Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
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User ID: 265
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
11mo ago
Sure, but it takes the sting out of
this community in particular had egregious problems with this
When in fact it's a general problem and not particular to this community.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
11mo ago
I'm pretty sure that Ford and Le Boeuf were never filmed together, probably at Ford's insistence. I haven't watched the whole thing, but every scene I watched had negative chemistry and gave of vibes of independent performances composited together.
I went to uni with a Biden, and she was a total party girl. An absolute embarrassment, in relative hindsight, but I thought she was really cool at the time. I have zero evidence or knowledge but zero doubt that she did several stints of rehab and an extensive "clean up your image" period. I was sure it was going to blow up for Biden when Obama got elected, but nary a peep since.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
10mo ago
I suspect Vladimir Putin is dead. I think the man in charge of the country is a double. World leaders are known to have body doubles, often multiples. For clarity, I'm going to introduce "Vlad", a person who resembles Putin and was recruited into performing as a double, likely after some cosmetic surgeries to tighten up the image. Putin has reportedly had some nasty health problems over the last 3 years or so, and I have seen multiple articles suspecting a double acting in certain capacities, with side by sides of Putin and "Vlad". I found this reporting credibly speculative, and I felt that I could reliably and consistently distinguish "Vlad" from Putin, particularly over time.
There is a problem of course: if "Vlad" exists, how can we be sure any particular Putin photo is actually of Putin?
Here is some evidence I've found, and I did not look very hard. I was reading https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12231813/Prepare-deeply-dangerous-unpredictable-Russia-Putin-replaced-says-security-expert.html and happened to notice "Vlad", and scrolled down further to find what appeared to be an older photo of Putin.
Note, I am not saying that these are great examples. If someone looked much harder, they could make a stronger case. "Vlad" to me looks softer and smoother, without the hardness or sharpness that I've come to associate with Putin's gaze.
My best guess at a narrative, if Vladimir Putin is in fact dead at this moment:
Putin probably has a double even before he gets sick. This may or may not be the current "Vlad". I think Putin realizes he has a likely terminal disease before the Ukraine invasion. As he gets sicker, the need for the double increases, both in terms of scheduling around illness and heightened scrutiny. Perhaps there is additional recruitment or cosmetic procedures. Putin invades Ukraine. Perhaps within a year of the invasion, he becomes incapacitated, and the double takes over, likely with the assistance of high level FSB.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
10mo ago
the almost certainly true idea that it requires far less innate talent to be a straight-A/high SAT asian student from Palo Alto than it does to be a straight-A/high SAT black student from Detroit,
This doesn't seem obvious, unless you are having innate talent do the heavy lifting. What do you mean by innate talent, and is there any evidence for your claim?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
Maybe Jennifer Lawrence is actually worth $25 million dollars, but I don't think so. A more sustainable model for Hollywood would be to pay more actors a more moderate sum, creating more things on a smaller budget to appeal to more groups and sub-genres.
A movie without a big star is risky, making it very difficult to get the right mix of stakeholders on board (director, financing, producers, executive producers, studio execs).
Eli Lake at Bari Weiss' The Free Press
He lays out in simple, clear language how the FBI has held double and triple standards when it comes to investigating or protecting powerful political figures. I believe this piece is downstream of more original reporting from the likes of Taibbi, Shellenberger, etc, ultimately stemming from Elon Musk's release of The Twitter Files.
You’ll recall that those scoops weren’t as big a news story as was the fact that Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing the story on the theory that it was the fruit of Kremlin fakery intended to sway the presidential election. It turns out that the FBI officials who warned social media companies that the laptop story might be part of a Russian scheme to mislead voters themselves knew that the laptop was real. And they knew so as early as December of 2019.
But instead of clarifying that the FBI had verified its contents, the bureau instead allowed a falsehood about its provenance to linger. Savor the irony. In an effort to counter Russian disinformation, the FBI actively allowed American disinformation to spread.
It’s also Russiagate—Trump’s alleged (and never proven) collusion with Russia—which was fueled by a Democrat-funded opposition research sheet known as the Steele Dossier. The FBI knew by early 2017 (at the latest) that the whole thing was junk. But like the Russian disinformation lie about the laptop, the bureau let the dossier falsehood linger while the Steele Dossier was hyped like Watergate by the legacy press and Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018.
Then there is the double standard the bureau applied to pursuing foreign influence investigations into Trump’s campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. That was one of the primary conclusions of a report released in May from U.S. Special Counsel John Durham. For Trump, the FBI opened a full investigation on the thinnest of pretexts. For Clinton, the bureau delayed investigations into potential foreign influence and offered defensive briefings to her lawyers.
Here it is useful to examine the other major event of last week: the serious allegations raised by two career IRS investigators who led the team probing Hunter’s tax violations. On Wednesday the two agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, testified in open session before the House Oversight Committee.
Ziegler and Shapley painted a picture of a long-standing probe that began in 2018 into Hunter Biden’s income that was stymied and delayed at nearly every turn. The delays were significant—so significant that eventually the statute of limitations ran out. Ziegler said that the probe did not follow normal procedures. Prosecutors, he said, “slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and road blocks from effectively and efficiently addressing the case. A lot of times, we were not able to follow the facts.” Ziegler and Shapley also said there were times when prosecutors informed Hunter’s lawyers about investigative steps, such as a search warrant.
All of that would be bad enough. But the event that led Ziegler and Shapley to eventually blow the whistle was when, in October of last year, the U.S. attorney in charge of the case, David Weiss, privately told them that it was not his decision to charge Hunter in districts outside of Delaware. That directly contradicted the pledge that Attorney General Merrick Garland made to Congress that there would be no restrictions placed on Weiss in his investigation of Hunter.
These feel like bombshell revelations to me, but there is also a sickening feeling of two movies on one screen. This stuff is worthy of coverage in global mainstream media, right? Not just "bloggers on substack"?
I don't have a NYT or WaPo subscription. In the last five years, I have completely lost faith in mainstream media. Is this FBI stuff getting the coverage it deserves? Shouldn't something like this make a career for a scrappy Berenson type at the NYT? Are they salivating or putting their (and our) heads in the sand?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
Surprising, no. Scandalous, yes. The foundation of justice in this country is based on rule of law, as opposed to rule of man. Obviously, that's an ideal that we do not always meet. But the cavalier attitude towards abandoning this principle is very, very concerning.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
Great post! Forgive a slight nitpick:
These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper, directly, to the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately.
The structure of this sentence boggles my brain.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
Courtesy Taibbi and Orfalea:
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
after Mexico demanded the federal government make Texas remove them
What, exactly, is the argument for removing border barriers? Can we analyze the tradeoffs and incentives? Why are Mexico and USA seemingly interested in more illegal border crossings while Texas is not? What are the costs and benefits? What are the tradeoffs? It seems to me that if foreigners are penetrating a border, the recipient country is justified to install disincentives and defenses.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
Where are the creative songbirds of thought and word who would transcend this opposition and maybe get both sides to become aware that both are equally stuck in the human condition?
Joe Rogan, maybe? Jordan Peterson, less so.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
What does Peterson represent in the culture war that's distinct from Rogan?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
He's not a true believer, just a theologian / philosopher, which is very blue-coded.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
a “bunker / shelter” that would be used for “some event where 50%-99.99% of people die [to] ensure that most EAs [effective altruists] survive”
This is especially galling coming from the guy who will flip a 50.1% coin forever at double or nothing on civilization's behalf. We might all be lucky he blew up "early".
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
I'd go with a (truly) genderfluid shapeshifter. Modify the exterior, and keep a somewhat consistent interior, and you can even play the interior across type -- where the hyperfemale body is balanced by a somewhat male personalty.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
9mo ago
The way that HBD is used around here seems to imply some amount of believing that
racialpopulation-level differences in traits like intelligence (1) exist and (2) are significantly heritable.
Would he really disagree with this? It's basic statistics. The sketchy part is attempting to map a distinct population onto some kind of "race". Since our populations are not as isolated as they were five hundred or five thousand years ago, race is a muddy lens today.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
8mo ago
Arnold Kling on Michael Huemer on Thought Crime
Michael Huemer has a meditation on the phenomenon of thought crimes. A thought crime emerges when one group of people decides that if a person is suspected of believing X, then that person should be punished.
It kind of goes without saying, but inherent in the notion of "thought crime" are both crime and punishment. If it doesn't deserve punishment, then it's not a crime.
the status of ‘thought crime’ does not in general attach to beliefs that are so conclusively refuted that anyone who investigates carefully will reject them. Indeed, it is precisely the opposite. It is precisely because epistemic reasons do not suffice to convince everyone of your belief that you attempt to convince them through moral exhortation. When the plea “Believe P because the evidence demonstrates it!” fails, then we resort to “Believe P because it is immoral to doubt it!” Indeed, you might reasonably take someone’s resort to moral exhortation as pretty strong evidence that they have a weak case, and they know it.
Calling something a thought-crime is a dominance move. It is coercive. You only have to coerce someone if you cannot convince the person voluntarily. If X is demonstrably false, then you should be able to convince someone voluntarily not to believe X. It is only if X is plausibly true, or ambiguous, that you have to resort to coercion.
This makes the accusation of thought-crime highly suspect. The more that you try to force me to believe that the virus could not have come from a lab, the more suspicious I become.
Amen, brother. But is this just preaching to the choir? Consider: A whole lot of NPCs and talking heads sure ate up The Narrative. Propaganda is effective, to an extent, but beyond that extent it is deeply corrosive, particularly to any intellectual class, who become disillusioned and cynical. Thought crime is next.
Religions in general, and Christianity in particular, are all about thought crime. You have to take the salvation of Jesus into your heart or something, and if you don't, have fun with eternal damnation. I can accept Aquinas, Chesterton, C.S. Lewis. These are men who appealed to reason, writing to convince and persuade.
I imagine only atheists see the appeal of comparing woke (progressive, successor) ideology to a religion of sorts, likely filling some kind of primitive need for tribal loyalty, purity tests, and expensive signals (rabid adherence to nonsense). I'd love to hear Antonin Scalia's take though. Or L. Ron Hubbard's. Perhaps what we are seeing with successor ideology is not an individual need for such, but instead just the character of mass movements, the nature of power, its patterns of growth and movement and perpetuation. Are propaganda and thought crime inevitable?
Let's take it back to 1984. Orwell demonstrates the existential horror of a regime that can successfully deploy thought crime. Didn't he make it blindingly obvious for everyone? I'm pretty sure we were all nodding our heads in 8th grade English class about the evils of totalitarianism, only a few years after the USSR fell. I suspect this issue is particularly salient for me, as a libertarian.
Anyways, I'm not mad, just disappointed.
Let's taboo "thought crime". It's just meant to be a convenient label / handle, but with extra salience from Orwell's 1984.
A thought crime emerges when one group of people decides that if a person is suspected of believing X, then that person should be punished.
I'm talking about society's seemingly reflexive need to punish wrongthink. This is corrosive because it's very difficult for society or its agents to determine exactly what an individual thinks. Furthermore, only acts (and not thoughts) have relevant consequences. We generally think it's ok to wish harm on one's neighbor for a brief moment.
Simple examples of thought crime include hate crimes, hate speech, accusations of being a racist rather than doing a racism.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
8mo ago
The older I get the more I realize libertarianism is a second order belief after you have a good culture. Humans are social creatures. Nobody would want to live in a world where 90% of society becomes fentanyl zombies. You’d rather just ban fentanyl.
Also when existential risks are involved. Martial law sucks, but it is sometimes necessary.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
8mo ago
In the US, at any rate, hate speech is not illegal.
But it sure is punished. The test is not illegality but punishment.
And "hate crimes" are crimes in which the victim is chosen because of his group membership (real or perceived). No hatred or other ideas need be shown.
I am rather certain I can find examples in the US in which someone was charged with a hate crime, possibly convicted, where it is simply not possible to know why the victim was chosen. By your standard, any typical rape of a woman is now a hate crime, as the female victim was chosen because of her membership in the group of women. I believe the intent and wording of hate crime statutes go beyond your standard and presume to read the mind of the perpetrator, mostly as inference from actual acts (speech or otherwise) committed.
I suspect there is a bit of motte and bailey going on, where there is lots of activity in the bailey that I find concerning, but your position is wrapped up tight in the motte.
For example, two women were charged with a hate crime for burning a Trump sign. Arson is the underlying crime, with apparent hatred (towards what protected group?) adding an additional hate crime: http://web.archive.org/web/20210624142206/https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-trump-sign-charges-20170418-story.html
Princess Anne police have charged D'Asia R. Perry, of Baltimore, and Joy M. Shuford, of Owings Mills, both 19, with multiple offenses, including second-degree arson and committing a hate crime, the Maryland State Fire Marshal's Office said.
"The intentional burning of these political signs, along with the beliefs, religious views and race of this political affiliation, directly coincides with the victim," a Princess Anne police officer wrote in charging documents to support the hate crime charge.
By committing arson, "in doing so, with discrimination or malice toward a particular group, or someone's belief," was the reasoning for charging the women with a hate crime offense as well, said Caryn L. McMahon, deputy chief fire marshal.
Here is another take on hate crimes in the US: https://mises.org/wire/how-much-problem-hate-crime
However, one major problem with this is how hate crime is defined. According to the FBI, “A hate crime is a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.” The underlying problem with this definition is it elevates non-criminal activity to the level of a crime. Spray painting a phallus on the side of a building is vandalism. Spray painting a swastika on the side of a building is a hate crime. To get a true understanding of hate crime, the underlying action must be fully understood.
This reads more like the bailey I am familiar with. Is it possible that the bolded section is true? Can painting a swastika on the side of a building be considered a hate crime? Not in the motte. What about in the real world?
Here is the state of NJ, according to the ADL (Anti Discrimination League, Jewish): https://www.adl.org/resources/media-watch/hate-crime-laws-cover-everyone
Hate-crime laws protect everyone, not just Jews, as the letter writer incorrectly claims. New Jersey’s hate-crime law defends all citizens from any crime committed because of race, religion, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or disability.
Bolding mine. It looks like the typical rape is a hate crime in NJ. Obviously this is not an accurate summary of the statute, and the ADL does not have the definitive take. Take the Jussie Smollett hoax. Widely described as a hate crime, but without any of the necessary evidence like "watching a racially charged movie beforehand, then discussing hey let's beat up that black Empire faggot".
One more clarification: Hate-crime laws only apply when there is an underlying crime to prosecute. The First Amendment protects speech — even bigoted and ignorant speech like the letter writer’s — and ADL staunchly defends this vital democratic freedom.
Biased language must be combated with positive speech from community members and leaders. But when someone goes beyond speech and commits a crime inspired by hate, then hate-crime laws have a vital role to play in ensuring justice and protecting the entire community.
Note ADL says the crime must be inspired by hate. That's not in the motte. Again, non-definitive, but still, there is a concept of a hate crime which is largely thought crime.
Here's Oberlin College: https://www.oberlin.edu/campus-resources/bulletins/condemnation-anti-asian-violence
Tips from Stop AAPI Hate on what to do if you experience hate and how to safely intervene when you see harassment or a hate crime taking place. (SMART Program, San Francisco, CA)
So Joe Random Blogger is going to somehow witness a "hate crime", including the watching of a racially charged movie beforehand and then the witnessed discussion to target someone because of their protected category, and be able to rightfully intervene?
As I've attempted to demonstrate in another reply, I mean hate crimes in the colloquial sense, not necessarily the statutes in the US (but possibly so). When people described the Jussie Smollett hoax initially as a hate crime, I don't think it was a claim that the crime would meet the statutory burden for a hate crime, and I think they are largely describing a thought crime on top of a purported actual crime of assault or whatever.
Disclaimer: this is a serious test for shady thinking. My apologies. Consider this a strawman, and please try to confront a steelman.
Note: see disclaimer above. This is shady thinking in note format.
EDIT: This is mostly in response to https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/why-is-the-academic-job-market-so particularly thinking about Scott analyzing how the academic job market actually works. I bet Scott's analysis is super annoying to many of those in the market, and likewise super satisfying to others. My thesis is that the others are rationalists and the many are not.
idea
rationalists explain foreign things from "first principles"
they liken themselves to newton and hooke, exploring new frontiers
for better or worse
to the experts in the field, they are cringe and dilettante, sneer worthy
the problem
within every field, there are certain "touchy areas"
everyone understands the truth but pretends not to
a bigger problem
rationalists home in on touchy areas
rationalists can't "understand the truth but pretend not to"
rationalists "say the quiet part out loud"
the solution
demonize the rationalists
sneer at the rationalists
how cringe, what baby
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