HaroldWilson
1mo ago
If you want to practice blind allegiance to a sacred document, go to a church/mosque/synagogue. That is no way to run a country.
HaroldWilson
5mo ago
Well I suppose that's bad news for people who want to break the law when driving, for the rest of us though it's a good if such drivers are off the roads.
but it doesn’t have to be this way,
This is simply correct. It doesn't.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
"I'm fine at the moment, but the whole thing seems pretty shaky".
This is a ridiculous extrapolation to make beyond data which cannot be stretched that far. And the question's word was not 'fine' it was 'good'!
They look at pricing of the goods that they have the most exposure
Well good thing we don't need to operate on these general anecdotes and vibes, we can in fact look at statistics.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
It's like asking somebody about the weather when they're standing in the eye of a hurricane, it feels fine now but I'm not exactly celebrating yet.
The thing is though, if you ask people most say that they themselves are in the eye of the hurricane. At which point we have to ask how significant the hurricane really is.
between 50-100%
This number is simply wrong.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIUFDNS
makes for over 25% inflation total
This is more accurate. However, two things to note. Firstly, your quarrel here is not with Joe Biden but American planning law. Secondly, I wonder what happens when we compare nominal wages to average nominal shelter prices - as you can see, they track together since Q1 2021, except for the past few quarters, in which admittedly shelter has outpaced wages. However, it's only one, admittedly large part of the basket, and this is urban rents which one imagines have risen faster than average. So all in all, not convinced.
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CUSR0000SAS2RS#0
you can expect to pay 2x or more your current mortgage on a comparable home
This number is an exaggeration, but aside from that look at this graph. The increase is clearly well underway pre-Biden. This has nothing to do with Bidenomics. Once again, if you want to blame someone blame NIMBYs.
Edit; just realised I put the wrong graph in and I've lost the right one. But the rent one proves enough I think. Unless this is a statement about interest rate increases, in which case ok but 'I think the government is running too contractionary a monetary policy' is sort of directly at odds with 'I think inflation is too high and it's the government's fault'.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
complaints are never addressed.
And a good thing too that they never will be, deflation is bad.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Pretty much any measure of inflation is coming down at the moment, and is approaching normal levels. And most importantly, wages are rising even faster.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
("affordable" used cars aren't a thing anymore),
Not sure what you mean by affordable, but they very much are. Just go on the internet and you can find used cars in working order which do good MPG for pretty damn cheap. Sure, most of them might be on the older side and a bit scratched, but that's hardly that important.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
That's not actually what he said. He said it was glorifying the war fought in an effort to go on owning people, which it is surely is.
HaroldWilson
10mo ago
Yawn. Pointlessly lazy and uncharitable. If the 'regime' plans to manufacture consent or whatever for the next 'ruler' by excluding a single slightly R-biased pollster from 538 forecasts, thereby increasing Biden's predicted chances of victory by 0.1% on a site no ordinary voter reads, I suggest the regime tries a bit harder.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
counter by making the Democratic party the explicit party of college-educated urbanites and Goldman Sachs.
College-educated urbanites yes (though really it's just all urbanites, rich or poor, educated or not), 'Goldman Sachs' absolutely not. Obviously their workforce is composed mostly of urbanites, but their corporate interests (lower taxation and lighter regulation) clearly align more closely with the GOP than the Democrats.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Oh come on that's hardly analogous. Those elections, as you well know, only allow government-approved candidates; there is no choice or consultation. It's ironic you should say that given that, as Skibboleth notes, it is often nominally Marxist regimes and their defenders that deploy the argument that liberal democracy is a farce that thwarts the real Will of the People, which can only truly be fulfilled by an authoritarian leadership.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
'we can win, so why compromise ' is part of why gun owners are so "uncompromising".
Well that's just politics on both sides though. If I have policy preference X, and think I can get it done, why would I compromise for less than X? I wouldn't begrudge the same behaviour from pro-gun activists..
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
It's almost like they just want to ban the guns irrespective of any direct statistical justification
Absurd strawman. Whether you find it convincing or not there is plenty of literature on the benefits of various gun control policies, and more generally on the benefits of low firearm ownership rates. Not saying you have to agree with its conclusions, but don't pretend there isn't any such literature.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
If that's the case I don't think the 'bullshit jobs' framework adds anything useful, because then it really just is a substitute for 'I don't agree with the policy goals the work being done aims toward'.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
Why the hell was Haidak kicked out in the first place? Because Title IX has been interpreted to require universities to referee adolescent relationships!
Can't say for certain of course but I am fairly confident that universities would want to punish rape/sexual assault quite harshly even without Title IX.
The key question is whether the benefits of Title IX outweigh the costs
Well sure but that doesn't really address the question of the bullshit-ness of the jobs, that's then just an ordinary policy debate.
Did it hasten an ongoing process? If so, then the regulatory cost was onerous and the fact that we're still paying it is stupid. Did Title IX instead fundamentally re-engineer a piece of American society, forcing a change to which Americans would have otherwise never consented? If so, then the price was even more onerous, paid in liberty instead of dollars. As far as I can tell, Title IX itself can only either have been unnecessary (in which case: it spawned mostly bullshit jobs), or necessary, in which case it is seriously objectionable on other grounds.
I suspect that as you suggest the growth of women's sports was happening anyway but nonetheless Title IX accelerated and shaped those changes (same for the other areas that Title IX impacts).
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
You literally can't get much stricter than Chicago in restricting firearms, and you also can't find many places with a higher murder rate
Speaking of, NH has some of the most permissive laws and also a negligible homicide rate. Again kinda makes the point for me.
This is ridiculous. One cannot prove anything with one or two data points. To take just one example, here is some tentative evidence that permitting decreases homicides, and RTC laws have the opposite effect. I'm obviously not saying that just because there's a study here you have to agree with me, but at least engage with the literature rather than saying 'look at Chicago' and calling it a day.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29785569/
The odds of a fire extinguisher protecting you from a house fire of any kind, let alone an arsonist, is incredibly low...
You see the subtle error in reasoning here?
Fire extinguishers do not impose wider social costs.
And because those instances are intentionally given outsized attention by the media who has every intention of maximizing the fear felt by their viewership.
Different thing, but you seem to be framing this as a fault of the media but surely if there is blame to be assigned here it has to go to the consumer, given that the media is surely just satisfying the demand for such news which we all demonstrate by consuming it as much as we do.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
General self-defense via firearm happens, at best estimate, somewhere in the range of several hundred thousand times a year.
True, but firearms don't seem to be a uniquely effective self-defence weapon, or at least there is some tentative evidence in that direction.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0091743515001188?via%3Dihub#s0010
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
The FDA regulates what drugs we are allowed to take.
Yes, but that's not a partisan affair. The FDA should take whatever action they deem appropriate on transgender care and they don't need politicians to weigh in on the specifics of the decision. Politicians determine the broad remit of the FDA, they don't interfere with its functioning on specific issues.
You agree that this trans pandemic is out of control
I wouldn't go that far, certainly. As for 'asleep at the wheel', it's a question of prioritisation. Political capital and legislative time are finite, and I'd much rather politicians focused on any number of other issues than making ad hoc adjustments to the state of transgender medical care.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
That’s much more than 1 in 6 million. It’s probably more than 1 in 100,000.
Well this is my point. 1 in 100,000 is still vanishingly small. Where would you draw the line for saying we can just chalk something up to statistical noise. 1 in 5 million? 1 million? 200,000?
This is different than a speedy public execution in the neighborhood of their peers, which I promise would have a deterrence effect.
Well, aside from what is asserted without evidence being able to be dismissed without evidence, the wrongful conviction rate would be to most people intolerably high. Executions are slow for a reason; the appeals process is there for a reason. John Grisham estimates the wrongful conviction rate to be between 2% and 10% - now, he isn't necessarily unbiased considering he works with the Innocence Project. So let's go with the lowest end of his estimate, 2%. In 2019, over 240,000 people were sentenced to prison for drug-related crimes, the most serious offence of whom was possession in only 3.7% of cases. But let's say your policies reduce drug crime by half - which is very unlikely - and then half the number again to be generous so we get 60,000. These are the ballparkiest of ballpark figures, but I think if anything I've surely got an underestimate, and that still leaves us with over a thousand wrongful drug executions per year, for apparent benefits in defence of which you can't even cite a single piece of evidence.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
a proposed bill to take kids away from parents who expressed resistance or skepticism
What bill? I hope you're not referring to SB107 because that isn't what that did.
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
you can put me in that camp that we are an evolved species with deeply rooted programming on what leads us to a happy life. And homosexuality to me seems like a couple of your genes are off that may individually have benefits but combined turned your gay, but the vast majority of your genetic programming is still happier in traditional heterosexual relationships. As a society we have decided that a small bit of a person their sexuality should dominate the totality of that person.
This all sounds very Just So. I mean what can anyone who disagrees with this do except to say that what is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence?
HaroldWilson
1yr ago
we're supposed to take people at their word
The debate over self-ID is one of policy, not necessarily of 'fact'. That is to say, even though it is obviously possible to lie about gender identification/dysphoria, one could nonetheless argue that as a matter of policy self-ID is the best approach because there is no more acceptable alternative. Thus, one could perfectly consistently make exceptions to a self-ID policy, such as in sport (I mean, no-one advocates 'instant' sport self-ID) or in cases of an apparently bogus case of identification in the justice system, as the policy of self-ID in other areas was one adopted from a position of pragmatism, not because literally everyone who claims to be trans must be telling the truth.
HaroldWilson
4mo ago
I honestly can't tell if you're trolling. 26 signatures. 26. Change.com. You definitely are.
I'd say that description is pretty indisputable. Which bit do you think is inaccurate?
Paywalled.
an uphill battle
I don't think you've demonstrated that. The only potential evidence here is the paywalled WSJ article which I can't read, can you quote the relevant sections? I would note though that it is still here.
Hard disagree. People wanted to ban KiwiFarms for the ideological leanings of its userbase and for their unabashed mockery of woke people, so they went looking for something other than "not being woke" they could pin on it as a reason for banning it, even though you'll find woke people doing eactly the same things (or worse) without comment. "Show me the man and I'll show you the crime".
This is more or less unfalsifiable reasoning, because whatever evidence I give of other justifications for their ban you will dismiss as motivated reasoning/manufactured. So not sure what I can say here. Also, FWIW Kiwifarms is still up and active.
I don't think the average Democrat engages in much cancelling, or tries to While certainly they (and I) would oppose some (most?) of the measures Republicans introduce here and there, it still wouldn't, I think, stand as a great priority.
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