Ecgtheow
9mo ago
I think the old concept of masculinity is less benevolent than you're construing it. If women are dependent on men to provide the necessities of life and physical protection then men hold substantial power over women. Without doing a massive cross cultural study I think it stands to reason that the physically stronger member of the relationship who provides the calories/income gets their preferences catered to more than the weaker member who in a pre-industrial world would be pregnant and physically dependent on their partner for prolonged periods of time. Cultural norms surrounding relationships evolved over centuries where men had substantially more power than women.
What's happened recently is that first industrialization and now the shift towards a service sector economy has largely equalized economic power. Guns and the modern state reduce the value of a husband's physical protection, and the gender wage gap is pretty minimal once you control for career choices. Feminism's defection from the old marriage bargain is only possible because the old marriage bargain was produced by a difference in economic power that no longer exists.
My read on this is that the masculinity influencers are pushing for a return to the old bargain under an individualist framework. Go out and make so much money and become so physically powerful that there will be something approximating the pre-industrial power differential and you can get a young wife who caters to your preferences. Emba is basically saying that men need to accept less. Derive meaning from providing for a family but without the power and deference your grandfather received.
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.
A relevant fact that I don't think has been established is what the typical outcome is for a drug user who says "no" to question six on form 4437 (which asks if the purchaser is "an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant or stimulant drug") but isn't charged with other crimes. The fighting has mostly been Democrats suggesting that since felons who "try & lie" on form 4437 aren't prosecuted it's unusual for Hunter to be prosecuted and Republicans rebutting them and saying that Hunter is different since he actually got the gun where "try & lie" felons are denied. This still leaves the question unanswered of what is the typical outcome is for a drug user who lies and successfully obtains a gun but isn't charged with other drug-related or violent crimes. Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee put forth an interesting example of a tax case that closely fits what Hunter did. Steven E. Smiff was a Florida Lawyer who didn't file taxes from 1997-2011 for the ~8 million in profits from his law firm. He paid the back taxes and got thirteen months in prison. Hunter didn't pay taxes for two years on roughly three million, paid the money back, and got two years probation in conjunction with the gun crime. Hunter's offense seems less severe since it was 1/7th of the years and 1/3 of the money, but maybe he should have done four or five months for failing to pay. It does look like Hunter got off a bit light for the tax stuff, but if that's the closest comparison a Republican congressional research team can find then the five years jail per count that The National Review suggests was never on the table.
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
11mo ago
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
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.
I'm not a lawyer and I've been trying to figure out exactly what the standard is for using force in self defense. I read some FAQ from law firm websites and a lot of the issue comes down to whether the threat is 'imminent'. In clarifying whether a threat is imminent these blogs usually focus on timing. If a guy with a knife says "I'm going to stab you", that is an imminent threat you can defend yourself against. A guy without a knife saying "I'm gonna go get a knife come back here and stab you" does not constitute an imminent threat and you have no right to use force until he actually gets the knife and comes back. I haven't found anything on conditionals like "I don't care if I have to kill a F, I will" where it's not clear what he is about to do, or when he will do it, since we don't know what he 'has' to do.
I'm also not clear what the exact duration on 'imminent' is since most of the examples given involve very obvious immeadiete threats like someone running at another person with a knife or baseball bat. If Neely is issuing general threats and a reasonable person might fear that he will assault someone in the near future, but he hasn't threatened a specific person or moved to begin the act of assault does that constitute an 'imminent' threat?
Ecgtheow
8mo ago
Then why do men struggle to find women who want to be homemakers?
My answer is people are status seeking and prefer to marry within their class. Middle and upper class women have unprecedented career opportunities in a society where status comes from career rather than family. The absolute standard of living for home makers has never been higher but the opportunity cost of motherhood is also at an all time high. Lower class women don't face the same opportunity costs but upper and middle class men don't want to marry lower class women and deindustrialization destroyed the ability of lower class men to support a family.
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
Matthew 25:34 NIV
"Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father; take your inheritance, the kingdom prepared for you since the creation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, I was thirsty and you gave me something to drink, I was a stranger and you invited me in, I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me.’
“Then the righteous will answer him, ‘Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and invite you in, or needing clothes and clothe you? When did we see you sick or in prison and go to visit you?’
“The King will reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me.’
I can see there being a theological implication of a homeless criminal saying he had nothing to eat or drink and being publicly strangled to death by a former soldier. He may have posed such an imminent threat to others that his killing was justified self defense but that wasn't in the viral video that provoked the response.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Those Prediction Markets are predicting the Republican nominee not the general election. It's totally plausible Trump is extremely popular with the Republican base and not popular with the general electorate.
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
11mo ago
That's why there's overwhelming demand for takes on gay and trans movement are top-down indoctrination and not an aspect of the true dominant ideology of our time, individualist consumerism.
Ecgtheow
6mo ago
There's two ways to approach this, you can try to reduce capital's share of income or you can try to spread capital's share of income more evenly through society.
Spreading out capital's share of income is conceptually easy. Just have some sort of wealth/inheritance/income tax that puts money into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, every citizen gets a non-transferable share and receives a dividend. Over time the Sovereign Wealth Fund becomes a larger and larger share of total investment capital and most of the capital share of national income is spread evenly among the population. There are myriad political difficulties in funding the SWF and the population would have to resist the temptation to drain the fund rather than live on the dividends, but conceptually it's pretty simple.
Solving r>g seems harder. You can artificially reduce r with taxes but that discourages investment. You can try to ramp up g, and obviously more economic growth is good, but reliably producing new technological breakthroughs so that we return to 20th century rates of growth seems unlikely.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I assume you're implying she's some sort of sex worker by calling her a "dancer" which would normally be a reasonable assumption but the article says they met when she was a movement coach on one of his movies. Do Hollywood production companies hire sex workers as coaches for their actors often?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's not rhetorical sleight of hand, it's a disagreement about the burden to respond proportionally that falls on people who are provoked.
The logic is that you're only allowed to use necessary and proportional force in self defense. If someone else throws the first punch in a bar fight you can fight back and claim self defense, but if you start stomping on their unconscious body it's clearly not necessary. If someone throws an empty beer can at your head and you pull out a gun and shoot them that's not proportional.
The issue here is that if the man on the subway successfully choked off the homeless man's blood supply then the window of time where his use of force went from necessary and proportional to unnecessary and disproportionate is incredibly short. The left position is that there should be significant legal risk to imperfect self defense so that people are heavily incentivized to deescalate rather than inexpertly use a chokehold and kill someone.
Your Autobahn example is not comparable because it reduces the whole thing to one moment where there's a life or death choice comparable to justified self defense. The people in the subway car had other choices, they could have endured having trash thrown at them, the man could have used a less dangerous hold, he could have stopped squeezing slightly sooner.
I live in California, I am annoyed regularly by a particular homeless man who lives near where I work and I have had fantasies of doing violence to him. I think it will be tragic if the guy who inadvertently killed him spends significant time in jail. But I don't think it would be good to have a legal code that says you can choke someone out if they throw trash at you and if you happen to do it a bit too long and they die well then there's no consequences.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
The actual utility of determining who is the 'Fastest Woman' or 'Fastest Man' is non-existent and society's interest in elite sports is in entertainment and propagandizing physical fitness. Anyone who is an Olympic finalist at something like the 800m is the recipient of profound genetic gifts, and the concept of fairness between them and the average person is laughable. Excluding an extreme outlier in terms of genetic advantage for the benefit of a cluster of the far far right tail of the distribution doesn't seem to have much to do with 'fairness' for the general population.
Semenya differs in that her genetic advantage is larger, traceable to a single chromosome, and used to construct a category of social solidarity. If Semenya wins over and over XX women may be less inspired to participate in athletics since they cannot identify with her as an intersex person. Or if there is a single gene which gives massive athletic advantage among 'women' then women without that gene would be less inspired to compete. The carve out for women's sports is an acknowledgement that it is worth creating categories for people genetically disadvantaged at athletics so that even though they can never really be the best they can still be honored for fulfilling their potential, even if it's limited.
The fun futuristic version of this to me would be if we eventually develop some way of calculating genetic advantage from DNA and creating athletic 'gene classes' for different sports. If we're worried XX women will be less inspired to compete if someone with an identifiable genetic advantage like Semenya wins than shouldn't we be worried about short men, or people born with poor biomechanics not competing? In the short term something like height classes in basketball seems like an obvious starting point.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I don't think the two situations are remotely comparable. Site owners removing accounts from a list of mods is much easier than removing protestors from a physical space.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Trump's conduct here is bizarre, what is the upside of retaining these documents? Why consent to being recorded and then say "hey rando, check out these top secret invasion plans I definitely didn't declassify." Why lie to your lawyers about moving the documents? If you're willing to not just "accidentally" misplace some classified documents, but defy a subpoena to return them why be so sloppy? Why not have Nauta photocopy them and return the originals?
I can buy that Alvin Bragg's indictment was a politically motivated hit job advancing a novel legal theory, but I just can't see that with this. They gave him an out when they asked him to return the documents and he lied to his lawyers about returning them all. This isn't the clever deep state ensnaring Trump, this is him agreeing to be recorded showing classified military plans to some writer. It's either idiocy or some genuine belief that he's above document retention law.
Ecgtheow
10mo 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
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
Yeah I don't think this interview added much evidence other than that other people on the car were scared. The fact that she brought up him throwing his jacket and not any other instance of trash throwing may suggest he wasn't throwing anything particularly injurious.
I'm confused about your reading of the Good Samaritan Parable.
The Samaritans aren't the friendly neighboring faith to Jesus's jewish audience, they're the heretical near outgroup. The Jews had demolished their temple in the previous century and in Jesus's time the Samaritan's profaned the temple mount by scattering bones on it. The parable is given in answer to a questioner asking 'who is my neighbor' that they should love as themselves. Before the heretical Samaritan helps the injured man, a priest and a levite refuse to help him, possibly because they value ritual cleanliness so highly they don't want to touch the man who may be dead. Jesus ends the parable by asking which of these is the injured man's neighbor.
Casting the hated heretic as the merciful unexpected neighbor rather than the high status fellow Jews suggests a broadening of the boundaries of who is a neighbor we are commanded to love, not a limiting of it to co-religionists.
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.
It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.
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