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Lord, make me an instrument of your peace: where there is hatred, let me sow love; where there is injury, pardon; where there is doubt, faith; where there is despair, hope; where there is darkness, light; where there is sadness, joy. O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console, to be understood as to understand, to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive, it is in pardoning that we are pardoned, and it is in dying that we are born to eternal life. Amen.
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FiveHourMarathon
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5d ago
In my own ethical view, it depends on the store.
I don't generally view our obligations to corporations to be the same as our obligations to individuals. A small business I would not cheat. A corporation has already stated that it will act to maximize profit, screwing me in the process if necessary or just beneficial.
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15d ago
I think this analysis has a fatal flaw in it. Sotomayor is an affirmative action appointment
This is why I brought up the example of Clarence Thomas, the single most obvious Affirmative Action appointment in the history of the Court, who has developed significantly over the course of his career. Conservatives are much more likely to cite Thomas' concurrences today than they were in 2002, when even Originalists joked that he was Scalia's sidekick.
I spent most of law school hearing obnoxious liberals (mostly white) talking about how dumb Thomas was; the fact is that he is probably smarter than most. Even the AA SCOTUS appointments are really smart people! ((One of the things that's so offensive about open AA is that it undermines the credentials of what are, factually, very accomplished people)) Maybe they're top 1% lawyers rather than top 50 lawyers, but they're smarter than the vast majority of the people criticizing them for being dumb. She might not be putting out top tier stuff at any given time, but she could grow into the role, like Thomas did.
I'm reminded of the Twitter discourse after the Oakland v Kentucky game this March, when a million people made jokes about Jack Gohlke being white and a future car salesman. And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.
I happen to like Sotomayor on a personal basis, in that I think it's hilarious that she'll go to Yankees games and sit in the Judge's Chambers. She's far from my least favorite justice, coming in above Kavanaugh, KBJ, and I still hate Kennedy enough to make up for the fact that he isn't actually on the court anymore.
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15d ago
The core emotion is inward, it’s self hatred not because they never did, but because they never could have. If they went back to being 16 now with their current personality, they’d end in the same place in the social stack. “I regret not partying in high school” should actually be “I regret not being the kind of person who would have partied in high school”.
Absolutely. Only boring people are bored. Endorse all of what you said.
I'd add that I don't regret in any way leading a dull and chaste high school life, in that I am happy where I am. Amor Fati. It's fun, occasionally, to daydream of how I could have acted with more agency at the time, but if I had the power to change anything I'm not sure I would. I might have ended up married to someone else, which I wouldn't trade for anything.
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11d ago
The Democrats are fumbling the ball, but Republicans still need to recover it, and as of yet they show few signs of being willing or able to do so. Jews moving away from the Democrats need to go somewhere. And the GOP is not offering a welcoming environment at this time. Some Jews who come to the conclusion that Right Wing Antisemites are merely harmless morons while Left Wing Antisemites are powerful and dangerous will make the switch, but I doubt it will be a mass exodus.
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12d ago
Kavanaugh: I hate that he has literally never had a job. In his bio he has no job he's ever had that wasn't either judicial or political. He's never argued a case in court or had a client. Judicial jobs, even as clerks, are rarefied air: everyone treats you with deference. He worked briefly in an "of counsel" position at a law firm, and it's not clear he ever did anything there, literally he couldn't give a good answer when asked. I also find him to be a bit of a government stooge, in regret over his role with Starr he finds the President to be immune from just about everything.
KBJ: I don't like how she was nominated, and haven't seen anything to change my mind as of yet.
Kennedy: Absolute nightmare of a Justice. Obergefell will go down with Dred Scott on the list of universally reviled precedents, if the current structure of the Court even survives the results of Obergefell. The number of ways the fake-test he created in Obergefell can and will be twisted by future Justices has the potential to undermine the constitution completely. The only positive way I can skew his opinion is that he wanted so badly to protect Gay Rights that he ensconced them into a framework that will allow a conservative court to protect other rights that they care about more than they care about gay marriage.
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12d ago
What do you mean by this?
Trump had the courage to engage and lead on the issues. Discourse on free trade agreements has changed completely from 2015 to today. Discourse on Russia and the support for Forever Wars has all but flipped partisan valence. Polling of the public, and the positions publicly espoused by Republican political candidates, have changed as a result of Trump's leadership on the issues.
Are you saying a calculating politician couldn't have appealed the way Trump did, he needed to be a true believer? I don't think Trump believes in anything apart from Trump...
I think it is incumbent to pretend to be a true believer in public. Trump's supporters believe that he is a believer, that is enough. If a leader is perceived as cynical, think Mitch McConnell, it is difficult to push public opinion.
We can debate what kind of costly signals are sufficient to reach a point where True Believer vs Extra Savvy Counterfeit become indistinguishable. When the young aristocracy physically fight and die in Flanders, it sort of doesn't matter if they're doing it "cynically" for credibility or honestly for patriotism. There's a broad perception among Trump's supporters that he has suffered for his beliefs, that he could have had an easier time of it personally if he had changed his view, and I do think that is important in terms of his ability to move public opinion.
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15d ago
Huh?
I guess running shoes are the edge-case that is most relevant here. But a treadmill, or a rowing machine, or a kettlebell seem pretty clear cases. Bikes I guess can go either way, but I also don't have a problem encouraging bicycle usage.
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15d ago
Funnily enough, inasmuch as my preference is originalism, I'd expect the Dems to fumble this one and end up with a mediocre judge on the court at best. But looking at that pseudo-majority they're running out there, if I were a Dem I'd be certain that we'd end up handing Trump another pick.
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5d ago
I might overcorrect towards giving people some grace on these things, because I can't imagine ever talking to my wife like that, it's so far outside of my experience that I don't want to assume I know what people are thinking. I know many people have more contentious relationships than I do.
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5d ago
So the argument is, if not for religion my life would be even worse?
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23d ago
It sucks, but if you actually try to enforce that balance reduction term he's just gonna split.
Oh, he's already split, I just hope he stays split. I've heard horror stories of guys who "repossess" construction work by destroying it, hence the need to rig up better cameras. The purpose of the balance reduction clause was primarily to motivate him to consistently show up, and secondarily to create a drop-dead date for the contract if he didn't. Once seven days pass where he didn't show up, there is zero remaining balance. On the off chance he tries to waste our time in small-claims.
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9d ago
Of course many founding fathers believed that slavery was wrong but that there was still a clear intellectual hierarchy of races... many abolitionists did believe in the 1820s and 1830s that black and white were equally capable,
These aren't necessarily contradictions in terms. There was widespread belief in a much more nuanced and fine-grained set of racial distinctions, the idea of a "white" race as opposed to a German/English/French race, or a white race as opposed to a "race of labourers" and a race of aristocrats, is developing throughout the 18th and 19th centuries. Many at different times have said that the black and white races contain, in due proportion, the capable and the incapable. Or one could believe that blacks are dumber than the English and less organized than the Germans, but smarter than the Irish and more moral than the Jews.
Gross white racial superiority is largely a modern innovation.
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25d ago
I thought of the classic bike cuck comic today, because I kinda feel that way in reverse: I'm particularly mad at someone because I know they aren't better off for having fucked me over.
I've had an ongoing nightmare with a contractor working for my father. He's repeatedly shown up juuuuuuust enough that it seemed like a bad idea to fire him and try to find someone else to finish (no one likes to take over a half-finished job), but then would demand a progress payment, and disappear for a few days afterward, with no notice. It took a month to do a week's worth of work, with a million excuses about how this wasn't ready and that wasn't right and this was bad and that was bad and whatever, and it is holding up other aspects of the same project. Last week, I wrote up a new contract to have him sign, indicating that in exchange for a payment on that day, he would come to work every day until the conclusion of the project. For every day he missed we would deduct 1/7 of the remaining balance. He's since missed three days. I didn't mention the balance reduction, somewhat dishonestly, because I didn't want him thinking "Well, is it even worth finishing for 4/7?"
Well today he comes in and demands to get half the remaining balance up front. "I gotta make my car payment or they're gonna repo the car!" I put him off all day then told him, hey, we're going to abide by the payment terms you signed last week, I see no reason to divert from them. Whatever issues there are with the job or with your finances, you knew about them last week when we put that together and you signed it.
Now he's saying he isn't coming back for two days because he needs to do other jobs to make money. I told him we intend to abide by the contract terms, and that he is obligated to come in every day. He said that he would make up any lost money charging us extra to do repairs on work he had already screwed up.
I'm going to need to rig up better security cameras at the property to make sure he doesn't pull some bullshit.
But the thing that galls me the most about the whole process is that he didn't benefit from this either. He's still broke! We paid him his entire initial estimate, and it took four times as long as it should have, so he didn't end up with a big pile of money at the end. It's going to cost us twice as much as it should have by the time we actually get it done, and he's broke.
Maybe I would feel better if he had just stolen my money, at least it would have made him happier.
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27d ago
I just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I have to say it is nearly perfect as a book, for me. It's the perfect mix of literary, philosophical, enough action to keep moving, enough sex to be fun without becoming grating or disgusting. The length is perfect, it doesn't drag beyond the material, and at no point was I reading just to get the book over with, but it's a sufficient length to explore a lot of ideas and really dig into the characters. It's obviously political, but not overbearing. It's about a time and a place but it is timeless, it neither holds your hand explaining things nor requires so much background that you need a history degree to get it.
I'm probably going to go back to Tolstoy for a few hundred more pages. Get at least to the start of the second war.
REQUEST: What are great graphic novels I should read? I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past, and read Tezuka's Buddha last year and found it to be as such a book goes very fun. I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it, kinda feel like it's something I should explore, now that I live in a world where I could get that from a library or get it off LibGen.
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7d ago
there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis.
I found the perfect metaphor for this scenario after yesterday: the Falcons drafting Michael Penix Jr. 8th overall, after signing Kirk Cousins for huge money in the offseason. All the possible outcomes are bad scenarios for the Falcons. If Cousins is good, Penix never plays, and they wasted the 8th pick, with which there is no question they could have drafted someone at 8 who could help Cousins win. If Cousins isn't good, and Penix actually plays, then they've wasted $45mm/yr for the years they should be benefitting from the cheap Rookie QB contract, undermining the team they could build around Penix if he's good enough to get picked 8 overall.
It's possible that this all plays out fine, and the Falcons are good despite it. Like the Niners and Trey Lance. But they're betting against themselves somewhere. They're either spending $45mm/yr because they're worried they might whiff on the 8th overall pick. Or they spent the 8th overall pick because they were worried they have whiffed on the massive free agent QB contract. The scenarios where things actually work are worse than they would be otherwise.
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18d ago
Sometimes they work, sometimes they don't. But regardless, it should be clearly marked. Many of them seem not to have a mute button at all.
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24d ago
The best example would be the Congo or Somalia, where we've seen decades of perpetual and miserable disorder.
In a world where the UN did not enforce arbitrary border set on an arbitrary date, Congo and Somalia's better-run neighbors like Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda would have a motivation to conquer, integrate, and administrate regions of those countries. Right now, only altruism can motivate anyone to help organize one of these failed states. We've outlawed any sense of enlightened self-interest.
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15d ago
Fast forward a few years, and it becomes normal for leftist women and their male ‘allies’ to dismiss anyone and everyone as ‘incel’, even married men with children as long as they come across as sufficiently deplorable to the average feminist.
The kernel of truth at the center of this is that even men who are objectively, even wildly, sexually successful can still harbor the sexual resentment that sits at the core of the incel label.
Incel, properly understood, is more like "unemployed" than it is like "disabled" or "nerd." Most men are involuntarily celibate (they would like to have sex but can't find a partner) for periods of their life. I've expanded the metaphor elsewhere:
We could distinguish [] between the "unemployed" incel and the "disabled" incel. Almost every man goes through periods when he is looking for sex and can't get it, very few young men are permanently physically incapable of getting laid. We could further distinguish among the unemployed incels the three general types of unemployment in Econ 101: Frictional, Cyclical, Structural. Virtually every man has periods of Frictional celibacy, between girlfriends or hook ups or busy at work or on a long term sojourn somewhere not amenable to casual sex. Obviously there's not a "business cycle" to sex, but we could substitute that for the lifecycle of the man himself, almost all men are ready and willing to have sex long before they are able to obtain it, and most are willing to have sex long after they are too old to interest most women. Those two categories are unimportant to us, they may participate in incel discourse for a time but ultimately they'll get their "fair share" of sex over a lifetime. It's the third group, Structural Incels, we should worry about. The Structurally Unemployed are those whose skills have been made redundant by industrial changes and reorganizations. Your coal miners or carriage makers. People who will never get laid with the skills they have. The solution to that is always training and help changing careers. Some people don't want to train and they don't want to change careers, well tough luck then. Sitting around whining you should have a bigger paycheck because you are the best carriage maker in ten counties, and failing to acknowledge that no one buys carriages!, is a bridge to nowhere.
What we see is a lot of guys retain the incel talking points and resentments, that they formed when they couldn't get laid, even after they are getting laid. A lot of guys continue to hate women for withholding pussy even after some women stop withholding it! A lot of guys who came into themselves are still mad about rejections in high school. Which I understand, there was a period between 16-18 when it seemed like I had somehow already missed the boat: every girl I hit on who didn't reject me immediately eventually told me she had lost her virginity some time ago to her [asshole] ex bf, and that now she wasn't really interested in that kind of thing anymore. And it's easy for those kinds of rejections to fester, even after one goes to college and none of it matters anymore. Or, a lot of guys who came into their own after college, once they got a good job, feel like they missed the boat in that ok fine I can date women now, but half of them got fat after college, and i can never get that back, they're always going to resent not getting it back then.
That's the dynamic I think you're seeing!
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15d ago
Contra Nate Silver on Political IQ Tests OR On the Limits of Moneyball Philosophy
Nate Silver, on his new Substack argues that Sonia Sotomayor should retire, and that if you don't want her to retire you're a moron. Some pull quotes:
However, I’m going to be more blunt than any of them. If you’re someone who even vaguely cares about progressive political outcomes — someone who would rather not see a 7-2 conservative majority on the Supreme Court even if you don’t agree with liberals on every issue— you should want Sotomayor to retire and be replaced by a younger liberal justice. And — here’s the mean part — if you don’t want that, you deserve what you get.
...
In my forthcoming book, I go into a lot of detail about why the sorts of people who become interested in politics often have the opposite mentality of the world of high-stakes gamblers and risk-takers that the book describes. Both literal gambling like poker and professions that involve monetary risks like finance involve committing yourself to a probabilistic view of the world and seeking to maximize expected value. People who become interested in politics are usually interested for other reasons, by contrast. They think their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day. And sure, they care about winning. But winning competes against a lot of other considerations like maintaining group cohesion or one’s stature within the group.
Silver's core argument is that Sotomayor, at 70, is old; and according to models the Democrats are unlikely to control both of the Senate and Presidency in the near future, and that therefore Sotomayor should step down now when it might be possible for Biden, Schumer and co to replace her with another Democratic justice.
I find this take to be indicative of the flaws in Nate's own mindset, the Moneyball/Analytics/Sabermetrics venue that Nate comes from applied to politics, and to a certain extent to Rationalism more broadly, so I'd like to dig into why this is so wrong point by point. For the purposes of this argument, I am viewing this from the position of, as Silver defines it, a progressive or a "person interested in progressive outcomes" who would prefer liberal outcomes to SCOTUS cases. We will also assume that Sotomayor is a decent judge. It's not a particularly interesting argument if we argue that Sotomayor sucks, and anyway there's a point about that further down. I've loved Nate since his PECOTA days, I'm not reflexively anti-analytics, but it has to be balanced with humanity.
Much like the Moneyball Oakland As famously put together talented regular season teams that failed in the playoffs, Silver's approach to politics is about grabbing tactical victories, but will never deliver a championship. Sabermetrics types have long derided concepts like veteran leadership, man-management, The Will to Win, clutch play; we can't measure them on the numbers then they don't exist. Yet while analytics have value, so does traditional strategy, team variance isn't entirely random. Let's examine how some of this applies to politics here:
Flaw 1) What Gets Measured Gets Managed Silver builds a toy model, demonstrates that within his toy model SCOTUS seats are really valuable, then assesses possession of SCOTUS seats based on raw-count of votes by partisan appointment. This is an extremely limited view of what impact SCOTUS justices can have. Sotomayor is 70 years old. Going by most projections, she has about 16 years to go. There's some indications of poor health outcomes, balanced by the fact that she'll get top-tier medical care. For reference, Scalia would have been 70 in 2006. Scalia was very important between 2006 and his death. His impact in general has been almost immeasurably huge on American jurisprudence, even the court's liberals owe a lot to Scalia in their opinions. He achieved this mostly by sheer force of will and intellect, and a long stint on the court. Clarence Thomas is another example of a justice who slowly came into his own, and in the last ten years (his age 65-75 seasons) has gone from punchline to influential intellectual force. SCOTUS justices take time to develop, both in terms of their intellectual impact and in terms of their relationships on the court. Replacing Sotomayor early may buy you a few extra years of a nominal democrat on the court, but it may cost you a more influential judge in the meantime. Silver, because his toy model can't account for jurisprudential influence, ignores all this. It's impossible to model, so it is ignored, or worse derided as fake and gay.
Flaw 2) Defeatism Silver derides politicians as irrational, for foolishly believing "their party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers on the major questions of the day." This is accurate, but also ignores the point: if you don't think your party is on the Right Side of History and has the morally correct answers, then you shouldn't be doing this. The only reason to get into politics is because you think you can win. If you can only lose, you need to change strategies. Silver's models predict that Democrats won't control the Senate for some time; that is within the power of the Democrats to change! Replacing Sotomayor because you likely won't control the Senate for another 16(!) years is like signing a high-priced closer to get a .500 baseball team an extra win, you still aren't making the playoffs. It also ignores history: the Senate has changed hands repeatedly, 8 times since 1980, or roughly once ever six years. If you start from the assumption that the Democratic message is basically unpopular in much of the country, such that they will never hold a Senate majority, then the Democratic party needs to rebuild from the ground up. Don't waste energy lobbying for Sotomayor to retire, lobby for Ds to pull their heads out of their asses in the heartland. If Democrats don't think they can win majorities, they shouldn't be Democrats, and shouldn't care about the SCOTUS majority. If you don't see a path to victory for your project, you need a new project. There's even a sort of "tanking" argument to be made that strategically, 6-3 and 7-2 aren't that different, so it doesn't matter if Sotomayor is replaced by an originalist, and it's politically better for Ds to face a brutally conservative SCOTUS, which might allow them to pass laws to bypass SCOTUS altogether, rather than a mildly less conservative SCOTUS. The only path to a liberal Majority on the SCOTUS is for Ds to win the Senate and the Presidency, repeatedly, they need to be working towards that goal, not maintaining their minority.
Flaw 3) Eliminating the Individual Silver assumes that any D is as good as any other D. That any D Senate is as good as any other D Senate, and any D justice is as good as any other D justice. This is misguided. The D justice that would get past this D Senate is probably going to be a milquetoast, below average, moderate. Sinema and Manchin wouldn't have it any other way, and no Rs have the guts to cross the aisle. If Sotomayor had the opportunity to retire with a 55 or 60 vote D majority, she could be assured of being replaced by a successor with a brilliant career ahead of him. If Sotomayor retires now, she's quite likely to be replaced by a third-rate non-entity. This is the Trump problem that made the original FiveThirtyEight blog unreadable since 2016: Trump didn't just accept the numbers, he changed them. That's what political leaders do: they don't accept facts on the ground, they alter them. Sabermetrics treats the ballplayers like numbers, probabilities of outcomes at the plate, but in order for every MLB player to get to the bigs, to become those numbers, that player had to believe in himself. He had to work hard, thinking he could get better, thinking he could win, even if statistically he wasn't likely to. Nobody ever made it to The Show surrendering to the numbers.
This kind of short-sighted, analytical approach to politics, slicing and dicing demographics to achieve tactical victories, is the noise before defeat. We saw the flaws in this strategy in the Clinton campaign, and to a large extent in the Biden '20 campaign where Trump vastly over-performed his underlying numbers. We're watching Biden '24 sleepwalk towards a possible November defeat, relying on demographic numbers that seem increasingly out of date. And while it's not all Nate Silver's fault, this kind of sneering bullshit is what drives people away from politics. It drives away exactly the people you need: people who irrationally believe in your political project, and will sacrifice for its success. It points away from leadership and towards management. It undermines coalitions by making it obvious they are only ever conveniences. It is bad politics.
TLDR: Nate Silver thinks 70 is a good retirement age for Sotomayor because we might not see a Democratic Senate Majority again for a while, but if we can't get a D Senate for 16 more years, what's the point anyway?
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8d ago
I think any persuasive case would have to include some sort of theory for why instigating a divorce would be in any way beneficial to the conspirators. Is it known that non-divorced right-wing comedians are less desired by social media outlets?
It's pretty obvious to me that influencers pushing Right Wing trad values should have happy marriages, and if they don't it's a significant blow against their credibility. This is just personal, I hold the old fashioned view that if a person can't practice what they preach it throws significant doubt on their system.
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12d ago
I'm still working my way through War and Peace, notating it as I go. It's such a tremendous work.
In between I listened to some graphic novel recommendations and read From Hell on my tablet. Really fun work, and fascinating that it is based on a pseudo-legitimate Ripper conspiracy.
I took a beach trip and grabbed a book my wife had bought and had been well reviewed, R.F. Kuang's Yellowface. The best thing I can say about it is that it was shorter than I thought it was going to be, it was a 200 page book with extra large margins and line spacing to make it 300 pages, so that it seems like a real book but is really an overgrown novella. Even in 200 pages, it runs out of ideas midway through. A blank space and a power fantasy where I was told a literary work would be.
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29d ago
My wife and I have to do a forced detox every six months or so, over a few weeks dropping down from double shot of espresso in the morning and an afternoon coffee, to single shot in the morning, to yerba mate light in the morning, to black tea in the morning. Then we start back up at a single espresso shot and the cycle repeats as we drink more and more coffee until we need to detox again.
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23d ago
The burgeoning tradcath revolt among the Gen Z dissident right smacks of insincerity; they pantomime the words and rituals, but there’s no genuine belief.
I don't remember where I first heard it, but something that stuck with me about a lot of the LARPer wing of TradCaths who are making "endeavoring to be more Catholic than the Pope" a byword instead of a gag, was the observation: if your God hates all the same people you do, you aren't really religious, you just have an imaginary friend.
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3d ago
Stupid thing I did this week: injured my lower back after following a driving range session with a kettlebell workout. I'm ashamed both of the fact that activity level was enough to cause an injury, and that I was stupid enough not to realize that level of activity would cause an injury. It is improving over a few days, no big deal, and I'm hopeful it's nothing, but I need to reassess my plans for the rest of the summer and that pisses me off.
...So "they" made him take the Benzos?
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