The rallying cry of the pro-Abrego Garcia camp is: "If they can do it to him, they can do it to any of us." In other words, they see no meaningful difference between him and a legal US citizen, and so there is no Schelling Fence that can be drawn between the two.
That is not the argument. The argument is that if they deport people without due process and then once they're deported, claim they have no jurisdiction, then there is nothing stopping that from happening to American citizens. The argument is not that there is no difference between Americans and non-Americans. The argument is these deportations, specifically, can happen to Americans as well as non-Americans.
Suppose someone pointed out that Americans can have heart attacks just like non-Americans. Your argument is analogous to saying that this amounts to saying there is no meaningful difference between Americans and non-Americans. Just because two things are similar in one respect, that doesn't make them similar in all respects.
The slippery slope argument (e.g. Laurence Tribe yesterday, and Justice Sotomayor's concurrence) is that if the government gets its way with Abrego Garcia, there will be no legal obstacle preventing them from treating citizens in the same way.
The problem is not that there is no legal obstacle. The problem is that there is no practical obstacle. It's not a slippery slope argument. They admittedly deported him by accident without any due process. There is literally nothing to prevent that from happening to an American citizen. It would be a slippery slope argument if they were saying they would target American citizens next. But the problem is that they are deporting people without regard to their legal status.
On other hand, the pro-Trump camp who wants Abrego Garcia to stay in El Salvador are not at all concerned that they will be next, because in their view citizens and non-citizens are two morally distinct categories.
It doesn't matter if they are two morally distinct categories if there is no due process to determine under which category a given person falls. What do you even mean by morally distinct categories? I understand they are distinct legal categories, but to say they are morally distinct suggests they have different moral worth based on their citizenship, which strikes me as callous and absurd.
The US government's treatment of citizens abroad is already effectively unconstrained by the law. The government can negotiate for the release of a citizen imprisoned by another country, but nobody would argue that the government is legally obligated to do this, and it's absurd to imagine a court compelling them to do so, because that effectively makes diplomacy impossible.
The US government is paying El Salvador to take, imprison, and abuse, not only its own citizens, but Venezuelan citizens as well. Of course there is a limit to what the US government should be obligated to do prevent such abuse, but it is totally reasonable to ask that they stop spending resources make the abuse happen for no benefit. The US government's treatment of its citizens (or non-citizens for that matter) is not actually unconstrained by law, but even if it were, that would not excuse its taking advantage of that fact to abuse people. One thing I find so shocking about this is, setting aside the legal questions of its responsibilities, the US government seems to have no desire to correct what it admits was a mistake. I don't understand why they are even taking up the position that they are taking, regardless of its legal merits.
This is because, according to the constitutional separation of powers, foreign affairs are a quintessentially "non-justiciable political question". In common parlance this means: If you don't like what the government is doing, the proper way to fix it is through advocacy and the democratic process, not through the court system.
I'm highly skeptical of this, but even if true, then the US government should not be deporting people to countries where it knows that people will be sent to prison without charge, nor should it be considering sending American convicts to prison in foreign countries. It's one thing to deport illegal El Salvadorans immigrants to El Salvador. It's another to deport citizens of other countries, legally resident in the US, who could be sent to a number of other countries or kept in the US. It's another to do this when it's known that they will be sent to a torture prison filled with gang members without charge. It's another to pay the El Salvadoran government to do this. It's yet another to invite them to come to the US from a safe third country and then send them to the El Salvadoran torture prison.
If you are going to argue for separation of powers, you should remember that the whole point of a democratically elected president is to avoid tyranny and to have certain powers reserved to an institution that represents the will of the people. They should be held to some kind of moral standard, if not a legal one. The point of the separation of powers is not to give carte blanche to the executive branch to do whatever it wants in its area of jurisdiction.
But of course the pro-Trump immigration hawks see no need to take it up, because even if these protests have no effect, this does not in any way diminish their confidence that if a citizen were to be treated in the same way, then the backlash would be swift, universal, and sufficient to compel the citizen's return - no court order needed.
This is a bad system though. The US is supposed to follow the rule of law, not mob rule. That's the reason there are courts. That's the reason the law can only be changed through the legislature.
Prior to anything else in the political life of a nation, there must be near-universal agreement on who constitutes the body politic for whose benefit the government exists and to whom they are accountable.
I know it's not a legal document, but I'll quote the declaration of the independence:
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
This is clearly inconsistent with the principle that some people are fair game to be lured into the country and then kidnapped and sent to torture prisons. The founding philosophy of the United States does not consider natural rights to be dependent on citizenship or physical location. They belong to all people. You will not get near-univeral agreement that the US government exists to deem 96% of the world's population to be without rights and free to be abused should they make the mistake of entering the reach of the US government.
The government of Quebec will cut funding for out-of-province students to study at English language universities in Quebec. The justification being that these students are a threat to the French language and that they leave after graduation (if you see a contradiction there, you're not alone).
Tuition at McGill (one of the top universities in Canada) will increase from $8,992 to $17,000 a year, making it much harder to compete with the likes of the University of British Columbia and the University of Toronto. Bishop's University expects to lose a third of its students possibly not to survive.
In Canada, every province subsidizes about half the cost of Canadian students attending its universities, regardless of their province of origin. The result is that, while international students pay full price, Canadians can attend university anywhere in the country and pay similar tuition rates. These subsidies are funded in large part with unconditional Social Transfers, that can be spent on other programs, but they are intended to benefit all Canadians equally. Quebec differs from the other provinces in that it funds about three quarters of the cost for Quebec residents and half for French citizens and Canadians from other provinces.
In my view, this is just the latest in the government's attempt to ethnically cleanse Quebec of anglophones. What is not well understood outside Quebec is that it has long had a large anglophone minority which has been shrinking for almost two hundred years (since the Great Migration from the British Isles). Places like the Ottawa valley and the Eastern Townships were originally settled by anglophones. Quebec City, Montreal (which was a majority English speaking city for a good part of the 19th century), and the Gaspé have long had very large anglophone minorities.
This history is attested to by placenames like Hull, Sherbrooke, Granby, and Drummondville, and by street names like Saint James Street and Dorchester Boulevard (renamed to René-Levesque). The three English language universities are located in these originally English speaking areas: two are in Montreal's traditionally anglophone western downtown and one is in Lennoxville, the last remaining predominantly English speaking community in the Eastern Townships.
At the time of the British conquest, French Canadians were concentrated in a narrow strip along the Saint Lawrence River. Other areas were immediately settled by an influx of immigrants from the US and Great Britain, but would later be swamped by the rapidly expanding French Canadians, who would eventually win enough political power to enforce its culture on the anglophones who didn't leave.
Since the 60s, the government has enforced the use of French and suppressed the use of English in almost all areas of public life, but recently, some misleading statistics have been used to stir up fear among francophones that their language is on the decline. It's been noticed that the number of people who speak French at home has very slightly declined in recent years. This is obviously because of the large number of immigrants who are making up a larger and larger share of the population every year. The number speaking English at home has declined even more. It is therefore absurd to suggest that French is in any meaningful sense on the decline, unless you're suggesting that Quebec is going to become a primarily Arabic speaking province. If you know anything about Quebec, you know what is implied by such claims is that English is displacing French. But the very thing producing this statistic of declining use of French at home is actually making the province more French.
In reality, partly because of a law that prevents immigrant children from attending English public schools, 90% of immigrant children grow up to be francophones, which is a larger share than the native population. Even a majority of anglophone children attend French schools and the vast majority of young anglophone Quebeckers are bilingual.
Quebec also has a large degree of independent control over its immigration, allowing it to prioritize immigration from French speaking countries, particulary France, Africa, and Haiti. The anglophone communities are thus largely prevented from replenishing their naturally declining populations with immigrants.
Earlier, this fear was used to justify limiting the number of places in English speaking CEGEPs (two year colleges that are attended between high school and university) and requiring almost all immigrants to speak French, including students, temporary workers, and those sponsored by family members.
The government is justifying these latest policies by saying they are needed to protect the French language (which is not under threat), while complaining that it costs them money to pay for students who leave after graduation (in large part because of their oppressive language laws). But if they leave, they're not much a threat. Canadian citizens are the only people who are allowed (because of a constitutional right) to put their children in English public schools.
They don't want them to stay. A small but stable anglophone minority is not a threat. These policies seem clearly calculated to slowly strangle the anglophone community until it disappears. The real fear is not that French will disappear, but that Quebec will fail to become purely French.
There was an episode from a few years that I think illustrates well the insanity that has taken over public discourse in Quebec and Ottawa. In 2020, Liberal Member of Parliament Emmanuella Lambropoulos, a trilingual millennial representing the Montreal borough of Saint-Laurent, told the official languages commissioner she would need evidence to believe that French was on the 'decline' (with air quotes). This provoked such outrage in Quebec, where she was lambasted for 'disrespecting' French Canadians and asked by other committee members to leave the committee, that she felt the need to offer her 'deepest apologies' and resignation from the committee the next day. You'd have thought she said something racist given the level of indignation expressed, with anglophone politicians falling over themselves trying to distance themselves from her remarks while Quebec nationalists accused them of secretly agreeing with her.
Glassnoser
2yr ago
Sam Bankman-Fried has been arrested.
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried was arrested by Bahamian authorities this evening after the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York shared a sealed indictment with the Bahamian government, setting the stage for extradition and U.S. trial for the onetime crypto billionaire at the heart of the crypto exchange’s collapse.
Bankman-Fried was expected to testify before the House Financial Services Committee on Tuesday. His arrest is the first concrete move by regulators to hold individuals accountable for the multi-billion dollar implosion of FTX last month.
There had been some speculation on when and even whether he would be arrested. Just yesterday someone told me to expect it to take two years. So, why right before tomorrow's hearing? And why not wait for him to give more interviews and provide more evidence?
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Let's say Israel agrees to a two-state solution but Palestine just keeps attacking Israel over and over. What is Israel entitled to do in response? Do they just keep retaliating tit-for-tat? Are they allowed to invade, depose the government, but then must leave just to return when the new government does the same thing? Do they just have to improve their defences?
Am I imagining it or are spelling, punctuation, and grammar rapidly getting worse? For example, it's become very common to put question marks at the ends of statements to indicate uncertainty. No one seems to know how to spell led, no one, all right, or its (my phone autocorrects it to it's every time, which may be the reason). And the past participle seems to be going extinct. People are saying things that sound, to my ear, utterly retarded, like "should have went". The only one I haven't heard yet is was instead of been. But I'm sure that's coming soon.
Is this just normal language evolution or is it an actual degradation? I think it's actual degradation because I actually am finding it increasingly difficult to parse these grammatically off sentences. For example, the situations in which you can use singular 'they' have expanded to include specific known people and I usually have to take a second to figure out that the speaker isn't referring to multiple people.
Spelling has been stable for a long time, but now people are pushing up against the limits of what their autocorrect will allow them to get away with. If an incorrect spelling is the correct spelling for a different word, it's going to be used and frequently. Are people just spelling at the level of third graders and their phones are saving them from looking like complete imbeciles?
But it seems to be getting worse. Is it because the average intelligence online is falling as it gets easier to use the internet? I don't think so, because I see otherwise intelligent people make a lot of these mistakes. Maybe it's because it used to be that most of what we read had been written (had was wrote for my future audience) by professional writers instead of average people.
There also seems to be a general decades long decline in the quality of even professional writing of unknown cause. Compare a newspaper article or even worse a scientific journal article from today versus 70 years. The fact that even proofreading for missing words, spelling mistakes, or the terrible grammar of a Chinese scientist seems to be a thing of the past, suggests that the problem is partly one of demand. We just don't care that what we read is well written anymore. Why is that?
Steve Sailer has been suspended from Twitter for allegedly violating their rules against hateful conduct.
His tweet said
Blacks suffer and perpetrate the majority of homicides/murders in the U.S., so anytime there's a sizable change in the national trend, it's usually driven by changes in black behavior. During the BLM Eras, black homicides [and] black traffic fatalities have trended together.
He appealed and the decision was upheld.
This is yet another way in which Elon Musk is going back on what he said in April.
By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.
I am against censorship that goes far beyond the law.
If people want less free speech, they will ask government to pass laws to that effect.
Therefore, going beyond the law is contrary to the will of the people.
It's starting to look like his attitude towards free speech isn't that different from his predecessors'.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
He wrote about it.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-i-used-to-suck-and-hopefully
I used to argue with white nationalists a lot many years ago on /r/anarcho_capitalism and what I found very frustrating is they refused to properly defend their point of view, particularly on the point of who counted as white. The rare time they would say, it was usually strictly people born on the European continent, so Turks in East Thrace were white but not Turks on the other side of the Bosporus strait were not, I guess. Attempts to pin them down on definitions like this were taken as bad faith tricks to undermine their cause and there was not a lot of interest in having real intellectual discussion about the merits of white nationalism. I found I could get them to explain why they thought whites were superior to non-whites, but I could not get anywhere discussing the practicalities of how a white ethno-state would work.
I completely agree that it makes more sense to select immigrants by the traits that whites are claimed to possess. Selecting them based on race is extremely crude.
Walt seemed like he was participating in good faith, but I found he rambled on a lot and would have preferred to have him pinned down more on some of these issues. I think he reinforced my impression of the alt-right, which is not that they were a bunch of super intellectual misfits but that they actually had terrible epistemic habits and were white nationalists more for the vibes as the kids say rather than its intellectual merits. I've read some of Richard Spencer's stuff and seen interviews with him. He's not that smart. I haven't been impressed by anything from the alt-right as far as intellectual arguments go.
I think that's separate from believing in human biodiversity. It's the leap from human biodiversity to white nationalism that I have never found convincing. I think there is a parallel here with communists, who are extremely difficult to convince to enter into a serious debate. Attempts to debate communists are shot down as risking undermining class solidarity. Similarly, attempts to debate white nationalists are shot down (though not nearly as quickly and definitively) as risking undermining white racial solidarity.
Another parallel is how communists put a huge amount of effort into debating theory (though not at addressing the best counter-arguments to that theory as they mostly only debate other communists) and almost none in how a communist society would actually work.
Glassnoser
2yr ago
Doesn't medically transitioning make your child infertile? From an evolutionary psychology perspective, isn't that similar to your child dying? It doesn't surprise me that some parents react as strongly to that as they would to their children dying.
It's not inconsistent to condemn human rights abuses abroad while acknowledging that the scope of the US government and its legal system ought to be limited to its citizens only.
Legally - not just morally - the US government's legal system is not limited to its citizens. Non-US citizens have rights in the US and the US prosecutes people outside of its borders, US citizens and non-US citizens alike.
But, returning to earth, it seems that Bukele's policies are widely approved by the people of El Salvador. On what basis can the American government (or, still less, an American judge) deny them?
On the basis that they are cruel and immoral. Popularity is not a justification. Moreover, if something is popular in the US and unpopular in El Salvador, it's popular in the two places considered together, since the US has 50 times El Salvador's population. If that shouldn't imply that the US gets to decide what happens in El Salvador, neither should the popularity of any given policy in either country justify the mistreatment of any minority there that objects.
But more importantly, you are ignoring the fact that the US government is paying El Salvador to imprison people that it is unnecessarily sending to El Salvador. It can stop doing either of these things at any time, yet it refuses.
The fact that the US is not all powerful is not an excuse for neglecting all moral and legal responsibilities to anyone who isn't a US citizen. The US government is not even trying to undo its mistakes. It would be one thing if the US government were taking all reasonable steps to undo the harm it has done to the people it has sent to El Salvador. Instead, it is doing everything it can to achieve the opposite.
We have Trump and Bukele sitting in a room together, amicably, with Bukele telling the press he can't force Trump to take any his prisoners and Trump telling the press he can't force Bukele to release any of his prisoners. Obviously, between the two of them, there exists the power to bring the prisoners to the US. There is no bona fide attempt on either of their parts to solve the problem. Everything you have said are excuses for subjecting people to inhumane treatment, not actual justifications for it.
Glassnoser
2mo ago
Yes
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Why don't we get rid of driver's licences entirely and just rely on car insurance? If you pose a risk to others by not having the skill to drive or by having some medical condition, your insurer could require its own tests. It could ask you to get a licence from a third party private organization. Then the free market would figure out the optimal test of driving ability.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Has anyone else noticed Twitter being really buggy since Elon Musk took over? It's worse than Facebook Messenger. For example, it has had trouble loading images for the last day. I don't get why people have concluded that you can fire all these people and have everything be fine. The content moderation is better, but Twitter as a piece of software is obviously much worse now.
I'm not saying that means firing those people was a bad idea. Maybe having software work perfectly is not worth the cost, and the stock market's reaction to the mass layoffs at FAANG suggests they weren't pulling their weight. But that brings me to a related question. Why was it so common up until recently for people to say that, despite the very high salaries of software engineers in California, they were actually very underpaid given the amount they made for their employers? This now appears not to be even close to true. Why did people think this? Was it just some dumb profit divided by headcount calculation?
As is tradition, my sister and I got into a heated argument, this time about Israel and Palestine. The argument started as a disagreement about the meaning of "from the river to the sea" and then became about the conflict and history of the region generally.
Now, my sister, despite her strong feelings about the subject, knows almost nothing about the history of the region and seems to have gotten most of her information from TikTok. Nonetheless, she raised some points that I don't know as much about as I should, and I'm hoping someone can help me learn more about the following claims. These are all things she claims have been widely reported in the media (other than CNN et al.) and is absolutely certain are true.
- Israel has dropped white phosphorus on Gaza.
- No babies were killed. The video evidence was faked or actually of things done to Palestinians.
- Israel is bombing Northern Gaza indiscriminately.
- Hamas is has not been proven to be operating out of any hospitals.
- Israel has cut off all food, water, electricity aide (I know there was some of this, but has it continued and are they completely blockading it?)
- Israel killed the Palestinians when they tried to leave Northern Gaza. She denied there was any evidence Hamas actually did this.
- Israel bombed Palestinians as they left to go to Egypt.
- The UK and the US were allied with Israel from the beginning and supported the establishment of the country.
- Thousands of Palestinian civilians have been killed by Israelis during the occupation. EDIT: I mean during peacetime and not casualties. I'm not talking about the casualties killed during current war.
I'm most interested in any claims of war crimes. I understand Israel claims they are not collectively punishing Palestinians but are actually targetting military targets, but what I'm most unsure about is what is the actual evidence we have about how much they might have deviated from that.
By the way, these debates always remind how bad most people's epistemic habits are. She told me I had fallen for Israeli propaganda and that she was actually very well informed on the subject and had read a lot about it. You see, she had friends who were personally affected (they live in Canada but have family from there or something) and she cared a lot about it, which meant she was not biased. Whereas for me, it was just something fun to debate and I was thinking about it too coldly to form a correct opinion. This from someone who had never heard of Mandatory Palestine and didn't know what a pogrom was, and seemed to know little of even post-1948 Israeli/Palestinian history. She also thought it was the deadliest current conflict and was deadlier than the Iraq War.
EDIT: The purpose of this question wasn't just to get more unsubstantiated claims. If people could provide sources supporting their claims, that would be helpful.
I think I was one of the first people to say that being outside was probably not only safe but one of the best places to be during the pandemic. I was also one of the first to argue that the lockdowns and masks would likely go on for a lot longer than most people realized. I also predicted the reversal of most remote work.
Current consensus defying beliefs:
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current efforts to fight climate change are causing more harm than good. (75%)
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congestion pricing is very good (99.5%)
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there might not be a recession within the next year (50%)
B.C. top court broadens sentencing law aimed at reducing indigenous incarceration rates
British Columbia’s top court has broadened the sweep of a sentencing law meant to reduce incarceration rates among indigenous peoples, ruling that indigenous-specific sentencing can be applied even to offenders who have become disconnected from Indigenous communities and are only minimally aware of their heritage.
...
The decision reduces a five-year prison sentence to four in a case involving an unprovoked, near-fatal stabbing.
...
The offender, David Kehoe, is a Métis man who prosecutors argued had not been aware until recently of his indigenous background. He was convicted of aggravated assault after he used a kitchen knife to stab a man who had played loud music in the parking lot of an apartment building where Mr. Kehoe lived.
Mr. Kehoe, who was 30 at the time of the 2018 stabbing, had a record of 33 prior offences as a youth and as an adult. (The victim suffered a lacerated liver and punctured lung, and received life-saving surgery. He did not submit a victim-impact statement at Mr. Kehoe’s sentencing hearing.)
Under federal sentencing law, judges must pay particular attention to the circumstances of indigenous offenders. The Supreme Court interpreted that law in a case called Gladue (which involved a fatal stabbing) to mean that the history of colonization has harmed indigenous peoples, and that they are therefore entitled to special efforts to reduce their overrepresentation in the penal system. Social workers and others write “Gladue reports” for judges at sentencing time to detail indigenous-related background factors.
...
As of Christmas Day, 34 per cent of federal male prisoners were indigenous, and among female prisoners the rate was 48 per cent, according to the Office of the Correctional Investigator. Indigenous peoples account for a little over 5 per cent of the country’s population. In 1997, they made up 3 per cent of the population and 12 per cent of men in federal prison.
...
B.C. prosecutor Grant Lindsey noted in his arguments that Mr. Kehoe’s parents and grandparents had not gone to residential schools. His criminality was related in part to growing up with a non-indigenous stepfather who used and trafficked drugs, Mr. Lindsey said. Justice Alan Ross of the B.C. Supreme Court accepted that there was little nexus between Mr. Kehoe’s indigenous background and his crime, and sentenced him to five years in prison.
...
Justice Marchand, who was appointed by the Trudeau government to the appeal court in 2021, added it was not “simply a coincidence” that Mr. Kehoe’s Métis mother had fallen into an unstable, dysfunctional environment. He cited the report of the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls to make that point.
Some additional background. In Canada, indigenous people have a lot of problems. They tend to be poor, especially if they live on reserves. Many of them have drug and alcohol abuse problems, and they commit a lot of crime, especially violent crime. There's a lot of teen pregnancy, and in general, many of them live what most people consider to be highly dysfunctional lives.
It has recently become accepted wisdom that this is definitely entirely due to their historical mistreatment, especially their attendance at residential schools, which were designed to forcibly assimilate indigenous children into Western culture. The evidence supporting this is weak.
I have a few questions about this and similar cases.
Why are prison sentences so low in Canada to begin with? You often hear cases where someone kills multiple people and they get sentenced to under ten years in prison. After accounting for credit for time served and parole, they're often only in prison for a few years. Is there evidence supporting this approach to reducing crime?
Is there any reason why the optimal sentences for indigenous convicts are lower than for non-indigenous convicts?
Does it really make sense to blame the offender's dysfunctional background on his indigenous ancestry?
Does it even make sense to blame his criminal behaviour on his dysfunctional background?
Why are crime rates among the indigenous increasing?
There is no scenario where Canada becomes part of the US voluntarily. It just isn't politically possible. Canada has a deep-seated anti-Americanism, which doesn't normally manifest as hate towards the US, but it does manifest as a deep conviction to never be part of the US.
Remember, Canada was largely founded by Americans who were loyal to the Crown during the American Revolution and established new settlements in a freezing cold theretofore sparsely populated territory. It is the only country that was founded in explicit opposition to the founding principles of the US. And then followed two hundred and seventy years of selective migration of Canadians who did not care about this out of the country into the more prosperous and warmer US.
Today, the politics are very different, but not being American is still the single core defining feature of our national identity, which we latch onto because we are culturally so similar. Quebec is another story, in that they have a different ethnic origin and a separate national identity, but they only make voluntary annexation more certainly impossible, because a change to the constitution of this kind would require unanimous agreement by all ten provinces. And if English Canada defines itself by not being American, modern Quebec defines itself by its French language and there is no more sacred political principle in Quebec than the belief that the French language must be protected by law. These laws would undoubtedly violate the first amendment. They violate Canada's own constitutionally protected freedom of expression, but Quebec sidesteps that using the notorious notwithstanding clause. Quebec will not join the US and be forced to give them up.
No amount of economic pressure is going to make Canadians want to give up these cherished identities. For most of our country's history, Canadians have been able to increase their incomes substantially by moving to the US. The profesional class in Canada can still do this, and there is still a significant brain drain. As irrational as it may seem, the ones who remain do not care as much about their material well-being as they do about preserving their independence and national identity, even if they associate it with ideas about peacekeeping and free healthcare rather than loyalty to the British Crown.
Annexation is extremely unpopular and there is an absolute determination not to get stuck with what is regarded here as a seriously dysfunctional political culture.
The second girl I met through Tinder was one of these people who cannot manage her own life. She was definitely the most dysfunctional person I've ever gotten to know well. She kept flunking out of college because she hardly attended any classes and didn't do any work. She would enroll in a new college every other semester and immediately flunk out. She couldn't keep a part-time minimum wage job for more than a few weeks because she wouldn't go half the time. She didn't need the money because she lived with her parents, but she desperately wanted it so she could buy MDMA, to which she was addicted, alcohol, take-out, clothes, make-up, and bus tickets. When she was unemployed, she would borrow money from me and almost never pay me back, denying she ever borrowed it. Any money she earned would immediately be spent. She didn't even have $3 for the bus to go home, which she stole from me at least once.
She lied constantly, even about inconsequential things like the names of her parents. She briefly suffered from paranoid delusions, in my opinion caused by the drugs. She was prescribed an anti-psychotic, which she did not seem to understand the purpose of other than she was "sick" and this was "medicine". She did not understand that her delusion had been all in her head. She told me about it as though it had really happened. She didn't seem to have made any connection between the delusion and the anti-psychotic she was on. I could not convince her to tell her doctor about the drug use.
She had no attention span. When we met, she was very talkative and would ask me questions, but I could rarely get two sentences into an answer before she changed the subject. She could not watch a movie without repeatedly skipping parts she found boring, which was always most of the movie. She often got bored of me and then started texting other guys she knew while still in my apartment.
Before long, we were just friends. She treated me really horribly and it was clear she wasn't right for me, but I stayed friends with her because I just felt so bad for her. It looked like her life was going to turn into a disaster if no one helped her. But it turned out to be a totally wasted effort.
She really wanted a boyfriend but didn't know how to go about it. I explained to her that a guy who invites her over to his apartment late at night for a first date is not interested in anything other than sex. When she finally got a boyfriend, I explained that he wouldn't stay if she kept cheating on him. She never took my advice.
She somehow got a guy from another city who was too good for her to propose to her. He was really nice, smart, and had a decent job. I seriously considered warning him off of her as I wished someone had done for me, but decided against it. They seemed really happy together. He would regularly make the nine hour drive each way to visit her. He once even drove up to pick her up and take him to meet his family and then, because she was afraid of taking the train home on her own, she convinced him after much resistance to drive her back, adding an extra 18 hours of driving. But the second he left she was meeting up guys and sleeping with them, which she told him about. She was sometimes having multiple one-night stands a week, one of which resulted in a pregnancy which she aborted. Obviously, it didn't work out with her fiancé, who she seemed to really love, but she just couldn't stand being alone.
Early on, when we were dating and I was starting to realize how awful she was, I went through her text messages and found one from her ex-boyfriend, who she always talked about so positively. He just said, without elaboration, that meeting her was the worst thing that ever happened to him. I might say the same.
I didn't get into it much, but despite the incompetence in the rest of her life, she was quite charming and manipulative. She somehow had a few good friends who seemed totally normal. But I find it hard to imagine how she could ever support herself or get a man to do so long-term.
Glassnoser
2yr ago
And I'll be honest, I've had a crush on Aella for ages; she's a very attractive nerdy woman, and as a sexually confident and charismatic female Rationalist, she is a very horny unicorn among horses.
Is this a common opinion? I really don't find her attractive at all. She looks like she could almost be very attractive, but there is something very offputting about her. Has she ever done a poll to see what people think of her? I was genuinely surprised when I learned how much she makes as a prostitute.
The European Union has passed the Artificial Intelligence Act
The new rules ban certain AI applications that threaten citizens’ rights, including biometric categorisation systems based on sensitive characteristics and untargeted scraping of facial images from the internet or CCTV footage to create facial recognition databases. Emotion recognition in the workplace and schools, social scoring, predictive policing (when it is based solely on profiling a person or assessing their characteristics), and AI that manipulates human behaviour or exploits people’s vulnerabilities will also be forbidden.
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Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.
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Clear obligations are also foreseen for other high-risk AI systems (due to their significant potential harm to health, safety, fundamental rights, environment, democracy and the rule of law). Examples of high-risk AI uses include critical infrastructure, education and vocational training, employment, essential private and public services (e.g. healthcare, banking), certain systems in law enforcement, migration and border management, justice and democratic processes (e.g. influencing elections). Such systems must assess and reduce risks, maintain use logs, be transparent and accurate, and ensure human oversight. Citizens will have a right to submit complaints about AI systems and receive explanations about decisions based on high-risk AI systems that affect their rights.
This is an extremely restrictive law that will really hold the EU back economically if AI becomes an important technology. It imposes huge burdens on all uses, for both the users and developers, and outright bans many very useful applications.
The law tries to mandate transparency, while at the same time discouraging it by restricting or banning certain uses. An AI specifically made for social scoring, for example, would be illegal, while a general purpose AI would almost certainly do something like social scoring internally as part of a more general ability. For example, if you have an AI run a company in its head, so to speak, how would anyone know what it is doing? How would you know how it is selecting job applicants? It would be a black box and current attempts to figure out how large language models actually work would be the only way to find out what they're doing. But continuing that line of research would expose the developers and users of these systems to liability.
The fines are also enormous.
Fines for non-compliance can be up to 35 million Euros or 7% of worldwide annual turnover.
This would be devastating for a small or low margin business. Many are just not going to do use this extremely valuable technology. Lots of online services are just not going to be available in the EU. In fact, this is already the case with Gemini and Claude, probably because of privacy laws.
I've long argued that the AI safety movement is unlikely to do anything for existential risk and will, if anything, increase it, while assuredly greatly limiting the benefits, and this is strong evidence that I'm right. The regulatory state does not have the capacity to deal with existential risk from AI, whereas it has a long history of stifling technological development.
Glassnoser
6mo ago
This is the first time a single topic has so completely taken over my Twitter feed that I've been driven off it because of how annoying and never ending the discussion has become. Every other Tweet is about Indians or H1B visas, and very little of substance is being said. It's just a lot of anger and dumb takes. One side is mostly just being blatantly racist while the other is getting really pissed off and gloating about the superiority of immigrants. It's incredibly boring.
I would be interested in a conversation about actually improving immigration policy. I find it ridiculous that the US has elements of randomness to its system and isn't blind to national origins.
I'd be curious to know more technical details about Canada's system. There has clearly been a huge drop in the quality of immigrants. I used to think that they just lowered the points threshold for permanent residency in order to raise the immigration rate, but I learned recently that they actually introduced or expanded some different immigration streams that just require employer sponsorships in specific industries which take people directly from community colleges and they actually targeted India first to start with. Apparently, this is being abused with basically fake college programs and sometimes even fake jobs. I'd love to know more about what happened here.
Glassnoser
1yr ago
OK, so why don't we find out? There's a good chance they would come up with a better system of testing and licensing than we have now. Is there any reason the government needs to issue licences?
Glassnoser
8mo ago
Do you have a substantive disagreement with his argument?
Glassnoser
1yr ago
Here is a Twitter thread listing some of the factual inaccuracies. https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280
Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.
Hsu claims no knowledge of cognitive differences between races caused by genetics. Has he said something different elsewhere? https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-controversial-views.html
The Canadian government is increasing the capital gains tax for the relatively well off. They claim it only affects 0.13% of Canadians, but this is a lie, since capital gains are extremely lumpy, mostly affecting estates. A much larger share of the population will be in that 0.13% at some point in their lives. The tax will affect a lot of middle class people, distort the economy, and, as I'll explain at the end, redistribute wealth to foreigners.
Currently, 50% of capital gains count towards your taxable income and so you'd pay half the marginal rate, which tops out at between 44.5% and 54.8% depending on which province or territory you live in. The new rule would raise the portion of capital gains that is taxable from half to two thirds for capital gains over $250,000. Primary residences are exempt and it doesn't affect tax protected savings accounts like RRSP and the relatively new TFSA. Most people don't save enough to have savings outside of these accounts and their primary residences, but you certainly don't need to be rich to do so. You could be someone who chose never to own his primary residence and increased savings in the stock market instead. You could own a cottage, to which the capital gains tax applies when you either give it to your children or when you die. Lots of middle class people will be affected.
The capital gains tax is actually a very unfair and even absurd tax. You invest after-tax income from your salary and then when you realize a gain on those savings, even if it's just enough to keep up with inflation such that you have no real gain, you pay taxes again. Someone who is equally wealthy but doesn't save his income for as long would pay less tax. So it taxes savers more than spenders and discourages investment. There are further distortions due to the fact that primary residences are exempt, which incentivizes people to save by investing in their primary residences, inflating property values and making housing more expensive.
This brings me to my last point. The Liberals are far behind the Conservatives in the polls and an election is at most a year and a half away. The main issues tanking their popularity are housing and immigration, particularly for young people, who see a connection between those two issues. Older people don't care so much and are happy to see their property values rise (property values have risen far out of proportion to incomes in recent decades). However, this new tax rule is being promoted in the name of generational fairness.
This makes no sense. The Liberals have dramatically increased the immigration rate, which certainly has inflated property values. There are good arguments to defend this, among them that the higher property values are a net gain for Canada since the vast majority of property is owned by Canadians and most Canadians are homeowners. It really only hurts renters whose parents aren't homeonwers and therefore won't inherit that wealth. Most young Canadians, even if they rent, have parents who are benefiting from this and therefore shouldn't really complain (although they do). Now, the government is doing the one thing that messes this up: they're redistributing much of those gains to the younger generations who include, in very large and increasing numbers, immigrants and their children. What is the point of inflating asset prices with immigration if you're just going to redistirbute the gains to those immigrants? If your goal is to be maximally charitable to immigrants, fine, but this is not in the best interests of Canadians.
The tax increase does exempt primary residences, but not other assets like secondary residences, and the reason for this tax increase is to fund the enormous increase in spending on things like subsidies for new home buyers and affordable housing. The deficit has ballooned to $40 billion dollars under Trudeau and I think the government is actually starting to get desperate and trying to think of ways to raise revenue without spending political capital. Corporations and trusts will also pay this higher capital gains tax. This will reduce business investment. The tax seems calculated to actually raise a fair bit of money while minimizing the number of people who think they'll have to pay it.
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