FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
No bio...
User ID: 675
the missionary is acting as though there is a law to be followed, when there obviously is not. The checkpoint guard is a potential threat, the "service charge" is not optional, and these realities must be engaged with. The missionary is thinking there's some system in place such that these realities are Someone Else's Problem, that the proper response is to file a complaint form and let the system handle it. He's blind to the fact that there is no system, that this is the way things are.
The cat lady is doing the same thing. She acts as though there's a system to enforce her will over and above her immediate actions. She apparently thinks there's a system that prevents the cat from walking out an open door, ignoring that no such system exists. She wants such a system to exist, ignores the fact that it does not, and so suffers the consequences.
The "dishes" poem (one of my favorites, by the way) illustrates the disconnect between cooperative systems of the type the people in these two examples are imagining exist, and the reality of individual choice. Washing the dishes is supposed to preclude breaking them, but there's nothing innate to the task to actually prevent this. What prevents breaking dishes is something entirely different, a whole other complex of assumptions and interactions with no actual connection to the act of dish-washing itself, and the existence of those assumptions cannot simply be assumed when it's time for dish-washing.
Assuming the above is correct, let's see if I can extend the pattern.
This scene from The Wire is all about the divide between the power of a hypothetical system and the power of material reality. The guard wants it to be one way: his whole job is in fact to be that system, that's the whole reason he's there, the reason he draws a paycheck, he has a uniform and everything! And yet, it's the other way: the system doesn't actually exist, even though he wants it to, even though he's paid to implement it, because at the end of the day, cooperation has to either be consented to or enforced, nd mechanisms of enforcement are both very expensive and quite limited in what they can achieve. Stanfield refuses to consent, and the guard, and the people the guard represents, aren't actually prepared for enforcement. They're bluffing, and Stanfield calls it. The guard's response is to try to guilt-trip him over his defection, as though Stanfield doesn't understand what he's doing, as though he's just making a mistake, and once this is pointed out he'll fall in line with the system. This doesn't work because Stanfield is not making a mistake, has no intention of cooperating, and knows that neither the guard nor the people behind him have any way of enforcing the system they're claiming exists. In reality, he has all the cards, and recognizes no reason to pretend otherwise. He is able to inflict emotional whiplash on the guard at will, by allowing the guard to pretend the system exists, and then demonstrating that it does not.
Applying it to the Culture War, there's the argument I've made for a long time here that the Constitution is dead, or that it is ink and paper, or that it is whatever five justices say it is. The point of all these statements is to highlight different ways that this system vs reality disconnect applies to the system of the Constitution: the document itself is not the power, the justices aren't even the power. The paper and ink and the justices interpreting it are just coordination mechanisms. The power comes from the social consensus that they exist to coordinate, and that power can be manipulated in a whole variety of ways that have nothing to do with a fancy piece of parchment or five people in silly black robes. A foolish person might imagine that their ignition key is what powers their car: they turn the key and the car starts! But of course, the ignition key is only indirectly connected to the car's engine, and if there's something wrong with the engine the key certainly isn't going to help.
This is one of the serious issues our society is trying to deal with. Our established systems are failing en masse, and there's a blatant disconnect between the way things are hypothetically supposed to work, and the way they actually work. Some people fail or refuse to understand this reality, and so keep appealing to systems that used to exist, or that we pretended exist. They do this because they want it to be one way, but it's the other way.
Does this count?
US stock exchange sets diversity rules for listed companies
America's second largest stock exchange has said it will set binding gender and diversity targets for its listed companies.
Firms on the Nasdaq, which include tech giants such as Apple and Tesla, will have to have at least two diverse directors, or explain why they do not.
The directors should include one person who identifies as female and another as an underrepresented minority or LGBTQ+.
It follows complaints about the lack of diversity in corporate America.
According to a Nasdaq study last year, more than 75% of its listed companies would not have met its proposed targets.
The US Securities and Exchange Commission, which regulates financial markets, approved the plan on Friday, meaning it will be binding.
"These rules will allow investors to gain a better understanding of Nasdaq-listed companies' approach to board diversity," SEC chair Gary Gensler said...
Is a binding decision that requires changing the boards of 75% of Nasdaq companies something worth taking note of?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
"Yikes, too white" is in fact a dumb meme. By itself, there isn't really a way to steelman it, any more than you can meaningfully steelman "keep the government out of my social security" or whatever. Some memes are just really stupid for how catchy they are.
Memetically or genetically, pure fork-in-the-socket stupidity is not adaptive. Generally speaking, if you see people doing something dumb, it's either because you don't fully understand what they're doing, or because you don't fully understand how they came to be doing it. I think it's surprisingly rare for people to do things for no intelligible reason at all.
I think the proper approach here is to keep stepping up the meta-levels until you get to something solid. This meme works because Blue tribe people care about race in a general sense. Blue tribe people care about race in a general sense, because to a first approximation all Americans care about race in a general sense. Race is relevant to our politics in a way it simply wasn't in, say, 1990 - 2010, and appears to be growing more and more relevant over time. This happened for specific reasons, and the reasons bear discussion in a way the ground-level dumb meme doesn't. If you want some interesting exploration, I'd recommend starting from there and seeing where the history leads you.
Second, do these people realize what scenario we'd end up in if they were to get what they seem to be advocating for (have all the white people move out of whatever area they're in)?
I don't think any of them are thinking all the white people should go in one spot. To the extent that this is a problem, mass immigration will solve it, and while the meme may be dumb, it nonetheless serves basic interests for the tribe that is pushing mass immigration. The broader pattern explains the meme's fitness, its relevance, in a way taking the meme itself at face value does not. The reducto you propose isn't actually relevant.
What are they even trying to signal?
"Whiteness bad, diversity good". It's not complicated, and unlike the dumb meme, it can be steelmanned. Whether the steelman is persuasive is another question; certainly many seem to find it so.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11d ago
I would take the other side of that bet. What makes it different than Oblivion's potato faces is that they already had good art, and replaced it with bad art. The difference is not subtle, so a lot of people knew in advance that the new art was bad, which would obviously undermine any plausible benefits to the change. Nor is there any serious technical challenge to hide behind; these are low-fi models and textures implementing what is probably the single best-understood and simplest-to-implement 3d art style there is. There's a DEI entity being paid by the company to propose CW changes to the game, and this matches quite well to a DEI change. Having been involved in the sausage-making for DEI-mandated changes to video game art in the past, that's what this looks like to me.
If what you say about locked accessories is true, this was probably seen as the cheapest way to double the number of custom options available to each player.
I'm sure that's roughly accurate to how they sold it to management. From experience, my guess would be that the artists got their marching-orders from management, decided it wasn't worth fighting, and did exactly what they were told with full knowledge that they were making trash, given that the alternative would involve a direct threat to their employment for a ~zero-percent chance of achieving anything. Your boss paid money for the bad advice because it's the bad advice he wanted. Having paid for the bad advice, he's not interested in you telling him that it's bad. Shut up and push the buttons, art monkey.
This is what mystifies me about how large the supposedly beyond the pale attacks on Romney during the 2012 campaign are such a huge theme on this forum, popping up time after time after time.
Centrist types frequently argue that Trump is a person of bad character, and that his bad character should be a matter of concern to his supporters. Romney is brought up as one-half of a refutation of this argument (the other half being noted rapist Bill Clinton), demonstrating that any Republican will not only be accused of bad character, but that the accusation will stick, regardless of their actual character, while any Democrat will be presented as heroic and that presentation made to stick, again regardless of their actual character. Romney is the Republican example because he was widely perceived to be the cleanest-cut, most virtuous candidate Reds could possibly have gotten, probably the most virtuous candidate either party has had in a generation or more, and it made precisely zero difference and arguably handicapped his ability to fight and win. It follows that such arguments should not be taken seriously, either now or in the foreseeable future. Good-faith conversation about the character of the candidates is impossible, at least across the aisle, and probably at all, and those who think otherwise are either ignorant or deceiving themselves. The fact that, having smeared him, Blues went right back to pretending they preferred him is merely the icing on the cake.
This argument does not rely on liking or supporting Romney in any way. I think it's a decisive argument, and I voted for Obama.
More generally, this is one of a class of arguments demonstrating that the basic assumptions civil society is built on do not hold, and that cooperation across the tribal divide is not positive-sum.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
No argument on that specific subreddit, but /r/hatecrimehoaxes provided a necessary and timely service.
What is gained by saying it?
[EDIT] - No seriously, what's the argument here? Doing things simply because someone told you not to is childish. The idea that liberty can be secured by rejecting all norms was tested to destruction, and it did not actually work at scale. The taboo exists whether you like it or not, and flouting it provides no benefit that I can see. The word is actually garbage.
I don't actually want you or anyone else banned for mentioning it. I'm not going to, though, because I don't see the point, and I'll make the argument against mentioning because I think it's a sound one on the merits.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
4mo ago
A big part of it is that they don't know what they don't know. Violence is memetic, and they have received a particular set of memes that deliver these particular results.
Think about it. The individuals in question are part of a very particular form of gun culture: they live in areas where guns are de facto illegal, and where all the firearms use they've ever heard of or experienced is criminal. That means there's no range time, no formal training, no places to do the training, no people to teach. The high turnover from prison and fatalities means there's little to no institutional culture to build on, no accumulation of knowledge. What you get is lowest-common-denominator stuff. Actual training takes significant time and effort to deliver results even for things as simple as basic marksmanship under stress; where is a gangbanger going to get a thousand rounds of ammo and ten hours of range time? I've been in the gun culture my whole life, and I only recently learned about dry-fire as a training tool; where are they going to hear about it? How are they going to learn to mount a scope or zero a rifle, much less learn more elaborate and esoteric ideas like small-unit tactics?
Gangbangers appear to think of gunfights the way they think of fistfights: an act of raw imposition of will on another. They see using a gun in terms of chunky primitives: you shoot, they die, rather than the specific mechanics involved: situational awareness, contact, identifying targets, aiming, firing, reloading, cover, clearing malfunctions and so on. They don't think of guns as specific tools with specific capabilities that can be optimized for, they're super-knives that stab from range. The memes they've received shape their intentions and their methods decisively.
It's worth considering that, from the perspective of the gangbangers, what they're doing works. They've almost certainly seen multiple friends and acquaintances killed by the time they're old enough to participate, so they know that their forms of combat do actually kill people. Their form of violence is reasonably effective, derives them benefits in the form of honor, and the significant decrease in mortality is probably a feature, not a bug, since it generally increases survivability for all involved. Gangbangers generally are attempting to assert dominance or to make a point, not to annihilate the opposition like John Wick.
It's exactly the behavior in the Crump tweet linked above. Ditch the particulars, go straight to the tribal pattern. This shit will be the death of us.
I wasn't terribly impressed by her behavior in the brief section of the video I watched. I think it's certainly possible that the kid and their friends were actually trying to scam her. Maybe she's a progressive and this is just desserts. Whatever.
The rage mob is a vastly larger problem than any of that. The rage mob is a vastly clearer problem than any of that. These people are making a living off generating large-scale hatred, and no one has the slightest idea of how to make them stop. I am convinced that the hate they generate has serious, long-lasting consequences in the real world, and the harm they inflict is reliably rewarded, and on a vast scale. This is a career now, with significant growth potential.
...And people tell me we're peaked, and it's gonna get better from here. Yeah, sure.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
As mentioned, it's a long story, but I can try to get you started. Some elements:
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Desegregation/Blockbusting/"White Flight", and the mechanics thereof. @The_Nybbler links one history, I offer excerpts from another here. The short version is that desegregation failed on its own terms, injecting massive amounts of interracial violence into previously peaceful and prosperous communities, which the authorities completely failed to anticipate or respond to.
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The housing projects. See the discussion of Pruitt-Igoe here. These occurred more or less contemporaneously to desegregation, and were likewise driven by Progressive social-engineering theories with the aim of creating peaceful, prosperous communities for the underclass. The result were, in the words of Spike Lee, "self-cleaning ovens."
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Deinstitutionalization resulted in insane people living on the street, rather than in controlled environments.
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De-criminalization and toleration of vagrancy allowed the homeless to become a long-term problem within communities.
These specific policies did fatal damage to the communities of most major American cities. With the communities destroyed, the social basis for reform and regeneration no longer existed, and so the problems became self-perpetuating, and have continued since. Attempted solutions to the problems created by the last attempted solutions have created significant problems of their own.
The damage of these policies was aggravated by a number of other social trends and interventions, which amplified the damage they did. In most cases, the harms disproportionately fell on minority and especially black communities.
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No-fault divorce, which delivered few of the benefits its advocates claimed, and all the harms its opponents warned of.
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The Sexual Revolution generally, which likewise failed to secure the benefits its advocates claimed, caused a whole host of problems in its own right, and is effectively irreversable.
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Lax drug policies and the cultivation of a ineradicable drug culture. The war On Drugs is one of the go-to examples of systemic racism, ignoring the historical fact that harsher punishments for the drugs ravaging black communities was a policy explicitly demanded by those communities, in an attempt to control the damage flowing outward from the above policies.
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Educational "reforms" that have generally degraded the educational system's effectiveness, failed at all stated goals, massively increased costs, and occasionally observably made kids more violent.
...And the list goes on and on, but these would be a start. I suppose the short summary would be that, in the 1960s, Progressivism gained a critical mass of support sufficient to implement its policies, and that we live now in the ruins that they made of what once was a remarkably prosperous and orderly society.
Hlynka was, in my opinion, one of the best posters this community has ever seen. I had an argument with him once that abruptly and very significantly changed my mind, my values and my entire perspective on a whole host of issues, all in a single sentence. What he had to offer, this community needed quite badly, whether the members recognize it or not. I'm quite sure he was right about most things, and of the few I'm less sure of, I'd still rather bet with him than against him.
That being said, I am pretty sure he knew the ban was coming, and was in no particular hurry to forestall it. My impression is that he just got tired of the bullshit, a situation with which I sympathize even if it doesn't change the outcome. We ask questions to find answers, and having found them, the purpose of a space designed to facilitate question-asking falls rapidly to zero, and it is time to move on. Godspeed, good sir.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
9mo ago
...Something it might help to keep in mind is that you're, like, two or three standard deviations more cheerful and positive in your outlook than a lot of the regulars here, who, having spent some time marinating in the unique local atmosphere, tend to have formed a pachyderm-like outer husk of bitter, misanthropic cynicism, the better to endure the chronic disappointment inherent to chronicling humanity's failures. It can take some of us a bit of time to shake the rust off and switch gears, and a few of us are just... permanently stuck in the frowny-face setting. Sloot in particular, I think, believes that they have divined the fundamental nature of all women, and does not like what they think they've found.
Personally, I find your attitude and general approach quite refreshing, so thanks for that. You're a good egg.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
It seems today is @07mk's lucky day! I'm pretty sure they'd appreciate whatever elaboration you could provide. I certainly would as well.
Hillary Clinton should have been jailed and she should still be in jail. There is nothing to be gained however from holding on to a tool that has run out of use.
I respectfully disagree. This bomb should be rode the whole way down, preferably while whooping and waving a cowboy hat. If Blue Tribe wants to jail him, they should jail him, but make them commit. Establish once and for all, beyond all denial, that this is what gets you prosecuted, tried and jailed: not burning kids alive for a political photo-op, not repeated forcible rape, not lying the nation into ruinous foreign wars, not running guns to the cartels or weaponizing the bureaucracy against political rivals, not lying to judges and abusing security powers, not normalizing organized, widespread political violence. I concede that this is a very ugly position to take, and submit only that reality is a pretty ugly place no matter how this goes.
I have a great deal of respect for the conscientious objectors of the Culture War, for the people who draw a line and have the character to stick to it. I have lines of my own, and hope I will stick with them when we run up against them. Unfortunately, war does not require individual consent, and proceeds regardless.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
In the case of this particular infographic, there was in fact a hierarchical organization involved: The Smithsonian. The infographics in question were presumably selected, vetted, and approved, presumably by something approaching a "Coalition of Activists", who at least hypothetically could be "reasoned with to stop". I think in this case, a lot of why it's going viral is the number of failsafes it evidently blows through without apparent effort, not merely the content itself.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
"Most people claiming to have a food allergy do not actually have a food allergy" != "food allergies do not exist".
Slow morning, eh?
For some time now, we've been discussing the implications of Hunter Biden's laptop, and whether the information it contained was relevant to our political system. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we know that the FBI knew about the laptop's contents roughly a year in advance of the 2020 election, and used its official access with the major social media companies to prepare their censors to perceive the story as Russian disinformation. Then when the story actually broke in the press, the FBI successfully pushed the social media companies to censor it.
From the laptop information itself, we know that for quite a while now, Hunter Biden has been engaged in various grifts, selling purported access to his father in exchange for lucrative sinecures with various foreign corporations, selling "art" for amusingly inflated values, and so on. The supposition on the Red side has been that this grift implicated Biden as well, and Trump's attempts to have that theory investigated led directly to his first impeachment. The laptop emails backed this story with evidence, with Hunter referencing how "the big guy" was getting a significant cut of his grift money, and one of his associates confirming that "the big guy" was in fact Joe Biden.
Blues on the other hand claimed that there was no reason to suppose any corruption was happening. While Hunter was obviously a junkie fuckup grifter, and was obviously making his money claiming to peddle influence, there was no evidence of actual payments going to Joe, so this was all meaningless. My impression of the previous threads is that even those here who thought Hunter was paying Joe, assumed that there would be no formal exchange of money, but rather quid-pro-quo.
Now it appears that Hunter Biden has been paying rent to live in his father's residence in Delaware, to the tune of $49,901 per month. For completeness' sake, it must be mentioned that this is the same residence where Joe was found to be improperly storing classified documents, alongside his Corvette. While it seems doubtful that the files would be of interest to a junkie who prospers by peddling influence for foreign corporations, it's a detail that does add a touch of piquancy to the overall narrative.
So this appears to me to be pretty open-and-shut. Joe Biden is corrupt, selling influence to foreign corporations in China and Eastern Europe through his son Hunter. Hunter collects the money, then kicks a large slice back to Joe through rent, and quite possibly other, yet undiscovered "repayments". Trump was impeached when he attempted to have these activities investigated, while the FBI sat on the information they were given, and engaged in a protracted disinformation and censorship campaign to keep that information from leaking elsewhere. That information does in fact lead to provable direct payments from Hunter to Biden.
Impeachment when?
[EDIT] - ...Or perhaps not! @firmamenti points out that while Hunter is apparently living in the residence and renting an office space for 50k, the office space is not specified to be in the residence, and very well could be an entirely separate location entirely unconnected to Biden. The hunt continues...
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
Every once in while we get these triumphalist "this latest happening proves the game is clearly not rigged, where are all the naysayers now!" posts.
The person you are replying to didn't claim "the game is clearly not rigged". They are pointing out that the numerous predictions that SBF was not going to be prosecuted were wrong, and predictably wrong. I'm pretty sure I predicted that he would definately be indicted and go to jail. I predicted this because it seemed obvious that his connections would not in fact protect him: the case is too clear-cut, the public too furious, and there's zero benefit to be gained. I can't think of a single example of a democratic supporter being caught anywhere approaching this clearly, for a crime anywhere near as significant and clear-cut as this one, and actually being protected.
I personally believe that the game is rigged. But the way the game is rigged is that things don't get to this point. The rigging works at the margins, not by providing obvious immunity to blatant, high-profile criminals who've been caught red-handed.
Do you believe that it's practical to build and enforce a set of rules that ensure acceptable outcomes so long as they're followed, regardless of the behavior of those operating under the rules? Put another way, do you think loopholes are a generally-manageable problem in rule design?
...I think the above questions are pointing to a concept that seems extremely relevant to your question, but I'm not sure the questions themselves communicate the issue clearly enough.
Long ago, I was interested in tabletop game design, and came across the concept of "rules fragility". As I understood it, the idea was to seperate out the general concept of "good rules" into "good when people are actively trying to work with them" and "good when people are actively trying to subvert them". If you're familiar with the PnP roleplaying concept of a "munchkin", or the proliferation of explicit GM fiat as a conflict resolution mechanism, both are necessary because of rules fragility. Generally speaking, the simpler your ruleset, the easier it is to eliminate fragility. Games like chess or M:TG are sufficiently constrained that their rules can be made very resilient, regardless of player cooperation. The sprawling D&D ruleset, on the other hand, is legendary for its exploits, paradoxes, and hilarious implications. Munchkins and GM fiat exist because roleplaying games are, of necessity, too complex to make rules that self-enforce a good experience on uncooperative players.
Life is a whole lot more complicated than D&D, and while societies as far back as we can observe have always tried to form some sort of rule set, until relatively recently human societies frequently resorted to some level of GM-Fiat-analog. This changed with the Enlightenment, which introduced the idea that we could bind society to rules not through a superpowerful enforcer, but through the law itself. The idea was that it was possible, even practical to write a set of universally-applicable, objective rules that could account for all the exigencies of circumstance and behavior, resolve all disputes and settle all conflicts. One way to put it would be that the Enlightenment idea our society was founded on was that loopholes were a manageable problem, on the object level and all meta-levels.
As I've argued many times previously, it seems to me that this idea worked as well as it did for as long as it did because a relatively homogenous population more often than not treated our social "game" as fundamentally cooperative, not competitive. Periods where this cooperation broke down stand out in our history as moments where the system worked very poorly or failed completely. The problem now is that we are no longer homogenous, and our social game is becoming increasingly competitive. The simple fact is that the basic ruleset our society operates off is in fact fragile. Being fragile, it can't hope to handle high-stakes competition between cultural factions of the sort we now enjoy.
...
As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?
Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.
Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.
At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?
...
[EDIT] - Nope, can't leave it there.
You appeal to the Rawlsian veil of ignorance. Any given ruleset can claim that it's an improvement or even optimal from a Rawlsian point of view. How should people assess such claims? Why should people accept claims that a given Rawlsian assessment is rigorous and reliable? If people disagree over an assessment, how can we resolve that conflict?
I argue that appeals to Rawls are just another dead-end, for the same reason appeals to law or the Constitution are dead-ends. Rawls doesn't actually provide a way to ensure good-faith cooperation, and without confidence in good-faith cooperation, none of the rest of these arguments matter.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1yr ago
If you want to rule Haiti, the straightforward approach is going to involve people with guns to remove the gangs and re-establish a monopoly on force. Organizing that level of force would be quite expensive, but routing the locals would probably not be prohibitive... but the most likely outcome is that the US and its allies then accuse you of numerous human rights violations, and you spend the rest of your life in jail.
There's a phrase from the old country: "Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics". The US runs on a very corrupt and self-serving variant of the CIE. Leaving Haiti to devolve into a hellhole of misery and despair is totally acceptable. Any action taken to impose the order that the Haitains so obviously need will not be judged against the existing misery, but against the platonic ideal of a perfect, utopian outcome, and so will be judged to be irredeemably evil.
So if a billionaire did this, they'd go straight to jail with a high degree of certainty. And on the vanishingly slim chance they were not prosecuted, what would they gain? Haiti has been a dysfunctional hellhole for hundreds of years. Even if outside force smothers the violence and imposes order, it's still going to be dirt-poor with a horrible reputation, and every likelihood of sliding right back into the muck as soon as the external influence steps back or is removed. What's the upside for the billionaire?
This is a publicity stunt, and a dumb one too. It will go nowhere.
But suppose it did? The concern here is that Abbott and De Santis did not follow the law. That they offered migrants a plane ride to a location, and perhaps took them to a different location instead, and that this is a crime that needs to be dealt with. After all, following the law is essential. We are a nation of laws. No one is above the law.
We have laws about who is allowed to enter the country. Those laws have been ignored for decades. Enforcement of those laws has been deliberately sabotaged by Federal, state and local officials, and by private organizations receiving funding on the taxpayer's dime, for decades. No one who matters has ever given the slightest fuck about enforcing those laws, for decades. Concessions to the hardships faced by migrants have been openly abused, for decades. Attempts at reform and compromise have been capitalized upon, and then betrayed, for decades. At no point in this story has anyone on the other side of this given the slightest fuck about the law. They do not give a fuck about the law now, and they will not give a fuck in the future, except on those occasions where foolish, blind adherence to the law by people like myself can be used to enable our abuse.
[Bile Removed]
...Suppose Abbott and De Santis did break the law. Why should I give even the slightest fuck? Why should I care about a system of law that primarily appears to exist to be used against people like me, while denying us any protection under its provisions? We are far, far past the point where a claim of impartial enforcement could be credibly made. What's the lesson we're supposed to draw, here? What's the argument that we Reds should even be attempting to follow Blue law, as opposed to openly defying the law and degrading Blue capacity for enforcement?
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
2mo ago
Accusing your critics of being some form of -ist is just another part of the standard playbook now. No sane company would shy away from using this highly effective tactic just because the show they're defending is actually bad.
The tactic in question appears to be "effective" in the way that taking out new credit cards to pay off your old credit cards is an effective strategy for managing your money: it might work in the short term, sort of, but in the long term it's a disaster.
Disney appears to me to have straight-up destroyed Star Wars as a brand, and arguably has done the same to Disney as a brand. that is a staggering achievement, and it bears notice.
Officials in Colorado and California (and more states to come soon, doubtless) can do this because they have the support of Blue Tribe, its captured institutions, and the consensus-generating machine that they collectively control and operate. A theoretical Trump presidency will have none of those things, and so cannot employ symmetrical tactics.
You might as well wonder why the BLM riots don't give Red Tribe a license to riot wherever they please. The answer is that Blue Tribe is the cultural umpire, and their statements on what is a riot, what a protest, and what an insurrection are dispositive. Likewise, you might as well ask why Blues get to flaunt repeated Supreme Court decisions at zero cost, or why Republicans can't use the FBI to hide their own scandals and spy on Democrat rivals. That's not the way any of this works. The power isn't in the rules, it's in the people interpreting them and building consensus around those interpretations. Two pounds of dynamite detonating in a national security facility is either terrorism or a harmless prank, depending on who the bomb belongs to.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
7mo ago
Given how hard the US right is now pulling for "1. feed Ukraine to Putin 2. ???? 3. PROFIT!"
The implication being that the pro-Ukraine side, by contrast, has a plan?
How'd Syria go?
Libya?
Afghanistan?
Iraq?
Iraq the first time?
Iran?
Afghanistan the first time?
...Like, what's your actual conception of how this is all going to roll out? Putin is couped by the competent, democratic statesmen who form his opposition and then Russia reforms into a functional capitalist democracy, thereby nullifying the threat of their considerable nuclear arsenal? Is that the road you're looking for?
If you want to defend the interventionist consensus, defend the results it has delivered over the last thirty years through the multiple fucking iterations it has played out, very publicly, at vast economic and social and human cost. Show how all the previous disasters were really just faulty perception, or working the kinks out, or something other than simply a blind-spot in your geopolitical perception the size of the fucking moon. I'll cop to not expecting the Russian army to be a shambolic trash-disaster, and sure, right now we are fairly thoroughly mauling that army for pennies on the dollar, given that Ukranian and Russian lives are considered to have no value in the equation. But what's the endgame, here?
What are you willing to call success, such that we can move on, job well done, no more entanglements and expenditures needed?
What are you willing to call failure, such that you agree that it's time to cut our losses?
Because I have heard this fucking song and dance before, where "these next six months are critical" for ten or fifteen or twenty years at a stretch, and my heuristic is that anyone selling that bullshit is either a braindead incompetent or a literal vampire who requires decapitation and a stake through the heart. I refuse to play this game where we pretend that all those previous disasters and betrayals and massacres and atrocities didn't actually happen or were just crazy random happenstance, where we pretend that American foreign policy and leadership should be presumed to be competent and efficient and generally on the ball. I can't pretend that hard, and I have zero respect for those who can.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
11mo ago
You just told me that violations of the background check and false statement laws run rampant and virtually unchecked.
The ATF is barred by law from retaining records of legal firearms purchases. That is, if you attempt to buy a gun, submit the instant check form, are cleared, and complete the purchase, they are not allowed to keep a record of the gun you purchased. Laws have been written, passed, and enacted specifically to prevent them from doing this, because gun owners know for a fact that compiling a firearms registry is one of the dearest desires of the gun banners and the ATF both, and so they fought hard to ensure that doing so was flatly illegal.
We have very, very good evidence that the ATF has simply ignored these legal restrictions, and has in fact built such a database. Because laws Blues don't like don't matter.
Nothing prevents the ATF from retaining records of illegal attempts to purchase a firearm. When a felon or a straw-purchaser submits an instant check form, they have just signed a form confessing to a felony. The ATF exists to investigate and prosecute such crimes, which are about as open-and-shut as you can ask for. They have consistently declined to do so in all but a vanishing number of such cases, year after year, for decades.
The authorities absolutely refuse to enforce the laws we actually have on actual criminals. They refuse to prosecute straw purchases. They often decline to prosecute actual use of guns in actual crime. They absolutely have time to hammer the shit out of law-abiding gun owners, gun sellers, and gun manufacturers. It's the same anarcho-tyranny we see in numerous other aspects of modern life.
Very briefly, because there is more to legitimacy than the strict letter of the law, most notably when "the letter of the law" is so obviously dependent on adversarial interpretation. A number of laws were broken in the leadup to the election, and a number of misdeeds were committed that were very real, but were not adjudicated as crimes. My assessment is that the collective result of those actions is that rule of law and the democratic process were breached, and that those victimized by such actions should adjust their expectations and commitments accordingly.
I am pretty sure that @ymeshkhout is correct that many and perhaps all the dramatic claims of ballot fraud are either spurious or intentional lies. On the other hand, the FBI really did break the law to illegally spy on an opposition candidate, and the broader set of the FBI and their close associates coordinated with journalists to lie to the public about this and many other facts, in a direct attempt to influence the outcome of the election. That seems like fundamentally illegitimate behavior to me, and the fact that it happened undermines the legitimacy of the subsequent election process. When enough such incidents accumulate, as I observe they did in both the 2016 and 2020 elections, I think it is reasonable to conclude that the democratic process is not only threatened, but has in fact been compromised.
I think a lot of the support for dramatic fraud theories comes from people recognizing that something is badly wrong, and defaulting to the scripts that society and the media have provided them for what "wrongness" looks like. "election was illegitimate" > "ballot stuffing makes elections illegitimate" > "ballot stuffing happened." This combines with a fair amount of grifting by people seeking to exploit this tendency, along with the general tendency of large, complex, contentious issues to generate considerable amounts of FUD as a simple consequence of mass human friction, distrust, misinterpretation and bias. It seems to me that this tendency is entirely worthy of criticism; you have to have some way of separating the wheat from the chaff, or tribalism will devour you completely. If you are going to discuss the issue with people on the other side, that requires some measure of common ground, and actual, observable facts seem as good a place to start as any.
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