Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I've always been somewhat annoyed by signs and bumper stickers that say the Marines or the Army protect my freedom. The guys manning the ICBM's protect my freedom and safety, everybody else does power projection in service of sometimes praiseworthy and sometimes horrible foreign policy objectives.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's hard to square this idea that progressives are relentlessly devoted to engineering the human condition with Scott's piece "Galton, Ehrlich, Buck" which describes progressives as considering Eugenics so taboo that they oppose even oppose sperm banks of very talented people or attempts to inform people with rare genetic conditions so that the don't marry people with similar genes The 'eugenic instinct' is dead, replaced by deep concerns about ableism.
Your examples of how the liberal engineering drive would function in response to HBD don't make much sense to me. Recruiting international scientists isn't about eugenics it's about meritocracy. You don't need HBD or hereditary IQ to justify it. You'd still want whoever the smartest people in the world are currently working in your labs regardless of how their children turn out.
I think it's less profound and more historically contingent. As with Eugenics where a regime of forced sterilization made the whole field taboo obviously segregation made the entire study of racial difference taboo. Even where that difference is not facially threatening to liberalism, like explaining black athletic achievement, genetic explanations are taboo (with maybe an exception for Ethiopians because they're a subset of black people and there's the environmental explanation of altitude). There's no IQ gap that would be small enough to not be taboo, because we're all the way down the slur cascade.
Ecgtheow
7mo ago
This isn't made explicit in much of the coverage but Bowman pulled the fire alarm in the nearby Cannon House Office Building and not the Capitol Building. The NYT article says that the Office Building was evacuated as a result but doesn't say whether there was any disturbance in the Capitol Building as a result.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Irish and Italian Americans never assimilated? How do you propose we measure assimilation, and what groups do you think have assimilated that the Irish and Italians fall short of?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I don't understand the logic at all, it seems like it would cost a lot of ad revenue to throttle user engagement that much. But maybe ad revenue is so low that anything he can do to juice subscriptions is good? Though once you cut low follower engagement by demanding a subscription then it stops becoming a good promotional platform for power users and they use it less which it makes less attractive to subscribers and the death spiral starts.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Oh absolutely. IVF results in the creation and destruction (or death by negligence) of many ooctocytes and blastocysts per cycle and it requires many cycles to get a successful implantation. On a per person basis a woman doing IVF is responsible for the death of many more fertilized eggs than a woman seeking an abortion. It's remarkable that the pro-life movement invests so few resources in convincing women paying thousands of dollars and undergoing unpleasant hormonal therapy to adopt instead.
The 'life at fertilization' position casts a funny light on the reality of human biology where 40-60% of embryos die before being born. If blastocysts are human beings than the leading cause of death is failure to be born, improving access to health care that makes fertilized eggs more likely to be born could become a leading pro-life effective altruist cause. However, older couples may be engaging in reckless oocyte endangerment whenever they have unprotected sex since they are placing a human in an environment where it will almost certainly die.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Ah, but the fiscal effects: taxes must increase because budgets must increase. Why? Solving problems is no longer the goal of the government; now, issues must be managed. Societal woes must be serviced by specific groups of unionized government employees. Union contracts have to be renegotiated because wages have to increase with inflation and/or remain a multiple of the minimum wage.
Federal Receipts as a share of GDP have bounced around within the same 15-20% range since the 1950's. Labor productivity has followed a roughly linear trend . Public Sector unions are still around but private sector unions are dead as a door nail compared to the pre-enshittification era. Here's a Brookings report outraged that we're hitting a record high of roughly 11 million Federal employees, but their graph shows we had roughly 9 million in 1984 and we've had a 40% increase in population since then so I'm not sure there's been a large proportional change.
Your talk about American Libertarian Capitalism but the era of triumphant deregulation before Conservatives started to admit that globalization deindustrializing the 'heartland' was bad lasted thirty years from 1980-2008?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
But taking CNN's "just asking questions" article at face value, it makes me wonder where all the real gay people are, and why we can't seem to get a gay rights case in front of SCOTUS with parties who aren't being puppeted, Chicago-style.
The New Yorker article says why they had to go with Lawrence & Garner
Since Bowers, no other test case had emerged in which someone was actually arrested for violating a state sodomy law. National gay-rights groups had been challenging state sodomy laws based on supposed harms to gay citizens, who were, litigators claimed, made to look like presumptive criminals. That strategy wasn’t working. After the Supreme Court, in Romer v. Evans (1996), struck down a Colorado initiative excluding gays from anti-discrimination protection, the time felt ripe for another challenge to sodomy statutes. But the gay-civil-rights groups needed to find plaintiffs who would not suffer custody losses or other collateral harms from admitting that they had violated criminal sodomy laws, which tended to rule out gay couples in a committed family relationship. As Carpenter puts it, civil-rights attorneys knew that they needed plaintiffs “with little to lose.” Garner and Lawrence fit that bill.
As to why 303 Creative didn't have any real gay clients demanding wedding websites:
Puzzlingly, before she actually filed the first suit in 2016, Smith had apparently never designed a wedding website.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Eh, I'm not sure it's a bad strategy to forge an alliance with the first generation and then try to assimilate the 2nd & 3rd generation who grow up on English language media.
So going through those examples
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Paul Letts was alleged to have let people cook meth in RV's on his property in exchange for some of the meth. The police raided his property and found 55 guns, equipment for manufacturing meth, possession amounts of meth and Letts later tested positive for Meth. He didn't plead guilty and lost his trial in two days, he had a criminal history and got 57 months in jail.
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Suzanne Wilcox pled guilty after being found at a traffic stop to have drug paraphernalia and a newly purchased handgun. She got time served (five months) and two years probation
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Isca Johnson was found to have marijuana and a gun in his home, he got 21 months jail. This one is weird because it says he was part of a joint state federal operation called "Crime Drivers" which targeted people with warrants out for violent crime, but it doesn't say anything about his criminal history.
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Darion Hayne had a [Edit:] 5.7 x 28mm handgun and 5.4g of Marijuana, he got five years probation with six months home confinement.
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Your fifth link goes to the Isca Johnson one again so I'll add one Sauma Brata Deb got 12 months for illegally posessing two guns.
So just looking at these cases the most lenient sentences available to a normal drug user who illegally possesses a single gun are six month prison or home confinement and two to five years parole. In that context it looks like Hunter did better then a normal person would, but only by a small amount because the penalties for this crime are normally quite small.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
That's different from being a slur though. I don't think astrology is real but if someone were to call me a virgo I wouldn't say they're using a slur.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Is there a recent historical example of barbarian mercenaries taking over the empire? There's instances in Africa where one ethnic group within a state created by an Empire dominates the military and uses that to rule society. I'm not sure African post-colonial states have comparable social and economic situations to the U.S. though.
If the American military suddenly became 70% Uzbek or something they wouldn't have a substantial share of the civilian population behind them, and there wouldn't be a primary export industry like oil or rubber or diamonds to seize control of and distribute revenue from to cronies.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Hanania was asked to speak to the Yale Federalist Society, i.e. a bunch of future red state judges and clerks, about his 'Woke Institutions are Civil Rights Law' hypothesis. While he seems remarkably devoted to biting the hand that feeds him by expressing his contempt for the conservative base he is not without influence.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
We went through an era where a number of convictions made under old forensic regimes got overturned by DNA evidence which reduced a lot of people's faith in the trial system. You might say if person did x they should die, but I'm only 95% certain they did x, so we'll confine them but not kill them on the off chance evidence emerges to vindicate them. Maybe then you give the prisoners who have no hope of such evidence emerging the option to kill themselves.
Though it's hard to ignore the perverse incentives that the worse you make prisons the more people will kill themselves and then you'll save money so it's a bad idea overall.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
If you want to marry an educated woman with ~92% of your income potential and expect them to forgoe most of that income by raising your kids you have to accept worse terms than your grandfather did when he married someone with 60% of his income potential.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
A big part of it is Musk blew the first critical step in doing a leveraged buyout when he substantially overpaid for Twitter. He took a company that was losing money and added a ~$1 Billion interest payment it had to make every year. He had to do something drastic to make it more profitable than it ever has been. A typical LBO is done by private equity with a clear plan to do that but I think Elon mostly wanted to buy Twitter as a fun mildly money losing toy when Tesla stock was at an all time high and then tried to back out when the price of both collapsed.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.
It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
America and the EU spend similar shares of GDP on law enforcement we just spend a much larger share on prisons than the EU does.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Possibly the way search engines changes thing is that now if you say a city is bad everyone from that city can share it on social media and yell at you? Celebrities have a weird code now we're they basically never say anything non-positive about other celebrities because they know if they do it will cause a minor social media flare up and they have to decide if it's worth it rathr than just venting.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Conservatives are quite capable of lawfare and they have a 6-3 Conservative Supreme Court majority. If 'intent to intimidate' rulings were shutting down conservative political rallies around the country they're quite capable of funding legal challenges and appealing their way to a court where they have a sympathetic majority.
The cynical view is that Conservative legal elites are completely fine with having their embarrassing white nationalist fringe suppressed and don't expect the statute in question to be applied broadly. The less cynical view is that this guy was charged because he was part of a group that surrounded some counter protestors and is alleged to have menaced them with the torch, which means he's being punished constitutionally for interpersonal intimidation and not political speech.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
This is what SJW's mean when they say white isn't an ethnicity it's a 'constructed position of power'. The category of white people has expanded and can expand further because it's not defined by a skin tone it's a coalition of people who have a God given right to look down on black people.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm not sure corporate diversity officers are the ones burning down police stations.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I read this paper a while ago but I think the comparison group for a lot of their metrics isn't the average person but people who were similarly wealthy in 1850 or 1860 but who owned fewer slaves. I remember reading it and being confused as to why the descendants of people who experienced a large negative wealth shock ended up better off then people who were similarly wealthy but didn't lose as much wealth.
For what it's worth the authors of that paper reject genetics as an explanation and think it has to do with sons of families that lost slaves ended up leveraging their families accumulated social status to marry much richer than average.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
From what I glean of liberal Christians, there's some remnant of religious belief remaining which they can't give up, but the pull of being a good liberal is too strong. Also, since Christianity is/was the dominant religion in the West, there's a lot of remaining cultural inertia about its power and influence. So if you can present yourself as "I'm a good X and the Holy Book says/doesn't say about progressive cause" that gives you some sort of authority by association.
Church is a lot more about community and social network then it is about scripture and theology for a lot of people. I don't think liberal Christians sit in the pews every Sunday, bring Casserole to the potluck, and do charitable work for political clout. There was a generation raised in the church who gradually became secular humanists and I think it's better for society that they preserve community organizations like churches then abandon them in pursuit of consistency.
I have twitter blocked on this device as a futile anti-procrastination measure but I saw that Jordan Peterson (or Mikhaila on his account) tweeted suggesting they should be naked and oiled up.
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