HaroldWilson
11mo ago
has values that are antithetical to the pilot values
China. Most Britons and doubtless RAF pilots would and do abhor their form of government.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I am not so convinced that there is a large divide between the British and Chinese states.
Well, where you complained (not unreasonably I might add, that is a bit ridiculous) about an unfair upbraiding by your RS teacher for your privilege, ethno-religious oppression in China entails internment, sterilisation, forced labour and physical maltreatment (even torture) in those camps at the hands of state authorities. This really is only a comment someone living in the freedom and prosperity of the West could make. Young Britons have it bad? Hardly anywhere near as bad as toiling in a Chinese coal mine or electronics factory.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Surely whatever you think about the UK, any plausible faults are on a completely different plane to those of the Chinese state, especially if the complaints you're levying are the aforementioned ones about affirmative action or whatever. Most importantly of all of course is the total absence of any genuine democracy or appreciable freedom of the press in China. Certainly to the extent that assisting China militarily because you were hacked off at a diversity initiative is indefensible.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Because people who are not petty children don't stoop to that level. They were misbehaving in gaming the system, maybe, but that doesn't make it a mature response to try to take it after they have clearly indicate that they are about to use it again. Much as in a library, if someone was keeping out longer by returning and loaning it again, and if you asked that person whether the book they had placed on the table was going to be taken out and they said yes, it would still be an absurd and unbecoming response to snatch it up and take it to loan it yourself to forestall them.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
real mass participatory politics with the people consulted at least about major decisions
What does this even mean? Elections are that consultation, and the electorate gets to decide what the 'major decisions' are by the salience of any particular issue come election time. Any more specific consultation than that is hardly necessary for a meaningful democracy, hence why every successful democracy ever has been a representative one.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
(Well isn't that real and important, then? Yes, yes, it's a fair point. But I still think jobs that exist solely to push unnecessary government paperwork are inescapably bullshit jobs. Hiring government actors--executive and judicial--to punish universities for failing to meet politically-imposed quotas on social engineering goals, so that universities must hire administrators to give themselves cover, is the very picture of government stimulating the economy by paying one group of people to dig holes, and another group to follow behind them, filling the holes back up again. But this is not the point of my post.
Is this just bullshit jobs or is it just that you disagree with the thrust of the work being done? After all they aren't, in fact, just digging up and filling in holes, they are presumably collecting real data which is checked, setting up grievance procedures which can actually be used etc. and even if you think it's in pursuit of a pointless or harmful goal it is actual things being done and work produced. Indeed in one sense this is no different to say all of the legal/regulatory work a food company must do to ensures that all of its products comply with the regulations of all the relevant agencies, it just so happens that whereas in latter case the goal of the regulations is relatively uncontroversial in the former it isn't.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
I agree they are defecting against the system, but that still doesn't mean it's a mature response to go very far in trying to stop him. In manners if not in politics, 'they go low, we go high' pretty much always applies.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
The usual answer would be ‘they aren’t voting against their economic interests, but they understand their economic interests better than CNN talking heads paid to sell books about the culture wars’.
What, then, in the GOP platform is supposed to benefit the economic interests of the working classes?
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Why would you update on any non-crime/policing issue on the basis of policing issue question?
HaroldWilson
28d ago
Aren't they on Reddit? For all the complaints about the bias of this place, they seem to have monopolized that site to an even greater extent.
Well maybe but that's sort of the point. If this is simply a right-wing reddit that doesn't say a great deal for it really.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
The nice thing about sovereignty is that peoples get to define themselves
I don't see where this gets him. People do get to define themselves, and, say, Britons or Americans have decided to expand who is included amongst 'themselves'.
Anyway this is similarly amusing to the debates between the 9 different factions of Trotskyites which get played out in the pages of magazines with a combined readership of 8. The grandiosity of it all is utterly bizarre for a movement which is - thankfully - so powerless and marginal.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
Raise Payroll Taxes - “even a modest change, such as a gradual increase of 0.3 percentage points each for employees and employers (or less than $3 per week for an average earner), could close about one-fifth of the gap.”
Yes, this is extremely important. Whenever people discuss Social Security they often act like the funding shortfall some irresolvable apocalyptic problem when really a moderate increase in rates can close the gap. From the latest trustees report;
consider that for the combined OASI and DI Trust Funds to remain fully solvent throughout the 75-year projection period ending with 2097: (1) revenue would have to be increased by an amount equivalent to an immediate and permanent payroll tax rate increase of 3.44 percentage points to 15.84 percent
Considering the possibility you mention of raise the cap, the actual tax increase needed without touching benefits would be decidedly moderate. And the above figure is all the way to the end of the century!
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
just in case someone else files a lawsuit that will make no substantial difference to anyone except, maybe, a successful plaintiff in search of an easy payday
I'm not settling on either side here, but this seems a little uncharitable. For one, in one sense even if no-one ever reads most of the stuff produced, and if (and I accept this may not be the case but nevertheless, if) lawsuits filed are on relatively substantive grounds rather than trivial procedural matters then the work is still important. Because, presumably, if a Title IX coordinator felt that a particular aspect of college administration did not comply the college would be anxious to make the appropriate changes, which if one agrees with the thrust of Title IX is a good thing.
This is a bit of a cumbersome explanation so here's a instance of a Title IX lawsuit that came up in a cursory google search. James Haidak was a student who recently sued his university for having a biased procedure when it expelled him following accusations by his ex-girlfriend, and on appeal he won on the grounds that he was never given a chance to defend himself in any kind of hearing etc., and now presumably it is the role of Title IX coordinators to ensure the their own universities have adequate procedures in this regard so they don't get hit by similar suits. So even if all their work now sits in a drawer forever they were actually doing something.
The key question of course is whether that many of the lawsuits they spend their time protecting against are substantial, or mostly trivial. Now this seems very hard to assess given that presumably the ones covered in the media are selected for the most interesting and meaningful ones, but a cursory search does throw up lots of cases that do seem at least somewhat worthwhile. Plenty of cases on the need for a fair shake to be given to accused students prior to expulsion, one about a kid who died from alcohol poising following an initiation (the parents demanding tighter restrictions on such) and yes lots of cases about women's athletics. Not, I appreciate, a life or death issue but a 'real' thing in the sense that Title IX cases etc. did actually increases access to college sport for women, which seems to indicate that more than box-ticking is being done, even if in some instances the work is over something that one could consider rather trivial in the grand scheme of things.
HaroldWilson
6mo ago
You may well be poorer than you were three years ago. Most people are not - incidentally, much, certainly more than normal, of the wage growth of the recent period has gone to lower income workers, which perhaps indicates why this discourse of a bad economy is tolerated despite the evidence to the contrary. Not sure what else to tell you is that, surprisingly, number continue to the best means of measuring things.
There is no way anyone on this forum would tolerate for a second this kind of 'lived experience' rhetoric if it was about, say, racism.
HaroldWilson
11mo 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
4mo ago
The_Donald
Hard to be at all sympathetic given that they banned any criticism of Trump. Hard to complain about being banned for 'contradicting woke orthodoxy' (which I don't think is a fair representation of what happened but nevertheless) when you don't allow any contradiction of Trumpian orthodoxy.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns.
This is a fairly pointless comment. 'How come a newspaper is discussing the notion of evil when they disagree with my policy preferences?'. You could find someone to make such a comment whoever was discussing the issue; 'there's a certain sick irony to an article in the Mail discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the fuel duty price escalator', or something. You may well regard lockdowns as evil but I don't see the connection between your disagreeing with their position on that front and the discussion of the root of 'evil' generally.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
without legislative authority
What is this even supposed to mean? Are you suggesting that the Civil Rights Act (and other related pieces of federal legislation) were unconstitutional?
it's the royal court who have decreed it, and the country then gets dragged along behind.
If the country was being simply 'dragged along' in matters of race and immigration, why did Hart-Celler poll so well (70% approval)?
If Americans got to choose, they would have chosen white
They did get to chose. It's called representative democracy. At any time they could - and can - elect a Congress with a white nationalist majority.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
Many countries offer citizenship by blood
True, but this surely just narrows the question to those who don't qualify for that, either because their origin country doesn't recognise it or they are third generation (so no Syrian national parents), or something else. Also, even if technically you could deport a second generation immigrant to Syria (I mean really they couldn't because that would presumably turn them into an international pariah, the costs of which would surely exceed the costs of just putting them in prison in Sweden), that is surely very cruel, to deport someone who has never even lived there to a country in active civil war?
And, of course, there is the evergreen fact that one of the most crime-ridden part of the country is the Deep South, which has permissive gun laws and a hoplophilic culture. With that in mind it's hard to take idea that the solution is yet more guns seriously.
That wasn't my comment.
Chicago is such a useful example of the people who claim to want to solve the nations' problems absolutely failing to achieve any of their stated goals, though!
No isn't because one data point cannot prove that. For all we know, Chicago may well have even more violence than it does already if gun control was relaxed. It may not of course, but simply pointing to one city proves nothing. Numbers are your friend.
Also, I will reiterate that it's very difficult for cities to control guns on their own, national or at least state level action is much more effective.
If you want to save lives, THAT is where you need to start.
I agree that gun suicides are very important to tackle! That why I support ERPOs and waiting periods which have been shown to effectively prevent suicides.
And there are multiple countries that have strict gun laws and much higher suicide rates. Japan and South Korea as glaring examples here.
Again, this proves nothing.
This suggests that, again, guns are not the driving or decisive factor here, and it would probably be better to investigate root causes rather than going after firearms directly.
Are they mutually exclusive? Governments aren't limited to one policy response per issue.
Would you support a ban on matches, lighter fluid, and fireworks, or other implements that can be used for arson
Probably not because the social cost of the arson facilitated by those items probably doesn't outweigh the value we get from their benign applications.
There's little evidence that a person who is legally carrying a firearm on their person imposes a 'wider social cost' in this respect, incidentally
Well they do, in part a) firearms are not tied to a person and more firearms in general circulation is bad for public safety, and more importantly b) even if they were SDGUs aren't that great compared to the average, and in consequence the expected utility for even a legal owner is negative given the facilitation of an easier suicide, accidents etc.
HaroldWilson
1mo ago
While one can no doubt find a sizeable contingent to defend any belief, the more common and reasonable argument people such as myself would furnish against focusing on personal agency is not that it is 'wrong' but that it is useless. If we are approaching this from a policy perspective how much control any particular person had over their health is only important insofar as it impacts what we need to do to remedy poor health now, on a society-wide scale. Politicians and academics are generally in the business of policy, not personal advice.
HaroldWilson
9mo ago
Come on. I am not in favour of euthanasia for non-terminally ill patients, but having said that to act like being in favour of it and being against the death penalty are two somehow contradictory positions is just silly. Clearly the voluntary nature of euthanasia changes their perspective.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
the tiniest hint of bias against certain races (blacks and jews in the US) is massively dangerous and a slippery slope to literal genocide
I don't think you see much of that in mainstream circles, seems a very online sort of thing, but where you do see it I agree that it is hyperbolic and unhelpful.
well they're not literally sending you to death camps yet so what are you whining about?
Much more than 'not literally sending you to death camps' there isn't that much serious bias against whites, not in the UK anyway. There is some 'diversity hiring' (but the available evidence seems to suggest that there are strong effects of in-group bias in hiring, which mostly of course favours whites, so on net even in the direct hiring process I think whites do fine, before one even considers broader questions of socio-economic inequality etc.) but it's hardly sufficient as to constitute a major or even minor concern for any aspiring professional in Britain. This RAF stuff has been newsworthy precisely because it is unusual for such vigorous policies to be in place.
HaroldWilson
11mo ago
but actual dislike and disgust toward whites and specifically white males
This is so terminally online. Are you British? I have literally no idea where you have picked this idea up.
This is completely pathetic. A pilot feels, perhaps not unreasonably, disadvantaged by this one policy, so that's grounds on which to throw your toys out of the pram and work for a state which, for most RAF pilots one imagines, behaves in a manner completely antithetical to your values?
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