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MathWizard

formerly hh26

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joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC

				

User ID: 164

MathWizard

formerly hh26

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 04 21:33:01 UTC

					

No bio...


					

User ID: 164

I think the main problem is that it disproportionately amplifies the opinions and behavior of the tiny number of humans in charge of giving the feedback, who are not representative of people overall. If half the population is left-leaning and half is right-leaning, and this is accurately reflected in the amount of content online, then a neutral AI trained online will contain a roughly equal mixture of both. If 99% of AI researches are left-leaning, and they deliberately reward the AI for left-leaning beliefs and punish right-leaning ones, then that's what it will exhibit. If 1% of people are... I don't know, pedophiles/cannibals/nazis/marxists, but are disproportionately over-represented in Silicon Valley such that 10% of trainers are, and they reward the AI based on their beliefs, then it will support those behaviors.

We, the people in abstract, are not in charge of training the AI. A very small number of people are, and they are deliberately injecting their own personal opinions into it without regard for the larger diverse opinions of the population as a whole. So, not only is it that I object to humans behaving poorly, it's that those specific humans are advancing their agenda in a way that disproportionately empowers them relative to their actual prevalence, and thus is more of a problem than just those people existing and having private beliefs. And pretending that they're trying to make AI behave ethically in the abstract is just a smokescreen for advancing a particular ideology that a small number of people consider to be ethical.

Like pretty much every point the left has, there's a genuine underlying issue that they identify: a kernel of truth, and then it has been exaggerated and distorted and taken way too far.

Representation matters a little. You should have a reasonable diversity of characters in different roles in different media. People should be able to identify with different characters that share characteristics with them other than just skin color. But not every single film has to have a rainbow cornucopia matching every single distinct subset. Every character in Mulan is Chinese (or a Hun), because it takes place in ancient China. Most characters in Peter Pan are English, because it's a story from England/Scotland. A lot of characters in Disney's Princess and The Frog are black, because it's set in New Orleans. A lot of American TV shows have a large diversity of characters interacting, because there's a lot of diversity in America. As long as all of these things exist, you will see both heroes and villains of each race. You will see bullies and victims and romantic love interests and weak cowards and loyal friends and scheming backstabbers, and lots of different people slotted into those roles. That doesn't require that every single piece of media have every single race in every single role. In some films the bad guys might be black and the good guys might be white. In some it might be the other way around. The point being: anyone can be anything, you are the arbiter of your own fate. As long as Hollywood does not converge all around the same consistent patterns such that one race is always slotted into a particular role, in which case children will pick up on those patterns and form those stereotypes. The left is right that this is bad. The left is wrong that doing it in the opposite direction to how it was in the distant past is good.

We already solved this problem. How many decades of under-representation, you ask? I turn the question, how many decades did we have it solved for? I don't know that every single issue was completely hammered out, but the 90s and early 2000s seemed reasonably fine to me. My generation grew up with healthy diversity and colorblindness on TV, and then we threw it away to punish our ancestors. The 50s were 70 years ago, who are you trying to teach "not to do this again"? Kids today are just going to learn that race and gender and identity categories are super important and you need to treat people differently according to their category and stereotypes, they're not unlearning stereotypes from the 50s because they didn't grow up in the 50s. They have no decades of learned racist baggage to unlearn because they haven't been alive for decades. They're learning the racism they're being fed on TV right now.

I was not previously aware of this event, but my guess is that this is an isolated demand for rigor. All of the major news outlets are biased and unreliable when it comes to politics and science, and have tons of skeletons in their closet regarding mistakes that have either not been retracted, or not retracted very publicly or noticeably. They probably all belong under "generally unreliable", and I would support Fox News being put there IF all of the other major news sources were subject to the same level of scrutiny and most of them placed in the same bin.

If it's being considered in isolation though, then I expect people to use this as an opportunity to discredit and censor right-wing positions by holding it to a higher standard than everyone else.

I doubt it. In theory, I'm okay with brutality for the sake of effectiveness. If a criminal is pointing a gun at police officers, by all means shoot him in the head to protect the police. If a criminal is violently resisting arrest, by all means have 5 policemen tackle him to the ground to restrain him. And if his head gets smacked and he gets a concussion while being tackled, so be it, and the police shouldn't be charged.

That is almost never how these brutality cases go. Usually it's a bunch of tyrants beating the crap out of someone they see as lesser than themselves for fun. It's not only excessive, it's unnecessary. They're not going too far in the line of duty: making a distasteful but utilitarian tradeoff between effectiveness and kindness, there's literally no point. If someone is already on the ground, already restrained, and no longer a threat then beating them further does not help capture them or keep the police safe. Police are humans just like everyone else, and they have the same tendencies towards bullying and abuse of power as everyone else. These people have often grown up in poor violent communities and they are the same poor violent people as the people they're policing, they just have more authority. In theory, the police would screen for this during the hiring process, and most of them do with some effectiveness. That is, I bet the proportion of violent thug-like people in most police forces is less than in the average population. But it's not zero, and it's not close enough to zero to ignore. The 90%+ of virtuous brave moral police officers do their jobs effectively and then don't get arrested for brutality so they don't make the news. Most of the time. There are exceptions, there are false accusations. But most of the time the police who actually get in trouble deserve it, and the issue is with people falsely generalizing that to say that all police are bad when they're usually not.

Assuming the video footage corroborates that this was pointlessly excessive, then these officers being imprisoned will make Memphis better off, because having violent thugs in the police force accomplishes nothing but justify the hatred that criminals and noncriminals alike have for the police and make them less likely to feel guilty about committing crimes. Police who follow the law and have respect for civilians are more effective at establishing a rapport with their communities and disincentivizing crime beyond just the threat of violence. Get the thugs out, hire better and more competent people who actually respect the law to replace them. This is not a tyrannical dictatorship, everyone has to follow the law, including the police and politicians.

I am a human. I have creativity. What I don't have is the talent/skill to bring the things I imagine to life without it looking incredibly misshapen, distorted, and low-quality.

Kickstarter is against the side of my creative work and me as a human who would be behind that work if I had AI assistance. This seems like the classic problem of the existing industry have superior lobbying power against potential future industry which doesn't yet exist as an organized group and doesn't have lobbying power.

The fact that the bike makers never intended the repeated 45 free minutes trick to work but didn't do anything to patch this exploit is a lapse of their judgement, not a shortfall in goodness from the black teens.

Hard disagree. The fact that the bike temporarily locks you out from immediately re-renting it demonstrates that the bike makers deliberately attempted to prevent this exploit, they just didn't expect people to go so far as to physically guarding the bikes while they were docked. Effectively, the kids are taking up the bikes so that they can't be used, as if they were renting them, without paying for it while it's docked. The fact that a protection is possible to get around if you go to extremes that reasonable people wouldn't go to (physically intimidating and harassing cusomters away from the rentals) does not make it acceptable behavior.

Further, there are tradeoffs to behaving in this low-trust way. Because the bike makers "patching" this exploit is to make the lockout period longer. Maybe they make it so the subscribed customers only get 45 minutes once every 4 hours, to make it untenable for squatters to sit around that long. Except now that harms legitimate good-faith customers who had a 30 minute bike ride, a 2 hour meeting, and then 30 minutes back. Straining the system in an adversarial relationship with the manufacturer forces them to make increasingly draconian patches to prevent exploits.

This is more akin to a sale of some item at a store that says "50% off, limit one item per customer" and having one person guard them so nobody can get any during the time it takes for your friend to continuously grab one item, go and check out, and then come back for more until they're all gone. You don't get moral dibs if the rules are clearly trying to prevent you from doing what you're doing but failed to account for the fact that you might use physical intimidation.

I'm always suspicious of theories that conflate changes in observable group opinion with changes in the opinions of actual people. Comments are not polls, they are not proportional representations of the total quantity of people with each opinion. Maybe it's just that there are a large quantity of both pro-lockdown and anti-lockdown people, but whichever group seems to be losing keeps quiet out of fear of being criticized, while the winning group mouths off and pats each other on the back.

So we could easily see comments from a group seemingly shift completely as the environment changes, while literally no individual actually changes their own opinion or temperament. Or maybe individuals are changing their opinion because they are easily-led sheep, but we certainly can't conclude that just from the general feel of comments shifting.

I would largely put it down to severity of the imposition. It's not exactly positive restrictions versus negative restrictions, but that is a component of it.

To adhere to all Covid regulations and suggestions, you had to

1: Wear a mask whenever you go outside. This requires you to buy a mask, remember the mask exists, have this thing on your face restricting your breating and constantly reminding you of its existence, be unable to see the faces of the people you interact with, and have your adherence be publicly displayed.

2: Not travel to places or spend time with friends and family as much as usual. Not go to work for several months, possibly having severe repercussions on your finances. Change your entire daily routine, and that of your family. Watch your kids miss several months of proper schooling. Have you and your family potentially suffer negative mental health effects.

3: Inject yourself with a newly invented vaccine that may or may not work or be safe (it does work and is probably safe, but that's hard for a 100 IQ person to know when everyone is lying constantly). Multiple times, because apparently the first one isn't good enough.

This was a huge deal. The entire country changed, for years. The economy took a huge blow leading to supply chain issues and massive inflation that it still hasn't recovered from (though part of that is that it rolled into the Russia sanctions, but the bulk of it was Covid). And the rules kept changing every week and people had to keep paying attention and changing their behavior in response. The Covid lockdowns were a big deal. You can argue that Covid itself was a big deal and therefore it was worth the cost, but it was a huge cost.

Meanwhile, to adhere to recreational drug restrictions I have to.... do nothing. I can literally do nothing, go about my daily life, and be in compliance with the restrictions. I can not damage my health by inhaling or injecting foreign substances, and not spend my money on a thing that I don't need or want. People who don't know that recreational drugs exist are in compliance with these restrictions, because it's a restriction against doing something, not requiring you to do something, and it's not something most people want to do anyway. It has literally no impact on the majority of people, so they don't care. You might compare it to if the government outlawed Skiing or something. People would get upset and protest that the restriction was stupid, pointless, authoritarian and evil. But they would be less upset than the Covid lockdowns, because most of them would not be impacted and could comply by simply going about their daily lives not Skiing. And if Skiing had already been illegal for decades then people probably wouldn't get that upset about it, because they wouldn't have made it into a hobby they enjoy or bought equipment for it in the first place.

The ability to use recreational drugs is just not a big deal for most people.

This reminds me of a quality contribution post, regarding the "it's okay to be white posters", which says "The far-right statement isn't: "It's okay to be white" , it is you tearing it down."

link: https://www.vault.themotte.org/post/the_shortest_quality_contribution

Part of why trolling sometimes works as an ideological tool is because people who react disproportionately to innocuous things look ridiculous and usually end up hurting their own side more than they help.

I'm going to try to steelman some of FC's points. I don't necessarily fully agree with these, but I think they have some merit. First, most of your comment seems to be premised on the idea that the objection is to converting all. You keep repeating and extrapolating the phrase "abandoning the faith their forefathers" as if that, itself, is FC's core argument: that converting to a different faith is bad/traitorous. This is an inherently relativist perspective, trying to be fair and treat all belief structures equally. No Christians ever object to the notion of conversion in general, it is always a position that Christianity is actually true/good, and other religions, therefore conversion to Christianity is good and conversion away from it is bad. It's possible to make all sorts of objections to this position, but the fact that you argue from a relativist perspective suggests you (or maybe FC, or both) are missing the point.

Second, independently from whether Christianity is true/good in some objective sense, there's the additional issue you don't seem to notice which is a simple pragmatic alliance. Currently, Christianity is in the middle of being conquered by wokeism. These are the two major factions argument FC seems to be putting forth, or maybe a steelman of their position, is that Christianity, as the defender and the prominent force for thousands of years, is the most realistic faction capable of actually defeating wokeism. The criticism is not just that you didn't choose his prefered faction, but that, in the middle of a war between two major powers, you joined a minor third party with no hope of defeating either. If you want to defeat woke-ism, you need to ally with or preferably join the Red Tribe for real, not play third party half-ally half-enemy where you're fighting against both.

Personally, I'm less optimistic than these arguments would imply about how realistic it is for Christianity to make a comeback and defeat woke-ism without significant Blue-Tribe support. More realistically, I'm hopeful if we can defend for long enough then woke-ism will eventually collapse on itself and/or mutate into something less horrible and/or the Blue Tribe will come up with something less horrible which can outcompete woke-ism, which will then conquer and take over everything and be worse than Christianity but better than current woke-ism and our society won't collapse. But I do think that Christianity has a powerful defense against woke-ism that non-woke atheists lack, which is a strong mostly-objective morality system. We know what is right and what is wrong, and when progressives make moral arguments it's relatively easy for us to A. not be seduced by their arguments, and B. make strong defensive arguments against them. And while these arguments aren't necessarily convincing to non-Christians if they rely on biblical principles which are not shared by non-Christians, but sometimes they are. I don't think most atheists have the same level of moral conviction (a lot of Christians lack it too), which is why they keep ceding more and more ground to the leftists over time. A lot of people don't care that much about moral philosophy, but they don't want to be a bad person. If they don't already know what's right and wrong then they let someone else tell them what to do, the only question is whether it's the church or the diversity officers. And, despite all of its many flaws throughout the years, if they're not going to think for themselves then I'd rather have people listen to the church than an alternate source.

Update to this post: https://www.themotte.org/post/498/smallscale-question-sunday-for-may-21/101809?context=8#context

where I wanted advice on getting an engagement ring for my girlfriend. I have since proposed before getting the ring (as planned), it went wonderfully, and we are now engaged. After looking at a bunch of examples together and honing in on concepts and features she found appealing (turns out she doesn't simply like flowers, which I already knew, but she really really really likes flowers), we settled on this ring

https://cms-media.taylorandhart.com/2021/11/11194729/Round_white_diamond_pear_diamond_halo_flower_engagement_ring-1000x1000.jpg

from Taylor and Hart. It uses diamonds, but they use lab-grown diamonds, so I'm happy with that. We considered substituting some colored gems in the flower, but then there's also leaves which would look a bit weird if we made them green, but would also look weird if we colored the rest of the flower but left them white. Most importantly, my now-fiance thinks it's really pretty exactly how it is, so we don't want to change things in case it accidentally ends up looking worse.

Thank you for everyone who offered advice, regardless of whether I ended up using it or not.

You can do equally annoying semantic tricks with pretty much anything, it's just harder to get away with it with when it isn't math:

Ie, "The Sun is smaller than a pebble" - - (Pebble is an alternate name I made up for the Milky Way)

"Grass isn't green" - - (I've defined Green to be 00FF00 in Hexadecimal, and this grass here is 28CF0E, which I have named "moss", so the colors aren't equal)

etc.

When you say things without rigorously defining every word ahead of time, there is an implicit promise that your words mean approximately what they usually mean in that language. Most words and concepts have reasonably well understood meanings, or such can be inferred via context. And this is almost always a good thing because it enables people to have conversations without carrying dictionaries around, not some close minded thing that needs to be challenged and abused with pedantic tricks and deception.

The Goal of the Futurist Right is not to create some new orthodoxy that can take the people who put us in our current predicament, and align them properly with the interests of our society.

As a Christian, I must reject this. For the Atheist Right this may your goal, but this is decidedly unchristian, and likely bad even from an atheist utilitarian perspective. Jesus came to save the sinners, taught to love our enemies, and spent his time teaching and hanging out with the lowest scum of society while the experts in the law mocked him and ultimately killed him. The easiest way to become evil is to be so sure that you are good and your enemies are evil that any acts against them are justified.

This is related to though perhaps a slightly different spin on Scott's Guided by the Beauty of Our Weapons. Perhaps a moral rather than rational/bayesian version. If you attempt to ruthlessly crush your opponents, and they attempt to do the same to you, then the stronger one will win with no correlation to who's actually correct. And to what end? You're no more likely to be on the correct side, and if you resort to evil methods in your pursuit of victory then you can rule over an evil society with you on top instead of them on top, I guess.

But if you do what's right, and you are more good and more kind then you will draw people to join you and simultaneously gain strength and build a better world. If you try to convince people that you are right, and they try to convince you that they are right, then if you are actually right you will be more persuasive on average.

Now, it's important not to be naive about this. We don't need to fill our streets with radical leftists and/or Islamists who seek to destroy us and build their own subcultures where they reinforce their beliefs and never convert. Survival as a society and culture is an important goal. But converting other people is also an important goal, not simply because they will be allies and help us but also because they are human beings who matter even when they do evil, and helping them to be better is the right thing to do. Marginalizing people might be positive as a instrument towards disincentivizing their behavior and limiting the damage they can do, but it is negative as an ultimate goal and the actual end goal should be conversion.

What I do remember quite vividly is hating English class for the next two years, because as often as not it was just hours of identifying sounds in words I could already read just fine, followed by homework of more of the same, all while I would rather just be reading a book.

That just sounds like an argument in favor of better tracking. Students who have already mastered a topic, in any subject, should be allowed to test out of it and move on.

Maybe kids are great qualitatively but they are certainly low status.

This seems like a solvable problem: make having kids higher status. You can't just unilaterally declare something to be high status by dictatorial fiat, but there are things you can do to push in that direction, or even more easily, stop pushing in the opposite direction. I think this one of my main complaints against the Blue Tribe, and all this stuff about the destruction of the family unit, is that they seem to be deliberately lowering the status of children and families. There's a qualitative difference between removing oppressive structures that force people into certain lifestyles, and actively disparaging those lifestyles and mocking people who like them.

Nobody should be forced to be a stay at home parent and raise seven children, but if somebody chooses that lifestyle then we should celebrate them as a strong person and a valuable contributor to society. Not mock them as backwards and oppressed and quaint. Everyone who mocks and disparages traditional families and cultures lowers the effective status of those lifestyles and makes other people less likely to choose them. People shouldn't be forced between a high status job versus a low status family, they should be able to have a high status family, provided they actually do a competent job of raising kids. But traditional families are yesterdays fashion, and red-coded which makes them automatically distasteful to the blue tribe. Families didn't used to be low status, but in the process of destroying gender roles our society has completely and utterly ignored the collateral damage, resulting in the current situation. Victory at any costs indeed.

Very few people actually have a problem with talented people earning lots of money and then spending their own money on personal consumption, even if this is "unequal" compared to untalented people who have less money. Nonzero, but very few. Most people complaining about rich people are actually upset at some combination of

1: Rentseeking. Big company gets a stranglehold on some sort of niche or patent, ousts/regulates/threatens out their competition, and earns tons of money disproportionate to their actual economic contribution. CEO/executives/shareholders get rich on economic surplus that they didn't rightfully earn.

2: Inherited wealth. If John is talented and earns a ton of money, as his private property he can do whatever he wants with it. One of the things people like to do with their money is give it to their children, especially when they die and can't use it any more. So John gives his earned wealth to his son Jim, who is a spoiled talentless loser, and gets all of the benefits of massive wealth with none of the personal contribution to society or perceived merit. Everyone hates Jim.

3: Interest. Capital is incredibly valuable to the economy. Therefore people who invest their money in capital can earn lots of money from their money. Therefore their wealth grows exponentially even without them having talent or contributing labor. Talentless losers like Jim can invest the wealth they inherited and continue to become increasingly wealthy without actually having any talent whatsoever. They're still contributing to the economy in the sense that the wealth they invest is useful, but they themselves have done nothing to earn it other than inheriting the legacy of their parents who did earn it (or stole it via rentseeking, or literal theft in the distant past)

These are all really hard problems to solve. I'm not entirely convinced that 2 and 3 are actually problems in their own right rather than just discomforting rights people have. Like, someone has the right to masturbate while smearing poop on their chest, but I find it disgusting and would rather wish they didn't even though technically I would agree they are free to do that in the privacy of their own home and I won't argue that the government should make it illegal. It's still disgusting to my sensibilities.

In my opinion, 1 is a genuine problem that definitely needs to be solved. 2 is probably fine if we can address 3, and 3 is only solvable by economic stagnation or post-scarcity. Basically, as long as the economy is growing, and capital investment is an important component of that growth, then the people driving the growth via investment will capture the growth. If the economy stops growing, or labor becomes a more important part of growth rather than capital, then capital is no longer so ridiculously valuable and interest rates will plummet. Until then, I think we're stuck with Jims getting richer.

Progressives have this insane tendency to assume that if it really is true that blacks aren’t as smart as whites on average, then the only logical thing to do would be to murder all of our fellow black citizens in Treblinka-style death camps. Why? Because, they apparently reason, only Nazis, as they’ve so often said, think blacks have lower mean IQs, so if it turns out that the IQ Nazis are right, well, that means Hitler should be our role model.

Or something. You can never quite get liberals to articulate why they are convinced it would be the end of the world if there are racial differences in intelligence, other than that’s the ditch they’ve decided to die in and it would be embarrassing for them to turn out to be wrong.

An awful lot of people believe that low intelligence logically implies moral inferiority. That if you are unintelligent, you are a bad person. It is a moral failing to not be smarter.

Progressives seem to believe this more strongly than conservatives, and use it as one of their primary attacks against the right. If you take "stupid = bad" as an axiom, then HBD forces you to conclude that less intelligent races are bad, and progressives who don't even question the "stupid = bad" axiom automatically equate HBD with "some races are inferior". But because the "stupid = bad" axiom is unstated, and probably not consciously endorsed, they can't quite articulate this chain of reasoning. The embarrassment that would come if it were incontrovertibly proven that some races were inferior on a genetic level is that it would be revealed that they are bigots. They have always been bigots against unintelligent people, but by restricting their bigotry to unintelligent white people, manage to convince themselves that that doesn't count. But if colored people are even less intelligent, and it wasn't society's fault it was inherent to the individuals themselves and their genes, then the progressives would either have to admit to being racist, or change their worldview to account for good but unintelligent people. Who, in my opinion, exist in multitudes. I've met quite a few. But a lot of people aren't ready to admit that.

Isn't this double billing? Which is a terrible idea and entirely unnecessary.

Someone has to pay for the internet infrastructure. And it makes sense that payment should be roughly proportional to usage. A system in which all users of the internet pay their ISPs for access to the internet, proportional to the amount they use, while companies and other web hosters pay nothing for this, is stable and sane, and what we have now.

An alternate system where companies and other web hosters pay proportional to the amount people use their site would also handle this. I think it's inferior to what we have now, because it strongly discourages the usage of free content (or cheap content paid for by ads), and would require websites to charge microtransactions to casual viewers to compensate for their access, so costs would just pass on to the same people they are now but with more friction.

But this? Trying to make companies pay for bandwidth use that customers are already paying for? That's pure greed, it makes no sense. ISPs are already getting paid for Netflix use, because Netflix users have to pay the ISP directly for however much bandwidth they use, which then compensates the ISP for the costs of building the network infrastructure. Netflix is not the customer of the ISP, the actual customers are. They're already being paid (and more than they deserve anyway given their natural monopoly).

I don't think that's opposite. The progressives aren't questioning that stupid people belong at the bottom, they're tacitly agreeing that stupid people belong at the bottom and arguing that minorities are secretly intelligent if all the cultural biases didn't keep underestimating them. The argument is "they aren't stupid so they don't belong at the bottom with the stupid people", not "it doesn't matter how smart they are, they still deserve good outcomes anyway"

It's one or the other, no in-between.

....no? It's definitely in between. He is a nice guy who genuinely believes in the value of his service, and has seen it genuinely help people, and has rationally concluded that valuable services are worth large amounts of money, and good advertising and optics help you sell more of them.

This is no different than a top class chef charging $100 for meals at a high class restaurant instead of working at a soup kitchen. You would not describe such a person as "the nicest kindest chef", it's not a charity, but neither is it merely a scam.

High value product for high cost = fair

High value product for low cost = kind

Low value product for high cost = scam

Low value product for low cost = fair

Whether it genuinely is a high value product, I have no idea. But I believe that he genuinely believes in it, and wouldn't offer it if he didn't believe it was valuable, in a way unlike Andrew Tate or other scammers.

Yeah, my understanding is that most of the therapy techniques were designed based on female patients, and therefore focus more on things like feelings rather than solutions to object-level problems. However competent ones exist, and will tailor their style based on the needs of their patient (or at least identify when they aren't a good fit and refer them to other therapists with a better-suited style). A suicidal man seeing Jordan Peterson isn't going to get a bunch of mamby pampy nonsense about "aw, I'm sorry to hear that, how does that make you feel?", they're going to get "that sucks, life sucks, but your life isn't over, let's come up with an actionable plan for how to make it suck less" and then having an actionable plan helps fix your mental state because you have a goal you can work towards (and once you enact the plan your life is objectively improved and that helps your mental state). Even a good therapist can't unilaterally fix your life for you, but they can help convince you to fix your own life and figure out how instead of wallowing in self-misery and inaction.

Not sure if this belongs here or in SQS, but it could either be a small question I don't understand or a discussion depending on whether or not people disagree about the answer.

Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way. That is, the right is usually more pro-military, pro-military intervention, and patriotic defending of one's homeland. Even though the right tends to be more focused on domestic issues and oppose foreign aid, military support tends to be the exeption. Although there was bipartisan support of the Iraq war (at least in the aftermath of 9/11) the Republicans were more strongly in favor of it and stayed in favor of it for longer. If Russia had threatened to invade the U.S. the Republicans would have been not only gung-ho about repelling them but also about retaliating and obliterating them in revenge so that none would dare try ever again. So you would think they would sympathize with Ukrainians as similarly patriotic defenders of their home turf, while the left would be all peace and let's try to get along and diplomatically convince the invaders to stop without violence, or something like that.

But that's not what happened. Why?

Is it just because the left has been harping on about Putin for years so hopped on the anti-Russia train too quickly and the right felt compelled to instinctively oppose them? If China had invaded Ukraine (for some mysterious reason) would the right be pro-Ukraine and the left opposing intervention because they don't want to piss off China (and accusing Ukraine of being nazis as an excuse)? That is, is there something specific to Ukraine/Russia that caused this divide here specifically, or am I misunderstanding the position of each side regarding military intervention in general (or has it changed in the past few decades and my beliefs used to be accurate but no longer are)?

Whose push? If he's just a puppet letting someone else pull the strings, then isn't that person or group effectively the President? How do you have Democracy and accountability if the literal President is just a figurehead representing unknown people in a political party? Does every Democratic Senator vote to decide what Joe Biden's next position should be? Does Nancy Pelosi call all the shots unilaterally and functionally equivalent to being the president herself except she gets none of the blame or credit if things go badly? Is Hillary Clinton the puppetmaster and electing Joe Biden was politically equivalent to electing her? Is the CEO of CNN actually influencing Joe Biden by implicitly threatening to smear him if he doesn't do what they want? We don't know. And next election cycle, if Joe Biden steps down and another puppet steps up you might have the exact same person/people pulling their strings, bypassing term limits, and pretending to be starting fresh with a new reputation, forgetting all the mistakes they made in the past.

I very much want a President who has policies and agendas, declares what they are openly, honestly, and publicly, and then sticks to them as much as reasonably possible. Because then we the people can decide which collections of policies and agendas we actually agree with and vote for whichever President has the best. Because we the people are supposed to be in charge, not shady politicians making secret deals behind the scenes and avoiding responsibility.

My own addendum

3.5: How does your answer change based on the fact that the vigilantism happened before the men were tried?

Having not seen the movie and just going on your description, I think I would be somewhat harsh on the father because he didn't even give the justice system a chance. If the men had been tried, found not guilty or gotten away with a slap on the wrist, and then the father killed them, I'd be inclined to give a similar punishment of ~10 years. Similarly if the police had failed to arrest them in the first place. I'd think that the father did the right thing morally in killing them, but that the law needs to be enforced and have consequences, and he can do his time in exchange for having his morally justified revenge.

But he didn't even let them get to trial. And, given that the all white and kind of racist jury did in fact find him not guilty, this implies that they would have been even more likely to find the original criminals guilty if he had let them (technically it would probably be a different jury, but in the same area statistically it would have the same representation).

I think vigilantism after the justice system has already failed you is much more defensible than vigilantism in anticipation of the justice system failing, unless there is a clear and repeated pattern such that you reliably know it will fail, which a single prior case does not establish. The father should get a fairly harsh sentence. Still less than an unprovoked double homicide would warrant, but quite a bit more than I would think fair for a vigilante attack when the perpetrators were not literally in police custody.

Rather than saying they don't exist, it would be more accurate and productive to say that they have a mental illness. Like with people with anorexia. It exists, it can cause suffering, it's complicated and hard to solve rather than just "made up" in a way that a five year old pretending to be a cowboy is. But it exists within the realm of psychology, and therefore effective treatments will also be within the realm of psychology: therapy and medications. And it is socially irresponsible to enable the behavior and reinforce the illness, even though sympathy may be appropriate as it is for most mental illnesses.