they'd just be more politically-controlled. There's something like 4k political appointees currently. Going to 50k would be a significant step toward making civil service leadership more politically-accountable when someone actually wins an election, rather than it just being de facto Democrat-controlled, but who knows how deep the rot is. In any event, it's definitely not putting a huge percentage of federal employees on the political chopping block.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Anglophones when they meet other anglophones with a different accent: "Cool accent bro!"
Francophones when they meet other francophones with a different accent: "Your mockery of our beautiful language is a disgrace to all that is holy."
ControlsFreak
7mo ago
Why don't we teach young women 'please never send mixed signals to men about your sexual interest as ambiguous coquettishness muddies the water around consent'?
Because a small but influential portion of society decided that while marriage norms solve this problem nearly entirely, they are the enemy to their political goals.
I know this is already dead and buried... and that @firmamenti already pretty much explained why... but we have now gotten the NYT response. No surprise, it's "Republicans pounce". They're banking on their readership not actually reading the report. They just refuse to even acknowledge all the stuff in there that demonstrates how differently the FBI treated claims touching the Clinton campaign from those touching the Trump campaign. If they just close their eyes and ignore the screen for half the movie, it's no wonder they see a different movie. They get their zingers in. "In fact, Mr. Durham said he agreed that the F.B.I. should have opened a preliminary investigation." See! It's all bullshit, what these right wing nutjobs are saying! Of course, completely hidden in this sentence is the distinction between types of investigation, one of the major points of the Durham report. If you didn't read the report or you're not otherwise familiar with this, you'll never notice. They're not explicitly lying. They're just totally ignoring the entire discussion about how they shouldn't have immediately opened a full investigation, how a preliminary investigation wouldn't have justified many of the investigatory steps they took, how thinly the whole shebang was predicated, how an unbiased preliminary investigation would have almost certainly quickly noticed, "There's literally nothing here," and then been quickly closed, how a proper response that was trying to protect American elections and elected officials would have been to provide defensive briefings to Trump rather than the obscene exercise of doing everything possible to malign him for possibly being the victim of a foreign influence campaign... or critically, how this all goes down differently when it is blue politicians at risk.
Of course, again, as already said by @firmamenti, everyone on the right already knows all this, so there's not much that needs to be said here. The only culture war things of interest is the response. How partisan actors continue with their tactics of "not lying" and memoryholing "inconvenient truths". I spent a lot of time paying close attention to the developments of this story back when it was happening in real time in 2016. I know specific media people who know this topic in great detail. The real culture war story is seeing their silence. Usual Suspect Numero Uno, Benjamin Wittes; where is his comment on the Durham report? I've been looking, even went to his new Mastodon. Best I can tell, there isn't one. If you can get away with just squeezing your eyes shut and not watching the painful parts of the movie, you're going to.
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