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
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
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
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
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
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.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8mo ago
On the most basic level a joke needs to be either funny or insightful or failing either, at least clever to count enough as an "acceptable joke" and not just being mean. We all know, I assume, about the social thing that happens sometimes with jokes where they are either too frequent or not actually funny enough that they are used as a form of bullying, or are opportunities to say what you "really think" but then hide behind "just a joke bro" when challenged. So that's the context I'm coming from: the forum-equivalent of bullying or "just a joke bro" are both forbidden by the rules and for good reason! They both tend to be long-term extremely toxic in a poison-the-well sense for forums, doubly so for those that aim to 'optimize for light not heat'.
By contrast, a joke that is, on the spectrum, more on the side of clever or insightful or all in good fun is fine (or even laudable if an AAQC) in the sense that it probably doesn't contribute to that kind of generalized toxicity. Thus even a short joke can be plausibly seen as at least medium effort in the way the first kind of joke fundamentally is not, and "low effort" is its own rule, however subjective. I hope this explanation helps you understand I'm not actually attempting to move goalposts or anything -- they exist roughly as outlined above, to my mind (not a mod).
While it's obviously difficult to quantify a joke as I noted, since it's highly subjective and even context-dependent (moods of crowds in comedy clubs a well-known confounder of the funniness of a joke itself along with delivery), Scott Adam had a proposal I subscribe to that a joke needs to contain at least one but ideally two or more of the following [to be funny]: Unexpectedness, Exaggeration, Incongruity, Relatability, Absurdity, Reversal. I would probably add in Transgression as its own category, though there's overlap. Since you clearly want to analyze it further, at least to me your joke doesn't contain any of these in any meaningful sense. Nor does it say anything clever. Nor does it contain any special insight. It isn't relatable, it isn't much of a reversal, it isn't absurdist, it just lives in a sour mediocrity and thus is best represented as pure sexism and disdain and dismissal of women. Or, it was just a quick thoughtless one-off that didn't land, I'm not trying to do some actual character assassination or judgement here -- you were totally free to respond in any number of ways other than digging in and claiming it's somehow "good natured ribbing".
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9mo ago
Actions speak louder than words is the test. It’s disappointing but within the realm of expectations for losers to be whiny, sad but occasional for a low-status politician to actually flail around in denial for a bit, but something else entirely when the top takes actions that are demonstrably motivated by impure motives and backed by hot air.
Look. If you ask Trump — and many have! — how exactly he lost, he refuses to answer. Even if you hold up someone like Stacey Abrams, who infamously refused to concede the Georgia governor race, if you asked her why… she will fucking tell you! It’s absolutely incredible that Trump will not do the same.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9mo ago
I'm interested in "failure mode of all democracies" -- do you really think this, and what evidence are you using? Because sure, I can think of a fair few countries where democracy went poorly, but I'm not sure I'd jump to "democracy always fails in this manner" or similar argument "all democratic failures happen in this manner" or even "all countries that get too multiethnic and are democracies fail this way" and the similar prediction that "all democracies are doomed to eventual failure". Not quite sure which angle exactly you're describing.
If anything, I think that the two-party system, for all its incredible and well-documented failings, actually serves as a pretty good insulation from what I think you're talking about. Since both parties have an incentive to change their policies (often incrementally, but the base pressures are there) in order to win, or regain an edge, this means that a multi-ethnic state cannot rely on simple alliances between ethnic groups, but must in some sense compete for them, and trade groups once in a while too. Don't think we'd get very far broaching replacement theory per se in this context, but more wondering about the proposed mechanism and evidence side of things. Even assuming deliberate importation of votes is happening and intentional (which I obviously above dispute), for the sake of argument here, you can't do so indefinitely. I just don't think it usually makes sense numerically, without being washed out by backlash. For example, we can plainly see that even Kamala has had to harden her border policies. That's in direct response to discontent. Might she be lying? Sure. But the discontent is real and might even cost her an election, which I count as evidence for my above contention.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
9mo ago
Unless you have some wildly compelling evidence otherwise, most of what I've seen indicates that those born in the US, raised in the US, even to immigrant parents tend to vote at least in broad strokes similar to their peers, and don't follow their parent's preferences to any abnormal degree. Certainly it's hard to imagine an 18-year-old voting Democrat for the sole reason they are eternally and perpetually grateful for their parents being allowed into the country by Democrats 18+ years earlier... that's just not how people vote.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
Right, of course context matters, but in the realm of politics two decades is almost never recent. You usually mean something within the last few months to a year, and sometimes 5 years at most, 10 if you really stretch. This holds true virtually 90% of the time, probably even higher, 99% wouldn't even surprise me. A simple search of literally any news article will demonstrate my point quite succinctly. Or even books.
If you use "recent" to mean 20 years ago it's almost explicitly dishonest.
For example, if I tell you that I "recently" moved -- even if I am catching up with an old friend I hadn't seen in like, 40 years, you'd still probably assume recent = last 5 to 10 years at most. I struggle to even come up with any sort of comparable example outside of literal world history where recent would acceptably mean almost two decades ago.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
I mentioned this above, but surely the parents aren't "recent" immigrants in nearly any sense of the word, right? Unless I have my timeline wrong they must have been in the country for at least 17 years, yes?
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
11mo ago
That's not what I said. There's principles, but we're talking about the context of people making a big fuss on Twitter. Making a big fuss on Twitter requires more than one's principles being breached, it requires some degree of outrage. I'm just saying that many of these "peaceniks" do continue to in good faith call for a ceasefire, but they may be understandably less motivated to loudly call for a ceasefire in this case.
The highly-upvoted post I responded to is alleging a double standard where none actually exists. It's also doubly frustrating that at least on its face, their post seemed to ask (really, allege, but hiding behind an insincere question) about where is the outrage and use that as evidence of a double standard. I provided a literal and direct answer to their question (i.e. people probably still are consistent but the "outrage"/"demonstrated harm" dial isn't very high here) and was downvoted for answering that very question. Guess people writ large aren't actually all that interested in other perspectives after all, it seems. They just want their echo chamber. Do better, Mottizens.
Like, did you read my comment? Read it again. I'm saying that most people see the news and see "rich international hobbyist loses a part time gig after political overreaction" and obviously that's a different level of harm and thus outrage as "poor working-class person gets fired from their minimum wage job due to online crusade". The difference is pretty obvious?!? Of course people are going to be louder about the second case! No one gives two shits about often faceless "Olympic Officials". Hell, no one gives a shit about the jobs of refs in practically any sport!!! So expecting a twitterstorm of outrage as "proof" people are being morally consistent seems misguided at best.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1mo ago
This is just anti-credentialism at its most stupid. If anything the legal industry is one of the best places to be credentialist, because so many cases turn on very specific case law and precedent that the non-credentialed have almost no hope of fully understanding. Let alone the whole demand for isolated rigor lens. Respectfully, your intuition is twisted.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8mo ago
You're the one who told me to "get lost" so don't act all persecuted. If you're here just because you can't be casually sexist somewhere else that's a bad reason. There's a massive gap between the woke police watching every comment for wrong-think, and regular users and mods simply wanting to keep the place from devolving into a reddit one-liners. I only ever responded because you wanted to die on the hill of wanting to keep your shitty one-line jokes instead of just moving on.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
8mo ago
Low effort one liners are perhaps not explicitly against the rules, but they are pretty close to it, last time I checked. If you want a joke forum maybe you should consider reddit yourself? Thanks for pointing it out, I've reported both comments. They add nothing to the conversation and only increase hostility and boo-outgroup feelings, again, explicitly against the whole idea. Did you re-read the copy-pasted message at the top of the CW posts recently? I know it might come across as sour grapes, but keeping low-effort punching-down rare is at least in theory a fundamental part of what I perceive to be the goal of the site.
Also, jokes are of course widely subjective and I know that jokes often trade explicitly on being a little transgressive. But to me, it's not even a funny-mean joke, nor particularly inventive; it's just mean.
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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