Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
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User ID: 1226
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
I haven't conducted a rigorous survey to determine preferences, but anecdotally a lot of women do avoid being alone with men they don't know/don't know well. However, it isn't necessarily easy in all contexts - sometimes you're stuck using a nominally public space which doesn't afford the usual 'protection' of crowds of people to witness any bad behavior (such as a hotel elevator late at night).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
An interesting side note to consider - if your ultimate goal is to get rid of immigrants these stunts may be counterproductive.
“It’s safe to say what’s going on is a pull factor, which is somewhat ironic given the criticism from some of these same governors involved in this about various pull factors that they claim already exist,” Magnus told The Times. He said social media plays a part in the problem because it is enticing “when migrants hear that there are buses that will take them to locations where they are told they will receive benefits and job.” Magnus noted that human smugglers use the same information to lure migrants.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
The entire point of sending them to Martha's Vineyard is that it was small and ill-equipped for the problem. Specifically, previous efforts to stir shit by bussing immigrants to major cities on the eastern seaboard failed to draw attention or rile up anti-immigrant sentiment (few noticed and no one cared - little enough surprise, as these are big cities and already have very large immigrant populations, including large numbers of illegal immigrants), so it was necessary to step up the shit-stirring. The defense offered - that this is about sharing the burden that border states have unfairly been forced to shoulder* - doesn't hold up to scrutiny. GOP-run southern states have made no serious effort to arrange for the large-scale transfer of migrants or asylum seekers to northern blue states, which is what you would actually do if you were burdened and trying to redistribute it. Instead they (Abbott and DeSantis) have done it about as inefficiently as possible, sending penny packets at considerable taxpayer expense and without regard for the welfare of the people transferred. That suggests that the point was either publicly owning libs or trying to rile up nativist sentiment.
(As an aside, I will not be at all surprised if it turns out that these people agreed to transportation under false pretenses.)
*whether or not it is actually unfair is another matter, considering the flow of Federal money and economic cost-benefit analysis of immigration.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
What strikes me about most of the people in the "surrender for their own good" camp is that they would never in a million years apply the same logic to themselves.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
For contempt because in part I view it as a fundamental right to be contemptuous of court
What does that mean? Contempt of court is ignoring the authority of the court. No one can stop you from doing that, but the court has to have the authority to bring you into compliance. To say that they can't do that is to, in effect, say that participation in the legal system is voluntary. Do a crime and then just say no to prosecution.
My sense is that Elon didn't really want to buy Twitter after thinking it through
He tried to get out of it, presumably because he woke up one morning and realized he'd agreed to buy a white elephant at a price that was well above its arguably inflated share price.
What are the lessons? Tech CEOs don't have much political power despite having loads of money. Even tech owners are surprisingly weak. It may be fun belittling government bureaucrats as do-nothing wordcels but the Twitter saga has conclusively proven they hold the whip hand when the chips are down.
The main lesson here is don't start believing your own bullshit. Musk came in and made a bunch of unforced errors, seemingly under the impression that he'd be able to 'fix' Twitter through sheer personal brilliance and force of will. The reality is that he seemingly has no idea what he is doing and has been governing twitter in an impulsive, personalistic, and reactive manner.
Or, for that matter, maybe it will pan out and Musk will come out looking like an unstable genius. So far Twitter doesn't seem to have had any critical technical failures despite sacking 2/3rds of its staffing. Now, there seems to be a shoe waiting to drop on legal/financial issues, but it is entirely possible that Musk will manage to radically slash prices, weather the storm of financial and legal troubles, and come out the other side with a functioning social media platform. Of course, scuttlebutt says he's trying to flog it off on Middle Eastern oil barons, so maybe not.
this episode should serve as a warning sign to conservatives who have spent decades dismissing humanities are irrelevant (long before the "woke" era). The SJW campus liberals may be annoying, and perhaps even ridiculous, but ultimately they have more power than you in society. And that power can be leveraged even in STEM areas.
I'm not sure why this is the takeaway. It's probably a good lesson for conservatives, but not for anything to do with this particular episode. In this particular parable hubris it is the market playing the role of Zeus, not SJWs.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
If AZ and MA want to negotiate that transfer and the immigrants agree to it, that's fine. For that matter, if AZ wants to unilaterally set up a program to send immigrants out of state with consent obtained in good faith, that is fine. But neither AZ nor MA have the authority to unilaterally expel unwanted individuals, and they certainly don't have the authority to transport people under false pretenses.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2mo ago
(honestly a completely reasonable opinion if you’ve ever spent a significant amount of time on a major university campus)
...why?
The fact that the US attracts a ton of foreign talent is a feature, as is the fact that many of these students bring money into the country. The national security pretext is largely irrelevant (we're mostly talking about undergrads and it's not especially difficult to vet or just exclude foreign nationals when dealing with genuinely sensitive research).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Red Tribers have a great deal of use for knowledge. It's just usually directly applicable knowledge.
This is my point. I want to reiterate: I am not saying that Red Tribers are stupid or have no skills. I am saying they have a general disdain for knowledge production. Which, bluntly, the rest of your comment and my own personal experience does not dispute. Knowledge is either inherited or received from trusted community members, and updated only slowly. It's not just that they don't want to personally do academic research, they don't trust the entire process because it's not part of their epistemological paradigm.
I lived in a small Red town in the US for a number of years
So did I. I've lived in Red America in one form or another (it's important to note that "red tribe" != rural) for most of my life. I went to private evangelical schools until I left for college (to my original point, my high school's college counselor advised against going to any but a select list of private Evangelical colleges). Most of my extended family is from the rural Midwest. My perspective on this is personal, not sociological.
(Something I find deeply frustrating about this forum is that it is taken as a given that criticism of the Red Tribe or Red Tribe-adjacent things are coming from a distance)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
I decided to google feminist vulcanology, and tbh everything I see looks like incredibly pedestrian efforts to encourage women to study vulcanology. This may be triggering to misogynists, but this does not look like some anthropologist rambling about other ways of knowing. If this is what's corrupting science, then I withdraw my previous statement and chalk this up as another instance of American right-wingers demanding slavish submission to their beliefs. Acquiescing to that would be pretty much the opposite of integrity.
If conservatives want to contest ideas, they should throw their hat into the ring, not demand liberals think conservative thoughts on their behalf.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
8mo ago
mine are that we seem to have unlimited money for Ukraine or Israel (or anybody else, actually!) but when it's our own citizenry, then everything is somehow jammed up.
Can you elaborate, because I keep seeing people say things like this, and I don't get it? It just seems like a kneejerk disaste for foreign aid tied into the topic of the day*. The big Ukraine aid bill took like half a year to negotiate and almost failed. The Federal government spent ~$6 trillion in FY23. Somewhere around 1-2% of that was foreign aid and included support for the largest conventional war of the century.
*what's even more frustrating is that many of the same people who do this also object to spending money on disaster readiness
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
it's insane to expose the President to prosecution for executing the duties of the Presidency.
Why? If the president can't do his job without committing crimes, maybe we need to either review his job or the law. The constitution certainly doesn't suggest immunity from criminal liability.
Furthermore, is there are reason why this standard is particular to the presidency and not any elected official? Shouldn't Bob Menendez be accountable to his voters, not some dodgy DoJ official? Who are federal prosecutors to to contravene the will of Illinois' people by charging Mike Madigan?
I'm beginning to suspect that Powers That Be may not Be all they're cracked up to be. Current track record on presidential assassinations is leaning really heavily in favor of deranged highly motivated individuals and against the Illuminati.
edit: deranged is not really an appropriate descriptor for many presidential assassins, but even the ones with clear political motives were acting alone or in a small group, not as agents of a significant institution.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
The "suddenly very concerned" part comes from how 98% of the time American conservatives have somewhere between zero and negative interest in treating mental health as a public policy concern and bring it up only when taking a defensive position after a mass shooting (and generally without any actual policy proposals)
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
4mo ago
This is why metaphors are overrated outside of poetry. They tend to obscure at least as much as they illustrate. If you want to stick with the fat guy metaphor, DOGE's "economy" drive is hectoring the patient for eating a salad for lunch while ignoring that he eats two pounds of bacon for breakfast and a box of Krispy Kreme donuts for dinner. You would discuss dieting plans where you step down food consumption and coming up with a plan the patient could actually follow and doesn't harm them. You wouldn't just say "you're going on a starvation diet now, figure it out."
But in actual fact the USG is not a fat guy. Spending is not food. It's not going to drop dead of a heart attack if it has irresponsible fiscal policy. The worst case scenarios involve a lot of economic turmoil, but the US isn't going to collapse because social security becomes insolvent.
Moreover, the US has a lot of tools with which to solve its fiscal problems, but no one wants to use them. Conservative elites are primarily focused on cutting taxes for conservative elites and weakening consumer/labor protections; electoral success dictates protecting transfers to elderly and rural voters. So the obvious solution of trimming entitlements and raising taxes is a nonstarter and instead we get a pantomime of cost savings* as a cover for re-legalizing banking scams.
*high confidence prediction: these will not result in meaningful government savings over the long run and will incur higher social costs
*intermediate confidence: they will actually increase government costs over the long run as even more Federal staff are replaced with more expensive, less efficient contractors
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1yr ago
it's why the Democratic party is now the party of the old, upper middle class whites.
That seems doubtful. Trump won the >$100k/yr vote in 2020* and his electoral coalition was significantly whiter and older than Biden's.
*not by a huge margin, admittedly, but the divides aren't huge in any income group; either major party trying to position themselves as the party of the poor/working class is typical American posturing where everyone wants to be rich but no one wants to be Rich.
Normies are the natural constituency of the center-right - the sort of people who think "life's good, don't rock the boat too hard". Swifties are generally weapons-grade normies and the female equivalent of grillo-centrists. Yeah, they're "feminists", but it's an extremely anodyne feminism whose practical beliefs are probably mostly shared by a lot of conservative women (e.g. I have a hard time imagining what my mother or her sisters would say if their husbands suggested they shouldn't have careers). The problem for the American right is that the center-right is dead and the Republican party is (or is at least perceived to be) dominated by reactionary populists and religious conservatives. Not only does this coalition want to rock the boat, many of them are saying the boat is rotten and needs to burned down and replaced.
The argument is that Kissinger enabled genocides/mass murders in Cambodia, Indonesia, Bangladesh, East Timor, etc... and thus bears responsibility for millions of deaths.
I'm not sure how much I buy that argument. Kissinger generally reacted to these events with callous indifference and took the position that they shouldn't affect US foreign policy (see also, his illustrative remark about Soviet Jews: "If they put Jews into gas chambers in the Soviet Union, it is not an American concern. Maybe a humanitarian concern."), but that sort of indifference is pervasive in international politics and Kissinger was mostly just crass enough to be on the record saying it instead of mouthing platitudes. While it doesn't exactly speak well of his moral character, attributing responsibility to him in particular mostly seems to stem from the tendency to treat the US as the only country with agency.
his role in normalizing relations with China probably saved way more Asian lives than he killed.
Almost nobody actually thinks in these sort of brute consequentialist terms.
I somehow doubt that either Hobbes or Burke would endorse the premise that one ought to be able to simply refuse to be prosecuted for murder. And even if they did, I'm not sure why that would matter.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
I find it reminiscent of many pro-Chavismo arguments from Western leftists I read some 15 years ago: authoritarian populism is more authentically democratic than liberal democracy because the former (supposedly) draws upon mass popular support while the latter uses sterile proceduralism to deprive The People of their voice while pretending otherwise.
This was mostly due to the fact that they liked Chavez' economic policies and needed a way to rationalize supporting an increasingly dictatorial government while claiming to still believe in freedom, human rights, etc...
For the contemporary American populist, it is much the same dilemma, except from the right. Your electoral fortunes have been tenuous at best and you're clearly losing the popularity contest with the younger generation. You can try to retool your message to be more appealing, or you can argue that corrupt institutions are creating a false consciousness and need to be swept away.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2yr ago
Blue states already share the cost, and annoying municipal officials is not going to persuade Democratic legislators to spend vastly more on border security (which Abbott and Desantis already know).
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
It's not a unified subset. It's a disparate collection of individuals with discriminatory beliefs which they nevertheless consider to be an integral part of their political identity, though you can point to specific groups in some cases. Religious conservatives are a big standout on the gender and sexuality front, but they're hardly exclusive. Insofar as there's a real unifying theme, it's the "facts don't care about your feelings" aesthetic that many conservatives (especially younger ones) adopt, which IME mostly ends up glossing prejudice as "realism".
To put it as plainly as I can: whenever you find right-wingers saying "I don't think I can be open about my political beliefs because I'll be ostracized", it's never about fiscal policy or foreign policy or even touchier things like immigration or criminal justice. You can think we should slash welfare or defend aggressive foreign policy or declare that Christianity is the one true religion and your left-wing peers at college may think you're an asshole (or a rube), but you're not going to be a pariah (nor is the TA going to mark you down on your essay). The sticking point is basically always about either gender/sexuality or race, and often beliefs that would be considered boundary-pushing even in conservative milieus. For example.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Other possibility is that it is not a new personality trait, only its magnitude has increased lately: Musk has had a documented habit of pushing not exactly reality based visions when he has been able to get away with it
I think this is correct. Musk can simultaneously be a narcissistic bullshitter and a highly capable manufacturing CEO. Delusional overconfidence can be a benefit in certain endeavors because even if you fall short of unrealistic expectations you may still exceed what was conventionally thought possible and you may stick with projects when less demented determined people would have called it quits. On the other hand, it can also lead you to throw away time, money, and effort on unrealistic projects that go nowhere because no amount of force of will can overcome the technical problems.
It can also lead you to repeatedly fall for obvious nonsense because you think you're too smart to be wrong, and none of your retinue dares correct you.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3mo ago
Listing Mexico and Colombia as places where Christians are persecuted seems like they're using a tendentious definition of 'persecution'.
"Every mentally competent adult citizen is entitled to vote" is a Schelling point because basically every proposal to "raise the bar" winds up being a veneer over "people I disagree with shouldn't vote" or "people I like should have privileged status".
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