HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Huh. The first few stock images that come to mind are a mixed bag. Harold, old white guy. “Why can’t I hold all these limes,” young black guy. “Distracted boyfriend,” three white people, one of whom is male. Maybe those are just dated?
Googling “stock photo” and looking at the first page of results gives a bunch of white people, mostly solo. The first black guy is playing a saxophone—does that count as stereotyping? There are a few Middle Eastern men, a couple Indians, and a single dog.
So I’m not really seeing it.
If you had to search for it, perhaps it's because you're not paying attention when you come across it organically.
Let's try this. I'll go one-by-one to websites from Fortune 500 companies in descending order and see how white or nonwhite the photos of people on their home page are. Sound pretty objective? Alright, let's play.
- Walmart. Black guy.
- Amazon. Bunch of product images. I don't really feel like revealing to the world what Amazon wants me to buy again.
- ExxonMobile. First guy is poorly lit but the face look kind of black to me when zooming in. Either way, the next person is a black woman too, followed by a white man.
- Apple. Black woman (on the watch).
- UnitedHealth Group. Asians.
- CVSHealth. Female is ambiguous, but the guy is nonwhite.
- Berkshire Hathaway. No photos of people.
- Alphabet. No photos of people.
- McKesson. Black woman.
- Chevron. White woman.
- Cencora. White woman. Nonwhites are nonetheless 3 out of 5 of the people whose races are visible on the home page.
- Costco. Two black people.
- Microsoft. Black person. 4 out of 5 of those with visible faces on the home page are nonwhite.
- Cardinal Health. Ambiguous, but I'd say multiracial.
- Cigna. A white male!
- Marathon Petroleum. 2 out of 3 white.
- Phillips 66. 2 out of 3 nonwhite.
- Valero Energy. Some of the people on the boat seem white, but they're distant and backs are turned. First face is black.
- Ford. White guy, followed by ambiguous woman and 4/6 of the remainder being black
- Home Depot. Two black guys, ambiguous woman, white guy
- General Motors. 8 out of 10 nonwhite
- Elevance Health. Black.
- JPMorgan Chase. Hispanic? A majority of the remainder of the homepage are nonwhites.
- Kroger. No photos, but 3 out of 4 of the cartoon characters are nonwhite.
- Centene. Black.
- Verizon. Nonwhite.
- Walgreens Boots Alliance. Well, not exactly a stock photo: they're announcing their new Chief Information Officer, a white guy. The next slide in the auto-rotating display is 5 nonwhite out of 7.
- Fannie Mae. Nonwhite.
- Comcast. 2 out of 3 nonwhite.
- AT&T. Asian, I think?
You get the idea.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
What are your picks for words/idioms that ought to be retired this year?
"Gaslighting". It has proper application sometimes, but it's increasingly little more than a synonym for "disagreeing".
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Thankfully my diligent use of ad-block prevents such visual and auditory pollution from entering my sensoria, most of the time.
It's not just ads though, but also stock images, staged photographs for college admission pamphlets, product pictures on Amazon, etc. (you can always quickly identify cheap Chinese imports on Amazon: they're the only ones with product pictures showing white people using the product).
I'm sure you can probably find white people in ads for euthanasia in Canada, at least.
It's increasingly difficult to find any refuge from the daily barrage of reminders that your society is signaling it hates you and is excited for you and your kind to die off.
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized.
I really think people like your former self who have a bit of a cop problem could really stand to do a few ride-alongs and watch a few dozen hours of police footage. As you say, it's really illuminating. American police are overwhelmingly incredibly well-trained, professional, and cordial, even when dealing with jaw-droppingly disrespectful citizens.
Indeed, it's always astonished me just how ill-informed and prejudiced so many otherwise intelligent people seem to be about police. I suspect it's for a few reasons:
- Ideological expedience. The Left is primed to hate police because of the race angle, and libertarians are primed to hate police because of a general distrust of state power. Both of these groups are very disproportionately likely to be in a position to influence public perceptions (e.g., academia, journalism, opinion magazines, blogs, etc.)
- The availability heuristic. People see the most egregious police abuses/mistakes and have no sense of how astronomically rare those events are. For every iffy police shooting that crosses your radar, tens of thousands of police interactions occur without any violence transpiring whatsoever. The occasional douchebag officer encounter makes the rounds on social media, but the vast majority of officer encounters that are professional and courteous - even in the face of obscenely disrespectful and obnoxious civilians - never get shared.
- Osmosis from the general anti-police zeitgeist. Even without ideological bias, it's easy to find oneself assuming that there's a problem if so many people seem to think there is.
- Lacking domain-specific knowledge. If you don't understand that police don't have quotas, or that civil asset forfeitures aren't as simple as police being bandits, or that qualified immunity only applies to civil lawsuits and doesn't permit police to engage in criminal acts without being prosecutable, or that police don't "investigate themselves" for wrongdoing, or that they do indeed get more training than hairstylists... well, then you simply don't know. And combined with some of the other numbered items on this list, it's easy for people to lazily round these things off to "yeah, I guess they are probably just rotten about this and that thing".
- On a related note: most jobs aren't exposed to the public like policing is (and not heightened in exposure for reasons of #1 and #7). Programmers, lab analysts, manufacturers, logisticians, consultants, actuaries, etc., etc. aren't jobs people are in any position to notice or think about or care about. I suspect most people would have similar groan-worthy misunderstandings about most jobs if those jobs were similarly criticized by clueless (and/or dishonest) ideologically motivated actors and trotted out for viral outrage bait.
- The sort of people who hang out in the greater rationalist sphere or in highbrow publications probably know fewer police officers in their personal lives and so have few opportunities to ask basic questions, correct misunderstandings, or even just harbor a modicum of charity (especially given the class difference between them and police officers).
- Relying on faulty intuitions about how policing ought to be done, especially the use of force. Violence is actually not something most people understand very well. For example:
- People don't seem to understand that the presence of a gun on an officer's hip completely changes the dynamic of a physical altercation between an officer and a citizen - the officer must interpret active resistance as ultimately a fight for the officer's gun. And the officer absolutely cannot afford to lose that fight, ever.
- Your hands justifiably scare the shit out of a police officer, because your hands are what is going to kill him. Fishing around for something in your car or your pockets is a potentially life-threatening situation for the officer, and you're doing yourself no favors by raising his alarm like that.
- An unarmed person does not mean a non-dangerous person. See bullet point #1 above. Also, cars are deadly weapons.
- Tasers are not a substitute for shooting. Where deadly force is justified, a taser is never an appropriate tool (unless there are other officers providing lethal cover). They are simply not reliable enough.
- The use of stern language and/or sudden violent physical control (e.g., grappling, tackling) is de-escalation. Failure to rapidly put a belligerent person into handcuffs only increases the likelihood that that that person will obtain a weapon or get into a vehicle and cause further harm to themselves, officers, or others.
- There is no such thing a shooting someone's legs. First of all, leg shots are often fatal anyway because of the femoral artery. But more importantly, if a situation justifies deadly force, it is imperative to maximize likelihood of neutralizing the threat. That means rapidly putting shots center-mass until the threat ceases.
- It is just kinda seen as "cool" and "righteous" to try to notice and stand up to supposed abuses of power. There's no esteem to be had in being perceived as a bootlicker.
Anyway, it truly did make my day to hear that how you (and @Amadan) changed your minds about policing. There are few topics that makes me despair quite like the topic of policing when I see it come up in spaces like this.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I think the biggest problem with that argument is that cars pretty much entirely kill unintentionally. Only about 535 accidental gun deaths occurred in 2020, according to the CDC. That's 2.2% of all gun deaths in the US that year. That's an order of magnitude less than annual accidental drowning deaths, and fewer deaths than (scarcely regulated) swimming pools or bath tubs alone.
It's not enough to say "here's a problem, here's a regulation that pertains in a very broad sense to that problem, therefore the regulation will help address the problem". If people want to commit murder or suicide with a gun, it's incumbent upon would-be regulators to explain how their proposed regulations would stop those people. "We'll make it illegal" does no good - murder is already illegal, and suicidal people won't care. "We'll require a license" does no good when people can trivially obtain one like they can a driver's license. And if the licensing requirement becomes sufficiently onerous that it's practically a ban, they'll run into the same problem as advocates of banning guns: how exactly is that going to happen in a country with a 2nd Amendment, more guns than people, and criminals who don't care what you say you've banned?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
What I find most depressing about this problem is how irreversible it is. Unlike almost all other policy - monetary, taxation, spending, the criminal code, school curricula, you name it - this can't be undone. These immigrants are never, ever going away.
I don't understand how people who are in favor of mass-immigration can just so completely throw caution to the wind. Even with high confidence that mass immigration won't be a problem, if you're wrong, it's game over. The multiculturalism mind virus is unlike any other policy fad in history I can think of in how dangerous it is. Even fucking communism can, in principle, be reversed and healed from. The fact that a policy so potentially suicidal as mass immigration just sails through without meaningful resistance just blows my fucking mind.
I was lucky enough to get out of Canada and move to a decent sized American city, near a major metro, that is 97% native-born. But so many millions of Canadians are stuck and helplessly watching their country and communities decay into a sort of rootless cosmopolitan economic zone - an unimportant physical space that is meaningless but for its capacity to facilitate the existence and economic productivity of equally meaningless and mutually-unintelligible people-tokens like yourself.
I'll attempt to respond to the article's claims, mostly in order:
White liberals, the Americans whose expressed views shifted most radically over the last decade, have begun to moderate their responses to questions, for instance, about the causes and ideal remedies to racial inequalities. There have been shifts in the ways people identify themselves, too. For instance, polling and surveys suggest that “feminist” and related labels seem to have lost some of their luster in recent years
The article doesn't cite or link anything here, but I pay close attention to everything that comes out of Pew and Gallup and I have not noticed this supposed reversal. In fact, I've noticed the opposite. For example, the data in this thread, among others, by Zach Goldberg, which shows white liberals becoming more woke over time on several measures.
As for the feminist label, even if that's true I suspect it has more to do with the TERF wars.
Data on media outputs and “cancel-culture” incidents also suggest that a corner may have been turned. Across a range of datasets, we see apparent declines in “grassroots” attempts to censor uncomfortable speech on campus (even as there are growing attempts to suppress political scholarship from external stakeholders).
This would also be expected if wokeness were still ascendant or peaked, as people realize just how dangerous it is to dissent from the orthodoxy.
Media discussion of various forms of prejudice and discrimination also seem to have declined significantly over the last year.
I'd have to see the data to say more (he doesn't link anything). I'm doubtful it's significant if true.
Within the Democratic Party, following anemic 2020 results and recalls of progressive politicians in blue states, there have been efforts to “course correct,” to avoid further alienating normie voters.
This is among the better evidence, but I don't think it means much. First, the recalls were few and far between, and they happened more in places that had simply gotten so bad that it was not sustainable even for Blue normies. But regardless, I don't think wokeness has ever been that popular with normies, at least beyond costlessly nodding approvingly to right-thinking platitudes to demonstrate they're good people. The problem has never been that wokeness is popular; the problem is that wokeness has implacable and mutually reinforcing power in important institutions.
The Democratic base has moved in a similar direction, broadly rejecting progressive candidates during the 2022 primaries. These countermeasures likely helped the party stave off the anticipated “red wave,” preventing extreme Republican candidates from facing Democratic challengers who were also perceived to be far out of step with mainstream America. Running moderate Democratic candidates against GOP extremists proved to be a winning move throughout the country in 2022.
I don't get the impression that Democratic candidates in 2022 were less woke than in the last few election cycles. I think the results in 2022 were less about any sort of Democratic moderation and more about people being sick of Trump and Trumpy candidates.
According to some accounts, there is a growing appetite among Generation Z for humor and subversion, for a slackening of constraints and an expansion of horizons. The heavy moralizing around identity issues, the constant and intense surveillance and management of self and others, the incessant calls for revolution and reform—these elements of woke culture are running up against a growing sense of nihilism and ironic detachment among young adults.
There is growing discussion of a “vibe shift” among Millennials as well. Many are coming to find the culture wars both unsatisfying and rote. They are exhausted by the relentless cynicism, fear, doomsaying, and impression management that have governed much of their lives—and for what? They recognize the revolution isn’t coming anytime soon. So they are looking instead to have fun, relax, and cut loose a bit. Or, at the very least, to stop having to be so neurotic, guarded, and paranoid.
Admittedly, I don't hang out around anyone from Gen Z, but I don't buy this. I'm open to data (he didn't cite any), but almost all polling I see on any woke-adjacent topic shows younger cohorts identifying more with the woke viewpoint than older cohorts.
Companies are slackening their enforcement of post-2010 norms and expectations on identity issues. For instance, they are growing less likely to rapidly terminate or suspend employees accused of sexual misconduct based purely on the word of accusers.
That's plausible. I do think #MeToo probably peaked and is heading back down from orbit. I don't think it'll land anywhere near the status quo ante, though, for better or worse. But I think #MeToo is at best a subcomponent or offshoot of wokeism and doesn't generalize to the rest.
At the same time, they are walking back their aggressive symbolic commitments to social justice and quietly defunding the financial pledges they made to various activist groups and causes. Many are also making aggressive cuts to the DEI-related positions that ballooned in recent years.
Rather than rapidly caving to employee “social-justice” demands, as they had for much of the last decade, managers at knowledge-economy institutions are increasingly trying to reassert their authority, firing employees who attempt smear campaigns against colleagues and the companies they work for, and imposing new rules on how internal workplace channels are used.
One of the links given refers to the Washington Post firing Felicia Sonmez - a person whose petty Mean Girls-worthy feuding with coworkers spilled out into the public to great embarrassment and popcorn. I don't believe for a second that the Washington Post is becoming less woke, sorry.
A second link is about internal conflict in the New York Times between the old guard and the new woke employees. But the linked article essentially admits that the woke are winning: "On the progressive side of the ledger, the Times has installed a new administrative layer in the newsroom aimed at implementing a modern workplace culture. The new roles are neither reporters nor editors, but university-style administrators, focused variously on culture, careers, trust, strategy and DEI. Their roles amount, as one told me, to trying to enact radical cultural change at the institution — from an old, white conservative institution to a progressive, inclusive one — as slowly as possible." (emphasis mine)
Next linked is Netflix's handling of its employees protesting Dave Chappelle. Netflix essentially said they're keeping him on and employees who don't like it can quit. Admittedly, this was a nice win. But Netflix, like the tech companies the quoted paragraph alludes to more broadly, are facing increasing financial pressure in recent times. Netflix's stock, for example, was cratering for months before the Chappelle controversy came to a head. I don't think it's much consolation to the anti-woke, or much indication of wokeness waning, that companies - who exist to make profit - eventually, might, somewhat, on the margins, cull some of their more useless and obnoxious employees when the company's finances look grim.
And actually, according to another link in the quoted section, it's not clear DEI-culling is as ubiquitous as the author seems to think. The link he gives cites a study which claims that 80% of tech firms "displayed a pattern of very minimal increases in diversity" (read: increased diversity) between 2008-2016, and the remainder were a roughly even split between increased diversity and decreased. Wokeness definitely didn't peak in that timeframe, so I don't know how this supports the argument that wokeness has peaked sometime since then.
He does cite a claim that "listings for DEI roles were down 19% last year [2022]", but later on that cited article claims that DEI job postings jumped 123% after the 2020 protests. You do the math. But, hey, I guess that's consistent with peaking, technically.
[Running out of comment space for full quotes, but he spends a couple paragraphs talking about how Disney changed CEOs after getting into trouble with DeSantis in Florida, and Twitter and Facebook have reinstated Trump.]
I don't know the details of whether or how much Disney has actually changed. But if it has, it was in response to state pressure. That doesn't strike me as evidence of an organic peaking of wokeness (unless you want to cite DeSantis' efforts themselves as evidence of it, which you could). Similarly, I suspect social media companies are afraid that Republicans are going get fed up with the progressive bias and censorship on social media, so I wouldn't read too much into whatever capitulations and bone-throwing they may engage in here.
And Twitter is a terrible example for his case. It only changed because a guy with more money than God was so fucking sick of its bias that he decided to just buy it and try to fix it.
I actually don't fault the author for being unpersuasive. It's really hard to measure something abstract and amorphous like wokeness, especially over time. And the few methods that exist are easy to nitpick, as I've done. A lot of it comes down to anecdotes here and there. But there's no way the author would win a competition where one side of the ledger is anecdotes of wokeness waning and the other side is anecdotes of wokeness run amok. Granted, his claim is that wokeness is merely waning, not that it has lost. But as that aforementioned New York Times admission alludes to with its plan of slow and steady death by progressive transformation, ideologies can remain insidiously dominant in institutions and cultures longer than you or your society as you know it can remain alive, to paraphrase Keynes.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
6mo ago
One issue with your thesis is stated succinctly in the "first they came for..." adage. A problem doesn't need to affect you now for you to be justified in being concerned about it and for it to be prudent to fight back against it.
A second issue is that a lot of problems are indirectly caused by a problem further up the chain that might have gone unchallenged when it mattered. Did it affect me that seemingly every institution and corporation in the country decided to get on board with DEI/diversity hires? Probably not at the time and not in any given instance, no. But the downstream effects of that phenomenon certainly affect me now in many ways. But perhaps a lot of the Left's institutional capture would have been mitigated if people cared enough to put a stop to it before these people were hired into prominent positions in the first place.
In other words, you can't just ask "Does this affect me right now? If not, I don't care." You have to ask whether the what's happening now will have predictable consequences that, perhaps after some more iterations, will affect you later.
The advice to get off the internet and touch grass or grill is so utterly risible to me. It is the motto of the unprincipled and the cowardly, as far as I'm concerned. Evil (and problems resulting from good intentions) prevail when good people do nothing, and all that. (Now, if someone is of a certain temperament and simply finds himself too emotionally crippled by the problems of the world to handle hearing about them, I actually have no problem with that person getting off the internet and grilling. We don't literally all have to be engaged with these problems to conquer them. I also don't expect amputees to be conscripted into the armed forces.)
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Then this would imply rural areas are safer than urban. the evidence suggests otherwise.
Can you elaborate on the evidence you believe supports this assertion? The stats overwhelmingly show the opposite, and it's one of increasingly fewer things that are still pretty easy to Google.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The biggest problem with Google search - and indeed almost all search engines, even intrasite searches - relative to how little it's complained about is by far the insistence on showing results even when very little actually matched the query. If my query gives me little to no results, then please just fucking tell me that and I'll adjust my query. Stop wasting my time showing me something that matched only 2 out of my 3 keywords. I put that third term there for a reason. It's as if the search engine assumes I'm in the habit of searching things like 2022 senate election results parfait, where it can safely disregard one of my terms because I'm just stupid or something. My query was written how it was written for a reason, damnit.
Google is actually vastly ahead of most other search engines in this regard, since it actually lets you enclose a term in quotation marks* to ensure it shows up in the results. This is still annoying, however, because sometimes I want the search engine to permit some amount of fuzziness in a term (e.g., include synonyms).
* And yes, before the naysayers appear, this does work - the only reason you think it doesn't is because your quoted term appears somewhere not visible on the page, like a dropdown menu, or has been removed from the page since it was cached.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Men and women don't differ that much in their views on abortion. Some stats from Pew:
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Even gender split on the question of whether life begins at conception and a fetus is a person with rights [1]
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60/51 female/male split on the question of whether women should have more say on abortion policies than men [1]
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76/68 female/male split on the question of whether the decision to have an abortion should be solely up to the woman [1]
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21/17 female/male split on the question of whether abortion should be legal in all circumstances, and 9/8 female/male on whether it should be illegal in all cases [2]
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Almost identical gender split on the separate questions of whether abortion should be legal at 6 weeks, 14 weeks, and 24 weeks [2]
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Confidence - 100% - I don’t get these things wrong
Do you know that saying something like that makes me lose confidence in you? No one should be 100% confident about vague future things, and not realizing that is a pretty big strike against you.
It reminds me of a story Russ Roberts at EconTalk tells about about the Stanford professor Ron Howard. Ron used to require students to assign a confidence to each of their answers on an exam. He would adjust the points they got based on their certainty - the higher the probability the student assigned to his or her answer, the more points they got if it was right. And he implored students to never ever assign 100% probability to an answer, because if you assign 100% probability to an answer and it's wrong, you get negative infinity points and you fail the exam. Alas, some students still put 100% probability.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
If I may make a suggestion: It's very frustrating and confusing to read "SD" and not know whether it refers to Sweden Democrats or Social Democrats, both of which are discussed throughout your post.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The person you were responding to is talking about crime, not overall safety. Additionally, they claimed that people want to move to a place where criminals would realistically require a car to reach, and that is satisfied with suburbs, not rural areas. Suburbs, as the link you gave agrees, are far less hazardous than rural areas.
And when it comes to crime, the second graph in that link indeed shows that the most urban geographies (light blue line) have by far the highest homicide rate of all the geographies. If you want to talk about "the specific urban area with the lowest urban homicide rate in the country" (NYC) rather than "urban" in general, you can certainly do that, but I don't think "just move to NYC if you care about crime in your St. Louis neighborhood" is going to get much traction.
And if you want to argue that people should include other hazards (e.g., car accidents) in their decision about where to live, you can certainly do that, too. But I would respond by saying that violent crime is pretty unique in how it affects our sense of safety and quality of life. I suspect people will tolerate quite a lot of risk of death by car accidents, lightning, and farm machinery if it means not having to be worried about crime.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Apparently it's been verified as legit.
The National Desk has verified the authenticity of the leaked images through its Nashville affiliate, FOX 17 News.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The problem with these databases of school/mass shootings is that they don't map onto what people think of as the sort of mass shootings we're discussing in this thread. A school resource officer accidentally firing his weapon, or a gang dispute that leads to one student shooting a few of his rivals, or a drug deal gone awry, or an 8 year old accidentally shooting a classmate when showing the cool gun he took from home, etc., - those all make it onto these lists. There's value in that, but it's important to recognize the broad scope of the dataset and not act as if these are lists of people who intended to kill as many people as possible, which is what our culture is almost always talking about when discussing mass shootings.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Is Holocaust denial becoming a more tolerated topic on this forum? Revisionists occasionally popped their head up at the subreddit, but as far as I remember, their comments were always downvoted. Not so anymore.
I think people on The Motte upvote quality contributions even if they don't agree with them, except for progressives (and even then, sometimes). There's no doubt that SecureSignals put a lot of effort into his posts, including detailed citations. That's true even if you think he's completely full of shit and a terrible person.
Notice also that the SecureSignals' opponents in that thread, especially johnfabian, also got upvoted, and that the net-upvotes turned to net-downvotes only when he started to get snarky. What does that tell you?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
US citizens are not going to want to do stuff like fruit picking, meat processing, restaurant kitchen work, and landscaping for the kind of money that illegal immigrants do it for.
Other countries without substantial illegal immigrant populations seem to manage just fine. But yes, wages for those jobs would surely go up, and consumer prices along with it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I'm not aware of any pre-Roe public polling on abortion, but the earliest polling data came just two years after Roe. Since then, there's been no significant change. So unless public opinion on this important moral question massively changed in two years and held steady since then, I think it's more reasonable to assume that Roe changed nothing about people's public opinion.
By point of comparison, public opinion on interracial marriage gradually changed from before and after anti-miscegenation laws were struck down by the court in 1967 in Loving v Virginia.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I want to hear the steelman for qualified immunity, because the most salient times it comes up are when it’s being abused. In other words, I have the urge to play devil’s advocate, but I’m underqualified.
I'm not well-acquainted enough with the facts and arguments to feel comfortable engaging someone who is, but in case no one else steps up the plate: I think the idea is that you don't want civil servants like police officers to face the possibility of ruinous civil lawsuits for just doing their job and making some sort of honest mistake. I think (although I'm not as confident about this) that you can instead civilly sue the department as opposed to the individual officer. That spreads out the risk and costs of litigating.
It's also extremely important to point out that qualified immunity has absolutely nothing to do with protecting anyone from CRIMINAL culpability. Officers who commit crimes are routinely brought to justice and qualified immunity has no bearing whatsoever on any of it.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I don't think it should be any surprise that the vast majority of Holocaust deniers are people who have disreputable beliefs about Jews. Given how it's considered rank antisemitism and just about the worst thing one can be caught believing, wouldn't we expect that the vast majority of people who have gone that rabbit hole (much less admit to it) are antisemites?
I just don't see how that has any bearing on the truth value of the claim.
It's always going to be the case that the most taboo ideas in a society are only ever seriously contemplated by people who have some strong ideological or moral conviction related to those taboo ideas. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people espousing atheism in Europe hundreds of years ago were rapacious sinners, edgelords, and reprobates of various other sorts. So what?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
4mo ago
But many regular posters insist that it's absolutely groundbreaking and will have serious CW implications
Except those supposed implications weren't mentioned in the OP.
I guess that's what it comes down to, though. When you think AI is going to be some godlike superdisruptor of everything, it's CW all the way down. I see it as just another technology and am pretty sick of how half of the output from places like ACX are devoted to this technology. But then I also see it in a non-CW context in the CW thread and it's defended on the highly disputable grounds that anything super important is CW or something.
I'll be honest, it rings similarly to the progressive trope of "I'm bringing up this political topic in this nonpolitical forum because everything is political, don't you people get it?!" No, trans issues are politics, no matter how important you think they are. Justice for Palestine isn't reproductive justice, no matter how important you think the two are. And new versions of LLMs aren't CW no matter how important you think they are. Everything isn't everything, and words have meaning.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
Again, really curious what percentage of your "native-born" city is composed of European immigrants who came in the late 18th and early 19th century. Because if that's the case, their ancestors engaged in all the behaviour you decry.
People who are pro-immigration keep using this bizarre line of argument that essentially amounts to "You think this bad thing is happening now, but it happened in the past, too!" ...As if we must think it was a good thing when it happened in the past? No, it was bad then and it's bad now. Do you get it yet?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
5mo ago
How do you bring yourself to stay employed at a place like that? I'd rather work at a gas station than feel like I'm selling my soul by helping my enemies run roughshod over a hobby I love and doing my small part to assist them in their complete takeover of our civilization. I'm especially surprised to hear this coming from you, since one of your common refrains is advocating Reds resist Blues, refuse to compromise, reject the system, deny their institutions legitimacy, etc.
When it comes to politics, it's all,
Then you attempt to primary those Republicans, hammer them mercilessly, make their lives a living hell and drive them from office in disgrace, if possible. If you manage to replace them with an actual Red Tribe champion, that's a win. If the democrats win the seat instead, well, you've replaced someone who was willing to vote with the democrats when it counted with someone who votes with the democrats all the time, but on the other hand you've also shown that efforts to work within the system result in losing to the democrats, which encourages the Red Tribe public to reject the system.
and
Intransigence reduces the likelihood of achieving things through the existing system from a nullity to a nullity, while increasing the likelihood of achieving solutions outside the existing system. That is a positive trade.
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The game is rigged. There is no benefit to pretending otherwise, and there is no benefit to continue playing. The proper response is to play the actual game according to the actual rules: secure your values at any cost.
But in the tiny sliver of overlap where the culture war actually intersects with your personal life in a way where you finally could conceivably stand up and actually sacrifice something, you're all talk (and not even in person to your coworkers' faces)? Can you forgive an admirer of yours for seeing this as weak, disappointing, and hypocritical?
"Well, my small contribution wouldn't make a difference - they'd just fire me and hire someone who'd acquiesce", you might say. But everyone could say that in every situation where resisting is a possibility. Everyone does say that, which is why Blues keep winning. It's a classic collective action problem.
I'm not trying to shame you. Well, okay, maybe a little. But I am actually genuinely curious whether you conceive of a grander justification for your small participation in the Blues' battle. Are you biding your time? Are you under the impression that the solution is going to be political and thus our personal actions in non-political life aren't actually making things worse?
I'm surprised no one has mentioned what I see as the biggest problem with this. Do we really want presidents to effectively unilaterally nullify laws the president thinks are wrong? How would those in the blue tribe react if a President Trump pardoned Jan 6th offenders? How would those in the red tribe react if a President Kamala Harris pardoned BLM rioters (supposing some future 2020-summer-of-unrest-like scenario where offenders were charged federally, for the sake of keeping this comparison apt)?
Yes, presidents have the power to pardon, but I don't think we should let that slide into something that looks quite like undermining the separation of powers. This is just the latest in a long-running series of examples (student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, vaccine mandates via OSHA, Trump's border wall funding via "emergency" powers, DACA under Obama) where the executive is trying to usurp power that belongs to the legislature.
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