MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
I think part of the problem is that climate activism in general and Sunrise and Just Stop Oil in particular are run by people who are good at talking money out of left-wing foundations, not by people who understand climate. (This is recent - Al Gore knew what he was talking about when he was the public face of climate activism). So they tend to think of the policy problem as a fundamental moral problem whose solution needs to be enforced by the State, not as a fundamentally technical problem whose solutions need state support to implement. And the preferred frame on the stupid left is something like "All major social problems are easy to solve and the only reason they haven't already been solved is that the people in charge are mean." So there is a lot of climate left effort going into allocating blame to a small number of rich people, rather than the general mass of middle-class people consooming carbon-intensive product.
The problem is that blame is not something you can measure with a thermometer. It doesn't matter whether the carbon emissions produced by commuting to a desk job in a F150 are morally the fault of Ford shareholders, Ford executives, Ford employees, Oil company executives, oil company shareholders, oil company employees, the banks that financed them, the politicians that set up the system they operate under, or the driver. Whatever the moral arguments, at a practical level the person who has to change their lifestyle to stop those emissions entering the atmosphere is the driver.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
Try not to do this.
To decide that you've had it up to here with the three or so well-funded idiots who make up Just Stop Oil and that you are going to hold your nose and sign up with the "I don't mind if the third world fries, it's hot out there I'm not surprised" crowd is a perfectly normal human response, and if at least some people do it it creates good incentives for activists not to be idiots. (Although I suspect that giving noisy idiots rent-free space in your head is bad for the soul). But that is a change in political tactics - changing your views on a factual question based on the noisy idiocy of a bunch of randos is irrational. If 550ppm CO2 is in fact as bad for humanity as the IPCC says it is, then this is the kind of fact that does not care about your feelings.
Part of what makes a University a University and not something else is a degree of self-government. An institution that teaches a 13-16th grade curriculum determined by the politicians and/or bureaucrats in the sponsoring Education Ministry may be doing something valuable, but it isn't continuing the tradition that began with those communities of scholars in Paris, Bologna, Oxford and Cambridge in the High Middle Ages.
FWIW, I don't think that the legislature abolishing tenure (something that happened long ago in the UK without causing serious problems) or regulating non-classroom DEI initiatives gets close to the point where it turns a public University into a Even Higher School. But (for example) a law prohibiting the teaching of books by paedophiles would be pushing the boundary.
SB16 seems different, in that if it is enforced as written, it prevents the University teaching that correct social, political or religious beliefs are superior to incorrect ones. An organisation where the curriculum is subject to government sanitisation to remove controversial topics is not a University.
Sandy Berger got a fine and probation for doing worse than what Clinton did.
Has anyone ever been jailed for merely mishandling classified information without improperly disclosing it?
ETA - a quick google found this list of example cases. It looks like big shots like Berger and Petraeus get off with probation and fines, but small fry can get 3 months in prison if they are unlucky. The multi-year sentences all involved at least the appearance of unauthorized disclosure.
I think it is pretty clear Clinton would not have been jailed if she was prosecuted. Similarly, it would be an injustice if Trump gets jailed for mishandling classified information (assuming, of course, that he hasn't been disclosing it).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
13d ago
Blocking $26 billion in aid to an extremely wealthy country that also has the wealthiest per capita diaspora community is now anti-semitism?
No, but it is something that rich centrist American Jews care about. There is a reason why AIPAC is as powerful as it is. The sort of Jews who might switch from D to R in response to left-wing campus idiocy are exactly the sort of Jews who support aid to Israel most.
I support third countries getting the feck out of the I-P conflict (my gut feeling is that foreign support for both sides is net escalatory, although I understand the argument that the US paying for Iron Dome specifically is de-escalatory). But I am not American, and my views on this issue are not socially acceptable in elite American social circles. Apart from short-term humanitarian aid while the mess made by the current war is being cleaned up, the only use of donor money in the area I would support is bribing other majority-Muslim countries to take in Palestinian refugees.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
You can push the failure of statecraft further backward in time if you like. The premise is the same: if we fought on the side of the Soviets, we were fighting on the wrong side. After all, the Soviets and Nazis were allied for two years, from 1939-41.
The US didn't get to choose which side they fought on, or even whether to fight - Hitler's ally bombed Pearl Harbour and Hitler honoured the alliance by declaring war. Assuming that Barbarossa happens in any alternative timeline, the only way the US avoids ending up on the same side as the Soviet Union is to cut a deal with Japan such that Pearl Harbour never happens.
The world where the US gives the Japanese explicit permission to carve up the European colonial empires in Asia as long as they stay away from the Philipines and supports the Nazis over the Soviets in post-Barbarossa Europe is obviously worse for humanity (either the Nazis win, or WW2 is even bloodier because it takes the Allies longer to win). I don't think either result looks good for the US either. In both cases, the US ends up as the weakest of three blocs (with the other two allied), doesn't have access to the Middle East oilfields, and is almost certainly on the wrong end of a nuclear monopoly. (The Allied bomb effort in our timeline was dependent on refugee talent who went to Los Alamos specifically to oppose Nazi Germany - if the US is neutral, then the Allied bomb project ends up in some suitably out-of-the-way part of the British Empire, and the German bomb project has more time and resources).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
Rather more than half, given that 1st-world Asian countries did in fact prevent 80-90% of the deaths relative to a US baseline, and "the best SV companies" are presumably claiming to be more competent than Taiwanese bureaucrats (are they? Good question, and I don't know the answer). In terms of the combined cost of COVID mortality and morbidity and of unnecessary and ineffective preventative measures, the US was shockingly bad (and the UK was almost as bad - the only thing we got right was the vaccine rollout).
Preventing 1/2 the US deaths isn't the level of competence of the best SV companies, it's the level of competence of a slightly-above-average first world government bureaucracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
4mo ago
I don't think most tax cheats who get caught "go to prison for a long ass time". The IRS only pursues criminal charges in a small number of high-profile cases (see Motte discussion and linked LessWrong post) and normally just drives you into bankruptcy with civil penalties. (There are about 1500 criminal tax prosecutions a year).
There are unfortunately no published statistics about how likely you are to be criminally prosecuted when there is $1.4m at stake (presumably more likely than for smaller amounts). It looks like the guideline sentence if you do evade this much tax and plead guilty is about 2 years.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9mo ago
There are plenty of people in the UK who campaign against airport expansion on climate grounds but whose lifestyles rely on cheap flights - I don't think the climate movement is excusing leisure air travel.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
What would "fighting back" involve? Are you suggesting that you know something Nixon's advisors didn't, and that he had a way of avoiding Senate conviction? Or are you suggesting that he stage a coup to remain in office despite the Senate voting to remove him? (SecDef Schlesinger and NSA Kissinger had already taken steps to prevent orders to stage a Latin America style coup reaching the military)
We now know that Woodward and Bernstein were stenographers and that Mark Felt (aka "Deep Throat") was a swamp insider trying to remove Nixon for swampy reasons. But that doesn't matter as a matter of law or politics - in 1974 the Republican caucus in the Senate wasn't prepared to support a President who swore like a sailor while plotting the cover up of an outrageous piece of ratfucking in an election he would have won anyway. If you are caught red-handed committing a crime, attacking the motives of the prosecutor is not convincing to anyone who wasn't supporting you anyway.
Nixon did find a way of turning a vast electoral victory into a way to lose - but that was staging the Watergate burglary in the first place. That is what I don't understand - why did he do it? With McGovern as the Democratic candidate, the 1972 election was basically in the bag without the information he was hoping to get from the bug tape. The trifecta of committing a serious crime, getting caught, and having powerful enemies is not usually recoverable, and I don't see how it would have been for Nixon.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
???
Are you saying that sending classified information over unsecure e-mail is equivalent to putting it on the open Internet? I suppose it might be in terms of possible harm (although in the case of Hillary Clinton's e-mails this would be mitigated by the fact that they were probably never routed outside the US), but in terms of legal culpability it definitely isn't.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
To be precise, the crime is intentionally falsely recording a personal expense (paying off Stormy Daniels) as a corporate expense (the Trump Organization paying a bill for legal services provided by Michael Cohen). Absent any other wrongdoing, this would be misdemeanor false accounting. Under NY State law, it gets upgraded to a felony because of the intent to conceal the campaign finance violations.
It would normally turn into felony tax evasion if the Trump Organization filed a corporate tax return based on the falsified accounts, but the indictment implies that the payments were 1040ed with the expectation that Cohen would pay personal income tax on them. This means that there was no revenue loss, so probably no tax evasion charges on the Trump Organization. (Cohen did not, in fact, pay the tax, and was jailed for personal tax evasion in 2018).
Apart from the tax angle, this would never normally be prosecuted unless an actual human being lost money as a result. But it is a real crime, not "three felonies a day" bullshit. Law-abiding businesses do not intentionally falsify their books and records. It certainly looks like the prosecutor has evidence of falsification and evidence of intent.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
You are correct. I should have scare-quoted something like "classified documents crime"
The crime shouldn't be scare-quoted either. Sandy Berger was prosecuted for mishandling classified documents as Clinton left office - he got a plea deal for a $50k fine plus probation, and lost his security clearance. The Trump case seems analogous. I agree that trying to jail Trump for the document-related crimes would be an escalation, although jailing him if he refuses a plea deal and loses at trial would not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The pictures in that article were cherrypicked from a group of trains at a depot which had been taken out of service for cleaning. I use the tube 2-3 times a week and I have never been on a train that bad - unsurprisingly, because a train that did get that bad would be taken out of service for cleaning.
Reading the article text, the vast majority of the trains that get that dirty are on the lines which run 24 hours on Friday/Saturday nights - in other words the mess is being made by drunks coming home from nightclubs. On the small number of times I have used the night tube, the trains were clean.
By Continental European or 1st-world Asian standards, the London Underground is a bit on the grubby side - comparable to Naples (although part of that is that a lot of European systems ban eating and drinking on the train - I hated this when I was in Berlin). The NYC subway is filthy. OP's link is suggesting that the LA subway is even worse than NYC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
While I assume that both parties engage in fraud to the extent they can get away with it, I would expect that Democrats benefit from it more simply due to the parties' positions on whether greater voter fraud protections are needed. I think it's unlikely but not impossible that the 2020 presidential election was within the margin of fraud.
Before the 2020 election, the Republicans' campaign for tougher rules against voter fraud focussed on the rarest type of voter fraud - retail in-person voter fraud such as non-citizen immigrants registering and voting - and conspicuously ignored postal vote fraud. This doesn't necessarily mean that the Republicans expected to benefit from postal vote fraud - it is more likely that they were worried about military being tossed on technicalities as a result of harsh laws against postal vote fraud, in the same way that the Democrats are worried about Republican voter-ID laws which de facto require a driving license to vote disenfranchising poor urbanites.
If the Republicans thought that the Democrats routinely committed postal vote fraud of the type they are now complaining about, the True the Vote crowd would have spent more time talking about it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Providing academically segregated primary schools with extended hours (so mums can work a regular 40hr/wk professional job without paid childcare, even if they can't work a 50+hr meritocratic elite job) would be the simplest option. You can identify the top 20% of the IQ distribution at 4-ish - you need to wait to identify the tip-top, but I don't think you even want to distinguish between the 1% and the 19% if you are doing eugenics.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The claim that Taylor Lorenz's coverage of the Oshry sisters was unethical doxxing depends on an understanding of "doxxing" which is not universal, even among online communities (which have a much stronger rule against doxxing than IRL ones). The Oshry sisters were running a social media influencer operation which made minimal attempt to conceal their legal names and very much traded on their family relationship with each other. Taylor Lorenz did not unmask an actively-protected pseudonym, and she did not share non-public contact information, which are the central examples of "doxxing". She signal-boosted the true, publicly-available, fact that public figure X was semi-public figure Y's mother.
If you wanted to defend Taylor Lorenz using the traditional rules of journalism (which I won't - the article was clickbait), there is a very obvious argument to make that she was unmasking hypocrisy - the Oshry sisters were making a big deal about how important family was while cutting out their mother.
The claim that this article was so unethical that Taylor Lorenz should be unemployable is the claim that there should be some kind of ethical rule against signal-boosting true but embarrassing publicly-available information about public figures - in other words it is a claim that journalists should not do journalism. The claim that it was a trashy article because it treated an Instagram influencer as if they were an important public figure is valid and accurate, but that isn't and shouldn't be a career-ending offence.
Does the Daily Beast even count as mainstream media anyway? The Wapo not holding it against Taylor Lorenz that she did tabloid shit when she was working at a tabloid is normal business ethics, even if they do think it was a trashy thing to do.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Gatekeeping access to a market based on willingness to obey laws and pay taxes is essential to a functioning market.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The point of Joe denouncing Hunter's influence peddling operation isn't to make him look cleaner - as you point out, this wouldn't work. Never apologise, never explain is the right way to handle a scandal that isn't bad enough to concern people who are not political news junkies or enemy partisans.
The point of Joe denouncing Hunter's operation would be to let foreign crooks know that Hunter doesn't have the influence he is selling, because that would make Hunter stop. I will admit that I don't know if that would work either - I suspect the average corrupt Ukrainian businessman would assume that Joe's denunciation is performative and of course Hunter has the influence he is selling despite it.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
And that Biden went after the Ukrainian prosecution suggests he was involved in the corruption
This is precisely what was in issue in the performative criminal investigation that Trump asked Zelenskyy to launch, and therefore in the first Trump impeachment. He probably didn't.
Biden bragged on video about having the prosecutor fired!
If Biden went after the prosecutor for other reasons, then it was stupid (because you shouldn't act where a conflict of interest exists, even if it is just for appearance's sake) but not corrupt. And there is a lot of circumstantial evidence that this is what happened - notably that the EU, the IMF, and the Ukrainian opposition all agreed that the prosecutor should be fired for slow-walking corruption prosecutions.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
Ok so Exxon tells the other firm their spending $100 million defending the case. Now it’s a bet the company case for the smaller but well capitalized firm.
And the judge tells them to knock it off. I am starting to wonder if the real problem is that US civil cases are mostly heard in State courts where the judge is an answer to the joke "What do you call a lawyer with a room temperature IQ? - Your Honor"
With a few exceptions (like the Delaware Court of Chancery), the US is egregiously unable to make sure important civil cases end up in front of judges who know what they are doing. As far as I can see, there are a few things going on that drive this - the thing that is most unusual internationally is elected judges, but I suspect that a bigger deal is the American tradition of handling all first instance cases in the County they are filed in - most states have no equivalent to the English High Court or the Superior Courts in the Canadian provinces as a dedicated first instance court for important civil cases.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1yr ago
The important difference is that Gawker was punished for saying true things about powerful people that they wanted to keep secret (the real crime was outing Peter Thiel as gay, the pretext was invading Hulk Hogan's privacy by publishing a sex tape) whereas Alex Jones is being punished for telling lies about ordinary people who happened to become newsworthy because they were involved in a tragedy.
Whatever you think about the wisdom of giving human governments this power, God convicts Alex Jones and acquits Gawker.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
Note that the argument that the students are making for "Columbia is profiting from Israel's US backed war in Gaza" is not the sane version of that argument. They are going after Columbia for holding index funds which contain regular American companies which do business in Israel. Apparently Microsoft is "providing surveillance infrastructure to the IDF" and therefore QQQQ is a hate stock. The kind of divestment the students are asking for is not a serious demand that they want met.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
14d ago
What do you mean by this? I thought Trump just executed the Sailor strategy and appealed to the neglected Republican base.
I don't think he even did that (at least not in the general - I think the case that he successfully executed a Sailer-like strategy in the primary is quite strong, but Steve Sailer presented the strategy as a way for Republicans to beat Democrats, not each other). Trump was the second least popular major-party Presidential candidate in my lifetime, and Hilary was the least popular. Even so, Trump only won because Hilary's e-mails turned up on her secretary's kiddie-fiddling husband's laptop shortly before polling day. It is reasonably clear from the opinion polling that either candidate could have walked the 2016 election by putting up an empty suit.
Putting pineapple on pizza is a crime against God and Nature (and pizza), and accordingly subject to universal jurisdiction even in the absence of specific local statutory law . I thought this was common knowledge on a forum where high IQ and good taste were the default.
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