Jiro
1yr ago
In 1989, the dictator of Romania, Nicolae Ceaușescu, was giving a public speech. Suddenly a single person started booing. And then another. Within a day, Romania was in revolt and four days later Ceaușescu had been tried and executed.
The context for that was that the rest of Eastern Europe was already in revolt.
Jiro
1yr ago
The crazy reality of Martin (etc) is that it really did treat homelessness as "a class with an immutable status that confers protections". In particular, under that line of cases, the involuntarily homeless could not be punished for anything that was a logical necessity for the homeless.
And the dissent didn't really bother with that. In Powell v. Texas the court ruled that just because the crime was involuntary doesn't mean it couldn't be banned. So the dissent denies that it's about being involuntary:
The Powell Court considered a statute that criminalized voluntary conduct (getting drunk) that could be rendered involuntary by a status (al- coholism); here, the Ordinances criminalize conduct (sleeping outside) that defines a particular status (homelessness). So unlike the debate in Powell, this case does not turn on whether the criminalized actions are “ ‘involuntary’ or ‘occasioned by’ ” a particular status.
Jiro
1yr ago
I'd assume that most people who use illegal drugs don't care about violating rules if they can get away with it. This would mean they're more likely to violate rules against using performance enhancers as well as rules against recreational drugs. It's not because the pleasure drugs and the performance enhancers are similar, it's because the same kind of people use both.
Jiro
1yr ago
The most obvious reason why more people questioned the Iraq war than oppose Russia is that the Iraq war was more questionable than opposition to Russia.
Jiro
1yr ago
That's true, but if I recall correctly, when I was looking at different causes of death in the United States, swimming pools turned out to kill a similar number of people (mostly young kids) to accidental gun deaths in the United States annually.
That says more about accidental gun deaths than it says about swimming pools.
Jiro
1yr ago
Getting enough sleep and eating right doesn't harm you. Neither does being rich. Using Adderall does, and if you don't prohibit it you get a race to the bottom where everyone takes it, everyone is as bad off as they would otherwise be (because the competitive advantages all cancel out), except they're worse because they also have the negative effects of Adderall.
Jiro
1yr ago
Wolverine wasn't the illegal immigrant standin. The mutant farm was in Mexico and Laura spoke mostly Spanish.
Jiro
1yr ago
because sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon, it's not going to save the LGBT if the culture shifts.
Sexual abuse allegations are a superweapon in the same way that racism accusations are a superweapon. You can't actually use them against anyone; you can use them against people lower on the oppression scale.
Jiro
1yr ago
Did you really think there are producers willing to front $100mm to make a movie about Gaza, inflation, illegal migrants, Trump, covid, BLM, metoo, or climate change?
I'd count Logan as being about illegal immigration.
It sounds like Playboy may have done this, though it's hard to tell. They tried to drop nudity in 2015 (which Hefner admitted was a mistake) and had to walk it back. Then (Wikipedia):
Playboy announced in February 2017, however, that the dropping of nudity had been a mistake and furthermore, for its March/April issue, reestablished some of its franchises, including the Playboy Philosophy and Party Jokes, but dropped the subtitle "Entertainment for Men", inasmuch as gender roles have evolved. The announcement was made by the company's chief creative officer on Twitter with the hashtag #NakedIsNormal.[61]
Following Hefner's death, and his family's financial stake in the company, the magazine changed direction. In 2019, Playboy was relaunched as a quarterly publication without adverts. Topics covered included an interview with Tarana Burke, a profile of Pete Buttigieg, coverage of BDSM and a cover photo representing gender and sexual fluidity.[1]
It went online-only in 2020.
Jiro
1yr ago
The anti-racism movement started well before the gay rights movement, so by this reasoning we should be in the middle of a massive backlash among the youth against any sort of anti-racism movements. It's fair to say that we don't have that.
Jiro
1yr ago
I flat out do not think anyone could make even a half-compelling case for Biden nationalizing Twitter.
Then pick a different example. There has to be some unlikely scenario. Let's go with your original court packing one.
You care about unlikely scenarios that happen at the 5-10% level, yet you don't care about unlikely scenarios that happen at the 3-5% level. Even assuming I fix the numbers so it isn't exactly at 5 (which is covered by both ranges), that's making a really, really, fine distinction. I simply would not be able to estimate such things with enough precision to say "well, maybe it's as high as 3-5%. but it couldn't possibly be as high as 5-10%". And I highly doubt you could really make such estimates either. It's not only subjective, but it can't be anything else; you're pulling numbers out of your hat.
Jiro
1yr ago
I think I'm still allowed to be worried about that 5-10%, because to me, that's well beyond my comfortable threshold for electing a president.
...
I'm mildly afraid that Biden will consider a court-packing plan, but this probability I place at more like 3-5%. Trump gets weighted higher at 6-10%. This is subjective, thus I don't expect people to agree.
Thatt's not just subjective, it's so subjective that your conclusion entirely depends on the subjective part. I mean, I could say "Biden has a 5-10% chance of cutting off aid to Sarael" or "Biden has a 5-10% chance of nationalizing Twitter" based on nothing whatsoever, and the percentage is small enough that it would be hard to argue exact numbers.
Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen.
Trans people want to be called by their assumed sex because they're well aware that the word for that sex already has a preexisting meaning, and they want to be treated as though that preexisting meaning applies to themselves. Claiming that words can mean anything you want is disingenuous because if the words really did mean anything you wanted, trans people would no longer want to use them. And Zack already covered all of this.
The "sir" analogy doesn't work because people who want to be called "sir" don't do so because they want to be treated like English noblemen. The word did once refer to English noblemen, but people today are not using the word because they want to get in on the English nobleman business.
What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict.
Zack's extensive posts include direct references to the Sequences recommending otherwise.
The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as ...
You are conflating "not pushing back" with "actively promoting".
Jiro
1yr ago
Can someone help me understand the continuing opposition to Citizens United?
The press misreported it for political reasons and people believed them.
Jiro
1yr ago
Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.
Jiro
1yr ago
That assumes that the phone number is there for security. It's actually there so that Google can collect information about you and correlate it with other information about you that uses the phone number. The claim that it's there for security is a lie.
Jiro
1yr ago
If you're presenting bad evidence, the solution is for you to present better evidence. Not for you to demand that someone else present better evidence. Bad evidence is not something you get to use in the absence of something better.
Jiro
1yr ago
This assumes that it is possible to not break the law. "Three felonies a day" is exaggerated only in that the number is less than three per day. It's still plenty per career.
It's saying "this is bad evidence". In the case of bad evidence it's inherently true that if it does exist, it's bad evidence, and if it doesn't exist, it's no evidence. By your reasoning, all claims that something is bad evidence are unfalsifiable.
It is not unfalsifiable, because you can dispute whether the evidence is bad. It's just that in this case, disputing that the evidence is bad would make you look foolish.
Jiro
1yr ago
Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?
Zack Davis's posts on LW lay out the case for that in exhaustive detail, though he covers Yudkowsky more than Scott.
by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.
This grants him too much charity. To put it another way, there's a motte and bailey. The "simplified rephrasing" is the motte. Like when he arged that medicine doesn't work, where the motte was that, well, medicine didn't work, and the bailey was a bunch of much less serious criticisms of medicine that are much easier to defend than "medicine doesn't work".
I'd give him a pass on that. It's actually demonstrating a problem with birthright citizenship.
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