Jiro
7hr ago
Ad campaigns cause outrage--and should cause outrage--as if the things in them were said sincerely instead of being calculated. You could even make that a general principle: if someone makes a calculated move about something whose truth they don't really care about, but screws up and does or says something terrible, you get to judge them on it anyway. "I was only pretending to be a jerk" is never an excuse.
Jiro
1d ago
Things that are true can sound an awful lot like things that are false; you need to look at the object level to determine how true and how false the accusations are, not just pattern-match it to what Hitler did. I'm reminded of CS Lewis' remarks about witches: if there really were people in league with the devil, then we ought to persecute them. Witch hunts are bad only because witches aren't real.
Jiro
1d ago
If they're second or third generation, the immigration/naturalization process can't have weeded them out (at least not directly).
Jiro
1d ago
It's much easier for your GDP per capita to go up by a larger factor if you start at a small number, so the comparison to American GDP proves nothing.
Jiro
2d ago
Time savings is linear in distance. I personally don't think it matters much until we're getting to pretty significant distance trips
Time savings per hour spent speeding is constant. The shorter distance also has a shorter speeding time.
Jiro
2d ago
He can definitely afford $15k + installation.
They're not trying to test "can he afford 15K", they're trying to test "is he willing to pay 15K", which is a subset of that. He may have enough assets that 15K wouldn't make a dent in his budget, but that doesn't mean he's actually willing to pay.
Jiro
7d ago
Probably a lot of the people posting here who criticize it aren't against vaccines (although even then I'm not so sure). This place is, compared to the general population, weird.
Except it is patently clear that the audience for this public shaming doesn't exist anymore.
It never needed an audience. It's always been a relatively small number of people doing it--these people just have a lot of power. It doesn't matter that, for instance, Disney refuses to make white men a big part of its audience most of the time. So they lose some money, they don't care. They aren't going to go out of business or get fired because of it.
Also, bear in mind that woke media can get popular. The audience is probably race blind and sex blind in the way that used to be considered good and now marks you as a fascist. They don't actually object to the media being woke at all unless it's very over the top (lectures about how straight men are evil, 100% female cast, etc.)--it's just that if the writers put a high priority on woke, they probably put a low priority on everything else such as good writing, so the odds are against woke things getting an audience. But it can still happen (Baldur's Gate 3 for instance).
Jiro
7d ago
I don't think mothers should be disadvantaged-- I think people who are relatively less capable, experienced, knowledgeable, etcetera in a job area should be disadvantaged. And unfortunately, raising children makes it harder to become those things.
Exactly how does that reasoning not apply to veterans too?
Jiro
7d ago
In theory, you could believe that one vaccine works independently of the others. In practice, not so much.
Jiro
8d ago
99% of the time, critics of the vaccine are anti-vaxxers. Weird rationalists are weird.
I can sort of see what tea leaves you're gesturing to. I just don't know what you mean exactly.
This is a tactic that allows mottes and baileys and is why we talk about speaking plainly. If he were to post that the vaccine is dangerous, it could be rebutted.
The main thing that distinguishes that from a troll post is that there is a lot of Covid skepticism here that he could be trying to appeal to, but the skepticism here is about lockdowns and the political handling of Covid, which is only his point 1. Everyone here (minus the lizardman constant) thinks vaccines work.
Jiro
9d ago
You may be aware of tariff shenanigans like coating sneakers in a layer of felt so that they count as slippers, adding flimsy temporary seats to cargo vans so that they count as passenger vans
Couldn't that be stopped with some language such as "products are classified based on their primary use"? If most people remove the felt or the seats, they then wouldn't count.
Jiro
9d ago
the foundation’s often bewilderingly destructive actions result from its complete faith in the superiority of liberal technocratic expertise to engineer a more perfect society from the top down.
Isn't wanting to engineer a perfect society from the top down, basically a Marxoid cabal by definition?
Jiro
11d ago
James spader’s character turns out to be a woman?
It isn't in the Wikipedia article.
Jiro
11d ago
If your family and friends were allied with Nazi Germany, you really should betray them and work for your country instead.
Jiro
12d ago
If Michelin-star restaurants are your requirement for "high quality food", then most people don't, and cannot eat high quality food most of the time they eat.
On the other hand, "the evidence presented by my enemies was adversarially selected" is a fully general counterargument.
Not really. It's just a fully general reason to reduce your confidence in the evidence (combined with rejecting evidence beneath a certain threshold). Your confidence may be reduced and there could still be enough left to believe it.
If someone says "I robbed the First National Bank at 11 AM on Tuesday", even if it's reported by your enemies, the fact that it's adversarily selected doesn't matter much, because it's hard to take that statement out of context without lying. (Things like "that's actually from a roleplaying game" are considered lies by normies.)
This is related to the discussion above as to why to believe the DHS when it says things about the immigrants it catches. For one thing, even an adversarial selector is believable if they say "this man was wanted for assault". They'll rarely lie and that's hard to take out of context.
Jiro
12d ago
Because the point there is...
There is no point there. But the reader is left to infer one. Of course, she can deny the reader's inferred point at any time when it gets inconvenient.
This is why people are asked to speak plainly.
Jiro
12d ago
If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him. - Cardinal Richelieu
You just did exactly this to James Watson. You have no right to complain about it.
Most of them are basically inconclusive; there are atrocities claimed that have no evidence for them, and DHS says the situation is some other way which also cannot be confirmed.
I'm not even convinced of this. Things like "this man is wanted for assault" and "was wielding a hammer and threw rocks" are things that could be verified. Maybe not immediately, but they can.
Very often the "atrocity" side is making highly emotive claims that aren't even really atrocities if you turn on your brain for a second or so
Of course, this factor is probably more important. The anti-immigrant side of these stories is obviously mostly or all spin even without having to decide whether the government was lying.
Jiro
14d ago
Except we recently had a government that literally lied on the facts - the Hunter Biden Laptop story is one such situation.
Like the media rarely lying, the government rarely lies. This was one of the rarelys. But even with a media that was mostly friendly to the government, there were significant sources questioning the government. If the DHS was lying here, the media would be going through the DHS's claims one by one and talking about how each one is a lie. The fact that that hasn't happened is a good sign that the DHS is telling the truth.
Also, the Hunter Biden laptop is one story. It would not be possible for the government to keep up a series of lies, one for every single immigrant arrest story.
You are being overly literal to hide what's being said.
Suddenly announcing that illegal orders from the President shouldn't be followed may literally be a hypothetical claiming that to the extent the orders are unlawful they don't need to be followed. But what it actually means is "the President is giving out illegal orders now and they should be disobeyed now," even if the speech doesn't literally include the word "now".
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