Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
To which I would say, would your model predict:
(1) Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?
"Trump" isn't a unitary figure - the people who would have had to prosecute Hilary were the DOJ, which Trump was embroiled in a...contentious relationship with, given his termination of his first AG (who, incidentally, had a long history with Hilary as colleagues in the Senate), and the role of senior officials at DOJ in promulgating and sustaining the Russian Collusion hoax. Any order Trump gave to try and prosecute her would not have been obeyed.
(2) The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?
How quickly we forget. There was at least one significant attempt at actual terrorism in the lead up to the Dobbs decision, coupled with strategic DOJ non-enforcement of (and thus tacit condoning of) the laws against harassment of judicial officers. There then followed a propaganda smear campaign designed to gin up impeachment efforts against conservative justices, notwithstanding similar conduct from liberal justices.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
One problem is that it contradicts the tribal narrative that presidential competence is important, which is a narrative that Blue Tribe has invested appreciable cultural capital in over the years, going back at least as far as Reagan
This is true. However, are the people who create tribal narratives and invest cultural capital the same as those who have an interest in and/or ability to oust POTUS?
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Zooming out a bit, another interesting pattern is, for lack of a better term, "reasoning break points". There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved, but evidently not quite enough evidence for anyone on his own side to do anything about it. Likewise, there's quite a lot of evidence that Biden is meaningfully senile, to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office. One might expect these two issues to compound each other sufficiently to tip the scales on either, but somehow they aren't quite enough even in combination.
I disagree; I don't think "being his party's nominee for President" and "being President" are meaningfully similar.
Biden's senility is a severe liability as a candidate, because being a candidate involves being the focal point of a large PR campaign centered around one's own speeches, appearances, and general celebrity. You manifestly can't do well at that if you can't speak coherently for more than a few minutes, are visibly shuffling aimlessly around the stage, and are otherwise out of it.
However, Biden's senility is not as severe a liability when it comes to actually being President (at least from the standpoint of the institutional Democratic party). All he needs to do is physically be alive to occupy the office; most of the decisions get made well-downstream from him, and those that require Presidential input can mostly be handled by his kitchen cabinet/advisors a la Edith Wilson. Whether or not he's compos mentis doesn't have any impact on the flow of money and influence to Democrat constituent groups/activists, or the implementation of Democratic policy priorities by Democratic-aligned actors within the bureaucracy.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Delinquents need to be beaten, murderers and rapists need to be hanged, and it all needs to happen as swiftly as possible so as to impress the right connection in the mind of the criminal between the illegal act and the punishment.
Hence the right to a SPEEDY trial.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Contrast this with Obama who was willing to make ideological or party based cabinet nominations like Hillary Clinton, even though she was absolutely not an ally of his
Obama picked Hillary as Secretary of State explicitly because she wasn't on his team - it was a deal to get the Clinton machine on his side for the general election. Plus, Barack had read "Team of Rivals" recently and was enamored of trying to have a Lincolnian presidency. They certainly didn't agree on policy - it wasn't an ideological pick.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.
The 60's and 70's were absolutely that polarized, as were the '50s for some conservative groups. Things were always both wilder and more normal than you think in the past.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Those are all still excellent subjects - just not in the ways the authors envisaged. Talking about the failures and successes of AID efforts in Africa; of COVID policies, of the persistent backfiring of foreign aid, the corruption of the UN, BRICs strategizing and world supply chains, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.
(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.
(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Isis wasn't US backed.
Not directly, but we sure backed a lot of "moderate" Sunnis in Syria that turned out to be Al Qaida wannabees or even affiliates. To say nothing of what we did indirectly through NATO via the Turks (who, to be fair, were mainly focusing their special hatred on the Kurds)
Some hamas fighter was in isis and brought her home as a souvenir ? That's my best guess, I give up. How?
It's actually worse than that, somehow. I'd post the substance of it here, but it's really quite NSFL; if you want the gory details, go to the link. TL;DR - she was captured by ISIL, had horrible shit happen to her, was sold at least five times as a child sex slave before finally being forcibly "married" at 15-ish to a Gazan fighter. He was captured by coalition forces, but then smuggled through Syria and Turkey to Egypt, from whence he took her back to his family in Gaza. There she was kept as a sex and domestic slave for the family - she was at one point married a second time to this guy's brother. The children of rape she bore them are still in Gaza, being raised as Arab muslims.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Anyway, how many Mexicans were launching rockets at El Paso and San Diego?
Not quite rockets, but the cartels are absolutely using drones to track the Border Patrol, and electronic warfare devices to disrupt our own, signalling quite sophisticated capabilities.
Of course, the reason they're not shooting rockets at us is because the cartels have no interest in trying to destroy the U.S., because we're the cash cow they milk their money out of, whether in the form of smuggling fees for migrants trying to gain access to our labor markets, or sales figures for drugs they supply to our hedonism markets. If October 7 had been a coordinated drug-smuggling operation instead of a violent attack, I somehow don't think the Israelis would have responded with bombs.
Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans?
Yes. Pancho Villa's attack on the U.S. Army garrison and nearby town of Columbus, NM. Militarily, it was much less effective than 10/7 - the attackers suffered far more casualties (over 100) than they inflicted (17). It still provoked a months-long US invasion that reached hundreds of miles into northern Mexico by U.S. troops and several small pitched battles against both rebel and Mexican government forces that resulted in several hundred casualties. The only reason it wasn't bloodier was that the terrain of Northern Mexico was so inhospitable and so lightly-settled that all belligerents were limited to small cavalry (or automotive) patrols. So there's actually a parallel here.
How many people would tolerate what's happening in Gaza if Gaza were located in South Africa? Depends on who was doing it and who was getting it done to, naturally.
There was an actual genocide perpetrated by U.S. backed "rebels" against arab religious minorities such as the Yezidi during the Obama administration, complete with the taking of women as sex slaves (at least one of whom "wound up" - three guesses as to how - in Gaza and was recently rescued by the IDF, actually). Barely anyone gave a shit.
The Arab world is currently engaging in a "near genocide" of Christians which is definitely an ethnic purge. I don't see any breathless news coverage of this.
During the recent civil war in Ethiopia a couple years ago, the Tigray people in the north of the country appear to have been subjected to an attempted genocide. Don't remember any huge news coverage about that - we were too busy freaking out about the end of the Trump Administration.
South Sudan appears to be undergoing yet more hideous racial violence between arabs and black african tribes which has displaced more people than the fighting in Gaza, and is being characterized as an attempted genocide. Don't see that leading headlines in U.S. papers, or causing protest movements on U.S. campuses.
There were plenty of war crimes committed in Myanmar's counterinsurgency/anti-drug fight in the Shan during the last decade or so - here's a few from an Amnesty International Report. This one made a bit of a splash because one of the groups being repressed were the muslim Rohingya group, which dovetailed well with reflexive American senses about who is oppressed and thus is an appropriate target for pity. But I don't recall it generating nearly as much vitriol as the Gaza war.
This was just 30 minutes of Googling by a semi-aware person. I'm sure I could find more...there's no shortage of suffering in the world.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
You're neglecting the other dynamic among high-participation GOP voters (the ones most likely to turn out for the primary, as well as to volunteer, donate, etc.) - that of the "former partisan who took his institutional role and oath of office seriously" once installed, i.e. discovered a strange new respect for the status quo once he actually faced the prospect of having to implement his prior policies on a disapproving department he now ran. The formerly rock-ribbed conservative jurist who suddenly is desperate to find any way to avoid actually implementing the positions he enunciated before being put on the bench. The bright firebrand Jim Hacker getting sabotaged by suave Sir Humphrey Appleby and immediately caving.
There was, and remains, a desperate hunger for conservatives who can credibly signal they will actually do the things they campaign on instead of just getting absorbed into the DC liberal borg.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Yeah, that kind of grasping behavior is not virtuous of the acquaintances. Asking a friend of means if they are able to help is not wrong; implying that you are owed it is bad manners.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
My grandfather taught me to solve chess puzzles with him from old magazines, kicked a soccer ball and threw a baseball with me, took me to the local small community college's football games and tried to explain what was going on (in retrospect he failed mostly because the gameplay was so sloppy it defied normal football analysis). Took me to local small-town orchestra concerts, went on small hikes in the hills, etc., talked with me about my favorite books, dinosaurs, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
It would be virtuous and convey a positive incentive for you to significantly reward the person who leant you their charger. We want people to cooperate and help others, even strangers, and reaping a (presumably highly-publicized) windfall reward for doing so would be a good model. The gesture also is virtuous in that it demonstrates the billionaire's acknowledgement of social, civic, and reliance ties with others in the community, and sets a standard of expecting people to treat those who render them aid well, if they have the means to do so. This is in line with other morality tales from western culture with similar themes, such as the fable of Androcles and the lion's paw.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
People do not universally experience the same relations in the same valence.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Many things are true, but which truths we emphasize is all the battle. Yes, families can be a drag. They can also be tremendously-joyous sources of shelter and respite. Parents can be idiots. They can also be wise and protective. Whether the positive or negative aspects of a particular social relationship get highlighted often follows resource generation and self-interest.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Look at just about anything on television or any movie, music, etc. The resounding themes are family is a drag, parents are idiots or don’t care, and that the point of life is hedonistic pleasure which things like family and religion are drags on
Yeah "liberatory" culture and increasing wealth definitely work hand-in-hand on this.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Bowling For Soup
Even there, songs like "Highschool Never Ends" and "Come Back to Texas" clearly have a core of molten sincerity beneath all the jokes.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
But then again, parents have gladly, like good conservatives, sat back and had their rights stripped from them over the past 50 years, and that was pretty negligent on its own…
I strongly suspect this is downstream from increasing individual wealth, which makes the family unit less and less necessary as a locus of economic production and coordination.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
I think my culture war angle on this is that most safety enforcement is too easily weaponized against ordinary people to be actually effective in preventing the worst excesses.
It's not just "safety" enforcement - enforcement of any standard is easier against the ordinary than against the willfully noncompliant. The battle against anarcho-tyranny is constant, and the temptation to slide down is extremely high on multiple axes.
OJ Simpson was ordered to pay $33.5 million in damages. Adjusting for number of victims and inflation, our hypothetical Alex Jones would have been ordered to pay $922.41 million - far short of the $1.48 billion the real Alex Jones was ordered to pay.
That's not how this works. First, the civil suit divvied up damages in a non-intuitive manner. OJ was found liable for $8.5 million in compensatory damages to the parents of Ron Goodman, and for $12.5 million in punitive damages each to the estates of Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown Simpson. (Rufo v. Simpson (2001) 86 Cal.App.4th 581, 614). The compensatory damages for a single victim's murder, adjusted for inflation, would be $16,717,408.10 today. Multiplied for the 26 Sandy Hook victims, that's $434,652,610.60 in compensatory damages in a hypothetical Sandy Hook case.
However, there's significant reason to think that the Sandy Hook per-victim compensatory damages would be significantly higher than the California damages awarded against OJ. compensatory damages, per the California standard at the time, reflected the "loss of love, companionship, comfort, affection, society, solace, or moral support suffered as a result of the death, but not for their grief or sorrow or for the decedent's pain and suffering." Notably, "pain and suffering" are two concepts which routinely factor hugely into the size of jury verdicts in tort cases. There also was no reference to "economic damages" like lost wages, which are also a large driver of compensatory damage awards. I'm not a CT lawyer, and none of this is legal advice, but a quick google turned up these civil jury instructions which, on page 121 (Instruction 3.4-7) lays out the types of damages permissible in wrongful death cases:
Wrongful Death Damages We have a statute that governs damages in cases such as this where there is a death. It allows for just damages which includes:
Economic damages of :
- the reasonable and necessary medical and funeral expenses and
- the value of the decedent's lost earning capacity less deductions for (his/her) necessary living expenses taking into consideration that a present cash payment will be made, and
Noneconomic damages of:
- compensation for the destruction of the decedent's capacity to carry on and enjoy life's activities in a way that (he/she) would have done had (he/she) lived and,
- compensation for the death itself, or
- pain and suffering.
The inclusion of pain and suffering and economic damages (if accurate) indicates to me that the per-victim award of compensatory damages would likely have been much higher in a hypothetical Sandy Hook wrongful death suit than in the OJ case, let alone the increased sympathy a jury would likely feel for the parents of murdered children versus the elderly parents of a middle-aged adult victim.
As regards the punitive damages, $12,500,000 in 1997 dollars is worth $24,584,423.68 today. Thus, a hypothetical Sandy Hook case awarding the same amount of per-victim punitive damages as the OJ case would have awarded $639,195,015.68. However, Connecticut handles punitive damages oddly, and in common law counts appears to restrict them to the prevailing party's attorney's fees, less taxable costs. (CT Jury Instruction 3.4-4). In other cases CT statute appears to mandate double or even treble damages. Frankly I'm too lazy to dig into what amount of punitive damages would have been available in this case, but this should demonstrate that calculating damages really is not as simple as just extrapolating from a different case in a different jurisdiction.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Gaetz immediately resigned from his house seat...maybe this is a bureaucratic poisoned chalice for the senate, which has the choice of either confirming Gaetz as AG or facing a potential appointment of Gaetz to Rubio's vacant seat?
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
Government jobs (at least the ones with policymaking discretion) are highly sought after.
Supah_Schmendrick
10mo ago
On a practical level, in a city like Seattle, a driverless taxi would become a toilet pretty quickly.
I wouldn't trust a fully-autonomous car in any location where there's a reasonable chance of any exterior disturbance in the vicinity of the car. Anything from wildlife to protesters to squeegee men - it's too easy to blockade the car (either intentionally or unintentionally) and harass the passengers.
The insurance companies, the AMA, and the feds are locked together in a perverse cycle that produces a system that somehow spends even more on healthcare than socialized medicine countries...but the lion's share of the extra money goes to doctor's salaries (artificial scarcity driven by the AMA, med schools, and residency limitations) and ever-increasing administrative costs (additional regulations and insurance bureaucracy).
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