Jiro
2mo ago
Who wrote "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore" on the statue of Liberty?
She wrote that when there were essentially no social services that immigrants could run up the bill for, and most of the immigrants were coming from faraway countries that they couldn't walk back to, giving them more reason to assimilate.
Jiro
7mo ago
But he could still decide to stop doing that at literally any moment.
So could anyone else. If a woman is employed, her employer could fire her. If she works in a store the government could zone the area and make it illegal to operate the store.
There's a difference between a not 100% certain source of income and no income. Counting the former as the latter is lying with figures.
Jiro
8mo ago
Charity is one of those things where some people need more, some people need less, and you can't aim the advice at the people who need it. And the reason we've come up with the quokka idea is that rationalists have a habit of not understanding that attacks are attacks and treating them with excess charity, like Scott not thinking that Cade Metz was malicious from the very start and if he had only been nicer to Metz, Metz would have written a completely fair article, or like this post.
What are the minimal changes necessary to get an epsilon away from the current model of "government guarantees the entire loan amount with no conditions and it's not dischargeable in bankruptcy, with private lenders available" and towards a model that incentivizes better behavior in schools and students?
Simple, try to change the law so that student loans can be discharged in bankruptcy.
The fact that it's hard to explain things to the average person helps you here. Average people will see it as "help graduates who owe a lot of money by at least letting them go bankrupt". They won't think about how it incentivizes universities to give loans only for useful majors, because they won't think about incentives at all. The left can't complain that you can't get loans for feminist studies because the cause and effect from allowing bankruptcy to that result won't fit in a sound bite.
(Someone points out below that a lot of loans are direct, which may make this harder.)
Jiro
5mo ago
The road network exists because the government collected taxes to build it. In the absence of taxes you could have (collectively) gotten roads built on your own without the excuse for government meddling.
By your reasoning if the government shut down all grocery stores and instead taxed us more to buy food, which it then distributed, it would be okay for the government to put arbitrary restrictions on what food people are allowed to eat since after all you're getting the food thanks to them. It's thanks to taxpayers, not thanks to the government.
Jiro
20d ago
It's like letting the police use stun guns. If you give the authorities "less severe" options, they can get away with using them more without being raked over the coals by the general public, or at least with being treated more leniently by the courts. So the more lenient punishment is not going to be just used as a replacement for a more severe one, it will also be used against more people, more often. Having a sort of half-jail makes it a lot easier for people who haven't done any real harm, but are easy to catch and punish under anarcho-tyranny, to be punished. (You can even argue that probation works like this already. Caning, as suggested by someone below, would be in danger of ending up like this this too.)
Jiro
2mo ago
So do it again. Say fine, trans women are women, and they should be modest and wear makeup and stay at home to raise the adopted kids.
That doesn't work, because "trans women are women" means treating them as women for the purpose of sports, prisons, bathrooms, etc. Treating gay people as married doesn't mean letting them do any controversial things. And having your child decide one day that they're trans is a lot bigger problem than having your child decide one day that they're gay.
Say sure, diversity is a strength, so lets hire some black CEOs who align with our mission to crush unions, roll back regulations, and lobby for tax cuts for the rich.
If you loosen the requirement to "CEOs are social justice allies but can be any skin color", we're already getting that. We just end up with CEOs who crush unions, roll back regulations, lobby for tax cuts for the rich, and still promote their ideology in everything they can get their hands on that doesn't personally disadvantage themselves. The guy in charge of Google Gemini may not literally be a CEO, but he's a person in charge of a project at a big corporation, and I'm sure he's not going to start a campaign in support of unions at Google, but the project itself was DEI enough that even regular media can notice.
Jiro
4mo ago
I would blame the progressives for having standards which enable it. If you say no gatekeeping, if you try your best to keep parents out of the process, if you go out of your way to laud how trans people are brave strugglers against the outside world, if you make sure that anyone speaks up against the trans gets fired from their job, you're going to get a lot of social contagion trans, regardless of whether you're backing them explicitly.
Jiro
7mo ago
I think another explanation is that the environmental movement includes a lot of people who are ideologically opposed to energy use and a lot of modern technology. Environmental measures that tell people to cut down on their energy usage are what they want. Environmental measures which relieve the need to cut down on energy are not what they want, and that's what promoting nuclear power to help global warming does.
Jiro
8mo ago
That's the equivalent of "I met a poor person who genuinely needed a car, and the US budget is obviously able to handle giving out a car, so we should buy cars for every poor person who needs a car."
Even if the immigrant isn't a criminal and can get a job at a reasonable salary, the problem is the country only has resources for a limited number of immigrants. Because the drain on resources is distributed as a zillion dust specks, if you peer at any specific example it will always seem like that particular example couldn't possibly drain enough resources to matter, no matter where you put the limit. But cumulatively, doing that ends up meaning completely open borders and no limit at all.
Or in other words, the sympathy for the individual immigrant is a concentrated benefit, while the drain on resources is a distributed harm, so it's always going to look like we should add just one more immigrant because we don't balance concentrated benefits and distributed harms very well.
Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive
From a rationalist point of view, this can be one of the bad things about the whole process. It's easy for some position to not "be generally persuasive" in the sense of "quoting it on CNN or sending it to your employer gets you in trouble", yet actually be fairly reasonable. I'm sure you can think of a number of examples (perhaps some low controversy examples would be "yes, I should run over a fat man with a trolley" or "yes, there is some acceptable non-zero level of violent crime", but many examples are very political).
There's also the problem of absolute statements made about noncentral examples. You can't say "Thomas Jefferson is a noncentral example of a racist" on the Internet. (Not that most of the audience knows what a noncentral example is anyway.)
And finally there's epistemic learned helplessness. The proper reaction to someone "disproving your position" is to politely ignore them. If you've checked around for a while, and haven't found any good counter-counterarguments even when you aren't being put on the spot and have some time and access to research, then maybe you can start changing your position.
Jiro
9mo ago
No, heavywater said something completely incorrect.
Is this a "someone is wrong on the Internet" post?
What he said that was "incorrect" is completely irrelevant to 1) the point he was making and 2) people's ability to understand the point he was making.
I really don't care if that Starbucks coffee is a "Venti" instead of a large and "correcting" that is just pedantry.
Jiro
9mo ago
First, if I'm Mexico, I am absolutely not letting the US unilaterally violate treaties we have made with them.
Ah, a treaty that requires that we make illegal activity easier.
I believe this is called policy laundering.
Jiro
11mo ago
this is being blamed on the usual "racist backlash" but oh dear those racist East Asians who aren't going to see it, tsk tsk!
I also recall that the Last Jedi did poorly in China because the actors weren't attractive.
Jiro
1mo ago
I have occasionally mused in the last few years that mandatory national service after high school would probably improve national cohesiveness.
This hasn't been how it's worked in Russia.
Also, the usual moral hazard of forcing people to work for you and not letting them quit.
Jiro
1mo ago
I would err on the side of extending leniency to posters with viewpoints that are underrepresented on this forum.
I would not. It's the moderation equivalent of not putting BLM protestors in jail because they're on the side of the left.
Justice should mean equal treatment. If equal treatment leads to disparate impact because one side commits more crime, so be it.
Jiro
3mo ago
If conservative publishers get cancelled, "picking up the $20 bill" is going to amount to "create your own social media and your own bookstore chain". In some cases it may mean "create your own payment processor".
Conservative book publishing outside of some of Baen doesn't have access to a general audience, and anything that gets big enough that it can try to sell to a general audience is going to get driven out of business. There will always be individuals selling on Amazon Kindle, but the audience will be tiny, just like there are always forums like themotte, but the audience is tiny.
Jiro
5mo ago
How about "Calling for the genocide of Jews is disgusting and distasteful in the extreme, but it is absolutely protected speech under Brandenburg v. Ohio and does not in itself constitute prohibited bullying or harassment."
Harvard can't say that because all the other things that they do claim are bullying or harassment keep them from being able to say it honestly.
If they say that, the next question would be about whether Trump support, Islamophobia, etc. are prohibited bullying or harassment.
Jiro
9mo ago
No, he's not saying that. You've got it exactly backwards. Read more closely:
What if transphobia is our culture’s version of the penis-stealing witch panic? Wise but evil women (gender studies professors) are using incomprehensible black arts (post-modernism) to make people lose their penises. Sure, those people are losing their penises through voluntary sex-change surgery, but this is just another case of the general principle that we replace the magical explanations natural to other cultures with the medicalized explanations natural to our own.
Scott isn't saying that the belief that transphobia is a threat is the panic and that transphobia isn't very big. He's saying that transphobia itself is the panic; transphobes are treating the pro-trans movement as evil penis-stealing witches.
Scott's dunking on his transphobe outgroup here. It's the exact opposite of saying that the trans movement has gone too far.
Jiro
10mo ago
Except Narnia isn't just a children's tale. It's about faith all right--it's a metaphor about religion and God. "People have actually been to Narnia, but they reject it anyway" is a close match to a common Christian strawman of atheists: that atheists have enough evidence to believe and they just refuse out of sinful arrogance.
And Lewis is too smart a person to not recognize that "people have been to Narnia but they still don't believe" matches this Christian strawman. If it's there, Lewis put it there on purpose.
Jiro
11mo ago
If you read the decision, the judges believed that the union deliberately timed the strike to happen after the concrete was mixed. If so, they deliberately caused the damage and the strike shouldn't be permitted.
Jiro
3mo ago
The elite not liking Trump isn't a bare fact with no implications. The fact that the elite doesn't like Trump means that if Trump gave up all distinctively Trump positions and tried to act like an establishment Republican, it wouldn't work. So there's no chance of Trump trying to appease the Democrats by becoming a "moderate"--he'd just lose his base and he wouldn't get anything.
You can't prove whether Desantis is going to backslide, but you can know that he's able to backslide.
Jiro
4mo ago
You could have tried a little harder to find links to some of the PD ones.
Fanny Hill and Ars Amatoria are on Project Gutenberg.
Reconstruction Political and Economic 1865-1877 (you should link to one of the better scans, Google Books has problems with images) and Red Network are on archive dot org.
No they don't. They may think "well, I don't know if trans is correct for my kid, I'm sure the doctor can figure it out". They'll assume that the doctor would act like a professional and diagnose based on objective standards that might say yes, but might say no.
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