Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1d ago
It's almost never about the personal impact of the transgression on the transgressor themselves; it's about modeling and justifying the behavior to people for whom it would very much be harmful (i.e. the mass of the hoi polloi).
Supah_Schmendrick
9d ago
Does anyone know why they named it to have the same acronym as Biden's "Build Back Better" plan? It feels like a deliberate choice, but I'm not sure why.
Trump calls lots of things Big and Beautiful. In his 2016 campaign the border wall was "big, beautiful." He's called the U.S. a "big beautiful department store"; an EO dedicated to eliminating information siloing in the government promised to build "one big, beautiful dataset", the various diplomatic initiatives his administrations have undertaken have promised "big, beautiful deals," etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
11d ago
I seem to remember that the Drug War of old included an element of "it's your own fucking fault, just don't do drugs" and it still failed horribly.
Your memory is at least partially incorrect; drug use fell precipitously during the peak of the DARE era:
On the question of drugs themselves, it seems like Americans, especially teenage Americans, really did change their minds about how dangerous drug use was. Gone were the days of cocaine paraphernalia on magazine covers. For example, high-school seniors (the group for which we have the most data) in 1979 were relatively sanguine about cocaine: only 32 percent said there was “great risk” in trying it. By 1994, that figure peaked at 57 percent. Support for drug-law reform also sputtered out. In 1977, 28 percent of Americans said marijuana should be legal, a 16-point gain over the preceding eight years. In 1985, though, support was back down to 23 percent, and it rose only barely to 25 percent in 1995. The dream of marijuana legalization was dead for a generation.
Initially, the War on Drugs also had a remarkable effect on the total number of people using drugs. The share of high-school seniors using any illicit drug peaked in 1979, at 54 percent. It then fell more or less continuously for the next decade, bottoming out in 1992 at 27 percent. The class of 1992, in other words, was half as likely as the class of 1979 to use illicit drugs. Similarly heartening trends obtained in the adult population. In 1979, there were an estimated 25 million illicit drug users, including about 4.7 million cocaine users; 4.1 million had ever used heroin. By 1992, those numbers had fallen to 12 million, 1.4 million, and 1.7 million respectively.
Supah_Schmendrick
14d ago
Yeah my comment was more along the lines of a neutral point of information. Any excuse to tell the weird story of Ian Samuel (RIP First Mondays; you were a good podcast while you lasted) and plug ALAB, which is wrong about most things but funny.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
We have been over this - the bill wasn't really a compromise; it was a back-door way of legalizing the hitherto-flagrantly illegal stunts the Biden Administration, like the Obama administration before it (but more so) had been using to throw the borders open.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
Scalia was, in fact, semi-famous in the legal world for always hiring at least one "counter clerk" (aka, someone who disagreed with Scalia on significant issues) in part so that he'd have someone smart in the room to play devil's advocate.
Of course, he didn't always pick winners; one such "counter clerk" was Ian Samuel, who later as a professor admitted to perving on his students, was broadly disgraced, but appears to have clawed his way back to respectability as an in-house regulatory counsel for big corps.
Supah_Schmendrick
15d ago
If you're using the latter ottoman and tsarist empires as your models, that's kinda telling. Neither was a particularly fantastic place to live, were intellectually and culturally stagnant, and were so politically unstable they suffered fairly frequent and serious revolutionary insurrections.
Supah_Schmendrick
24d ago
The rationing systems during WWII I think were a success.
Yes, but the objectives of the market change between war and peacetime in highly relevant ways.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If there's a high and specific mens rea requirement like "corruptly" or "willfully," you can get away with less specificity in describing the actus reus
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I refuse to debate you further about the exact technical definition of "purpose" and whether it exists objectively or just subjectively, no matter how much you want to have that debate.
Okay, I don't particularly care about technical definitions; I was asking because I didn't understand what you were trying to get at with "not just a sense of purpose but an actual purpose," which seem to me to round to the same thing.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I don't think so, because I don't know what an "objective" purpose would even be, hence my original question. An omniscient being would be aware of an infinite number of perceived purposes for a person, but that doesn't make any of the purposes non-subjective.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I don't care to litigate the proper definition of the word "purpose". So long as you agree that the concept exists, I think we can agree that it's a different thing from the perception of it, which is my point.
I'm not sure I do agree that the concept exists independently of an observer/interpreter, either external (as in the case of someone reading code), or internal (as in a person asking "what is my purpose").
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
It's the same as the difference between a perception of anything and the thing itself. The map is not the territory.
There's a difference between applying that statement to a physical object, vs. to an intangible trait or quality.
When I write code, the code has no sense of purpose at all, yet still has a purpose.
Wasn't the community just arguing over this with Scott's piece on "the purpose of a system is what it does"? This doesn't clear things up any. There is your intention as the author; there is the result of the code as it functions; there are various interpretations of the code by outside observers/users...none of which necessarily overlap or align. Which is the objective "purpose" and what is the reliable method for determining it?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
It sounds like you can't even in theory imagine a world where it's actually true; such a world would not just give you a sense of purpose but an actual purpose!
What is the distinction between a "sense" of purpose and an "actual" purpose? How would a human person know how to distinguish between the two in the wild?
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
"Merit" is not defined as "the person with the largest pile of money at death."
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
If at any point he had stated that he was opposed to gay marriage, his base would have fallen out of love with him and turned on him in an instant.
Again the amnesia strikes - he did this! Repeatedly, during the 2008 election!
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Yes, but a bilateral conflict is how you reach a new stable equilibrium; one-way ratchets don't have any brakes.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Republicans have a failure mode of cult of personality;
How quickly we forget the "Is Obama Enlightened" discourse, and even the "Cocaine Joe" and Bernie memes of the late Obama era. Not for nothing did Bill Clinton quip that that when it comes to picking Presidential nominees, "Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.".
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
All that said, I do find it funny that most modern proponents of meritocracy do not challenge what is probably the biggest modern source of un-meritocracy in the West, which is inheritance. Even the most wild-eyed free market libertarian who advocates for pure meritocracy typically does not call for all humans to be put on a truly level playing field, which could only be done by forbidding parents to pass on their wealth to their children. And the truth is that, whatever you think about passing on wealth to children, all meritocratic ideologies that accept inheritance are at best just nipping around the edges, and not addressing the biggest un-meritocratic phenomenon in the whole human world.
This is because we don't want to optimize for consumption, production, or accumulation within single human lifespans. Not for nothing do we have the proverb: “A society grows great when old men plant trees in whose shade they shall never sit.”
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Not true, actually. Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia" include a plan for gradual emancipation through colonization, and he was a proponent of the portions of the Northwest Ordinance barring slavery from newly-acquired US territories. Virginia was contemplating a plebiscite on emancipation in the early 1830s. If anything, support for slavery got stronger as the 19th century wore on, via what should really be a quite familiar process of reciprocal polarization between south and north. The William Lloyd Garrison radical abolitionists and Calhounian "positive good" types fed on each other to the exclusion of what had been the predominant view that slavery would eventually shrivel and die on the vine after the banning of the slave trade in 1807 (which was done at the first instant the Constitution allowed it, btw).
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
What the fuck is going on?
Politics has replaced religion as a foundational cornerstone of personal morality and identity, and people really don't like having those questioned. Seriously; just look at the polling about whether you'd be comfortable dating someone with different politics/religion and the two concepts have flipped over the last half century.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
I have a lot of sympathy with postmodernism, and have little patience for the trad LARPing that some of the less well-thought-out posters here seem to embody,
This seems like a contradiction; trad-LARPing in the digital age is insanely post-modern and Baudrillardian.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
TDA, with no conclusion language or question begging (i.e. don't use "invading army", "criminal gang" etc to describe them)
But Tren de Aragua are a criminal gang. That's their purpose for existing. The BBC, no fan of Trump or his deportation agenda, say it started as a corrupt local railway union which extorted carriers and contractors on their section of line, then turned into a prison gang, and now is a "transnational criminal organization" which controls diverse economic activities including gold mining and sex trafficking, and engages in political assassination as well as more commonplace "murder and torture."
The question is whether their activities in the US are in coordination with the Venezuelan dictatorship, as asserted by the administration.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Biden could function because he was surrounded by reasonable people.
Hardly.
Do they, though? What with AI and grade inflation, they increasingly can't really read or do basic math. I don't think this stereotype is as universally applicable as it was before.
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