EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
I know what you're here for. What's his bias? Politically I at least like to think of myself as a true moderate, maybe (in US context) slightly naturally right-leaning but currently politically left-leaning if I had to be more specific.
User ID: 1043
So yeah, emergency expedited Supreme Court oral arguments were today, about - contrary to what the headlines might initially seem to tell you - whether district court judges can issue national injunctions. More specifically, on if "relief" can be given to non-parties in a lawsuit, unilaterally by judge's decision. This is not on its face about Trump's birthright citizenship claims though of course that is more immediately at issue. I highly recommend this piece with a classic back-and-forth between two law professors who disagree about whether or not they should be allowed (disclaimer: both are, however, strongly against the Trump interpretation of birthright citizenship), a format I feel like is way underrepresented in today's news landscape (but weirdly overdone and trivialized on cable TV). NPR would never. Ahem. Anyways...
Some mini-history is these injunctions, as best I understand, basically did not exist until the mid-2000's when suddenly they started showing up a lot, and on big topics too. DACA, the Muslim travel ban, the abortion pill ban, various ACA issues, it has tended to cut across administrations though often the pattern is they show up against the one in power. Both professors agree that the Constitution itself doesn't really say much about the subject one way or the other beyond generalities, so it's going to rest a little more on general principles.
The central and immediate disagreement between the two seems to be whether or not you can or should trust the national government, when it loses a major case, to go back to the drawing board and/or pause the losing policy because narrowly slicing it up doesn't make sense, or whether you might as well do a nationwide injunction because of a lack of trust or simply that the application fundamentally isn't something you can legally slice up finely.
The more general disagreement, and this is the one that to me is more interesting, seems to be what to do about judge-shopping and partisan judges having disproportionate impacts, with some very different ideas about how to address that, contrasted below:
Is this frustrating for you [Professor Bagley] — for this to be the vehicle that may finally be forcing a resolution on the availability of nationwide injunctions?
Bagley: I suppose it’s a consequence of having developed a position over time and across administrations. What it means to have a set of principles is that they don’t change just because you happen to dislike the inhabitant of the White House.
I think a lot of people — and I’m not speaking of Professor Frost here at all — come to this issue out of righteous indignation against the president of the opposite political party, and that’s actually my big concern.
We want to put our faith in these judges, but these judges are just people too. There’s 500-plus of them, and they’re scattered all over the country. Many are smart. Many work hard. Some are dumb. Lots are political. Many are just outright partisan hacks.
All you need to do in order to get a nationwide injunction is file your case in front of one of those partisan hacks, and then we’re off to the races — with these immediate appeals up to the Supreme Court, where hard questions are decided in a circumscribed manner and where the courts themselves reveal a kind of highly partisan pattern of judging that calls the entire judiciary into disrepute.
I would love this birthright citizenship [executive order] to be blown up into about a billion pieces. It is a moral, ethical, legal, constitutional travesty. I don’t know that the engine to do that is a nationwide injunction. In fact, I’m pretty sure it’s not.
That said, I think no one who’s looking at 21st century America right now thinks to themselves, “Things are going great.” There are a lot of deep problems. I think our democracy has misfired in a pretty profound way, and some of the institutional constraints on the president that previously held are starting to give way.
I don’t think we give up much by giving up the nationwide injunction. I think we help right the ship, but I don’t know that I know that for sure.
And I think anybody who comes into these debates with extraordinary confidence, one way or the other, about the long-run consequence of doctrinal shifts like this, ought to have their head checked. I have a view, but, like many things in life, it is provisional and what I think is a principled and thoughtful view.
But lots of other people, who are also principled and thoughtful disagree, with me.
So in short, it's too risky to allow judges this power.
Professor Frost, you’re probably not in disagreement on all of these policy and practical issues. Where do you see agreement and disagreement?
Frost: First, I do not think there’s a single judge that exercises this power — in the sense that, yes, that judge issues the nationwide injunction in the district court, but it can be immediately appealed up to an appellate court of three judges, then immediately taken up to the U.S. Supreme Court, as was the case in the mifepristone case, as is the case in most of these cases.
You could say, “Well, we’re now forcing the Supreme Court to decide cases more quickly.”
Wait to see what happens to the court if each and every one of the children born in the United States has to sue to protect their citizenship. Courts will be overwhelmed in that situation.
The consequences for courts are not always great when they have to quickly respond to nationwide injunctions and reverse them, but they can do that. If it does quickly get reversed, then it’s just a couple of weeks, a month or two, that it’s in place.
I will also say that if forum shopping is your problem, your solution is to address forum shopping. And there are proposals out there by the Judicial Conference for more random assignments, and I absolutely favor those. I think forum shopping is a problem. I think politicization of the courts is a problem, but the answer is not get rid of nationwide injunctions. The answer is end forum shopping.
Nationwide injunctions are literally saving our nation at the moment.
It’s not just birthright citizenship, although that is the poster child for nationwide injunctions, and it’s an excellent vehicle in which to consider the issue for someone like me, where I’m worried about a world without them.
Think about the Alien Enemies Act. We have an administration that says it can deport people without due process, and when it makes a mistake, it’s too bad, too late.
If that could not be stopped through an injunction, I think we should all be afraid. And that’s one of many, many examples of an administration that wants to unilaterally rewrite the law without the impediment of Congress or any sort of legal process. Without nationwide injunctions, each and every person potentially affected would have to sue to maintain the rule of law.
So in short, national injunctions are sometimes infinitely more practical, and not the direct problem at stake to begin with, more problems lie upstream. However:
I hear Professor Bagley and the other critics as to the downsides, and here are the downsides.
While the nationwide injunction is in effect, the law is being stopped. This is the frustration Professor Bagley was [describing] about how the government can’t implement its policies. And maybe six, seven, eight months to, at most, a year, the Supreme Court rules and says, “Actually it’s a perfectly legal policy,” and we’ve lost a year.
I recognize that as a cost. However, I’d rather live in that world than the world where a lawless president, or even a president that’s edging toward that, [can act without that constraint].
Obama and Biden did a few things that I thought were lawless, even though I liked the policy, like Deferred Action for Parents of U.S. citizens, which was enjoined by a nationwide injunction. That was an Obama policy.
The imperial presidency is a reality. They are all trying to expand their power, and I’d rather slow them down with the loss of some useful policies that I think are good at the end of the day and prevail in court, than allow for running roughshod over our legal system, as this administration is trying to do.
It's come up here from time to time whether the slowness of the system is a bug or a feature. This debate in at least some respects reflects that tension. Is it acceptable for judges, even well-meaning ones, to pause things for up to a year? One might reasonably ask then, can the Supreme Court thread the needle and simply restrict national injunctions to more narrow occasions (as just one example, the current citizenship case where precendant including Supreme Court precedent is pretty clear), not completely get rid of them? Bagley again:
And the trouble is, in our hyper-polarized environment, that kind of claim is made by partisans on both sides of the aisle whenever somebody is in office who they disagree with. So it is, I think, a comforting thought that we can just leave the door open a little bit, but if you leave the door open a little bit, you’re actually going to get the same cavalcade of nationwide injunctions that we’ve seen.
I’d be open to a narrower rule if I’d heard one that I thought could restrain judges that were ideologically tempted and willing to throw their authority around. But I haven’t seen it, frankly, and, until I do, I’d be pretty reluctant to open that door at all.
I know we've seen some vigorous discussion over the last while about activist judges. But one interesting theme I've been picking up over the last few months especially is, how much work exactly do we or should we expect the judges to be doing? For example, we had the overturning of Chevron, which ostensibly puts more difficult rule-making decisions in the hands of judges. An increase in work for them, championed by the right. But then, we had the right also start claiming that having immigration hearings for literally every immigrant would be too onerous and they should be able to deport people faster, perhaps without even (what the left would call) full due process. Too much work. And now we have the right claiming that each state or district would need to file its own lawsuit, or even assemble an emergency class action to get nation-wide relief, for an executive order with nearly non-existent precedent. An increase in work across all districts. Traditionally the right is against judicial activism in general, saying judges are too involved, implying they should work less. Maybe this all isn't a real contradiction, but still, an interesting pattern. What does judicial reform look like on the right, is it really a coherent worldview, or just variously competing interests, often tailored right to the moment? A more narrow, tailored question would be: what is the optimal number of judges, for someone on the right, compared to what we have now? Do we need more and weaker judges, or fewer and weaker? Or something else?
I want to talk about this piece (archive/unpaywalled here) from The Atlantic, titled Trump Rants About Sharks, and Everyone Just Pretends It’s Normal
The video clip the article is referring to is from a recent rally and is here on Twitter. One excerpt the article highlights:
I say, ‘What would happen if the boat sank from its weight and you’re in the boat and you have this tremendously powerful battery and the battery’s underwater, and there’s a shark that’s approximately 10 yards over there?’ By the way, a lot of shark attacks lately. Do you notice that? A lot of shark … I watched some guys justifying it today: ‘Well, they weren’t really that angry. They bit off the young lady’s leg because of the fact that they were not hungry, but they misunderstood who she was.’ These people are crazy.
The article's main thrust is that there's a double standard when it comes to mental fitness. We are used to this level of low-coherency rambling from Trump, but not Biden:
At rallies, the former president makes stream-of-consciousness statements that would raise questions about the mental acuity of anyone who said them at, say, the tail end of a night at a neighborhood bar, but that somehow don’t generate the same level of concern within the press or the Republican Party when Trump says them in front of a cheering crowd. By contrast, when Biden makes a gaffe—mixing up a name or a date rather than, for example, suggesting that boats sink because they’re heavy—questions arise about his mental fitness to be president.
There's also some hand-wringing about scientific awareness and facts. Shark attacks aren't up overall (but I don't think this is what Trump is claiming, so irrelevant), boats don't sink simply because they are heavy (is this just stating the obvious, or does he really think the heaviness of the boat is what makes a boat sink?), he plays up his connection to MIT to seem smart (completely true, spurious connection is just his uncle who was a professor there in an unrelated field, so clearly an unmerited brag). And then there's the actual fact of the matter: this is a silly and poor would-you-rather, because ships aren't being forced to include massive batteries and in any case a battery dropped in the ocean poses practically zero risk to nearby swimmers of electrocution, that's not how electrocution works. I suspect the guy he asked this question to remarked how unusual a question it was out of diplomacy, not that he was genuinely impressed by Trump's intelligence or question, much the same way we might speak to a small child.
Anyways, though I think the article actually does make an excellent point in that media attention is not fair at all in its coverage of mental fitness for both candidates (and honestly, that goes for both sides, though the Fox side of things is considerably more overt and distorted in my opinion) that's not the main point I wanted to make. I want to turn this a bit on its head. Pollster Frank Luntz likes to say something that has always really stuck with me. It's not what you say, it's what they hear.
What happens when we apply this paradigm?
We're not talking about the surface level of meaning in the sharks and such. Like I said, the claim that Trump was claiming shark attacks are increasing (rather than just being featured more prominently in the news recently) is a little tenuous, but this misses the point. What people hear is not an opinion about sharks. They hear someone discussing some interesting recent news with them. It's echoing some fears and validating them. It's attempting to pass the famous Beer Question and succeeding. I think a lot of Trump's comments follow this pattern. Sure, it's often incoherent. I think people don't realize how much so until they really listen to an unfiltered Trump interview. However, the main takeaway for a listener at this rally is not obtaining new facts about sharks or boats. It's getting a sense for the candidate and what they are like. What they perceive is that Trump has connections, that he likes thinking outside the box, that he rambles a lot, that he is in tune with what's happening in the world around him, and things of that nature. There's a little bad in there, but it's mostly a positive impression.
This shows up in other areas, too. Biden is (understandably) very careful about specific words and phrases when asked about Israel and the war, in what he says. What people hear isn't someone thoughtful, however. They hear someone who doesn't have an actual plan, who wants the problem to go away. The fact that Trump has deliberately said almost nothing about his opinion heavily hints the same (the debates are going to be interesting).
Now, are we wrong to completely ignore the actual content of Trump or Biden's words? Sure. Probably. A lot of hay has been made about Trump's vindictiveness and threats about what to do about the Justice department and other major agencies if he wins again. But I'd argue that people already do hear the vindictiveness in his voice. They will weigh it alongside other things on the scale, and in November they will decide. Does this mean words are irrelevant? No. The media will do, if not its job, than certainly something approximating it if you squint. We will hear about details if we know where to look. But completely ignoring tone and the "what they hear" part is a major, major blindspot in the media. I get it, it's hard to talk about the impression a candidate gives, because that's a straight expressway to bias leaking in. But certainly an attempt should be made.
So yeah, I guess the tl;dr is that left-wing media still doesn't get Trump because they only look on the surface, and when they do a deeper dive, they aren't charitable. The question becomes this: If we accept that discussing a candidate's tone and impressions are equally as valid as the content of their words, how can media (if it even can) depict and discuss them fairly?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
It’s true that robotics is getting renewed attention, but this seems to be more the result of increased investment rather than any foundational sea change in knowledge or theory. The fixation on a bipedal and human-ish one is also just that, a fixation, and still leads to some difficulty even moving around consistently - see for example the robot marathon and of course claims that the Tesla robots have been somewhat relying on human controllers last I heard. No new paradigms yet there.
There continues to be progress on the LLM front but this is actually, maybe contrary to the impression you are getting, slowing. I wouldn’t call it a plateau at all but there’s a real sense of struggle out there. Most of the focus in the last six months has been tool use of various kinds, rather than fundamental improvements, though there are some theoretical ideas kicking around that might prove fruitful. On the contrary the major research labs have started to see some diminishing returns. Meta notably can’t even catch fully up to the front players and most of the team quit in frustration. Anthropic has been stuck in a bit of a rut with 3.7 only a mixed improvement over 3.5 and in some ways a regression. OpenAI has had trouble getting the so-called “version 5” off the ground that’s an impressive enough improvement to deserve the name. Google is catching up and adding some neat things. Context windows are going up. “Agent” systems are being experimented with more. Video generation is showing some sparks of brilliance but the compute required is pretty steep. Deepfake video and voice, even real time stuff, is the biggest issue right now, more than any AGI crap.
It’s still hard to believe, even despite intellectually knowing why, how many Americans and even Mottizens display an astonishing capacity to rationalize bad foreign actors. China wants Taiwan primarily out of essentially hurt feelings; the fact that this is a batshit insane reason to start a war over a territory that has self governed with no major problems for over 30 years is so outrageous many are tempted to look for deeper meaning when there is none. Even if the US literally sent 10x the arms to Taiwan, do you know the impact that would have on Chinese national security? Almost literally zero. Zero. Nothing. Nil. Zilch. Nada.
Hell, Taiwan doesn’t even present a regional influence threat. They don’t and couldn’t project power into the South China Sea for example. The only vague threat is as a refuge for Hong Kongers and other dissidents, and even that is far overblown.
Well, maybe some of it has to do with America’s short memory when it comes to the potency of war fever. A lot of Americans try to pretend they didn’t support the Iraq war, but the opinion polls at the time don’t lie. I’ll grant there was some government deception of course but that doesn’t fully explain it.
I mean, doesn't this body cam video kind of vindicate a lot of BLM-type people cop critics? We have a house call with slightly weird vibes that gets escalated -- BY the cops -- and someone ends up dead in their own home literally 10 seconds after what was previously a peaceful discussion. That kind of background impression, as a Black person especially, would be legitimately terrifying, right? That you could be having a rough night, maybe jumping at shadows, feeling a little off, you call people whose job is to protect and help communities feel and be safe, but you say or do the wrong thing in a moment of panic and you could end up literally dead?
It's sadly a bit self-reinforcing too of course. Nervousness around cops leads to irrational behavior around cops, so you could probably make the argument that demonizing the police is self-defeating behavior. But saying "almost all police shootings are justified" in a non-justified shooting moment is a weird take.
With that said I don't want to be too uncharitable. You're right that if we think about it in a false positive/false negative/etc. kind of sense, the false positives are usually very obvious and often overshadowed by the large amounts of true positives, so to speak.
And there are actually useful takeaways from the body cam video beyond "cops bad" or "cops racist" or something like that. I clearly see gaps in cop training here:
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Was it a good idea or not for them to continue investigating after "resolving" the complaint?
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Why didn't the cop in the first half of the bodycam video speak up more and act as a counterbalance to his clearly annoyed and apparently on a hair-trigger partner?
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Why was the cop so 0 to 100 aggressive in escalating things off of her strange Jesus comment?
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Was the cop's warning/threat to the lady effective in its actual purpose?
1 might have a larger discussion, but 2-4 show some clear missteps by the police - the partner was ineffective at his job, the cop escalated needlessly, and in a bad and ineffective manner even if he was going to escalate.
Edit: changed vocab to more accurately convey my point
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
AFAIK as IQ is deliberately intended to be normalized, the gap is exactly the same 85 to 100 as 100 to 115, and if you think that those two aren't the same, you are also inherently saying that IQ is the wrong tool for the job. That's not even getting into the whole "what benchmark do we set 100 at", do we update it year to year or try to peg it to some historical benchmark (though this is not necessarily fatal to IQ as a metric in the same way the first is, it does present a question that must be addressed when using IQ).
Mini-rant of the day (am I repeating myself or do I have deja vu? must be getting old): While I appreciate the intention behind occasionally using "they" as a gender-neutral pronoun in cases where the gender is unspecified, the amount of reading fatigue it generates is underrated. First let me say that my actual preference might be a somewhat stupid-sounding but actually refreshing/mildly helpful habit of simply using the opposite pronoun as a habit. For instance, in the financial column "Money Stuff" (great reading BTW) the author when talking about an imagined or generic CEO will use "she" as the pronoun. I'm not really a believer in the whole micro-aggression literature, but I can still see that subtle and low-key (non-mandatory) attempts at gently pushing back against stereotypes can be nice. Handy little reminder not to jump to assumptions. For fairness, this should be more generalized: teachers are mostly women, so use "he" as the general form. Doctors are mostly men, so use "she". College grads are mostly women, so use "he". "They" can still work in a pinch, or perhaps in official documents, but I feel like the tradeoffs involve are favorable on the whole.
But nonbinary people in fiction? That's a whole different story. Consider the following sentence ripped from a story I am reading:
Mirian and Gaius took turns instructing Jherica on soul magic. They would be the weakest of the time travelers, so it seemed best to give them some means of self-defense against the one they couldn't simply die and recover from.
This sentence is a total mess, and a nontrivial cognitive load, for no good reason. Well, not zero good reason, but here the tradeoffs fall very strongly against a generic pronoun: the loss in clarity, the mental burden, the flow disruption, the forced "backtracking" through the sentence to clarify meaning are absolutely terrible. The first "they" isn't immediately clear on the subject - is it the two people, or the nonbinary person? Okay, contextually, we figure out it's Jherica. But then we have an implied subject (who is doing the giving?), the next "them" needs context that takes a moment to process (Jherica again), and then another "they" also referring to Jherica, but needs double-checking. The wonderful thing about this sentence if Jherica were given a normal gender is that "they" clearly refers to the pair of people and not the individual. It's a useful tool in sentence mechanics that is completely ruined. "She" or "he" might induce a small amount of confusion (did the author accidentally chop up the pair and is referring to just one of them?) but partly that would be the author's fault for substandard sentence construction, and I still don't think it is quite as bad. It's far from uncommon to be referring to a group of people alongside an individual, and super useful to be able to casually and implicitly differentiate the two via pronouns.
To be clear, the story is wonderful, and there isn't any big deal or mention made about gender here at all (at least if there was I have no memory of it), and authors can make mistakes especially when self-edited (as is likely the case here). Or, in fact, I'm not even positive the author did make said character non-binary in the first place, since the author occasionally uses "he" in the next chapter, but not always. So it's not some massive culture war thing in this particular case. I think the point remains however that some progressives have tried to gaslight people (including myself) that gender-neutral pronouns are a minor inconvenience at best, and leverage already-existing rules of English. It's true that "they" already can serve this purpose (e.g. "Who's at the door and what do they want?" when it is fully unknown) but there are still some significant burdens if it becomes popularized.
It seems that it really shouldn't be a big loss to perform some nonbinary erasure here. Many forms of fiction already do things to make it easier on the reader (and I always notice when they do) such as giving main characters names that begin with different letters, or in anime they will color the hair differently not just for aesthetics but to make characters more differentiable. Sure, these semantic and visual 'collisions' happen IRL quite a lot (e.g. two Joshes on your team at work), but it seems to me the loss in realism is more than offset by the practical benefits. Note that this isn't purely an anti-woke position, in my book: I think giving characters some identifiable traits can make them more memorable. So there might be good reasons to throw in an unrealistic number of non-straight or mixed-race people into your TV show beyond deliberate representation! I don't think I'm advocating for anything too extreme.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8mo ago
When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?
There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election. The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.
Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly, and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.
The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.
Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”. The former recognizes that setbacks happen in politics — even unfair ones! And it recognizes that there will be other chances and that the system is more important than ego. But the second, oh boy, it’s shortsighted and selfish and threatens the whole thing. It’s kind of like a marital fight. There is a line between some things you might say to your spouse in anger, and some things which should literally never be said, because they can’t be taken back and might threaten the entire marriage. With the assumption that the marriage is a good one - here, the assumption that the system of democratic elections is a good one.
It’s not at all clear what kind of system Trump would put in its place, which is PLENTY worrying in and of itself, but I have a very hard time imagining it being better than our current one, and I likewise have I think very good reasons to believe that even if you think for example that the Justice Department needs reform and fairness, Trump is probably one of the worst people to actually do so. That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.
Something that needs to be briefly said about some other "human factors" on the defense side of things. Not only is the Secret Service made up of real people who make mistakes, but also their job is 99% super boring, maybe even 99.99%, seeing as the last actual assassination was so long ago. Seems like a recipe for complacency. Of course, as an aside, it seems near certain we've foiled some other attempts both real and bluster, mostly in the earlier stages - I wonder if today's events change anyone's dial on the old vet killed in an FBI home raid last year who had made explicit sniper threats, owned a similar gun, and had the training to use it, though of course he wasn't going to be climbing on any roofs. No, what I mean to say is that there probably aren't all that many dedicated Secret Service agents in the first place. The threat surface as well as responsibility is enormous. You have someone following family, some following former presidents, keeping an eye on their suburban homes; for the president (and others like former President Trump) you have advance teams, mobile response, counter assault, crowd control, preparation for biological attack, equipment to maintain and transport and man, for all of that you need 24/7 presidential protection which means at least two or three shifts, plus presumably vacation time; and then on top of that you have at least the basics that man the static White House itself that needs all the same protection. It's a lot.
Faced with such a massive manpower requirement, what's normally the solution? Outsourcing. The classic. You may not notice, but at least some significant presence at these events is local or usually state police. Their numbers are welcome, but their training and skillset is very different, and these events don't happen all that often in a given state, much less an incident. I'd say these numbers are very helpful for ordinary law-keeping, and regular level incidents, but this can create problems in a Presidential-level threat environment. The Uniformed Division as a whole it seems about 1200 or more judging by some quick math per this recruiting factsheet (though even that division is subdivided and only a fraction are involved at an event like this) and only 20% of the service overall are veterans, so at least some of the UD are not veterans. Which might not matter, but at least anecdotally a veteran soldier's handling of an often-boring and then massive-adrenaline quick-decision environment is likely a bit different than a civilians, despite training. The point remains, that Secret Service numbers often need bolstering to get the kind of presence they would like.
Why do I bring this up? One theory being thrown around is that maybe someone withheld taking a shot on the shooter on purpose. This is plausible of course and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. However, there are two things that might need to be taken into consideration as higher-likelihood events. Disclaimer: of course we're still in the realm of relatively low-information speculation here, we have only seen a few chunks and slices of the story so far. One is simple - communication problems. Local/state police might not be fully looped in or on the same radio channels the same way the pros are, and I'm sure there's some institutional issues or bad feelings too. While pro FPS players who have spent years on a single Counter Strike map have named callouts for all buildings and rooftops, I'm not sure that kind of thing is SOP or even practical for this environment, assuming there even was a direct line of communication. We all know how in a corporate environment sometimes you need to speak to three people before communicating something, even professional organizations aren't immune to games of telephone. Second, the local/state police themselves. Although presumably a Secret Service agent will fire first if they see a gun, I'm not completely convinced that local/state police outsourcing would necessarily have the means and mindset to do so in the same fashion, and might even view a threat to the general public as more likely or more dangerous than a threat to the President, and that's not even saying it is a deliberate choice, just a natural disinclination. And furthermore, according to the BBC interview guy, it was precisely these regular cops who seemed confused and indecisive when they had reported the gunman - so perhaps a combination of the both of the two points above.
As a more funny aside, you know who responds almost the quickest of anyone? The media with their cameras, some of whom you can see sprinting to get a good photo or two even before we know the shooter is actually down.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Well I'm glad that you acknowledge that your entire argument is predicated on the belief that child-on-child, permanent-consequence outright violence is inevitable (or at least highly likely) to occur in deliberate group-mixing.
I take strong exception to that. I think your belief that somehow placing your presumably-white kid in with your thinly-veiled majority Black school has a significant chance of landing them in the hospital or something is unsupported and warped by media perceptions and fearmongering. Sure, we can go and agree that many Black communities have a violence problem. I think there's a high amount of overlap with poverty, of course, but sure. But this doesn't happen on every level. I would concede, of course, that changing school administration away from a "forgive everything" paradigm might be needed to make this work of course.
I am aware and acknowledge your concern about how using kids to break a negative, self-reinforcing cycle feels a bit bad. But seriously, what else can we do? It's very well established that exposing kids to people different than them is by and large very effective at helping them understand that different is not necessarily bad. And it's not even all about race. Kids can very, very easily fall into bubbles far more easily than adults. My younger sister, for example, went through a phase in middle school where she was upset that our family vacations were only in-country because "everyone" was going to France or Hawaii or the Carribean or such. Which blew my mind because (at the time parents were upper-middle class and still are) at least part of my upbringing was in lower-middle class areas where I was quite aware that many families don't actually take family vacations hardly at all! That's just a small and trivial example. There are far more serious ones. Kids are sponges and need deliberate exposure to other ways of being and living while young.
So I'd challenge this whole paradigm that parents are being somehow brainwashed by SJW-stuff into putting their kids in danger for no real return. Rather, I would like parents to acknowledge the time-lag danger of accidentally raising an intolerant, ignorant, or sheltered child. And yes, that means that once in a while, a parent should go "I don't think my child has enough perspective and will be a more kind, well-rounded person if I break them out of their bubble a bit". This goes for many aspects of parenting. What you're proposing is exactly the same worldview as helicopter/lawnmower/bulldozer parenting and shares the exact same issues! Kids need to confront some sucky parts of life at some point, you can't coddle them forever! Learning interventions are best done young, just like how we now tell kids up-front they were adopted and that's fine rather than try and hide it until some future teenage moment.
Again, in case I lost some focus: the whole point of my post is to point out that otherwise-benign and rational actions like the self-sorting only when in strongly minority situations can have severe, negative consequences for society at large. Think of it like a game theory problem. All we need is to tweak the rules slightly and we can fix the game! In this case, acknowledging that there are negative consequences of growing up in excessive homogeneity.
Wouldn't you love a world where we don't have this 13% for half the violence stuff? We can get that world. America's violence problem is an aberration world-wide, which should be a clue that it's fixable. We aren't somehow doomed or powerless to simply attempt to live our lives in fear of radical violence. We are the architects of our own fate.
How do you in-person voters... remember anything meaningful? Grew up in Oregon and opted for a mail-in ballot even here in conservative Utah purely for the convenience. I actually love being able to dedicate a little time one evening to reviewing the mailers I've set aside, the websites of a few candidates, and making sure I could remember the background behind things. Do you just quickly Google stuff? That sounds kind of dangerous as the #1 result isn't always a holistic or accurate portrayal.
Which (voting by mail) was almost incredibly useful this year. I don't know how much y'all may or may not have heard about this, but the Utah Legislature tried one of the most blatant and anti-democratic power grabs in memory, trying to give themselves power to effectively ignore or rewrite ballot measures even after they pass -- which isn't great IMO to start with, but the wording they put on the actual ballot measure/amendment to give themselves this power was an EGREGIOUS misstatement of the actual content of the measure (basically, a bald-faced lie). This happened with not one but TWO measures, both struck down by courts for being misleading to voters (though the second was less overt) -- but weirdly, this decision came too late to reprint the ballots, so votes on both will not be counted but will still appear. (Even worse, the whole thing wasn't prompted by anything understandable -- it was specifically because an anti-gerrymandering ballot measure passed that the legislature didn't like and got caught ignoring)
My point? Although the system worked in this case, if the courts hadn't managed to rule in time, or dropped the ball, a ton of voters right there in the booth may have been confused which one out of the four was the lie, which one was the exaggeration, which one was the one everyone likes, and which was the one that is probably useless (formalizing the election of county sheriffs, which... is already the case?)
But if you take home the ballot, and get to research as you vote, this becomes much, much easier. Professional politicians, hot take, take unfair advantage of voters, even well-informed ones, when voting in person. Vote by mail!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Simply using IQ necessitates that you grapple with these things. That's the nature of using numbers to describe something human. You, the invoker of IQ, need to prove the numbers work as numbers and aren't better being left as philosophical concepts or practical examples, or point to something well established that does. The simple, self-evident fact that IQ is fit to a normal curve and you yourself don't seem to believe that a symmetric 15 point gap is equal across the domain is in and of itself a tacit admission that IQ is the wrong tool. Are you familiar with the statistical notions of how an assigned number scale can be nominal, or ordinal, or interval, or ratio? It's not a perfect paradigm by any means, but it's one you must grapple with at least on some level, and happens to be incredibly relevant here in this case. See also OP's initial claim that the distribution has a weird asymmetric tail, also evidence (though more mild) against using IQ as the correct tool. Similarly, the fact that you dodge the 100-center question, which is a fundamentally important question to the use of IQ, is not acceptable.
I mean, I get the whole all models are wrong but some are useful, but these are just the very basics, the fundamentals, they are not nitpicks. An example of something that at least does attempt to address these issues and mostly succeeds is the Likert scale. You might be familiar with it. It's the classic 5 or 7 point scale in response to a question, with "strongly agree" and "slightly agree" and "not sure" and disagree options. There's a natural zero, and at least psychologists attempt to say that the distance between each point is "equal". I know forced normalization distorts this equal-distance formulation slightly, in terms of the math, but two properties that persist across the transformation are the aforementioned symmetry of responses, and also the center point of responses. These two decisions are non-negotiable and mandatory to make and cannot be hand-waved away. They are inherent to the math and the use of a numerical model.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I'm doing a fun little assignment where we're supposed to find a few misleading graphs, infographics, or other data visualization and talk about how it could be misleading. For example, I remember this fun one from the CBC in Canada that deliberately misstated the proportion of public funding. Anyone have any other good examples that spring to mind? (Not that I'm trying to freeload, it's not that kind of difficult assignment, but I'm curious if there are any that have just stuck in your head like that one did for months or years?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2yr ago
I think presumably the implication is that the FBI believes that ISIS truly does recruit online and that by re-routing some of the would-be terrorists to them, they are taking away "real" terrorists. This assumes that a) there is a finite number of people who would commit a terror attack for ISIS online (thus being a sort of zero-sum thing), and b) if the FBI doesn't help them, they will go to someone real who can. I think assumption A is probably fine, I don't really think that the FBI is somehow generating additional potential recruits by their actions, so a fixed pool generally seems to make sense. Assumption B is a bit trickier, but from a law enforcement perspective, is it truly worth the risk of ignoring potential terrorists because you're hoping that they aren't serious and that they will grow out of it or something? Furthermore, I don't have much sympathy to be honest for the so-called "false positives" in this kind of scenario. Even if you are (let's say) hoodwinked and egged on by the FBI to do things you don't want to do in actuality... nothing's really stopping you from just stopping these conversations? Unless their process violates assumption B (the honey traps somehow radicalizing MORE than a comparable "real ISIS" control group) I can't see this being a concern keeping many people up at night. It's not like going to a terrorist training camp is the kind of "whoopsie" that anyone could be suckered into doing.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10mo ago
This seems kind of... fine? It's not a "do not fly" which creates real and tangible problems, it's rather at worst a waste of government money, right? The program description also mentions that very much unlike the Bush-era program, they take at least some people off the list after a while. If Gabbard temporarily has a few ride-alongs, maybe she gets to be outraged personally for a little while but it doesn't seem like she suffers any actual, uh, harm?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
10mo ago
What's most interesting to me about Walz, though I've been uncharacteristically out of date with politics the last week or so, is that I did see that he has a pathetically low net worth. Without his pension, it's only like 300k or something like that. Which is actually quite nice and rare! I can't remember the last time we had a major presidential or VP candidate who hadn't at least made a million off of books or something. So at least in one sense, he has a legitimate claim to the everyman title.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
My memory that opposition to methane burning is more about leakage than anything about the plant or process itself. Of course, it is much better than coal, which is pretty bad. Methane, as you may know, is ~28 times more potent as a greenhouse gas then CO2, so small leaks can add up. However, I haven't looked at analyses on whether natural gas alone is or isn't sufficient for meeting Paris goals. My suspicion is no, but I could be wrong.
Hybrids still don't have full market penetration even among new cars. I'd be much more amenable to making hybrids required, rather than this electric-or-bust current policy. Unfortunately, they are still more expensive than traditional gas powered cars.
Still I quite like nuclear. Makes me wish the gen-4 reactor research funding wasn't so spotty and late.
The best claim to Mormons being Christian is the everyday practical reality of being Mormon. At night you pray to “God the Father”. You ask for forgiveness of sins, something you believe is only possible through the sacrifice of “Jesus Christ”, and a request you believe is mandatory to receive “salvation”. I mean if you had to pick like ONE thing that defines Christianity, wouldn’t you say that it’s more or less exactly this thing? Either you think Jesus died for your sins, or not?
Also, gosh, you can go to the literal official website, not even the one dedicated to explaining our beliefs, and whaddaya know, right there on the front page is a section "What We Believe", with the first link in the section "Learn About Jesus Christ". Clicking this link contains such totally heretical (/s) topics such as:
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Jesus’s Divine Mission
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His Ministry Gave Us the Perfect Example
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His Teachings Show Us the Way to Salvation
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His Sacrifice Means You Can Live with God
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Jesus Made Forgiveness Possible
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Because of Jesus We Will Live Again Someday
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You Can Follow Jesus
If you wanted details, although it's dated in a literal sense, Joseph Smith wrote out exactly an answer to this question ("What do you believe?") in 1842 and we call them today the Articles of Faith which are relatively succinct and also has the advantage of doubling as a primary source.
On a more practical level, i.e. wondering what modern practice is like, I would direct you toward the resource Gospel Principles which has 47 chapters and honestly? Having both read through it and taught lessons from it, I personally consider it the perfect balance of succinct and descriptive for probably 95% of all purposes, as well as quite honest. I'd be extremely surprised it if missed even a single notable modern doctrine or practice, because for many years it was the basis for the first year of lessons for recent converts, so there's obviously not much reason to "hide" anything there, because most of the people using the book were already baptized members. The book is also extremely careful of its wording, and contains some handy scripture (Bible and otherwise) references that offers some further clarification
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
4mo ago
Ironically however, this was the result of limited and over-competitive NSF funding causing a race to the bottom for existing funding dollars. Increasing the NSF budget allows the (highly relative) “luxury” of being principled. Clearly, the goals of reforming science and saving money are getting insanely conflated here. I argue that it’s better to do one or the other but not both at once, or you get exactly the current shitshow
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I'm not normally one for being suspicious, but... reddit /r/politics post-debate thread isn't showing any comments because of a "reddit error"...
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Yeah, it's tough because reading all the ProPublica reports, it seems Thomas and Crow are like, legitimate friends. I do feel strongly about appearance of impropriety being the standard to shoot for, though, so... yeah. I sympathize with the difficulty of having to be really fucking careful about who your friends are, but at the same time I feel like yeah, they DO need to be really fucking careful who their friends are. Otherwise maybe turn down the nomination. I'd love to see some of that happen once in a while.
I mean my fundamental bias but one I'll defend is that these guys are just people. People are usually relatively honest and normally motivated. I will say that if for decades you are taking ultra-luxury trips, but in the back of your head you know if you piss them off too much they might stop, that kind of thing does tend to distort thinking just a hair. And there's no way you're taking weeks and weeks of vacations with people and you never talk politics? Ain't no way.
What I saw one article advocate for, I'd love for it to be the case, is to ask actual questions, high-quality ones that are answerable, in the confirmation hearings to try and get a better sense for some fundamental values and styles of different potential justices. Things like these (not a perfect list) that include stuff like when was the last time you changed your mind? What's a bias you struggle with? What kind of effect would you like to have on the court? Could you explain more details on why you lean originalist/textualist/etc?
I suspect the court will be fine. I would go nuclear is court-packing or something similar happened, no matter who. I strongly, strongly advocate for what the conversation should really center on: Maybe let's talk about some Constitutional Amendments to the Supreme Court process? I'm open to that. Would necessarily need to be bipartisan. In practice, I'm not super sure what it would take (if even possible) for the GOP to get on board something like that however. Maybe make some sort of general, government ethics amendment?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
I'd indeed agree that poor political framing is deliberate because it minimizes people getting their feelings hurt and maximizes profits and audience (most of the time; you still have things like "Don't Look Up"). Imagine if Captain America Civil War actually included a more potent anti-UN arguments. You'd get a lot of negative news coverage, distracting from "Spiderman shows up and fights . Is this corporate greed and cowardice, or is it something more particular to the screenwriters and directors? Probably both, but I actually think the people themselves (whether you think this is corporate capture or not is a separate question) are choosing to enforce these hedges. Like many movies with fantastical/superpower/supernatural/advanced sci-fi elements, it's a work of fiction and escapism and spectacle, and the hard part is finding the right balance between these things. Which is actually hard. For example a too-grounded superhero film can exist (Logan maybe?) but requires much more character work, and risks boredom if it fails. A too-much-CGI film can flop, even if the CGI is good, because on some level it strays too far. Oh, but wait, if it's sci-fi, you can get weird again, but wait, you still have to anthropomorphize things to a certain extent, and you still can't get too weird or it sounds like bad writing even if there is an interesting deeper meaning. Hard to pull off. At some point "vibe" starts to matter which goes beyond just the script itself. District 9 is perhaps one of the few, very few, sci-fi films that successfully marries weirdness with actual groundedness.
I actually think the middle fight scene in Civil War at the airport is a great case in point. We go into Civil War excited for some Captain America as a character, and we know he will work at solving some mostly-solvable problem. We go in excited to see Spider-Man and Cap fight it out. We go in curious what might happen with conflict between "good guys". Fans might be wondering about the aftermath of the whole Hydra thing from Winter Soldier and other plot points. We get this! In the airport scene, we also clearly get the violence pulled back. Anytime it gets too real especially in the side cast, we get a joke, but one that's usually topical enough it doesn't feel like a total distraction (though it actually is). It is entertaining, and it mostly works. We already have accepted that kids are a prime audience for the movie. In fact, making things kid-friendly is probably part of it. Nothing exactly forbids a kids movie from discussing real-life, difficult questions, but it's harder to pull off, harder to market, and if we're being honest kids don't generally want too-hard questions in their movies. That's an adult thing. So an R-rating is an crude and easy proxy for adults to pay attention, even if it isn't strictly necessary.
I agree that personally, I find conflicts in fiction without clear good-bad divides and more than 2 factions incredibly enjoyable on average. I do wish there were a bit more of it. But also ask yourself, have you ever shied away from watching a movie because it was too explicitly political? Even if it didn't line up exactly with current attitudes or parties? I think that experience is more common than many movie-goers would let on.
I do circle back to District 9, actually, as an example of what I assume you want more of. Have you seen it? How did you feel about it? Can you think of similar others? The only ones that spring to mind are maybe things like Minority Report, Children of Men, V for Vendetta, maaaybe Dune 2.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7mo ago
Honestly I can't parse this comment as anything but overtly sexist, and plainly adds nothing either. Do better.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Oil and gas only matter if a war is fought on the years scale, not the weeks or months scale. This is virtually guaranteed not to be the case. Any Taiwanese conflict is going to be a months-long affair at best. And if it's longer, there are larger macroeconomic considerations more important than oil. I think you dramatically overestimate how much oil a country goes through mid-conflict. No one is going to boycott selling China oil in peacetime, either. In short, this entire line of reasoning is irrelevant and severing the so-called Russia-China military alliance (which mostly only exists on paper, it's not like the Russian fleet would ever, under any circumstances, fight alongside China against the US, which is the only thing of real value Russia even has in that theater.).
I don't think this is true, though you use this as a foundational premise. The conversations just look very different and so you might not recognize them immediately as such. Probably for tactical reasons (not wanting to give ammo to right wingers), it isn't usually highlighted as a problem-alone. There isn't the angst-for-its-own-sake aspect like there is for some other issues (like income inequality). It does actually come up at least sometimes! It's just usually in a hopeful kind of context, paired with a solution. For example, there are still well-publicized pushes for community violence interventions (I've seen them highlighted several times in national, left news outlets). One dimension of the gun control is exactly this. There's also talk about how this kind of violence is the result of the prison and justice system. And as an aside, indeed I am at least a little sympathetic to the particular argument (of many, some of which are bunk) that once you send someone to prison once, they acquire friends and influences that encourage further lawbreaking in the future, including homicide. In other words, there are actual, plausible mechanisms for these beliefs other than a vague
So yeah, they DO talk about this death/crisis. Just not in isolation (not anymore). One of the things that struck me watching the Malcolm X biopic recently was how up-front he was about problems within the black community and taking ownership of the fix (though still he blamed white people for all of this, at least early on in his life). And yeah, that approach you don't see as often (though I can't say I'm like, super plugged in to Black culture and news, so it might show up there) which I do find interesting.
So that's for many modern leftists. I find your talk about earlier revolutionary leftists very interesting. You can definitely see the seeds of later problems in some of what they discuss. Such as the perpetual, mob-conducted non-state violence of the Cultural Revolution in China. Or how untenable abolishing so many groups of people from the vote would be, as per the list you quoted which would eliminate a huge percentage of the population. However, modern US progressives still have much more in common with European social democrats (or democratic socialists) than they do with any form of communism, though they sometimes adopt the same language (the goals are very different).
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