JTarrou
2d ago
I believe rights come with responsibilities. If cops are going to get the benefit of the doubt in use of force because it's their job (as I believe they should to some degree), then they owe a moral debt to those they defend. Laws are thin and high, but I honestly don't know how this guy lives with himself. I'd have slapped that police chief in his bitch face and gone through the door, because I don't want to spend every night for the rest of my life wishing I had. Dying is easy compared to that. A reprimand is nothing.
The law cannot solve every problem. We have to enforce the norms we want to see. My words mean nothing in society, and relatively little in the more rarified air of professional violence. But I've seen my days. I've made those calls, and there's 0-5s no doubt alive today who can tell you exactly how well their orders worked when they ran counter to the mores and interests of my team.
Every man on his worst day should be judged by his peers. For those cops, I am their peer. If there be any honor in violence, surely it is from the defense of the weak. Sixty armed men listening to children die? Utterly contemptible. Every single one should do the honorable thing, it should never have come to a court case. They should lacquer their badges into the floor under the urinals of the school. Their children should take their mother's surname. Their parents should cut them out of every family photo.
In the hierarchy of violence known colloquially as "honor", these men are the lowest of the low. Cowards who shirked their duty when it mattered most. I'd rather have a hitman for the cartels at my dinner table than one of the Uvalde cops. All who train for that terrible day that probably won't come gaze in horror, pity and contempt at those whose day came and who failed the moment. Complete moral collapse. Dishonor.
Today, we do not hold our men of violence to such standards. Which is why we are policed by dishonorable cowards.
JTarrou
3d ago
It may not matter legally, in court, but it absolutely matters to society at large. Any criminal justice system will be ragged around the edges, all states are organized violence. It matters what group the mistakes and violations run against in general.
If the cops unjustifiably kill someone with forty felonies, run the legal process, but don't ask me to give a fuck. Society is better off no matter how cruel or unjustified the actual police behavior is. That has to be balanced against the costs imposed by the dead criminal.
If the cops unjustifiably kill some random law-abiding productive citizen with a family and community, that's much worse. It not only means that the police are poorly trained, but that they are being aimed at a part of society they shouldn't be. Mistakes will happen, but it isn't difficult to make the judgement between these sorts of cases.
Of course, in the media we are constantly told that the second scenario is happening, which on inspection turns out to be the first.
JTarrou
9d ago
FWIW, I think IQ testing should be used to track all public schoolkids into an appropriate educational stream. I think it explains a whole lot about the world nobody but places like this want to talk about. But it is not something to be optimized at the cost of all other endeavors.
For academics, it is the primary requirement. For everyone else, the diminishing returns kick in fast.
JTarrou
9d ago
ven when range-restricted to the top 1% of 13-year-old test-takers on the SAT math, the four quartiles among The One Percent follow a rank-order with respect to any doctorate, STEM publications, STEM doctorates, patents, whether-95th-percentile-income eventually attained.
Yes, IQ and its proxies predict academic success. That's what I said. Our economy is set up to award higher incomes to those with higher education, thus the income. But this is just circular logic. High paying jobs are mostly gated behind advanced degrees, which require at least an average IQ to fudge and a high one to excel at. Give out jobs based on who is the best basketball player, and height would predict income just fine.
JTarrou
9d ago
I've spent most of my life associating with the lower half of the IQ distribution. I'm well aware of the failure modes and ridiculous behavior of the dummies. Stupidity, however, is its own limiting factor.
The failure modes of intellect have basically no upper bound.
JTarrou
10d ago
Humans can survive nearly anything, and die to nearly anything. But injury is fucking easy. People pretend that anything short of death isn't a big deal, but death isn't why violence is scary. Every violent situation contains a distinct possibility of major injury for someone, usually everyone involved. The sort of thing that changes your life forever.
Even without death, a simple fistfight will almost certainly require months of healing and rehab, if you win. More if you lose. It is rare that a real fight ends without both participants having broken bones. Fingers and toes the most common, of course. Add weapons/vehicles and this risk skyrockets. There are a world of outcomes from violent situations, but few of them are as good for either party as before the fight. Even winning without injury has its psychological and social costs.
JTarrou
10d ago
Most positive traits correlate somewhat. So do most negative ones.
The problem with intelligence is that it makes you retarded. Smart people can convince themselves of anything, and thus lose connection with reality in proportion to how smart they are.
Take Scott's most recent post on child rearing for an obvious example. He's the smartest person I've ever met personally, and he's a tard.
JTarrou
11d ago
All well and good so long as we remember that "Merit" as measured by IQ is just the ability to do well in school and learn complicated things. It is not some end, just a talent like hand-eye coordination.
As to the rest, the absolute best any non-elite can ever hope for from the universe or a test is blind fairness. Anyone who thinks we can weight things one way or the other to offset "privilege" is just building a privilege generator.
JTarrou
11d ago
Violence is an inherently high-variance activity. Those who whine about the necessity of violence are fundamentally immature.
There's a common scene in street fights where a girl starts a fight, drags her man into it, then impedes him in the fight so he loses. This is the basic strategy of the political left, and the psychology that underwrites it is identical.
JTarrou
11d ago
Without offending the bleeding heart types who do nothing to help but condemn anything that might?
Here's the trick, you start with them.
JTarrou
12d ago
"Democracy" just means oligarchy, and always has. Every appeal for the common people, teh working class, the proletariat is in fact an appeal for one faction of the ruling elite to triumph over another to rule in their stead. Elections are just another layer of complexity to be controlled by by the oligarchy.
The reason "Democracy" always turns to "Tyranny" is that the oligarchy is so loathsome to the actual common people that they'd rather have a king. They'd rather be ruled by the general with the biggest nuts than a consortium of college professors, propagandists and bureaucrats. And they are right to do so.
JTarrou
15d ago
See, I think it's Russia, and Denmark is just happy collateral damage.
But I am generally in favor of rubbing Europe's nose in its failed sovereignty and the consequences of demilitarizing.
JTarrou
16d ago
Depends on who you think is being fucked with. Greenland, Denmark, or Russia?
JTarrou
16d ago
It is possible that the world order is turning towards one in which Great Powers (USA, Russia, China, and maybe the EU) hold influence over the smaller countries in their vicinity.
Perhaps you could point me to the time in history when this wasn't the case? There is no turning, there is no change, there is not even a policy difference. Only rhetoric. As you note, the US has had a military and resource interest in Greenland for a century. We already have access, we already took the place over once. The only thing that's new is Trump saying things on Truth Social. Trump is vocalizing actual US policy, as opposed to the fake policy everyone else pretends we're doing for PR reasons. Real international politiks are real.
JTarrou
16d ago
I think your model of "isolationists" needs some nuance. Very few people believe in zero US military action anywhere in the world at any time. We have a lot of security issues on our plate as global hegemon. We have a lot of national interests, and a lot of disagreement over what those are.
All presidents preach a less involved foreign policy than they actually produce once they're in office. What voters and "isolationists" seem not to like is long, expensive, bloody, drawn out conflicts. By that metric, Trump's military actions have been notably limited, most of all the Maduro op. The success of the operation sort of cuts out the legs from any isolationists arguing against it. Similar to the Iran bombing, which all the isolationists said would be WW3, and........wasn't.
JTarrou
16d ago
He could also have shot to wound
This is stereotypically the response of someone who knows absolutely nothing about firearms, violent encounters, the law around use of force or really anything at all relevant to a police shooting. It is so perfectly wrong that it delegitimizes anything else a person might say about the subject. It misunderstands the law, the morality around use of force, the physical capabilities of small arms and the reasonable limits of police training.
JTarrou
18d ago
The fundamental question seems to be whether prediction markets are basically gambling or basically banking. For prediction markets to work at scale, they have to be on the gambling side. The question is whether people's innate risk-aversion leads them to treating it more like banking, which ruins the point of a prediction market in the first place.
The whole point of a prediction market is that people with inside knowledge will exploit it, thus leading to shifts in the odds line, thus leading to that insider information being communicated to all of us, anonymously through the price signal.
JTarrou
20d ago
It's just bait. Most kids aren't that enjoyable for most adults to interact with, plenty of exceptions of course. You're not supposed to say it because society has a guilt complex over how anti-natal we are. Here's the basic truth, so long as the kids are fed, clothed and housed reasonably well, not sexually or physically abused, the parents have done their job. Decent parenting isn't this crazy life-destroying thing that people make it out to be as if "tiger momming" was a good idea. You don't have to spend thirty-six hours a day enriching your kid. All that bullshit is posturing for other parents, not for the kids.
JTarrou
22d ago
There's another big one: Our military speaks spanish and doesn't speak the six thousand dialects of the middle east. Having reliable communication with the locals is a pretty big deal.
JTarrou
22d ago
Did the bombing of teh Iranian nuclear facilities start a general war? Trump has ordered a fair few military actions, but none of them so far have lead to a wider conflict. Every time he does this, or engages in some sabre-rattling diplomacy, everyone shrieks that he's starting WW3 and wasn't he supposed to be anti-war?
Well, can't know what's in Trump's head. What we can know is the track record. I oppose a general invasion of Venezuela and hope that isn't Trump's plan. As far as a night of bombing and snatching a foreign head of state? It's cool if you get away with it.
JTarrou
25d ago
I think you're mistaking the advertising for the substance. From my dim memories of PK, it was a lot of complementarian christian feminism packaged in terms like "being a prayer warrior". A lot of "You need to be the leader of your household (by taking your wife's advice on everything)". There was absolutely nothing there about how to game single women, keeping wives in line, excelling in competitive endeavors etc. Nothing of what you're talking about. It was much more #2 than #1.
Furthermore, the whole "alpha/beta" thing is a useful shorthand perhaps, but not super descriptive of the phenomena we're talking about. You can't make large numbers of men "alpha" because it is an inherently zero-sum competitive thing. Those who claim to teach this are selling snake oil. There can be only one in any given room or situation. If we're talking how to appeal to women, the answer is contextual respect. You just need to achieve something respectable, and be a leader in a context that tickles a particular woman.
Of course, lots of men have contextual dominance of a field that reduces their appeal to most women. Being top DPS on your MMO raiding guild is competitive and zero-sum, but unlikely to attract many girls (though not zero). Being the least gay dude in a community theater is easier and better odds. The most sexually successful men I know are a pastor, a bartender/part owner of the bar, and a guy who organizes community bike rides. When you understand why this is, you understand contextual dominance.
Been a minute since I looked at the floor schematics, but I'm pretty sure the room had multiple doors. Get teams with a shield up front and a ram, charge, breaching shotgun or Halligan on each entrance and go to work. If one team is pushed back by fire, the others can work on the other doors. Yes, some guys are probably gonna catch rounds, but with body armor and a shield, plus the perp is shooting through walls and metal doors, risk of death minimal.
I also want to say there were ground level windows in the room, which could have been covered by teams outside the building. As a tactical problem, this one was pretty fucking easy.
Keys. The fuck outta here.
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