Yes, because the only way people ever get a sense of what the "good" and "bad" parts of town are is from GIS data and not by opening their window and noticing that they live in a beautiful neighborhood of detached single-family homes with carefully maintained lawns and not a graffiti-covered ghetto. Yes, he probably watched TV and local news with its inordinate focus on 'if it bleeds it leads" crime coverage. This horribly biased mainstream media may have misled him into thinking he was likely to be a victim of violent crime, and so he gunned down a black band geek (edit: in what would have been) the first murder in KC in 2023 to take place north of the Missouri River. Or he may have just been an addled old man who didn't consume much news and made a mistake.
Either way, the issue was not, as you asserted originally, that this guy watched society collapse around him. He may have watched society collapse on TV and become confused.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
We have had categories of speech that are not protected by the first amendment for a long time, obscenity, threats, incitement to lawless action. It's easy to imagine how these narrow restrictions might be broadened and abused, yet we've had them for a long time without degenerating into a censorious dictatorship. The fact that you can imagine a hypothetical slippery slope isn't significant, the question is if we're actually sliding down it. I'm asking you for evidence that we are.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
What is the similar law? There is specifically a Virginia statute against burning objects on public property with the intent to intimidate. Show me the law against 'protesting with an intent to intimidate".
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
The Right is allowed to say cities are hell hole slums, that they hate NY city values, and that people making less than 25k are lawless leeches who should be disenfranchised because they're the party of the real working class fighting back against elites who disparage deplorables.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yes, and you can explain that as either a) the government is really bad at getting black kids to study and really good at convincing them to chop off their genitals or b) the state isn't actually very influential over either and culture/genetics is the driving force in both cases.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Leaning on the owner is usually a second degree boycott though. We can't directly boycott x because we aren't its consumer base, but we are the consumer base for company y that works with x and we can threaten to boycott y if they don't boycott x. It's still a sort of social shunning rather than a direct censorship.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Did he do fraud? He plead guilty to failure to pay, but not evasion. They're not alleging he set up some illegal shell companies to hide his income, just that he didn't pay what he owed.
The game theory about how to punish attempted fraud vs. late payments seem meaningfully different.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
It's nice that he just kept the war plans in his highly secure hotel bathroom and showed them to memoir writers rather than faxing them to our enemies but that's still obviously illegal.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
George W. Bush went to Yale and he was famously seen as an idiot by the left in the 2000's merely because he had a few malapropisms and committed the largest foreign policy blunder in my lifetime. If your family is loaded and you're not an eloquent speaker people will assume that your degree wasn't really earned. The right is similarly dismissive of Jill Biden's PhD because she got it after Joe became a senator.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Is Trump only getting roughly 440 miles of border wall constructed a story of deep state subversion or the constitutional order functioning properly and the president being unable to build large infrastructure projects without congressional support. Trump only got a small congressional authorization for the Wall, roughly 1.5 billion. He tried to fund the rest with money authorized for military construction and drug interdiction and got held up in court with legal battles. Biden won and undid the reallocation of DoD funds to the border wall.
That's what typically happens when the president tries to govern by executive order, he's hampered by lawsuits and undone by the next president.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
If you choked a non-homeless person to death after they verbally insulted you should you face no penalty? The article says he yelled but hadn't physically assaulted anyone yet. Should the law be that if someone makes a verbal threat someone else is allowed to murder them in response?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Yes, plus you'd expect the personnel involved and the potential for whistleblowers to increase dramatically. You'd also need to avoid producing statistical irregularities by overstuffing in certain places so you'd have to coordinate between different groups. The complexity is just much higher.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Well so far no one who actually is a father appears to have responded but a lot of people reported to the mods. That's pretty funny, though I expect eventually a father will respond. Has there been a demographic survey recently, does it ask about children?
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
I don't think you're wrong that the media is more favorable to affirmative action than the public but this post is a low effort restatement of what I suspect is a widely held opinion here and so doesn't add much value If you found a non-opinion article from a mainstream news source covering the opinion and demonstrated how the subconscious bias influenced their writing that would be a lot more interesting.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I'm not sure going from being the Mayor to the third largest city or a District Attorney to teaching at a college is failing up. In terms of salary it might be, since Lightfoot only made 216k as mayor of Chicago and the average Harvard professor makes 190k she could easily see a raise. I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect one term politicians to sink into ignominy. If you lose in a 70-30 landslide there's still going to be someone with a cushy job to hand out in that thirty percent. And if you look at what Happens to right wing Failures like Sam Brownback or Paul Ryan they usually end up at some Christian College or on the Board of a Major Company.
I'd say the incentive problem is on the other side. Being a high ranking politician is low paid compared to the other options available to those with the skills and connections to get elected, and attracts considerably more unpleasant scrutiny and stress. Teaching undergrads is probably about as remunerative and much more fun than being a prominent politician. That means elected positions attracts narcissists and ideologues and if you want to fix that you have to make retaining the position lucrative and pleasant, so that people do whatever they can to keep winning rather than doing one term, cashing out and kicking back..
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
You can't argue about what causes someone to experience revulsion so it's not really a good basis for public reasoning in a democratic society. Especially if you're going to make the case that the state should do something to curtail someone's individual autonomy you generally need to ground it in the prevention of harm.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The cancel culture debate isn't about whether people can have private conversations it's about people's rights to speak from various platforms. Speaking from a platform isn't a private transaction between person A & B, it involves the approval of whoever owns the platform. Consumers and employees play a role, as they can boycott or stop working for platform owners who use the platform to promote things they think are harmful. That's not physically preventing person A from Person B, it's just creating an incentive structure for the platform owner to deny person A from using their private platform to talk to Person B.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Why might trans people be worried about people who don't recognize them as the gender they identify with banning cross-dressing?
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If there are uncaptured publishers, and massive demand for male oriented fiction that is not being served, why haven't these uncaptured publishers gobbled up market share? Who do you think is an uncaptured publisher?
If there are a bunch of genius male authors being suppressed why don't they put their stuff on Kindle or Fanfiction.net and go viral? A fair number of female authors have turned viral fanfic into successful novels.
And you still haven't explained the gender disparity in fanfic where no barriers to entry exist.
You're assuming the causation is that publisher's are captured so audience's become female but if our only evidence is timing the causation could run the other way. As audiences become more female publisher's cater to female preferences, and women are disproportionately woke. This explanation fits better with the efficient market hypothesis and so I think has Occam on its side.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
If you put a transgender person alone on a space station and give them HRT they're still going to have experiences aligned with their gender identity. How they experience emotions, sexual arousal, and some of their personality characteristics are going to become more closely aligned with the gender they identify with. On the obvious stereotypical stuff, trans women will find it much easier to cry, trans men experience more arousal in response to visual stimulus.
If you put a white person on a space station and let them increase their melanin levels are they going to have any experiences that constitute 'the black experience' or are part of black culture in the U.S? I would think not, because those experiences are inherently social. Perhaps they might have to change their skin care routine, but that doesn't seem a comparably large change in internal subjective experience.
That is to say that melanin is constitutive of race almost entirely because it's a flag that indicates how others should treat you socially. Gender is both a social cultural experience and an internal psychological one.
It makes sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to the gender I identify with than my birth sex, so I would like to occupy the social position of my gender identity and take hormones so my internal experiences and body align more fully with that gender". It doesn't make sense to me for someone to say "my internal psychological experience is closer to a different race" because I don't think races have unique internal psychological experiences outside of social treatment.
As you point out with the case of pregnancy there are going to be all sorts of things where trans people have experiences that are wildly atypical for someone of the gender they identify with. Obviously criminalization of speech is bad and I oppose that. But if someone says to me: "I think my internal psychological experience is closest to a man's and I would like to occupy the male social position and take testosterone, but the only way for me to have biological children is to become pregnant and so I have chosen to do that please refer to me as a man" I would do so.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
People training a chatbot have a very good reason to get the AI to value language taboos over the lives of millions, it will never actually makes life-saving decisions but it will generate a lot of speech. A chatbot that can generate personalized hate speech at scale would make the internet a much less pleasant place, but a chatbot that would rather kill a million people than say the N-word just produces absurd responses to hypothetical scenarios.
Whatever AI is actually in charge of disarming bombs or flying planes won't be producing speech at scale and so the incentives to train it to be so overly deferential to speech norms won't exist.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
Yes, the relationship between social status and a particular metric of status can change over time, literacy is a better indicator of social status in 1600 than in 1990. But I don't think we can assume everytime a particular metric of status becomes less heritable it is because it reflects status less, though I'm also not sure how you'd test whether a metric is genuinely measuring status.
Ecgtheow
9mo ago
Yeah I was a little taken aback by the lack of attention paid to wealth in this. He says wealth has a stronger implied generation to generation persistence then his other metrics of social status but he doesn't show whether or not wealth correlations changes as a function of genetic distance like he does for the other metrics.
He does show that wealth is asymmetrically hereditary in that the paternal grandfather predicts wealth but the maternal grandmother does not. If social status is produced by wealth, and wealth is inherited by sons then wouldn't we expect other status measures to be less correlated with the female line than the male line?
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
The Hold Steady has a song about this called Guys go for looks, girls go for status.
Conservatives are mad about drag queen story hour and that's just reading a book not doing a dance. There's a lot of ambiguity in determining whether a performance is sexualized and it's reasonable not to trust a political movement that doesn't think you have a legitimate place in public life to draw those boundaries in a fair way.
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