Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Does that mean it's impossible for war to ever be primarily caused by one of the two belligerent parties?
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
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 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
Walterodim said he wanted to strip the vote of people making less than 25k because they're basically wards of that state. Romney said 47% of the country is dependent on the government. Ted Cruz famously disparaged New York City values in the 2016 primary. Marjorie Taylor Greene called New York filthy and disgusting.
I suppose I'm conflating all these politicians (and one random commenter) with "the right", but it is an interesting phenomenon that open disparagement of cities and low income people is acceptable on the right at the same time they claim to be anti-elite populist crusaders.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yeah, I think the second paragraph is a big part of it. If once every now and then a homeless man threw trash at people on a subway, then endure it and wait for the police to show up is pretty tolerable. If they're doing it constantly and the police do nothing then the temptation to take matters into your own hands is quite high. Effective policing is an important public service the state needs to provide.
Comparing 2008 and 2020 it seems like there's a clear policy choice whether an economic shock shows up as inflation or unemployment. In 2008 the bottom of the labor market took a massive hit, but people who kept their jobs could pick up assets cheap. In 2020 massive stimulus has kept the bottom decile of the labor market up and kept unemployment quite low, it created a surge in asset prices and has driven down real income for the top decile.
There's a top bottom trade off but it also seems like we should try really hard to do the right amount of stimulus. The deficit panic post-2008 kept the economy way under-stimulated, and the second round of COVID stimulus was probably way too much. There's also a lot of partisan politics that get in the way, Republicans really didn't want Obama to be able to stimulate. Biden campaigned on a bunch of stimulus because the Democrat can't do less stimulus than Trump. Some sort of pre-commitment to automatic stabilizers pegged to the unemployment rate seems ideal.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It depends on exactly what was going on in the car and how potentially lethal that choke hold is. The guy was not assaulting anyone he was reportedly throwing trash around. If he's throwing plastic bags and paper then unless you're extremely confident you can safely restrain him you probably shouldn't do something precisely because the risk of violence for escalation is not worth preventing someone from having harmless trash thrown at them. If he's throwing glass bottles or heavy objects pointedly at people then restraining him seems justified to prevent harm. I don't know what the typical risk of death with that chokehold is. If it's really easy to kill someone if you hold slightly too long and anyone taught that hold would know that then his use of force was clearly disproportionate. If it's a one in a million chance then he's probably not.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Right, which is why you shouldn't escalate a confrontation unless it's necessary to prevent imminent violence. If this guy was about the attack someone and he intervened imperfectly then it's self defense gone wrong. If he was simply spouting profanities and throwing (non-injurious) trash then the person who decide to escalate the confrontation to physical violence shoulders the legal risks of that violence going wrong.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Yes, but as well know from British period dramas like Bridgerton the black share of the population was much higher back then and that it explains crime rates /s
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
I'm not saying Jesus personally saw Samaritans as his outgroup, I'm saying that the Jewish man he is telling the parable to did because most Jews at that time did. It's unexpected that a Samaritan would help a Jews in the parable just as it is unexpected that a Jew would ask a Samaritan for water in John 4.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
I first heard of bussy from cis gay male friends in college. The Wikipedia article references donutussy (the center whole in a donut) which seems a good indicator that appending -ussy to things is mostly a joke and not some deep aspect of gender identification. I am not in the habit of discussing trans women's anuses but my guess is that with most jokey euphemisms for genitalia the appropriateness depends overwhelmingly on context and personal dynamics and can't be deduced from the etymology of the term.
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
11mo ago
No? It's a good thing to encourage physical fitness. I suppose I could have used a term with less negative connotations but something like the Olympics is government produced media designed to promote specific values, we just happen to think those values are good.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Only being able to pass a limited number of bills through the reconciliation process in the senate and avoid the filibuster probably adds to the incentive to compile everything into one or two laws.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Is being a lightweight or middleweight boxer instead of a heavyweight demeaning? Why would participating in the 5'9" and under Basketball Division be demeaning?
I don't expect it to be a commercial success. When they're not joined to nationalist competitions like the Olympics track, swimming and gymnastic events don't seem to draw large audiences either. Youth & College Sports are basically publicly funded programs outside of a few major sports like Division I Football & Basketball.
I don't think we fund them because it's extremely important to society to determine who the fastest 800m runner is, we do it to encourage athleticism broadly. Why not allow the bottom half of the male height distribution an opportunity to participate in the organized version of am enormously popular sport and get some degree of social status for fulfilling their athletic potential?
There are a range of employers who would love to have a large pool of low wage workers who aren't protected by labor laws, low taxes, and minimal environmental regulations. A de-facto guest worker situation where migrants can enter the country but have no political rights, no access to entitlements, and are subject to threat of deportation serves their interests. Agriculture, meat processing, and construction are all powerful economic interests capable of organizing and lobbying for their needs.
The usage of E-Verify is something of a proxy for the balance of power between anti-immigration Republicans and this sort of employer. Many states in the south have mandatory E-Verify but major border states like Texas and Florida do not, or did not until recently. When Florida tried to do Mandatory E-Verify in 2020 they originally amended it so that agricultural employers would be exempt. But as far as I can tell the 2023 bill mandating E-Verify that passed a few days ago does not exempt Agriculture.
It'll be interesting to see how that shakes out. There's already been substantial wage growth at the bottom of the labor market post-2020 so if farmer's have to start hiring legal workers it could drive up costs of fruit. Part of the case for immigration restrictions is that it would increase wages for native workers, but those costs would obviously be passed on to native consumers. I don't think it'll be a major issue for Republicans in 2024 because the President always gets the credit or the blame for economic conditions. But if Republicans ever did enact serious restrictions on the labor supply it'd be interesting to see how they'd handle the ensuing inflation.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Unionization of Agricultural workers is really hard for a variety of structural reasons and at least in California the United Farm Workers is basically dead.
This is part of why I think using force in self defense in response to verbal threats (if that's what happened) is really bad. If you make threats and someone starts trying to restrain you in a chokehold are you expected to de-escelate and hope they stop when you're unconscious because you recognize you're in the wrong for issuing threats?
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
A lot depends on what exactly happened in that subway car and everyone has gotten way over their skis on this. If someone inadvertently chokes off the blood supply of someone who was throwing glass bottles or metal cans that's a very different act than gradually choking out someone who issues nonspecific verbal threats and flung some papers. Is Neely vaguely muttering threats or is he up in a specific person's face telling them he's about the punch them out? Penny's self defense case hinges on a lot of information we just don't have.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
Neely ran away from a residential care facility he was placed in as part of a plea deal and there was a warrant for his arrest at the time of his killing. He's a shining example of someone who should be institutionalized, but lowering barriers to instituionalization involves complex trade offs and reasoning about them from viral news clips seems like a bad idea.
It comes up a lot in discussions of homelessness that there are lots of low visibility functional temporarily homeless people, and then a smaller number of high visibility dysfunctional long term homeless people. I briefly worked with an otherwise functional middle aged adult who had been homeless for a couple months. Cheap flophouses would be a huge benefit to people who are temporarily in between relatives with couches to crash on, but it wouldn't do much for the guys screaming on the subway.
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.
In this framework I'd say Iraq was hawkish internationalists using 9/11 to pull one over on Hawkish nationalists and get them to do a democracy/market access war that didn't really have much to do with national security. Ukraine is an alliance of dovish and hawkish internationalists that defends an international principle (no annexation of territory in Europe) without U.S. troops. My dovish nationalist Mennonite uncle is opposed because nothing is worth the risk of nuclear war and the young conservatives hawkish nationalists I know are opposed because it's money spent on something that has no obvious benefit to America.
But I don't think it's really that simple. The polarization over Russia post Trump and the legacy of the Cold War probably has a lot to do with why there's an age divide among conservative people I know. Older ones fantasize about America wiping the floor with the corrupt Russian army and the younger ones complain about the cost of foreign aid.
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