MotteInTheEye
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User ID: 578
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
This is a really strange take, since in Genesis the men of Sodom immediately try to rape the angels that are sent to Lot to warn him to get out. Genesis hardly leaves you wandering what could have been so bad about these people that they were condemned.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I would guess he had some perfect plan for how to destroy the gun without a trace that required him to be in a certain place.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Disagree. People who are already celebrities like the names you listed have battle lines already drawn around them to some degree, so let's leave them aside. If it was the CEO of Ford, my gut instinct is that on e.g. Reddit the reaction would be essentially the same. They would have to work a little harder to identify the "violence" that said CEO had inflicted on employees or consumers, but not that hard. It's second nature for "late stage capitalism" thinkers. "I'll extend him the same consideration that he extended to the thousands of drivers who died when Ford covered up evidence of faulty brakes / the millions dying from climate change due to lobbying against emissions standards / the families who went hungry when layoffs happened while he pulled down $50M / year."
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
We know that now but I think the sides had already been chosen before that became know several hours ago. I don't disagree that there is a special hatred for the insurance CEO but I don't feel that the overall reaction would have been any different if this had been any other major company's CEO, do you?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
There's no mystery to solve. The leftist instinct in America is always to sympathize with the poorer person whose life is in disarray. It's extremely clear which way this breaks in both cases (everyman subway rider / deranged lunatic and CEO / presumably indebted twenty-something).
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I'm not sure I fully understand this, even a car mechanic won't give you a price up front, they'll give you an estimate, and sometimes, even with a machine, a repair doesn't go the way they expect, and your bill is higher than the estimate. Are you asking for medical care to have set, up-front pricing unlike car repair, or are you saying their estimates are significantly worse / harder to get?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Those aren't contradictory views, both those things can be true. They could have met in the middle.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
There's no way this increases the pressure on Trump. Yes, pundits will absolutely pull the "we criticized Biden when he did it so we are being consistent by criticizing Trump now", but that will be more than cancelled out by not being able to say "first President to do X" and "his predecessor famously didn't pardon his own son".
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I'm fully on board with the death penalty proposal, but also, I don't understand why prison operators can't maintain a monopoly on violence even in its absence. Is it simply jurisprudence that has made corporal punishment and solitary confinement impossible or would it somehow be unaffordable to apply them as needed? A guy alone in a room with food coming through a slot can't rape or intimidate anyone, and I have a hard time believing that the extra number of toilets required wouldn't pay for itself by cutting down on all the violence that prison guards have to deal with, even leaving aside the benefits to cooperative prisoners.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I expect that what he has in mind would be something like government-sponsored genetic engineering or embryo screening for prospective underclass parents.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It seems pretty clear that Scott would favor a voluntary eugenics program and/or genetic engineering.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I can't. I use the mobile website for Facebook itself but I had to install the Messenger app to send messages.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It does require a separate app install on mobile though, right?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Has no one ever told Scott about color contrast best practices? That's not even close to a pleasant reading experience.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
With a little creativity you could discover an unbounded number of actions leading up to the phone call without which it could not have occurred. E.g., the guy who let you in in traffic so you would be there on time, the other guy who slammed on the brakes just in time to prevent a major accident which would have stopped you from arriving at the coffee shop, the gal who set her alarm so that she could open up the coffee shop that morning, the engineer who put the final touches on the cell phone communication standard your phone used to receive the call...
There's obviously no moral obligation on you to identify every single event without which your phone call couldn't have happened. You owe a normal debt of gratitude to someone who minorly inconvienced themselves to help a stranger. Of course a bigger gesture would be a nice act since this particular act of kindness looms large in your mind, but there's no coherent case that you owe anything more than you would if the call hadn't earned you any money.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I agree with your assessment that a repeat of Jan 6 is unlikely but I don't think it's because people are cowed, I think it's because the actions taken by the "rioters" didn't spark the admiration of their own side that progressive protests do. Begging someone else to do something about the problem, burning it all down because you don't like the hand you are dealt: conservatives, with their emphasis on personal responsibility and an internal locus of control, just don't resonate with these courses of action the same way progressives do.
For rank and file conservatives, the way Jan 6 was handled by the DoJ is a glaring injustice, but the rioters themselves are not heros. I think they are regarded as, at best, well-intentioned idiots and buffoons, and at worst, feds and their dupes working to supply the establishment with casus belli for extreme action to stamp out their political opponents.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
There's a knock on effect of execution for murder or attempted murder on how expensive and awful prisons are. Gangs thrive in prison because the guards are not able to maintain a monopoly on violence, which is partly because many prisoners have nothing left to lose.
Edit: forgot to make the full connection to the current topic, which is that policing minor offenders like shoplifting would still get a lot easier with the consistent application of the death penalty even if they aren't the ones getting executed.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
It's still a pretty big jump from "has read some posts by Scott" to "reads the Motte", right?
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I don't think this question is in good faith but just in case: it was a simple misdirect joke, making it seem like he was talking about the Pacific garbage patch that progressives are very concerned about and then revealing that he was speaking figuratively about a country. It would be like if a tsunami was in the news and I said, "I'm very concerned about this massive tidal wave about to hit our shores - but enough about the Democrats' immigration policy."
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
She also claims that were the DoE disbanded, half of the people would go to the Dept. of Labor (where DoE originated from) and others would go to places like Dept. of Health and Human Services. That removing the DoE wouldn't really do anything except push bureaucrats around.
This seems to be a strange hypothetical where the DoE is axed but its full budget is reallocated to the most similar departments. It seems like anyone who would actually axe the DoE would either be looking to shrink the federal government's budget or would at least move the money into very different departments.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I don't think that's very typical, at least assuming that you went on to college afterwards. Although all I have as evidence is a gut feeling and my own n=1 case: I worked a fast food job for six months at the beginning of college and could not have been less interested in maintaining connections with any of the people I worked with there.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
Note that Trump is already heavily associated with having McDonald's as a cornerstone of the American diet.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
I think Mensa selects for people whose IQ test score itself is their highest "achievement", i.e. the lowest performers at any given tier of IQ. So it's very possible that Mensa members could have on average unusually poor mental health.
MotteInTheEye
1yr ago
(gestures to my username)
This is not really true. It's true in the same sense as it would be true to say "material determinists claim that there certain orderings of a deck of cards that can never be created." Some orderings of the cards will never be created, and since material determinism says that the entire course of the universe is already set, in a sense that's equivalent to saying that there are some orderings which "can never" be created. But for all practical purposes it would be a misleading way to phrase it.
The same applies to Calvinism. Calvinists teach that everything which will come to pass has been foreordained by God from eternity. This means that those who are foreordained not to be saved, "can never" be saved. But it's not due to anything special in the person nor susceptible to our analysis ahead of time. Certainly it is not a Calvinist doctrine that certain sinful acts allow us to know here and now someone's predestined fate.
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