JulianRota
8mo ago
Here's a few good articles with some more details:
https://newrepublic.com/article/60919/enlightened-despot
This is a 2007 essay by American judge Richard A. Posner describing how unusual the way the Israeli courts have expanded their own authority is, though it's a bit vague on specific cases and exactly how they worked.
https://hashiloach.org.il/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%A7%D7%98%D7%99%D7%91%D7%99%D7%96%D7%9D-%D7%A9%D7%99%D7%A4%D7%95%D7%98%D7%99-%D7%9C%D7%9E%D7%94%D7%A4%D7%9B%D7%94/
This is a (long) article in Hebrew (Google Translate seems to work pretty well for it) by Daniel Friedman, a professor at the Faculty of Law, Tel Aviv University, that goes over the concepts and types of judicial activism and cites a bunch of specific cases to document the rise of "radical" activism, which he defines as directly contradicting legislation rather than interpreting how it is to be applied in situations that it doesn't specifically cover. Strangely, I can't tell the exact date of publication - it seems to be pretty recent but predating the latest reform controversy, I'm guessing around 2020-2021 by the dates of the cites and the single comment.
https://he.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D7%91%D7%92%22%D7%A5_%D7%95%D7%95%D7%A1%D7%A8_%D7%A0%D7%92%D7%93_%D7%A9%D7%A8_%D7%94%D7%91%D7%99%D7%98%D7%97%D7%95%D7%9F
This is a Wikipedia article about a specific ruling in 2007 where the court basically tells the military what tactics to use to protect a school from incoming rockets. The "Judgements of the High Court" section linked appears to have articles on the details of a number of the other significant cases as well.
JulianRota
9mo ago
Well I'm not in charge here or anything, but I don't think the mods/admins would mind as long as such threads abided by the same rules as the rest of the board. I might follow along myself - I'm a urban dweller right now, about the opposite, but I do find myself interested in such lifestyles.
There does seem to me to be some meat to the idea that we're meant to thrive in more connected communities. That's probably a good topic for discussion in the main thread, or one of the alternates, or something. I do sometimes find the main thread a bit fast-paced for my tastes for actually participating.
JulianRota
9mo ago
I have also found it surprisingly difficult to find details about the cases that people who have issues with court overreach are complaining the most about. Presumably the actual rulings and legal documents are in Hebrew. I've put requests for details out to a few of the people who have talked about this, I'll follow up if I hear anything good back.
JulianRota
10mo ago
Every programming language has a "standard library" of helper classes/functions/etc that are included with it, a library of loadable third-party modules that provide more stuff, and a way to specify and load those.
Python is a pretty good general-purpose language, and usually my first suggestion for what to learn for programming newbies. You can find the docs for the standard lib here - Python standard libs are known for being pretty comprehensive. Personally, I have trouble reading large volumes of docs that aren't relevant to anything I'm working on, so I recommend to anyone seeking to learn to just go ahead and install Python locally and start building things. Usually your 2 for local automation tasks and sometimes modding games are a good source of tasks that are simple enough to not overwhelm a newbie but still feel like you're accomplishing something useful.
I would suggest building some stuff using just the standard lib to get used to how to do things. Later on you can learn about how to find third-party packages, install them, and use their functionality.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I'm not sure it's that much work on top of what sub mods already do, but you do need at least a few trusted users with strong technical skills and a strong enough community for a critical mass of posters to be willing to continue their activity on a new site. We are indeed fortunate enough to have both.
JulianRota
11mo ago
I guess I would mostly code as one of those Reds that's modestly adverse to HBD. I don't quite agree with any of my siblings here. If I had to characterize my actual beliefs briefly, I'd say:
I think that color-blindness is the right way to run a society of fixed population size (immigration being a separate discussion). Even if HBD is strongly true, what of it? Capitalism and individualism has already proven to be mostly adequate at slotting people of varying skill levels into appropriate jobs, and giving appropriate punishments to individuals who commit crimes. I don't think we should discriminate by race at the society level at all - either to give an artificial boost to people who some may feel have been unfairly discriminated against in the past, or to artificially suppress people who, based on their race and HBD research, may be more likely to be less intelligent than average or more inclined to short-term thinking, i.e. more likely to steal, assault, murder, etc. If one race appears to be less likely to be CEOs and more likely to be murderers, and HBD suggests that this is likely to be a perfectly legitimate outcome given genetic tendencies, then I'd say society is working correctly and no intervention is needed.
I don't necessarily think HBD is wrong, but shouting it from the rooftops too loudly IMO tends to encourage policies I don't agree with, and increase racial tensions. In case you haven't noticed, racial tensions are already kind of high. Some have already called for a race war, which doesn't seem like a great idea to me. Perhaps I am a fool and it's already too late. But I'd like to say we at least tried to find a way to live together before anything like that kicks off.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Oh that was an intentional strawman, I don't think anyone ever reaches that point.
Interesting, especially alongside @RenOS's points above. Possibly nobody ever really does. I've seen things like your examples, though that's a pretty momentary thing, and easily fixed once the person moves around a little or faces you. Kind of close to RenOS's picture passing.
I mostly agree with your points on pro- and anti-trans people, though it seems to me that people that pro-trans are very common, and people that anti-trans are pretty rare. Maybe I'm seeing a biased picture, but if there are that many super-anti-trans people around, how come I never see them? I mostly hang out in pretty right/red places, and the most I see is complaints about how they all seem to be kiddie diddlers, not that they aren't "real" because they don't pass to a very high standard.
JulianRota
1yr ago
All interesting points. It may be culturally impossible, but I think it'd be interesting to see someone make all those levels as formal definitions and do an actual experiment somehow on what percentage meets each one.
I haven't spent a ton of time around trans people in person. The ones I have seen have been pretty obvious, though I can't be sure there are others I haven't noticed.
Funny you should say - Buck Angel was the first thing that came to mind as the best-passing FtM I was aware of. But when I found his (?) Instagram, I actually noticed that most of the pictures were pretty close-up and didn't show much but face and some upper body. And in several of the ones that were further out and showed full body, the pose just looked kind of feminine somehow. And if I listen to a video, the voice sounds kind of feminine too. I watched a few minutes of video of Blair White too, and haven't gotten quite the same sense. She (?) seems maybe a bit more masculine than I'd expect, but that seems to be a bit more accepted in women and somewhat more common in women who do things like become a full-time podcaster/influencer about politics.
JulianRota
1yr ago
That's an interesting question as well. Particularly if you include some of the other things pointed out in this thread - if you're more primed to think about trans-ness for whatever reason, it's probably more likely to identify actual trans people, but you would think that also corresponds to a higher chance of perceiving cis people who happen to be somewhat marginal as trans when they aren't.
I think it's also affected a lot by the evident desire of most people to clearly and obviously be the gender they were born as. If you got a bunch of candidates to all wear the same shapeless coveralls, get the same short haircut and shave any other body hair, and avoid any makeup, presumably it would be rather harder to tell. Probably a number of people who are on the spectrum of trans-ness but don't want to get actual medical procedures already voluntarily do things like that, or try hard to dress as the opposite gender.
There also seem to be a lot of differences in how people move. I've observed a few times that I can usually identify somebody's gender from a great distance, much too far to see any facial features or details of clothing, just based on how they move. It's hard to explain what the actual difference is, but it seems to be real.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Nice find, thanks!
Yeah I've watched The Wire multiple times. IMO it's on the list of the greatest TV series ever made. I think I could make a case that they soft-pedaled a few things though, because nobody would want to watch a show about how bad certain things are.
JulianRota
1yr ago
The TV show The Corner based on the book? No. From what I can tell with a few quick searches, it's only available on mail-order DVD and not streaming anywhere.
JulianRota
1yr ago
One thing I find mildly irritating about the janny thing is that the prompt only shows up on thread/comment views. If it wants me to janny, I don't know it until I click into a thread I was interested in reading. Now it wants me to go off and rate posts, and when I'm done, it sends me back to the front page, and I have to go to the thread that I actually wanted to read again. Not a huge deal, but it could be solved by having a prompt show up on the site front page too.
JulianRota
1yr ago
It may be worth getting a humidity gauge for your living space. Islands and coastal areas usually have decently high humidity outdoors in all seasons, but if you heat a space more than 10-20 degrees C, the humidity in that space will be substantially lower unless you deliberately add more water.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Funny, I'm just starting Homicide myself.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I wouldn't be surprised if there are farming bots designed to look as human as possible, including posting at the average rate of a reasonable human. It may not be quite as fast, but it's easy enough to automate, and no reason you couldn't have a single bot run tens of thousands of accounts like this, so you might still get a reasonable number of decent karma accounts after a month or so.
JulianRota
1yr ago
FWIW, I've noticed something kind of related - if you make a post that gets a lot of direct replies, you do get notified for all of them, but the newest ones are at the bottom of the comment responses on the notifications page, so you have to scroll past all of the older replies and their full subthreads to see them, which is kind of easy to miss. It might help to sort the replies on the notification page as newest-first.
JulianRota
1yr ago
An interesting point as well. I have wondered at times if we're a little over-concerned with how safe our children are, harkening back to the 90s era of complaining that everything is "for the children" and Free Range Kids and all that. I may need to think a little on how those basic beliefs intersect with the abortion stuff. I wonder how much the Chinese care about abortions?
JulianRota
1yr ago
Well that's a point. Maybe the whole thing is me just over-thinking things. If you're happy with the situation, then all is well and good I guess.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I agree, and that's why I don't consider the overall American healthcare market to be meaningfully capitalist from a consumer's viewpoint, and so in that case the morality of a capitalist system does not apply, in so far as owing the person doing a job for you a fair wage for the work that they performed.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I agree, and would specifically like to have just the parent post. Seeing the full context is often too distracting IMO. Plenty of things, especially short things, are tough to evaluate as good or bad without seeing the 1 or 2 level parents of the discussion - was it a nasty sneer in response to a reasonable point, or a continuation of a well-received round of joking around?
JulianRota
1yr ago
Isn't this pretty much what Bush actually did though? As I recall, the initial demand was, hand over Bin Laden and other Al Quada bigwigs, or we invade. And we then mostly sent the Northern Alliance that already existed some weapons, advisers, and air support. Seems pretty much like what any colonialist would have done to start. I wonder if the real mistake was trying to control it afterwards. I'm not sure what 19th century Britain would have done after they had run the Taliban out.
JulianRota
1yr ago
Maybe... still feels like a stretch though. Why do it now? Is there some active pressure on the German government now that I'm not aware of?
It all seems awful speculative. Like, maybe Germany will end up being critically low on energy this winter, but that's not established yet. Maybe they won't be able to think of any solution better than buying Russian gas after all, but ditto not established yet. Maybe they will / would have come under powerful enough political pressure to cave on that, but ditto. And maybe the US would be worried enough about Germany caving on this and unable to otherwise help them or pressure them to carry out a risky act of sabotage, but ditto.
Which all leads back to, why do it now, when the only possible benefit to the US is after 5 or so things all happen in the right way in the next 6 months or so? I'd buy it more if it happened after all of those things actually did happen and the German government was actively looking to cut a deal. It all feels a little loopy and desperate.
JulianRota
1yr ago
In fact, the whole invasion of Ukraine is a prime example of many actors looking at the same geostrategic equation and coming up with different answers, each of which was obvious at the time, and usually wrong in hindsight!
As I recall, prior to the actual Ukraine invasion, at least 80% or so of the military commentators I could see thought Russia would take over Ukraine with the greatest of ease. Even for the first week or so, there was a lot of commentary to the effect of - these aren't really setbacks, actual invasions take a little longer than this even when they're going great, everything is still going according to plan overall, Russia will still end up stomping Ukraine with trivial losses.
JulianRota
1yr ago
I'm meh on topics - the fun of the Culture War thread is that you never know what you'll come across next, could be any of the above! And you're free to bounce around topics on a thread if it makes sense.
Re migration plan, I think we're about as prepared as it's reasonable to be. DB has automatic backups (uhh right?) and hosting is a standard k8s cluster, as offered by many providers and build-able by hand on any host with a bit more work. Naturally any more details will be held close to the chest - if anyone was trying to attack us, a public plan would just give them their next target in advance of actually migrating.
It's probably a bigger help that we don't go out of our way to ridicule or attack people, unlike Drama or the Kiwis.
I don't know if there's a specific trigger (a towel seems like a pretty silly one), but there does seem to be a thing where you're willing to make significant effort to help people who you know personally or observe to be suffering from certain types of issues, while also completely ignoring the plight of anyone you don't know or who is suffering through other issues.
The unkempt bum lying on the street demanding money with a opiate-induced need in his eyes gets ignored. The lost but cleanly dressed stranger gets (correct) directions. You might cover an acquaintance's share of the check without a thought.
I dunno about housework. If somebody's house is messier than usual, I don't really care much. I guess they're a bit lazy about cleaning. If somebody's house is a little too clean, then it seems like they either hire cleaners, or spend much more time than usual cleaning, which is a little odd.
More options
Context Copy link