Corvos
3mo ago
If the risks are higher than people are willing to deal with for the $50k / year we pay ICE agents, we should first try paying more
The thing is that you need lots of ICE agents to deal with all the illegal immigration. Making them so expensive that there aren’t enough of them to scale to immigration is effectively an amnesty by the back door.
Corvos
3mo ago
If you have any friends or acquaintances who went off to get jobs in other places, prepare to drop them a line explaining the situation and ask them if they know anyone who’s hiring.
The layoffs happening sound large so it’s not your fault, just cost-cutting. People will likely be sympathetic. Worst comes to the worst, maybe you could band together with some other guys from the same company and try founding a startup.
Corvos
3mo ago
Oh, cool. I have never read any Islamic work but I know there’s stuff I’m missing, like the famous work on sabbiyah (?), the holding together of culture.
Corvos
3mo ago
There is a sarcastic line about such people becoming Theologists. It’s true to some degree - it allows people to spend lots of time thinking about what God would be like if He exists without ever having to seriously opine on whether He does.
Corvos
3mo ago
Of course. But you can't know until you try, so ultimately it's just a question of how dissatisfied you are with the status quo.
Corvos
4mo ago
Sort of like when driving, it's often more important to be predictable than anything else, big democratic economies like ours work best when there's some general stability and transparency
I know what you mean and I don’t even disagree but equally stable, predictable managed decline like we have in the UK isn’t good either. It can be worth a bit of uncomfortable screwing around if that gets you out of a stable attractor.
Corvos
4mo ago
I wouldn't be surprised to find that big chunks of Trump 1's administration felt more comfortable taking orders from Obama than from Trump.
Ick. I'm on record elsewhere as being in favour of applying tit-for-tat cancel culture to some degree but I draw the line at these emotive 'if you don't say what we want you to say right now you're a murderer' kinds of proposals. Not openly celebrating Kirk's death or saying he deserved it right afterwards is a reasonable ask. Feeling the right emotion on command - or pretending to against your will for political reasons - is not.
Corvos
4mo ago
Yes and no. There's a lot to be said for a name that nobody will ever forget.
Corvos
4mo ago
Agreed, I meant more than I don’t find acronyms a great solution in general.
I’m sure we didn’t use them before 1900. I’m not sure what we did do.
Corvos
4mo ago
IMO English is an unfortunate language (compared to Japanese) in that it is difficult and disapproved-of to shorten words and phrases in a way that is still readable. You can't just stick a couple of kanji together or throw out half the sounds. You can't turn 'leave without pay' into 'no-pay leave' without sounding childish, let alone 'go-no-pay' and 'life without parole' can't be turned into 'forever-jail'. I think part of it is the cultural love-affair with sophisticated latinate vocabulary (he says as someone with an impeccable classical education, but we're all hypocrites here).
Acronyms are an attempt to solve the job but are often too complicated in their own right and are mostly unreadable unless you already know what they mean (BATNA).
Corvos
4mo ago
Actually, if you met me, you'd probably like and respect me.
It's true – even if you say you're done with the concept of empathy.
We'd probably disagree on a lot of things, but we'd make it work.
Um, this is lovely and all, but have you ever actually been in a serious conflict with another person or group of people? Especially with a militant Leftist?
I have, as it happens. I sent an email offering to meet up and find a compromise that worked for us, and got an email back that said, to the best of my recollection, "There is nowhere that we will compromise and discussing things with you would be a waste of time".
People in the real world, actual aggressive self-righteous goal-oriented people, don't compromise because they're nice and they want what's best for everyone. They compromise only if they have to in order to get what they want. (And often not even then, look how the trade unions caused the decline of British industry rather than compromise on ideology).
Corvos
4mo ago
St. Andrews is pretty rural I think.
My impression is that getting a rifle is more difficult, because it's easier to use as a weapon and also just easier to accidentally kill people if you don't watch where you're firing. Shotguns are much more common. He might be able to get one but it wouldn't be easy and he'd probably need notes from a stalking club or something.
Corvos
4mo ago
Came up in a different thread, but an urban college student is very unlikely to be allowed to buy a bolt-action rifle in the UK without being asked searching questions about why he needed it. He might have been able to manage anyway due to his family, but it wouldn't have been trivial:
This surprised me, so I looked into the data a bit. The results are muddy but mildly interesting. THIS IS EXCLUSIVELY AN ANALYSIS OF FREE SPEECH INCIDENTS AT UNIVERSITIES, not firings etc. and not in the workplace or media.
- you're right, there's a pretty even split. Left 848, Right 830.
- a lot of these incidents are attempts. I thought that the left would be much more successful at actually cancelling people, which would be what we hear about, so I filtered out cancellation / disruption attempts and kept invitation revocations, event cancellations, etc. The results are tilted towards the left, but less so that I would expect: Left 434 to Right 319.
- the Left is much more likely to disrupt or attempt to disrupt events: Left 321: Right 40.
- filtering out disruption attempts and keeping only cancellation attempts gives you Left 217, Right 500. The right is about twice as likely to make a failed attempt at cancelling an event through the official system. This accounts for the majority of right-wing activity.
- FIRE's database contains various different type of events. The right is three times as likely to attempt to cancel an artwork, cinema showing or performance (Left 107, Right 335). To some extent this may be cofounding the results, as FIRE counts the cancellation of six different artworks in the same show as 6 cancellation attempts, equally for multi-film cinema performances. The left is twice as likely to cancel a speech (Left 602, 277).
- During peak woke years 2016-2024, the left was only responsible for about twice as many cancellations (Left 599, Right 305).
Broadly I would say that the number of attempts since 2000 are broadly equal. The manner is somewhat different: the Left are much more prone to disrupting events where the right tries to cancel through official channels. The left are more likely to cancel speech, the right are more likely to cancel art. The left tends to succeed more often, and has attempted to cancel more in the last decade, but not overwhelmingly so, which surprises me.
Caveat: I don't like the way that some of the data is gathered: counting the cancellation of Abortion Film Pts. 1, 2 and 3 as three separate cancellations seems dubious to me.
Corvos
4mo ago
Hmm. She says she's specifically quoting from Malcolm X, and that was celebrating:
Accusing Mr. Kennedy of "twiddling his thumbs" at the killing of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh Diem and his brother, Ngô Dinh Nhu, Malcolm X told a Black Muslim rally at the Manhattan Center that he "never foresaw that the chickens would come home to roost so soon." He added: "Being an old farm boy myself, chickens coming home to roost never did make me sad; they've always made me glad.”
The speech in general is pretty icky:
Malcolm X told the crowd, estimated at about 700, that immediately after Mr. Kennedy's assassination the Black Muslim leadership had been asked for comments by the newspapers. He charged this was an attempt to trap the organization into a "fanatic, inflexibly dogmatic" statement. He said the press was looking for such a remark as: "Hooray, hooray! I'm glad he got it!" With this exclamation, there was more laughter and applause.
Throughout his address, which lasted an hour, Malcolm X repeated a previous contention that the Black Muslim movement is based on monotheistic love and tolerance of all men, including white men. However, he said that while his followers were nonviolent, they were encouraged for purposes of self-defense to study judo and karate and "everything else you should learn that will show you how to break a white man's neck." Again there was applause and laughter.
Corvos
4mo ago
The doctor in question isn't just drawing a comparison to it, though. She's saying, 'Charlie Kirk knew there was genocide happening in Gaza and he loved it and he wanted more of it. Now he's dead and it serves him right.' In her own (quoted) words: "The chickens have come home to roost". That seems pretty close to celebrating his murder. At the very least it seems to be saying, 'Charlie Kirk deserved to die this way'.
At least in the UK, we have seen considerable immigrant-on-native violence already, with the government desperately covering up any immigrant involvement. See for example the Stockport killings, those incidents in Ireland, the murder of David Ames a few years back. The Stockport killings attracted particular notice because the government crackdown to white rioting in response to the Stockport killings (zero tolerance, beatings, incredibly long jail times for Twitterers) was so obviously different to when an ethnic riot had taken place the week before (the government apologised for trying to separate an ethnic child from its ethnic-yet-abusive parents, police gave hostage-style videos apologising to a room of bearded muslims).
Have you forgotten the way politicians all across the world took the knee? The riots that were egged on by politicians and completely ignored by all the forces that were supposed to do something about them? The armed ambush of ICE agents? The attempts to blind police with lasers? Jane's Revenge, who were never caught? The two trans shootings at churches?
In the UK and the US, conservative/white violence has not received any government support and almost certainly never will. The opposite really doesn't seem to be true. Can you point to any example of the Trump administration protecting white domestic terrorism? I really think you can't.
The closest I can get are the killing of George Floyd, and the Wikipedia 'Violence Against LGBT' page. But 'very violent man dies violent death' and 'homeless transgender prostitute murdered by client' just don't seem even close to 'university debater / US President candidate sniped from rooftop'. I will grant that if you are gay in very poor, very rural parts of America you have some legitimate reasons for concern, though nobody bothers collating these incidents for other kinds of groups and I think that tells you all you need to know about state sanction.
These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there.
This is pure revisionism. There was no moment where 'cultural conservatives' agreed to some compromise position on social issues. They have fought every inch of the way. There was no 'there' to leave it.
Then how did these compromises happen? Did these groups slaughter their opposition, beat them to death, and take over the tools of the state? No. Some portion of the people who had been conservative on those positions decided to switch their support. Groups like gays, blacks and immigrants appealed for public sympathy and mostly got it. The Spectator, the oldest right-wing magazine in the world, became known as 'The Buggers' Bugle' because of its staunch support for gay rights. I was a conservative and a gay rights supporter growing up, and I saw no contradiction between those two things. Yes, groups that had been oppressed needed to do some PR work and some activism. That's how any social cause works. But once the compromises had been made those groups immediately tried to use the laws that had been made to benefit them, like the Equality Act, to enforce their absolute right to impose their will and preferred worldview and bulldoze any disagreement permanently.
I really don't know how I can persuade you of this. Conservatives in the 2000s had broadly come to terms with social change. They wanted to keep their rights to live their own way to some degree, and they didn't want things to go further than they had already gone, but nobody was secretly dreaming of exterminating the gays and the immigrants in 20010. Such ideas were so far out of the Overton Window you couldn't see it with a telescope. Whereas people like Ozy were writing:
But my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.
Which is indeed what the Left tried to do. And all parties increasingly recognise that the old compromises were not compromises for the left, but merely temporary setbacks on the march of progress.
Corvos
4mo ago
In all seriousness, can you genuinely not tell whose great-grandfather was an aristocrat and whose was a subsistence farmer? Or is it just no longer relevant / not considered polite to notice?
Corvos
4mo ago
I see. I don’t have much to say except thank you very much to you and @MadMonzer for your detailed replies. I will go away and think about it some more.
Corvos
4mo ago
Those people were wrong, and it matters that they were wrong. In both the UK and the US we had huge enquiries for the killing of black people, resulting in vast systematic changes to the way that policing was done in the UK. When I was growing up being gay meant being on the absolute tippy-top of the progressive ladder of privilege. Constant handwringing and historical guilt trips were the norm. Nobody with any kind of public presence whatsoever would think about cheering on their brutal murder.
These groups achieved everything they needed by appealing to historical injustices, and they could have left it there. But because they couldn’t reign in their persecution complexes, they pushed far too far, far too hard, and attempted to exterminate even the mildest of cultural conservatism permanently. And now here we are.
Corvos
4mo ago
Perhaps I’m totally off-base here but to my mind the main service that perhaps 75% of people need from a bank is to serve as a trusted ledger who can take transactions, update a stored value, and make transactions. This is absolutely necessary because it is now broadly impossible to live a cash-only life without seriously constraining your activities.
Given that the software has to be developed at scale anyway for purpose of dealing with standard customers, it is my further understanding that providing these services to any client or business (with all standard regulatory oversight) is essentially free. If you remove the ability to run an overdraft, there is basically no risk.
Am I am wrong about either of these things? If not then what reasons are there, if any, for not legislating that banks must open super-basic accounts for any person or group who asks and must continue providing that service unless the client or the government says otherwise?
I wonder if there is any way to access this training?
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