JulianRota
1yr ago
Okay so that's saying that some of the founders did find slavery abhorrent. I don't see how that proves your point though. They all appear to have united behind their cause primarily because they found political tyranny abhorrent. The fact that disliking slavery was a minority viewpoint which they chose to compromise on in order to achieve their primary objective of classical liberalism shows that that was indeed their primary objective. I'd say it shows the opposite of what you claim - the British showed little objection to slavery and the slave trade at the time (they wouldn't start to seriously oppose it until decades later), but at least some of the founders did oppose it, so they were at least slightly less "racist" and "white supremacist" than was the norm at the time.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Does it matter whether the Jan 6 protestors were fools or badasses? It may be satisfying to some, but I don't think it's very important to the country the moral value or lack thereof of the protestors. What's much more important is to what extent Congressional leadership and multiple high-level people in many military and law enforcement agencies coordinated to ensure that the Capitol would have very minimal protection on Jan 6 despite ample intelligence of how big of a protest there was going to be, as well as lots of provocateurs. Unless we believe Mr. Sund is completely full of shit, I think it's hard to conclude anything but that exactly that happened. They wanted an ugly riot and they did what it took to ensure that they got one.
JulianRota
1yr ago
To say accurately what the US was founded on, we should look at what the system was like before independence was declared and why they declared independence and fought a war against the most powerful army of the time for it.
The founders wrote the Declaration of Independence to proclaim their reasons for claiming it. It's published, you can go read it here. You'll see that it says nothing at all about slavery or race - it's all about civil rights, taxes, and various details about how the government works. Those were their beefs with the British system, not anything about slavery or race.
Indeed, it would be pretty weird for anything like that to be in there, considering that slavery and racism were near-universally approved of in those days. The British certainly had no problem with it at the time, and neither did any of the other colonizing powers. A claim that America was "founded on white supremacy" would only be accurate if the primary reason for declaring independence was that the British demanded that they tolerate colored people and they were sufficiently opposed to that to make war based upon it.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I wanted to write a bit about the ongoing adventures in Israel with Judicial Reform. I'm not a huge expert in the country or region myself, but I've got a few friends who lived there and keep pretty close track of things. They/I might be effectively biased as a result, but here's a decent summary of it from what I have read.
As background, the Israeli Supreme Court appears at a glance to be similar to the American one, but there are a number of critical differences. Notably, there is no Constitution there that the Courts are on paper obligated to make decisions about whether laws are compatible with. In addition, the nomination process for new Justices includes the current Justices having veto power over any new selections. And, beginning around the timeframe of the 90s, the court increasingly granted itself the power to override arbitrary government and military policies and decisions at will based on rather arbitrary criteria including “reasonableness,” “worthiness,” and the “principle of equality.”
And so, in the last few months, Netanyahu and his government have been attempting to pass a series of reforms the limit the power of the Judiciary. This has been met with remarkably fierce protests, seemingly from all levels of society. Many of the most highly respected institutions have (or at least seem to have) joined in, including tech workers, entrepreneurs, Air Force pilots, academics, labor unions, doctors, etc. The fundamental issue appears to be more whether you are for the current right-ist governments policies or for the ability of the courts to be essentially an arbitrary check on them. The usual canard of "danger to Democracy" seems to get thrown around a lot by the anti-reformists, but I'm not seeing it - how is it "Democracy" for unelected and unaccountable justices to arbitrarily override the policies of an elected government on their own whims?
In any case, the first phase of the reform appears to have gone through, with others in the works. It appears to be unclear whether the courts will attempt to strike down new laws limiting their own power, or exactly what would happen next if they did so.
The WSJ has a decent overall summary of the situation with some more details. This fellow is rather less neutral and more critical of the anti-reform movement. This op-ed has more details about specific actions the court has taken that many think are inappropriate.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm reading Time On The Cross. It's supposed to be a statistical economic analysis of the US Slavery system. It could probably be considered at least weak slavery apologism, in the vein of "it wasn't really all that bad". Not that I'm super into defending slavery, but the anti-slavery line has been so overdone by the modern Blue Team that I think it's in need of some defenders.
This seems to be a pattern in a number of historical subjects. Many things in the past were pretty bad, but if criticism of the bad things goes unchecked, then exactly how bad it actually is can get overstated and ridiculous exaggerations get spread by unethical grifters. You need at least some apologists or things get out of hand.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Just went to do volunteer duty, and a slot for a post in the list has the radio buttons but no actual post: https://imgur.com/a/AJogzPc
The other two posts in the 3 post list were perfectly normal, just the third one was completely blank - no content, date, or links.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I've wanted to remark for a while on the "tan suit" thing. I've been a pretty conventional conservative all through the Obama era. I'm not exactly glued to the media or anything, but I think I was following right wing media and forums around then pretty regularly. I still have no recollection of ever hearing about this tan suit thing from any conservative source at the time. I couldn't for the life of me name the year in which it happened.
I'm pretty sure I've only heard of it after the Obama era from Liberals trying to dunk on how lame criticism of Obama was. I tend to think they thought it sounded bad to claim Obama had no scandals, so they cherry picked the most ridiculous thing he was ever criticized on to make red team look bad, even though it was so tiny and insignificant in that world that nobody remembers it. Pretty good rhetorical tactic, I'll give them that.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I have a strap wrench I got for some maintenance task long ago. I keep it in the kitchen now because it also works great for opening any stubborn jars.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Well they banned you for a bit so I suppose I won't get an answer right away, but if you're game, I'd dearly like to hear an actual rigorous definition of exactly which wars America has fought in the last few decades were "for Israel" and why. Near as I can tell, none of them were suggested or approved by the Israeli state, and none were particularly beneficial to it.
I think I could make a better argument that the US in it's war-making has been rather hostile to Israel. Israel was not permitted to join in on Operation Desert Storm. Saddam launched some SCUDs at them anyways in hopes of provoking a direct response. The US forbade Israel from responding directly and attempted to stop Saddam themselves.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Drivers are paying for roads through various taxes, including on fuel, tires, and registrations. It probably doesn't fully cover the cost of road construction and maintenance, but I've never heard of a transit system that charged fees high enough to cover the costs of construction, maintenance, and operation. Since both types of systems are effectively subsidized, there's only an ideological difference between which one is preferred. Parking is true, but has the issues that I cited, which you haven't provided any accounting for.
If you forced these things, which effectively just mean drastically higher charges with no other changes in the short term, you would be voted out of office in any type of democracy. If you intend do to it anyways, then you are practicing authoritarianism, not democracy. You would effectively be making every single resident's life much worse for the decades it would take to actually reconstruct everything.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Can you clarify exactly what you mean by "subsidizing cars"? I can't think of any way we're doing that which would be a quick-fix to stop.
The most direct way we're "subsidizing cars" is by requiring large parking lots on every business in most cities. We could stop that, but it's exactly the problem I'm talking about - there are tens of thousands of already-built lots with them in every city, with millions invested in each one. You can't change it without spending millions more per lot on demolishing and reconstructing everything, and whoever did it first would be at a massive disadvantage.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Mmm interesting, I wonder why Google was so wrong. Insert rant on how Google search results have gotten a lot worse in the last few years. That being the actual minimum outdoor temperature would indeed make living a walkable life there non-viable for all but the hardiest souls.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't think you're getting my point at all. I never said I wanted to change anybody - I posted that specifically against that position because nobody can change people. My point is that you cannot change a non-walkable area into a walkable one. I specifically said "IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful."
JulianRota
1yr ago
That may be another good factor. I've never been to Sioux Falls specifically, so I don't know what people there think about the winter weather. Presumably the people currently living in Sioux Falls are happy enough with what that currently entails, though I've heard anecdotes suggesting that the residents of nearby Minneapolis seem oddly comfortable in sub-freezing weather. Most people don't like sudden radical lifestyle changes, so I doubt they would be happy if we were to magic Manhattan into the same geographical location and they had to live there. But it doesn't seem that implausible that we could find a population of Americans who can live with needing to physically carry every crumb of their food all the way home even in the 6 degrees F lows that Google says it has there. Could we find 200k of them and convince them to live there? That, I don't know.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Manhattan has an awful lot of $500/month+ parking spaces for a place nobody wants to drive to. And an awful lot of $2k/month and up (way, way up) apartments for a place nobody wants to live in. The oddball hoops you have to jump through to get a rental there suggest that the number of people who very badly want to live there and are willing to pay out the nose for the privilege remain quite high.
I don't think it's that controversial of a statement to say that people who like urban spaces really like them and are willing to pay and make other sacrifices to live there (small spaces and lots of possibly annoying neighbors nearby), and people who like rural spaces also really like them and are willing to make different sacrifices to live there (nothing close by, moderate drive to get to 1 or 2 small grocery stores, hardware stores, bars, etc and maybe very long drive to get to any more or bigger of the above).
JulianRota
1yr ago
While I lean towards defending the car culture side in the overall debate, I think I'd soften that a bit. See how much the car drivers moan when they have to wade into an environment that actually does favor pedestrians and transit at a large scale, like Manhattan. Are the car drivers special snowflakes who hate to drive unless they have massive free parking lots everywhere, lots of wide-open 45mph multilane roads, and very few pesky pedestrians who have a tendency to go every which way on a whim?
I'd say more neutrally that the desires of drivers and pedestrians are fundamentally at odds with each other. A large-scale environment that's great for walking, like good enough that Sam the Stockbroker in Manhattan, who makes enough to keep a BMW in a private garage, chooses to walk and take the train to his job anyways because it's easier and better, will inevitably be bad for cars, due to expensive and scarce parking, slow and narrow streets, and pedestrians going every which way. Meanwhile, if it's great for driving, it will suck for walking, because of the huge parking lots, huge distances between things, and narrow and poorly maintained sidewalks with intimidating high-speed car traffic only a few feet away. My overall point is more that any environment that favors one or the other cannot be changed to be the other way without basically demolishing the entire city and rebuilding everything differently.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I recently found an interesting post about the driving/transit+walking divide that I'd like to discuss some here: If We Want a Shift to Walking, We Need to Prioritize Dignity.
The basic point that this article makes is that a good and necessary measure as to whether people would actually want to walk somewhere looks like so:
If you were driving past and saw a friend walking or rolling there [on a sidewalk], what would your first thought be:
“Oh, no, Henry’s car must have broken down! I better offer him a ride.”
“Oh, looks like Henry’s out for a walk! I should text him later.”
I would like to use this to assert that: For 99% of modern-day American cities that are not currently pedestrian-friendly, there is no reasonable change that will ever make them so.
The problem is that, once you build a city to be car-friendly in the modern American style, with 3-4+ lane arterial surface roads and expressways everywhere and all businesses having massive parking lots that are virtually never full, the structure of your city is fundamentally unwalkable. You can toss in some sidewalks and buses, but you'll never create a landscape where people actually want to walk places. Not that literally nobody will ever walk anywhere, but where people who have money and status and can afford to keep cars will actively choose to walk and take busses to places instead of driving.
Here's a link to a Google Street View of a random road in a random medium-small city in America. It's actually fairly urban compared to the surrounding region, but I'm pretty sure nobody who has any alternatives chooses to walk there. And in fact, there aren't any pedestrians visible on that road in Street View. You can create some paths to walk on, but you can't duct-tape making walking dignified and respectable onto a region where it isn't already.
IMO, the majority of attempts to make walkable neighborhoods in non-walkable regions are not particularly useful. Usually, they're in residential areas, and you can maybe make that one neighborhood walkable, and create one little walkable urban square with some restaurants, coffee shops, light retail, a bar or two, etc. But you're not going to be able to create an area where a successful person can access everything they want to be able to do regularly with walking and transit, because they can't get anywhere but that one little urban square easily. Not saying that they aren't pleasant or that people living there don't like them, but they're never going to lead to a region or society where people choose not to have cars.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I don't have anything great on the trans depiction thing. But a looked-over aspect I did want to note. So Uhura is black in Star Trek Original. (I haven't seen much of it to be honest, so I'm going on a few assumptions, but I could be completely wrong about her depiction). This is shown as a neutral thing in 2 ways. 1 is the obvious, that nobody treats her differently or as less than equal because they see that she is black, or female. The equally important IMO but more subtle way is 2, that she doesn't have a chip on her shoulder about it, i.e. constantly (mis)interpreting every minor mistake or social faux-paus as somebody being racist against her, every bureaucratic snafu as the system being systematically racist, being automatically more trusting of any other black person she encounters no matter what their official position is, etc.
Both of these serve as a social message, to non-blacks that blacks are perfectly fine ordinary people who deserve equal treatment, and to blacks to get over obsessing about historical injustices and just be a regular part of the team.
On a grand strategy decades-long view, our society has done an excellent job at drilling point 1 into the majority of white people. We don't seem to have done so great and are arguably regressing on point 2.
I suppose this does also apply to all other maybe-political minority depictions, including trans-ness - it says something whether or not that person correctly or incorrectly interprets bad things that happen to them as being done due to their minority status.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I haven't seen anything yet to adjust my priors that it's some combination of 1. Room-temperature IQ people who were UFO nerds back in the 90s or so who have now become military officers, congresspeople, etc nerding out, seeing what they want to see, misinterpreting ambiguous evidence, etc, and 2. Manipulation and leaks by some shadowy Government/elite group trying to misdirect attention from whatever is really going on. As others have said, nobody is acting like there's an actual secret being leaked here.
I don't put a lot of faith in, well we still don't have a shred of actual evidence, but this guy who supposedly saw some actual evidence is totally more believable than the last guy who made some outlandish claims with no evidence.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Yours sounds like it behaves more like an actual injury. Mine tends to feel better when I'm using it, and tends to flare up when I'm not using it.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Yeah that's pretty similar to what mine is like
JulianRota
1yr ago
I very much relate to this. I have various off-and-on soft tissue injuries. They mostly seem to come and go for no apparent reason. I've seen doctors for a particularly bothersome one, got an MRI and blood test, only to be told basically, :shrug: I have no idea what's going on, there's nothing to be done. I don't think conventional medicine has much of anything to help with these sort of issues.
At least for me, usually working through it as much as I can is a lot more helpful than any form of treatment. I've had this with certain movements in my knees, one big toe (yeah, I know, weird, but it kind of makes walking tricky), one wrist, and I don't think anything else for a while. The usual pattern is that it starts hurting when I put force on it in some particular way. Trying to avoid putting any force on that joint, and most other typical treatments, doesn't seem to help much. It seems to help a lot more to try to use the joint as much as I can anyways, avoiding whatever specific movement makes it hurt the worst. Usually after keeping on it for a while, the painful motion just stops being painful.
It feels like this is getting a bit rambly, but I basically agree that we don't seem to have any real idea how tendons etc work, and that unconventional things like the use pattern I described seem to help more than anything with as little overall inconvenience as possible.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Honestly, it's frustratingly common for it to be a big headache to get a new repo running properly on your local system. I've seen it plenty of times at companies and open-source projects of all sizes. Fortunately, at least companies usually have people who can help you out with initial setup. It's less common with open-source projects - if they had people willing to help newbies, they'd usually have already fixed the problems that make it so hard.
Anyways, not to get on too much of a tangent, but you're not crazy and it is painful. You can work through it though, and it'll get easier to onboard into new projects with time. It's also usually a lot less painful to actually do work in a project once you've got your local setup sorted out.
JulianRota
1yr ago
which contends that Ronald Reagan's administration dragged its feet in dealing with the crisis due to homophobia, while the gay community viewed early reports and public health measures with corresponding distrust, thus allowing the disease to spread further and infect hundreds of thousands more
This is rather curious if you think about it a bit. I'm not sure exactly what we knew at the time, but knowing what we know now and what we did about Covid, the most effective thing that we could have done at the time to stop AIDS would have been to double-down on homophobia. Aggressively bust up gay clubs and meeting spots where the most promiscuous gay men would go to have sex with multiple strangers on a regular basis, shut down any mailing lists, newsletters, etc that were effectively used for the same, significant prison time for the worst offenders, etc. (Actually, maybe it's not such a great idea to lock up the most promiscuous gay men who might have AIDS in a prison with a bunch of other men... maybe you'd need a AIDS-only prison for them, then who cares if the end up spending all day humping each other, they've all got AIDS already anyways)
I don't think a thread specifically for women would be a good idea. But I think it might be a good idea to have a thread focused on homesteading-related topics. A thread, maybe monthly to compensate for lower volume at first, focused on practical discussion and advice on stuff like preparing and preserving food, review and repairs of home appliances, childcare and education, building local tightly-knit communities, etc.
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