Jiro
11mo ago
LoTT isn't powerless. But she is less powerful than, say, the New York Times or Washington Post, and doesn't have the resources of such organizations.
Claiming that someone is less powerful than someone else doesn't make them powerless.
Jiro
11mo ago
If woke cancellation tactics were already forms of disproportionate retribution against random unknown people, how is adopting the same tactic on the right going to result in a better equilibrium?
It decreases the overall acceptability of disproportionate retribution among people on the other side. It's the same reason why woke cancellation is a threat in the first place: it affects few people directly, but it intimidates a lot more.
But there’s at least some mainstream thought such as some research here including citations in the intro that suggests nonviolent protests were associated with both successful campaigns and shift in vote share more often and more strongly than violent ones.
Nonviolent protests, especially back then, ran under good cop/bad cop where the violent protests made the nonviolent ones effective.
There's also the fact that "nonviolent" and "doesn't cause harm" aren't the same thing. Protests in the 60s were absolutely meant to cause harm to members of the outgroup. Telling your employer that you tweeted in support of assassination is a nonviolent protest (and so is firing someone for that tweet).
Jiro
11mo ago
This is not what "is Trump's fault" means in this context. To many Biden voters, Covid is Trump's fault in the sense that he is responsible for poorly responding to it.
It's implicit. A number of people made the comparison, and there were more on the old thread.
Jiro
11mo ago
Clearly the intent was to make people wear masks as much as possible, except when incompatible with other desiderata like being able to consume food in a public setting; what do you think would have been a better rule to settle this trade-off without causing uncertainty and enabling a lot more disruptive haggling?
"You should wear a mask except when predominently engaged in activities that require being maskless". Eating takes up most of one's time in a restaurant.
As for people like OP, ... Their existence protects against sliding into the sort of illegible system where the written rules are never the actual rules, enabling corruption and causing friction everywhere.
Trump's prosecution was already a case where the written rules aren't the actual rules, because people are not usually prosecuted for his crime. The OP was being a concern troll, not trying to follow a universal rule.
Jiro
11mo ago
Then you are weird enough that your reactions should not be used as a guide for rules dealing with ordinary people.
Jiro
11mo ago
Believing that the president should order a hit squad on Trump implies that Trump is such a danger that that's required. Claiming that he's that dangerous encourages violence from everyone, not just from a government raiding party.
I wouldn't have this kind of problem with someone asserting that Trump should be arrested and given the death penalty after a fair trial, but not many people will say that, precisely because that doesn't imply that he needs to be killed by any means possible.
Jiro
11mo ago
It's possible to disfigure a man with boiling water without immersing him in it.
Jiro
11mo ago
The difference in this case is that the cops were holding all the cards: they're armed, she's in a nightie; they're big and beefy, she's a tiny woman.
... and that in the scenario of you walking down the street, it's very unlikely that the person rebuking you had a pot of boiling water.
Jiro
11mo ago
"Never trust anything that can think for itself, if you can’t see where it keeps its brain." I'm not confident that we can see where a given Administration keeps its brain.
I think that this metaphor makes a lot of sense when applied to a presidential administration, especially one riding on a movement that isn't about them, but the comparison of figurative thing to literal thing in the metaphor makes my head spin. When would you actually run into something where you don't know where it keeps its brain?
Jiro
11mo ago
For example, when a poster suspected of being trans on 4chan is met with countless replies of “you will never be a woman”, I doubt that those replies’ authors are not intending to cause pain.
On 4chan? 4chan specializes in being outrageous, which also serves as a filter to keep outsiders away. Everyone gets attacked on 4chan.
Jiro
11mo ago
Running a campaign is likely to fail for factors unrelated to whether my views are either better than or popular than the president's.
And if I disagree with both a cop and the president, should I try to become both at the same time?
Jiro
11mo ago
Somehow I doubt that Roosevelt would have endorsed that if you don't like a retail service worker, a cop, the president, and restaurant food, you should endeavor to become a service worker, a cop, and a president all at the same time, while cooking food. That's just absurd. It's completely sensible to disagree with how someone does a specific facet of their job, and expect to be taken seriously, even if you aren't willing to do their job yourself.
Telling people that they shouldn't criticize the president unless they've been in a presidential campaign just amounts to "pretty much nobody's allowed to criticize the president".
Jiro
11mo ago
Going with your cellular automata analogy, you're missing that people don't have knowledge of the global landscape, only their local neighborhood.
In the modern world, this is true for nobody relevant to the question.
Jiro
11mo ago
The reaction of a large chunk of Western elites to Gaza can't be explained just by being scared.
Jiro
11mo ago
There's a large chunk of the elites that are sympathetic to Gaza and oppose Israel, in ways that can't be explained by just being afraid.
Jiro
11mo ago
Sports illustrated swimsuit models are wearing swimsuits. They're not strippers.
Jiro
11mo ago
In this case, sure. But as a general rule, that doesn't work as well as you imply.
First of all, it's a matter of framing. People are likely to assume that having committed a crime predicts someone's future behavior a lot more than it actually does, particularly if the crime is described in general terms. This won't matter much if it's 19 versus 12 which is pretty bad regardless, but suppose the government lumped together some things of different severity? You're a sex criminal if you have sex with a 12 year old, but you're also a sex criminal if you accidentally expose yourself if there's no bathroom and you try to take a leak behind a building. And all that the general public sees in the criminal history is "sex criminal". The public will treat the latter guy as badly as the former. In theory they could look him up in further detail, say "well, he just took a leak behind a building", and discount their judgment appropriately, but many people will take shortcuts and not do this.
Second, it's a moral hazard if you assume an imperfect justice system. It's true that a conviction predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. It's also true that an accusation without a conviction or any evidence predicts bad behavior in a Bayseian sense. By the same reasoning that applies to convictions, we should pay attention to accusations made without evidence. But the danger of this is obvious: it's a market for lemons situation. You don't know whether the accusation is baseless or not, but the person "selling" the accusation does, and therefore has an incentive to "sell" baseless accusations. An imperfect justice system that occasionally convicts disliked people on a three-felonies-a-day basis will face the same incentives as the person making baseless accusations.
Applying these to Trump's conviction is an exercise for the reader.
Jiro
11mo ago
If she had said 0.1 percent, it would have probably failed to inspire the same reaction.
What do you think of the high rate of trans associated with social media consumption by kids?
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