MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
11hr ago
14-18 is when you're supposed to transition into an adult
This process is broken (particularly for boys) across the West regardless of urban form, although I agree car-dependent suburbia doesn't help. [Things would be different if a teen could run a beater car with the income from a Saturday job and some DIY shop time on Sunday afternoon - I don't know how realistic that ever was in the US, but given the cost of insurance for teen drivers it probably never should have been.]
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12hr ago
Do you have a link to polling showing that Americans generally dislike Indians? I know Indian immigrants in the UK (who are highly selected and are the highest-earning, best-educated ethnic group as a result) poll net-positive but when I try to find US polls Google keeps sending me polls of Indian-Americans rather than polls about them.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12hr ago
Looking round Israeli settlements on Google Street View shows a lot more multifamily buildings than would be allowed in US suburbia. Israel proper has a housing crisis due to rapid population growth and entrenched NIMBYs in the Tel Aviv and West Jerusalem suburbs, so the settler demand is for any family-sized housing (including multi-bedroom flats), not for American-style suburbia.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12hr ago
than wait for sufficient demand to justify a bus and professional driver
And this is the whole point. Privately-owned cars just work better than any kind of scheduled or on-demand transit at low enough population densities, or at off-peak times (noting that in a major city, only the middle of the night is off-peak). But something like London's Victoria Line or Paris's Metro 1 have enough demand to justify a train and professional driver every two minutes and then some, from 6am to after midnight. Roads for private cars don't scale to that level of demand. Autonomous cars help a little bit (because of faster reaction times) but not enough to turn London, Paris or Manhattan into DFW or Atlanta. Centrally co-ordinated autonomous cars can do a lot better, but the kind of person who really wants to live a car-based lifestyle is exactly the kind of person who doesn't want their car controlled by someone else's computer.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
12hr ago
· Edited 12hr ago
additional few minutes for the trains that stop there
That's a very large cost for a successful HSR route. You are potentially delaying 1000 people by 4 minutes (for a Shinkansen) or 6-8 minutes (for a TGV, which has worse acceleration) to allow a single digit number of people to get on or off.
To get full benefit, you also have to route the high-speed line through the intermediate city you want to stop at, which adds a lot of construction cost and NIMBY-aggravation. There is a reason why the TGV tends to make intermediate stops at out-of-town park-and-ride stations.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13hr ago
Germany has a firewall. France has a firewall too
It's called "two thirds of the voters voting against right-populists". If that changes, the incentives on politicians change. As long as two thirds of the voters oppose right-populism, centrist and centre-right parties who break the firewall will be punished at the ballot box, as we just saw in the Netherlands.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14hr ago
And single-family homes on small lots.
The metro areas with urban growth boundaries are the same ones that resist densification downtown because that is what blue state voters (especially blue state Republicans) vote for. Houston and Austin are sprawling at the edges and densifying in the middle simultaneously because that is what Texans (including Austin liberals) vote for.
This effect is less obvious in the UK because everywhere has local politics dominated by Boomer NIMBYs and the only solution appears to be for the working-age population to wait it out six-to-a-bedroom in our overpriced hovels chanting "They can't live forever".
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18hr ago
Sex slaves for blind people?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
18hr ago
Other public transit pros:
Generally the density of places with it means I can add a second or third destination after the primary museum, gallery, glory hole, restaurant on a whim
If everyone else drives to a destination neighbourhood, then once you get there the place is necessarily dominated by parking so you can't walk from the theatre to the restaurant to the bar. There are ways of fixing this problem - New Urbanists talk about "park once" districts and point out that the proof-of-concept is the mall, which forces people to get out of their cars and walk from shop to shop by putting the "street" the shops are on indoors. But it means giving up the ability to park right outside the building you are going to.
Self driving cars make this a lot easier because (even if they are privately owned, rather than robotaxis which don't park up at all) parking in a lot outside the destination neighbourhood becomes zero cost. On the other hand, they will add a whole different set of moving congestion problems that we haven't really thought about yet.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
Is there an allegation that
- The law was broken?
- The votes were not counted correctly?
Given the known context, it reads like a claim that "history will discover" that Trump was a Russian-backed Manchurian candidate.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
People (including Elon Musk, who can't be prosecuted, and Lucy Connolly, who quite properly was) called for arson, directed against actual, identifiable human beings who were Muslim asylum-seekers based on a crime committed by someone who was neither an asylum-seeker nor a Muslim.
Some of us think that, morally, facts matter when burning people out of their homes.
Legally, actual incitement has always been a free speech corner case, going back to John Stuart Mill's writing about when it is legitimate to say that corn-dealers are responsible for starvation. (He thinks this is fine under normal circumstances, but not if said directly to a riotous mob outside the home of an identifiable corn-dealer). The US tradition is deliberately overprotective of free speech in the corner cases to avoid chilling effects. "Grass is magenta, therefore you should burn down a hotel with people in it" is exactly the kind of speech you would prefer not to protect, but need to if you want as strong a free speech culture as the US is trying to produce.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
1d ago
There is an important practical difference between "My opponent won using dirty tricks" and "My opponent won by breaking the law and/or tampering with ballots" which is that, given the laws and traditions of western democracy, one is a sore loser whining and the other is an implicit call to overturn the result. And frequently an explicit one - see 2000 in Florida (everyone), 2004 in Ohio (left-wing Democrats), 2016 (Jill Stein and a few fringe left-wing Democrats), or 2020 (Trump).
Hilary's explicit claim is "Russia hacked and wikileaked the Podesta e-mails with the intention of helping Trump beat me" (almost certainly true) and that this meaningfully affected the results (almost certainly false). It is the same type of claim as "Twitter and the Deep State tried to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop story, and this meaningfully affected the result in 2020" (false, because the suppression did not succeed, but this was not for want of trying), not "Dominion, Smartmatic and GOPe election officials conspired to report results that didn't match the votes cast"
Being a modestly talented politician, Hilary is able to make the less explosive claim while darkly hinting to her crazier supporters that she secretly believes the more explosive one (that Russia hacked voting machines or otherwise corrupted the tabulation of the election). But she carefully avoids making it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Nowhere in the article you link does Hilary claim either of the things I said she didn't claim. I agree she is throwing shade on the election in a way which is irresponsible, but she carefully doesn't say that the votes were tabulated incorrectly or that the law was violated.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Russiagate wasn't election denial - the leading Democrats and Deep Staters pushing it didn't deny that Trump in 2016 had won a plurality of the popular vote in states representing an majority of the Electoral College, or that Trump was the lawfully elected President. (There were some more fringy figures like Jill Stein who tried to overturn the 2016 election, which goes back to @quiet_NaN's point that "not spamming frivolous allegations of election fraud" is somewhere where the pro-establishment left is better than either the anti-establishment left or the right).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Yep - Piggate was eminently survivable, and did more damage to the people pushing it than it did to Hameron. It was hilarious, but everyone including Corbyn knew that it was nothing more than that. The source was an unsourced allegation in a book by a bitter donor who hadn't received the peerage he thought he'd bought and paid for.
Brexit, on the other hand, was total political self-destruction.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
The behaviour of the current President demonstrates that you would need to amend the Constitution to make it non-pardonable, of course - otherwise you get away with it if your candidate (for President or Governor, at least) wins.
It is a good idea in principle, but the problem is that the decline in public confidence in US elections is not driven by actual fraud, and definitely not by fraud that could be proven to the criminal standard but is currently being under-punished. It is driven by widespread sloppiness, corner-cutting, incompetence, and insecurity that means losing candidates can spam plausible fraud allegations and election officials can't refute them.
Announcing that you are going to start hanging the people doing the election fraud and then not finding any of them will further reduce confidence in the system. This is a general problem with making highly-visible solutions to non-existent problems a key part of your politics.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
Reading the link, most of what happened in Broward County in 2018 is standard-issue incompetence causing waste and delay, but not affecting the ballots. The only irregularity which goes to the correctness of the results is the discrepancy in precinct ballot tallies, with about 800 (0.1%) more votes in the boxes than there should have been.
Incompetence which is almost certainly non-fraudulent but which opens a 0.1% margin of fraud in an unusually bad county doesn't point to a possibility of wanton fraud on a nationally (or even statewide) significant scale.
That does not, of course, make it acceptable and everyone involved with adminstering that election should have been (and, as far as I can see, was) fired.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
2d ago
A few soccer players make a lot of money; most make little
This is directionally correct, but European football is unusual among sports in how much less true it is than elsewhere. Large European countries have multiple divisions of fully-professional football, all of which pay the players a living wage. England, for example, has: Premiership (20 clubs, make the big money you expect of pro athletes) EFL Championship (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is around £500k annually, which is more than newly promoted IB MD or Biglaw partner, but less than the average for those groups) EFL League One (24 clubs, average salary for main-roster players is north of £100k, with stars earning £200-300k and even benchwarmers getting in the upper-middle class range if they play outside London). EFL League Two (24 clubs, average salary around £50k which is comfortably middle-class) Nationwide Conference (24 clubs, not required to be fully professional by league rules but all currently are, salary figures not published but anecdotally most are in the £20-30k range except for a few stars). Plus a few fully-professional clubs, or individual star players with pro contracts at semi-professional clubs, in the lower leagues.
Rosters are 25 per club plus youth players, so that represents a total of c. 3000 players making a full-time income as professional footballers. Essentially all of them are better off (relative to overall lower wages in the UK) than minor league baseball players.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
I made a mistake - it was Rubio and not Hegseth. I found it on Lawfare Media. Googling gives many examples of MSM coverage such as this in Politico, although I note that most of the MSM articles don't use quotes, so it is possibly a paraphrase.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
The stereotypical Indian in America isn't a middleman minority - they are a H1B computer programmer.
The stereotypical Indian in the UK is doing some mid-level professional job - pharmacy, accountancy, IT etc.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
even she would not permit Somalis to settle in her state
It is not quite as bad as misspelling a spelling flame, but I think people alleging retardation in their political opponents have a special responsibility to double-check their grammar.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
And Clausewitz wrote a book saying that "War is the continuation of policy by other means". I think Clausewitz is right and Hegseth is wrong.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
If you ignore legal technicalities, the real issues are fairly clear. Before the alleged "double-tap", they were:
- What is the appropriate level of force to be used when interdicting drug smuggling outside US waters? Or to be pithy, is the War on Drugs a real war like World War 2, or is it a metaphorical war like the War on Poverty?
- Who decides? Is this an inherent Article 2 power of the President, or is it subject to Congress' power to declare war and to regulate land and naval forces?
- Does all this form part of a cunning plan on the part of the Trump administration to start a war against Venezuela?
For contrast, if we ask the same questions about the War on Terror, the answers are:
- It is a real war.
- Congress decided by passing the AUMF
- It was part of a cunning plan to start a war with Iraq. The Deep State and pro-establishment Democrats were in on the plan alongside the Bush administration. It turned out to be a pretty poor plan.
After the double-tap story, the first question becomes slightly more pressing because the level of force the administration is proposing to use is "Maximally destructive naval warfare, equivalent to USW" rather than "Civilised naval warfare".
But fundamentally, this is an important issue because pre-Trump, US policy was to treat drug smuggling as a law enforcement issue, and to interdict it by having civilian Coast Guard vessels intercept drug boats and arrest the drug dealers, with lethal force only used if the drug traffickers fought back. Trump is now treating drug smugglers as a wartime enemy. And no Congresscritters were harmed in the making of this policy change.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
6d ago
This is, in substance, the unrestricted submarine warfare debate.
If a surface warship has found an unescorted enemy merchantman, or driven the escorts off a convoy, it is in sufficient control of the situation that it can reasonably be expected to hail the target, board it, seize the ship, the cargo, or both, and take crew prisoner if necessary. (Warships carry much larger crews than merchant ships). If the merchantman doesn't respond to a hail and gets fired on, the warship is able to rescue survivors and either seize the cargo or allow it to go down with the crippled ship - including if necessary by using a deck gun to pound the crippled ship into flotsam after the crew have successfully evacuated.
If a submarine finds an unescorted enemy merchantman, it could in principle offer the same courtesy (and occasionally in WW1 this actually happened - WW1-era torpedoes were unreliable and you didn't have many of them, so allowing the crew to evacuate and then sinking the ship with the deck gun was the way to go). But obviously the sub doesn't have the ability to seize cargo or take survivors on board in the way a surface ship would so the crew are left drifting in a lifeboat.
But more realistically, the submarine normally has a sound military reason for hitting and running - either the aim is to torpedo a merchant ship in a convoy without being spotted by the escorting destroyer, or to attack an unescorted merchant ship in an area where enemy destroyers are operating so you want to get away fast before one shows up. So in practice, when you use submarines to interdict enemy merchant shipping (which was the main use case for submarines in both world wars) you are sending merchant ships to the bottom with all hands on board. Given the customs of the sea that would later be institutionalised in the 2nd GC, the vast majority of sailors (including plenty of uncucked naval officers) saw unrestricted submarine warfare as per se perfidious and/or piratical. British Admiral Arthur Wilson favoured hanging submariners as pirates, leading to a backlash and ultimately to British submarines proudly flying the Jolly Rodger - the most recent example being HMS Conqueror when it returned to port after sinking the Belgrano in the Falklands War. Ultimately, the world's navies decided that USW was too militarily useful to be illegal, and Donitz was acquitted on that charge at Nuremberg.
Using small drones operated from a safe distance is more like submarine warfare than surface warfare - you don't have the resources to do things the old-school way so if you want to effectively interdict the commerce in illegal narcotics, you have to be willing to send boats to the bottom with all hands. A surface navy or coast guard officer who sank a boat with all hands "to send a message" when he was on the scene and able to board would be considered a moral monster by everyone who has ever set sail - and doubly so if he took a second shot on a crippled boat to make sure it sank without rescuing the crew. This is quite apart from any criminal liability under the UCMJ or 2nd GC - naval law implements sailors' understanding of morality.
Here we have a case where the US has admitted that they could have interdicted the drug boats the old school way with a surface warship, but chose to use drones. Hegseth said that the point was to use lethal force which wasn't strictly necessary "to send a message", which, regardless of legal technicalities, is evilmaxxing for the evulz from the perspective of maritime custom and tradition. If Hegseth is bullshitting and the real motivation is to interdict more boats with less resources, then this is in the territory of "is USW militarily necessary in a way which overrides sailors' gut feeling that it is piratical?"
This is the New Urbanist view - that you can absolutely build destination neighborhoods where everyone arrives by car, parks, and then walks within the neighborhood, but Americans fail to do so by default. Apart from indoor malls and planned New Urbanist communities, Toronto is the place I would most expect to pull it off.
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