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
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Federal officers were lazy and/or incompetent in their court filings, and tapped the phone of some minor "advisor" (often a minor role used to burnish credentials) who barely even worked for the Trump campaign. They tapped him after he left the campaign. That's hardly some deep conspiracy. Oh, but the FBI also chatted with a few campaign aides. Oh nooooooooooooo
Yeah, at least this claim about wiretapping the opposition campaign is total bullshit. All the evidence I've seen of actual government official interactions with social media companies was similarly quite tame and also not conspiracy-level. There was some sus stuff going on tone-wise about the Hunter Laptop thing, sure. That's a little worrying. But it wasn't a total hit job either, it wasn't like suspicion was entirely partisan and contrived. A lot of reasonable people at the time thought the whole thing was a bit weird and sketchy.
Unless you have a more specific "actual government official leans on social media to suppress unfavorable story simply because it was unfavorable" evidence to share? This is the standard I think is appropriate. Non-officials can do whatever they want as part of the normal but imperfect media landscape. For example, it's important to note that even the laptop group letter was signed by FORMER intelligence agency people!
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8mo 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
9mo ago
Yes, we do assume Hillary was being bitter, because action wise she didn’t do jack shit about it. For anyone paying attention, you might notice that not very many Democrats followed her rhetoric either.
You shouldn’t read into Florida’s subsequent results. 9/11 happened pushing a major Bush wave… and then Obama won it twice again. Being red is recent. This should set off warning bells in your brain about personal bias that you’d even mention Florida like that, and be so flagrantly and factually wrong.
There’s some merit to the general pattern of “Democrats break X tradition for allegedly noble reasons, Republicans then see it as fair game and break X+1 tradition harder and more effectively”. Absolutely. But there’s a level of equivalence here that is just absurd.
For example. Yes. Riots in DC. Not the same as literally occupying the seat of government. These two riots are not the same. Likewise. Faithless electors your own link is talking about, uh, celebrities advocating for doing so? The whole thing was pageantry anyways as it seemed to pretty much every legal scholar everywhere that individual electors can’t actually go rogue. Contrast the Pence convincing effort or the alternate slate effort which had a (still not crazy high but not zero) chance of creating a more real crisis. It’s insane to me that you refuse to see this. At some point we moved from random House reps doing protest votes to actual, organized attempts to submit alternate electoral slates based on a sum total of zero evidence and a “throw literal shit against the wall and see if anything sticks” approach to evidence. Not. The. Same! At least hanging Chads were, you know, real.
Now note that I’m really not reading too deeply into Trump’s every word either. When he said that we wouldn’t even need to have more elections if he won it was obvious he was simply exaggerating how effective he would be about fixing problems. But new evidence about his activities in the aftermath clearly show he is ultimately corrupt in motivation and self-serving in action.
And of course with all that said, why on earth would I have a problem with the system if Trump were to win? He can and probably will get a ton of votes, all legitimately. The voting system broadly works.
As an example unless you are a gutless loser like that Georgia governor candidate, even if some halfway shady shit happens in state elections (fights about voting on the margins of the rules, like induced turnout related stuff) the typical reaction has almost always been “well let’s try harder to win more state gov’t seats next time”.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Eh, I dunno about that. There's a long history of back and forth about which party is the "defender of the Constitution" and such. They both have held that mantle at different times pretty strongly in the last even 20 years only. Sure, Democrats are playing their hand pretty strong, probably too strong, recently (junk like "democracy dies in darkness" and all that, great on paper, even true on paper, horribly mangled job in practice). Democrats cry wolf about a lot of things. But not Trump. This dude actually jokes around about suspending the Constitution which is not cool and not-so-jokingly asks about deploying troops domestically which we've only seen in living memory a few times in the 60s and once in '92 for the LA race riots. The dude doesn't even pay lip service to checks and balances and admires dictators.
Election night is long and pauses in the pace of reporting those results isn't that odd. AFAIK, pretty much all the states counted continuously after starting the process, and did not takes breaks (example). In other words, that's a false claim.
The consent decree didn't lead to any substantive change in policies other than notification about signature matching, and I'm not concerned overmuch about chain of custody in the sense that people can often look and see if their ballot was accepted, plus any deliberate vote-changing associated with those concerns sound wildly implausible. In terms of ballot harvesting, etc. I definitely think there's some good room for stricter laws, though I don't necessarily think for example we need to be too worried about family or close friends agreeing to physically drop off sealed ballots at drop spots as a convenience thing. Campaign affiliated people doing it as some sort of service? Bad. Generic GOTV for example making it easier for seniors to vote? I think that's fine but could use a bit of supervision or auditing or something to avoid abuse, but possibly fine.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9mo 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.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Clearly a jury who heard the facts more directly than you and I felt differently, and I'm inclined to trust them.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8mo ago
The arguments against election fraud can be summarized as there being no election fraud
What a lazy, dishonest, and incorrect summarization.
Also akin to painting Trump’s efforts as “regarding election integrity” — even most posters here, however truculent and to the best of my recollection, seem to often concede that Trump’s personal and individual efforts were manifestly not grounded in any kind of honest concern.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
Always good to hear from DTulpa Gabbard herself! :)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
Let me put it this way. Trump has, let's say, a 90% chance of not harming the Constitution or the rule of law at all. Maybe higher, because I place a high confidence in general US systemic resilience? I think I'm still allowed to be worried about that 5-10%, because to me, that's well beyond my comfortable threshold for electing a president.
Does this sound crazy? Consider this: how many presidents have suspended parts of the constitution, acted unconstitutionally in a big or blatant way, or triggered a significant constitutional crisis? Madison (war of 1812 militia and war stuff, debated), Jackson(nullification crisis AND outright defiance of SC on Indian removal), Lincoln (habeus corpus in civil war), Wilson (WW1 free speech stuff), FDR (court packing AND Japanese-American citizen internment), Nixon (Watergate and related obstruction); as well as recent examples Bush (wiretapping AND detainment stuff, debated) and Trump (possible bribery AND Jan6, heavily debated) that are worth mentioning. A few other possible violators, depending. I think a few arguments were made for Jefferson for various things, and Truman for some Korean War stuff, and some even say Reagan for Iran-Contra (defying congress outright). I left off Johnson, although he WAS impeached, because the core issue felt like it hinged on technicalities of Cabinet appointments and personality clashes. Of course, the list goes way up if you're talking about ANY unconstitutional action, judged after the fact.
So that's 6-8 presidents out of 46. 10 if you are expansive. Those that threaten the core fundamentals of the nation, that's probably just Jackson for his SC defiance and FDR for court packing (and maybe the four terms if we are being honest, though totally legal it was worrying), because although some wartime stuff is in theory worrying we can probably give a bit of a pass to that, even if it involves some core free speech stuff, due to theoretically all wars having an end date. Trump is definitely not (currently) on that core fundamental list.
So historically only a 4% rate of bigtime, core fundamental danger, though that's a really, really crude calculation where I don't yet know how I feel about it. I'm mildly afraid that Biden will consider a court-packing plan, but this probability I place at more like 3-5%. Trump gets weighted higher at 6-10%. This is subjective, thus I don't expect people to agree. However, I don't consider "not suspending the constitution" as a fair predictor of future behavior just because it's literally the default expectation. We have to look elsewhere. Could we have predicted FDR and Jackson's transgressions? FDR had a lot of sweeping changes, and a lot of them undone by the SC, with big economic pressure. I don't know how useful this is. Major planks of major plans have been knocked out for a lot of presidents, including several recent ones from both parties, no connection with major crises yet. Jackson was highly pugilistic and the classic original populist. However, this is tricky and subjective. I kind of feel like this is a good Trump comparison? It's gotta be, right? But I also think you could come up with other parallels for other presidents with Jackson, so I'm not sure. Maybe the standard is actually talking bad about the SC ahead of time instead? A lot of presidents also grouse about this. I don't think Biden himself does this as much as other Democrats. But he does sometimes.
Got distracted, we return to the original question. Why am I rating Trump higher than Biden in existential risk?
How much of that is due to rhetoric? I've actually rewritten the second half of this comment eight times (I counted), with many, many deleted sentences talking about evidence. Let no one say I can't at least try to be fair, or at least consistent. I think I've decided after this long reflection that it's actually all due to rhetoric and language. If someone makes noises about doing highly dangerous constitutional/existential stuff, am I really supposed to ignore it if most evidence points to it being bluster, though rooted in strong and (I think) genuine feeling? Biden makes noise about court packing. I actually rate this as concerning, I do try to be fair. Trump makes noise about election stuff. Both of these concern core interests. However, court packing would likely fail, whereas election denialism stuff... might succeed? IS that fair? I could possibly be nudged in either direction on Biden court packing. Is my feeling on Trump a sign of TDS? Or is it simply a case of listening to what he literally talks about all the time and treating it at face value on the off-chance it's not superficial but real?
I'm going to make that an actual question. Broadly: does the recent adage "if someone tells you who they are, believe them" hold water when it comes to presidents and what they say?
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
Hold on. I grew up in Oregon, they have had mail in ballots for a very long time, and nothing yet has surfaced as a problem despite this worry of yours that vote-buying is possible.
I’m of the school of thought that the system is responsive enough that we can actually wait, yes actually wait until we start to see hints of an actual problem before taking action. Otherwise just let things take their normal course, that has a long history of decently functioning checks and balances.
That system, which involves judges sometimes making calls in cases that don’t allow for the full regular process to play out, due to time constraints and the nature of a national emergency, is a fine way to resolve things. Sometimes I think a few judges overstepped. That’s not okay to be upset about, but it’s also normal. Nothing was diabolical about it. And in fact despite the so-called massive weaknesses of how things played out, practically zero evidence of fraud showed up to court. Due process after the fact was followed, and that due process determined that most every allegation was either worthless or unsubstantiated.
Moreover, guess what? People in every state are still armed with democracy even now. Many but not all states have reverted parts of their covid changes. And in all states, if voters want to “tighten” (quote marks because it’s a misnomer, IMO) voting laws, they are perfectly free to vote to that effect and elect representatives who share their views to make or revert changes moving forward.
Classic example is Raffensburger in Georgia. Voters re-elected him with a significant margin. In other words, The People we’re perfectly happy with how the process went.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I had seen the phrase show up two times, maybe three, in the thread and it seemed a little too systemic for me not to mention it. It's all about the "context window", and yes it's true that LLMs are very sensitive to that (sometimes in a helpful, human way but not always) (and aside from of course the sometimes clumsy attempts at making the output PC). A fun example is I put your version of the question (which frankly I consider to be slightly more of a leading question due to the word "native" having strong connotations, but to some extent all LLM questions are leading, so what can you do) into chatbot arena. I got one answer that said not usually, but sometimes for individuals in "years and decades" maybe (and gave some context about the "Windrush generation" who came in the 50s and 60s), and a second answer that said it would probably be offensive, briefly mentioned it might be occasionally accurate, but then ended by saying that using the term would be a "microaggression". The first turned out to be a ChatGPT variant like you used, and the second was Gemini (lol). I still think my question phrasing gets more to the meat of the issue, but yeah, you can only get so far with LLMs. Asking "If we're having a conversation about immigration policy, and someone started talking about "recent" immigrants, what do you think would count as "recent"?" produced yet another answer that said usually 1-3 years and sometimes 5-10, and a second answer that basically said "bro that's actually super duper subjective, here's some things that might influence that". *shrugs*
I still think it's misleading. The news articles we're usually slinging around here usually employ the phrase to mean a few years at most. If "recent" introduces a significant misunderstanding, doesn't offer any advantages over the more generic "immigrant", and a better alternative "second-generation immigrant" exists, to me that's three strikes.
This is a little off topic, but along the lines of thought about how good arguments sometimes lose their power over time.... I actually do give good stock to the theory that CBT specifically as a psychiatric tool has lost a lot of its effectiveness because it's seeped into the water of the common understanding and provides almost a type of immunity to it.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I realize I'm doubling down a little, but I feel it's justified. As an example, we can ask a LLM (here, Claude): "If I say "recent immigrant" what time-frame would people most expect that to mean?"
The term "recent immigrant" doesn't have a universally agreed-upon timeframe, but it generally refers to someone who has immigrated within the last few years. Most people would likely interpret "recent immigrant" to mean someone who has arrived in the country within approximately the last 1 to 5 years. However, the exact interpretation can vary depending on context:
In casual conversation, people might consider "recent" to mean within the last 1-3 years. For statistical or research purposes, "recent immigrant" might be defined more precisely, sometimes covering a period of up to 5 or even 10 years. In some government contexts or for certain programs, "recent immigrant" might have a specific legal definition, which could vary by country or purpose. The perception of "recent" can also depend on the speaker's own frame of reference or the immigration patterns in a particular area.
We're probably within the realm of "casual conversation" ranging to "research purposes" so lo and behold, exactly what I said. In politics, "recent" usually means at most the recent election which even in the UK is only at most 5 or 6 years in the past. Even a follow-up question to Claude about the UK turns up that some media would use the word to mean a decade, at most. I'm glad you can acknowledge that the word might not make sense but the fact you used it in the first place is, if not an indication of outright dishonesty and manipulation (which given you as a mod I'm going to say no this is not the case, let's be charitable :) ), at least a major warning light that should be going off in your head about bias creeping into your language. And bias to the point it's leading to what I still insist is objectively an outright and blatant misrepresentation. If your word means 95% of the time (or more! I think textual analysis would produce 99% or higher) something that is factually false, using it is just straight up bad, no two ways about it.
Stepping back from the brink a little, I suppose you could see the context as "is immigration writ large any good"? In which it makes a little more sense. I do quite like your point about being caught in a double bind between not being able to critique 20-year-old policy and also not current policy. And yes, I think the European model of combating racism has its clear drawbacks here -- my general observation is that Europeans like to pretend it doesn't exist and sweep it under the rug when possible, while Americans talk about it much more directly and often. I'm sure both have their merits, but (despite my bias) I think the American model is still better. In psychology, we've sort of learned that it's usually better to err on the side of "talk about your feelings" rather than "bottle them up" even if there are actual risks of talking problems too much (and there are). I think the same idea roughly applies to politics. So the UK approach of trying to keep things bottled up is fundamentally doomed.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
How is it harassment if she's unaware? About the details, I found this 2018 ACLU article about the same program interesting. A few points:
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Allegedly the program is largely algorithmic in who it selects, and this algorithm is often pretty irrational. This means while it's still possible it was targeted at Gabbard, on balance I'm inclined to say it wasn't. Apparently a group is considering suing on her behalf, and this might (we would hope) surface some details, and I support that kind of accountability and attempt at transparency, so I approve.
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Allegedly the marshals use some subjective judgements about "suspicious" behavior, which does raise false positive concerns, but presumably the escalation is simply banning flying altogether, which I would assume (could be wrong) would be a higher bar and one especially unlikely for a high-profile person like Gabbard, so I'm not quite convinced this is a real worry.
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In terms of waste of money? Yes, it sounds like an absolute waste of money. I would appreciate this program were to receive more scrutiny. But sadly, this seems fairly par for the course in terms of the American paranoia about terrorism. And to be fair, taken in aggregate, the government does seem to have been fairly effective over the last decade in preventing mass terror attacks, including on planes, so I think it's quite possible that the general public doesn't mind this kind of cost too much.
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What does the enhanced checks look like? Sounds like "Quad S" which means your luggage might be swapped for explosives, might be searched, and you go through a metal detector and a patdown. Most of those things are fairly normal in today's situation, though of course
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We should also consider the alternate hypothesis: maybe she did actually deserve scrutiny? Certainly we don't want politicians to be above the law. This is admittedly a super-tricky balance to strike. IMO, this being exposed is good and so are any lawsuits that come of it.
In other words, at risk of sounding cliche, but the system is working fine. Politician suffers minor inconvenience and secretive government program receives more scrutiny. Not a bad trade.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
Preachy, smarminess of Glenn Beck 2.0 for real but with even more disdain for the truth. I hope he doesn’t manage to somehow launder his own image back to respectable.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1yr ago
There's a little bit of smearing, but I happen to think (and it seems to some extent you agree) that a fair amount of it is self-inflicted. I trace unhappiness with the court back to perhaps the original sin, Citizen's United, which to me seemed like a needless own-goal pretty much everyone disliked. Which is remarkable, because normally you'd consider Bush v Gore to be the big source of unhappiness, but the Democrats seem to have took that one in stride. How different it looks now.
In terms of scandal, the Kavanaugh hearings weren't that much worse than Thomas'. The nomination drama behind Garland and Gorsuch was a bit dirty, but nothing that got me quite as enraged as some people on the left. However, financial scandals were just a matter of time to come to light, like the -- I went back and counted, there are at least eight billionaires -- who have some degree of suspicious links to Supreme Court members. And don't get me started on the "we don't really need an ethics code". Uh, yes, you kinda do. This is a very severe challenge to legitimacy. And back to jurisprudence, there wasn't necessarily a strong reason to overturn Roe, Hodges was broadly popular but certainly a major event, and as a Supreme Court you do have a certain amount of political capital and around that point they really should have gotten the memo that they were stretching it to breaking. Rather than wait it out a little longer, they are charging ahead with things like the looming, presumed causer of chaos: Chevron doctrine revisited. On top of the Trump things, of course. Not intervening in the Florida case the judge there is clearly sandbagging was a big deal to me personally but I don't think that will echo much farther.
Yes, a few are aware of the legacy aspect. Roberts certainly is. However, I get the sense that Alito and Thomas are a bit "damn the torpedoes" right now. Barrett might be having second thoughts about things. It's harder for me to get a bead on Gorsuch and Kavanaugh. I think it's also Kagan who has been a little abnormally vocal out of court as well?
I mean I think near zero on the z-axis? While my x and y answers are probably non-zero, and I do think maybe a rough 60% genetic contribution to individual heritability of g, for lack of a better term (I don't know how exactly to mathematically adapt this to populations in a fair way) but I appreciate z being its own axis. In essence, I don't think it's of any worth to spend a ton of work to evaluate x at all. Like, let's say there are in fact large but not enormous population differences. What am I supposed to do with this information? Am I supposed to be aware that I treat some populations differently than others, and do nothing about that? That's just stereotyping, which I think is morally wrong. Even if say 2/10 of Green candidates for a job are suitable vs 8/10 Blue people, individual respect and concepts of fairness matter more. I'm not gonna toss all 10 Green candidates to save time. Even if the job is important.
It's just stereotyping with extra steps, and is frequently the case. In practice many racists I see are using correlated but generally only semi-accurate indicators to judge group affiliation, and then do little follow-up. Like name, dress, skin tone, things like that. Sure, maybe they make sense on average, but on an individual level? Forget about it. I lived in Miami for a while, and I can tell you first-hand that a lot of people are far more than their upbringing, but more to the point, there's a huge difference in someone from Argentina vs Brazil vs other part of Brazil vs Peru vs Colombia vs Puerto Rico vs Mexico vs Cuba and somehow I'm supposed to believe that either they are all the same, or that other groups happen to be special and uniquely stupid, or something like that? Or that the only thing that matters is the exact percentage of some vague notion of "whiteness"?
And then even going along that note, genetic groups do NOT correlate 1-to-1 with skin color, for example, not as neatly as many would have you think. It brings to mind the craziness of one-drop policies in the antebellum South. What if someone is half-Blue half-Green? Their skin doesn't always average out or something. Africa is a big continent and not all of them are Black and not all Blacks are from Africa and again for the love of God genetics literally doesn't have a notion of race as these neat, immutable boxes, and history doesn't either. (Ancient) Egypt is a great example of how modern looks at racial groups and skin tone are often anachronistic. Maybe the whole white vs Black as a dichotomy or single slider is a straw man, but that tends to be the actual end result of a lot of this discussion.
In fact, someone just last week said on this very forum and I quote word for word:
White children that come from homogenous environments are some of the happiest, healthiest and smartest in the world. There is nothing bad, comparatively, about them or their education to be found.
Which I don't even know where to begin. I love reading and talking about history, and this just reeks of presentism. Look it up. On top of implying some one-dimensional scale of whiteness. Like, if you're going to use it that way, at least say WASP or something. And he didn't stop there, oh no. Of course, a discrimination step comes next. We didn't mention Hispanics or Asians, but that's another often awkward conversation rarely brought up because there isn't a clean and clear answer.
Anyways the end goal of this whole (disorganized, sorry) rant is basically, the whole HBD discussion is orthogonal, almost completely, to morally permissible practical applications. I apologize if I dragged both orthogonal arguments into the same thread. The whole idea of human rights and human dignity fundamentally involves the idea that a person's worth and treatment should, within reason, not depend on instant snap judgements. Were the American Founding Fathers hypocrites for writing words about equality and God-given innate rights when they didn't want poor people to vote, or enslaved people, or non-landowners, or certain foreigners, or women? Yes, at least a little bit. But that didn't make their words and ideas wrong.
Edit: edited intro to address OP's axes more directly.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
2yr ago
On the contrary, the statement being vetted by so many people and subject to so much scrutiny implies it’s a very solid and defensible statement…
EverythingIsFine
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26d ago
Who is “they”? Best I can tell it was mostly the parents and school trying legal tricks (presumably to protect their reputation or something)? And the stated purpose feels at least facially plausible even if made in bad faith (that releasing shooter thoughts only makes them more famous and validates their approach as their writings are guaranteed notoriety) even if you disagree (as I do) and think there’s more to lose by a perception of secrecy. I mean, despite thinking this, it’s also true that media attention spawns copycats. I’ve never seen the copyright angle used but it also seems legally plausible.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
Again this whole thing would be easier, ironically even for Trump, had Trump not personally torpedoed a major compromise immigration bill before coming in to office. Which among other things would have increased the number of available judges.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I'd be willing to bet money that if you did a textual analysis of every use of the word "recent" as used by British people you'd find that easily 95% of the use of the word is used for lengths of time less than 10 years. Probably more. Challenge: can you even find a single example of the word being used, in a politics-adjacent way, to mean 20 years or more? I honestly don't think you can, not without breaking out the history books. The modern debate is one with the context of politics, not history. While I realize "history" is an extremely slippery term, there's a reason we don't really start to use it until the 20-30 year mark. The distinction? If I had to take a stab at it, I'd say "politics" is implicitly something you can do something about, and history is not (and history is also something you need a little distance from to gain greater benefits of hindsight as well as some extra objectivity). Although anecdotally that window seems to be narrowing (I've seen some "historical"-oriented analysis of events as recent as 15 years ago).
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo 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
11mo ago
I mean the firing bothers me for example and I've been against OK-sign policing since the issue began, and I was part of the vehement "let's tone it down" camp in the HD case -- but stakes and the amount of consequences do matter. As the OP alludes to, I think part of the reason I'm not as outraged here is the job of "Olympic official" feels like a low-impact part-time job rather than something more extensive. Also, there's kind of an expectation for some PR bullshittery that comes along with the Olympics. I don't really expect them to be super fair on the fringes. If, for example, articles were to come out saying the official had been totally blackballed from everything in their sport, or lost tons of money, or something along those lines I would feel more strongly! As far as I know most officials for this type of thing are somewhat well-off hobbyists from a wide variety of countries. The Home Depot case however was someone who is often living paycheck to paycheck and has to deal with a lot of crap already in their job, and furthermore I know firsthand a lot of people in similar positions. That's a significant contrast. Moreover I don't even have a strong sense for who is running the IOC in the first place, so seeing it as part of some larger and uniquely Western cancel war isn't immediately obvious to me.
Spying is an overblown talking point. They spied on like, one guy? Maybe a second, and neither of them big deals?
The campaign didn’t get meaningfully “bogged down” by any investigations, not anything special counsels don’t normally do
Russiagate actually did fade pretty quickly after the Mueller report in the news and from Democratic politicians
They tried to impeach him over something almost explicitly a quid pro quo - you could argue that some presidents get a pass for that kind of thing (Nixon sure as hell did it but that wasn’t what his impeached for) but it’s still, um, bad. And note that after the effort failed in Senate vote, they dropped it. You don’t see Kamala whining about it on the campaign trail
If you think that was abnormal lawfare you have not been paying attention to politics the last several decades
Scope and scale matter. My point stands.
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