Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
fat
Hey, some of us fatties have reasonable opinions about things and a civilized demeanor!
(said with tongue firmly in cheek)
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
what I think I see in the historical record is that major technological innovations do in fact seriously alter the rebellion equation, often permanently. Would you argue otherwise?
I agree that technology - particularly information technology - plays an important role in setting the rebellion equation. In particular, technology plays a big part in setting the amount of revolutionary energy bouncing around a society. However, I wouldn't go so far to say that it's entirely, or even mostly dispositive. In the language of my original question to you, another variable is the strength of the cork keeping that rebellion energy in the metaphorical bottle.
To expand on this, I think that the factors playing into that equation have to include, at a minimum:
- the technological capacity of individuals and small groups to effectively combat the dominant society, either physically or ideologically;
- the capacity of individuals or small groups to coordinate, including spreading ideas, recruiting fellow rebels, and/or organizing actions;
- the willingness of individuals or small groups to risk adverse consequences for rebelling;
- the delta between current material circumstances and those which can be convincingly promised by a revolutionary ideology (the "de Tocqueville" factor);
- the capacity of the dominant society to identify would-be rebels;
- the solidarity of the dominant society in the face of alternate, rebellious ideologies (the "asabiyyah" factor);
- the willingness of the dominant society to punish rebels;
- the general competence of the dominant society; and
- the responsiveness of the dominant society to demands of the public.
I'm pretty sure that each of these factors can be manipulated semi-independently, and that each of them has a significant impact on the likelihood and character of rebellion. Clearly, advances in techological progress of a society do not monotonically increase the likelihood or seriousness of rebellions; there are clear population-level trends in the ethnic, religious, and regional character of contemporary violence that put paid to that theory.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
is the sufferability of evils a universal constant, or does it change over time?
I should think that simple history would demonstrate that "sufferability" is not, at least in absolute terms, a constant. We can see this by comparing the conditions animating different revolts over time: the peasants in Wat Tyler's rebellion lived in manifestly different conditions than the frontiersmen who rose in the Whisky Rebellion, even though both uprisings were putatively triggered by taxes that were perceived to be too high, and the decisions of local officials which were perceived to be abusive. We can also see it by comparing the circumstances of protesting/revolting groups and comparing them to other groups similarly situated in time and place who did not engage in such protest/revolt. Thus we can see that, for example, there were several serious slave revolts in the U.S. during the first decade of the 19th century, then again in the 1830s, but otherwise seem to have been very rare, even though those same revolts often resulted in the passage of increasingly strict laws circumscribing what limited freedoms slaves had.
And if we observe variance, what causes this variance?
A hard question, but one the best explanations I've seen is de Tocqueville's - revolutions and revolts happen not when people are maximally oppressed, but when things are getting better sufficient for them to develop expectations that then go unmet, and when repressive forces are weak and/or internally conflicted.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Society requires coherent values.
Does it? Or does it just require sufficient force to keep the cork in the bottle?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
when did major left leaders ever support such violent measures?
The current Vice President of the United States shilled for bail funds to get rioters out of jail (and incidentally got someone killed when a murderer was also bailed out using those funds). Congressional leaders encouraged mobbing and harassment of Trump administration staffers. The Biden DOJ made sure to exercise "prosecutorial discretion" to refrain from prosecuting criminal harassment of justices at their private residences over the leak of the Dobbs decision, after the Senate Majority leader threatened justices by name, stating that "I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It's not, because civil tort common law, or even what a defense attorney may argue on behalf of his client, is worlds away from the standards of behavior and judgment expected of a prosecutor. Prosecutors, precisely because they have the imprimatur of the entire state and people, and have the authority to take away people's freedom and even lives, are expected to behave in a more restrained way and not go haring after novel theories just because it gets them the result they want.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
no major political figure egged them on for their methods.
Not, strictly speaking, about the Cavanaugh disaster, but there's no shortage of left-aligned public misbehavior to choose from during the Trump years:
"If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere." Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)
"This is my call to action, here. Please don't just come here and go home, go to the Hill today. Get up and please get in the face of some congresspeople." Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ)
"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or Senate, that's when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength." Hillary Clinton
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
"No one has been convicted based on this specific fact pattern before" isn't a defense.
No, but "any lack of clarity about what the law does and does not allow must be resolved in favor of the defense" is such a rule - the Rule of Lenity, to be precise. I know only Neil Gorsuch and like 17 other principled civil libertarians care about it, but still!
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This convergent evolution suggests that it's the only viable structure for our current level of scale. We could not have chosen differently.
Unclear. If the Constitution's original first amendment had passed and capped the size of congressional districts at 50k or so (as opposed to the ~700k we currently have) it's not clear how American political institutions would have evolved to deal with that.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Fascinating to see how contemporary evolutions of both "police-work" and the duties and responsibilities of citizenship have evolved to make some of these clearly obsolete
To seek and preserve public favour, not by pandering to public opinion, but by constantly demonstrating absolutely impartial service to law, in complete independence of policy, and without regard to the justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws,
What modern concept of "public favor" is distinguishable from "public opinion," let alone the perceived justice or injustice of the substance of individual laws? What constituency is there for law qua law, independent from the results, or "perceived justice" of the ultimate outcome? In a way, we're all utilitarians now. Kto kago is truly the order of the day.
To maintain at all times a relationship with the public that gives reality to the historic tradition that the police are the public and that the public are the police, the police being only members of the public who are paid to give full-time attention to duties which are incumbent on every citizen in the interests of community welfare and existence.
What private citizen really thinks that stopping people who drive too fast, park in the wrong place, coralling mobs, preventing retail crimes, and investigating serious crimes are all "duties incumbent on every citizen?" Moreover, would we even tolerate a private citizen attempting to undertake any of these tasks?
And those are only the two that seem most egregious to me.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
In my opinion, the greatest fault of Capitalism, and the real problem that is behind it, is that it is so productive that can share money to unproductive people, creating a new caste of Priestly Propagandist
What makes you think that pre- or non-capitalist societies didn't have unproductive Priestly Propagandists? What were the nomenklatura bureaucrats of the USSR, or the mass of the ecclesiarchy of the Roman Catholic Church during the middle ages? What were drunken courtiers at Versailles?
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
And what percentage of the populace knows that, or cares? If she were elected President she'd be counted as a "Catholic" just as a non-practicing Jew would be counted as "Jewish."
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I mean, yes. But they're still generally recognized as "Catholic" by the broader American populace, which doesn't really pay attention to internal doctrinal niceties. Nancy Pelosi still counts as "catholic" for general U.S. purposes, despite having views on abortion and gender wildly out of step with official church doctrine (though I'm not so sure the German catholics would disagree with her...)
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Catholics have to maintain loyalty with Rome on certain matters.
Not to look at U.S. catholic opinion surveys, which routinely show significant support for changing major aspects of church doctrine regarding sexuality and gender, among other things.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
The NYT is a Jewish-dominant newspaper filled with Democrats
The NYT is a liberal, secular- and reform-Jewish-dominant newspaper. These people are just about fully-assimilated WEIRD anti-nationalists, and have no more love for the conservative religious right in Israel than they do for the conservative religious right in the U.S.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
I'd say that when the incumbent prosecutor's election campaign was run on the basis of his experience going after that same candidate as part of a highly-politicized state AG's office, you have a pretty big tell that subsequent cases are more likely to be lawfare than legitimate.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
This is not how the FEC understands campaign contributions:
We could have had testimony on how the FEC understands these things, but Judge Merchan explicitly ruled that Brad Smith couldn't testify to anything substantive on that front, because allegedly only the Court had jurisdiction to rule on legal interpretations like the meaning of statutes and regulations - even ones outside the Court's proper jurisdiction, apparently.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Trump was summoned into existence by his followers.
His "followers" didn't give him $2 billion of free media coverage during the 2016 cycle. When Trump declared, he was only polling 10% in the GOP primary. He didn't break 40% until March of 2016. He was lucky enough to be running against a weak and numerous slate of wooden neocons who hadn't seen which way the wind was blowing and couldn't get out of each other's way. When Ben Carson is your closest competition, you know things are pretty dire.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
he and his close associates pushed all manner of blatant nonsense that failed to get any traction because of a stark lack of evidence.
Like Mrs. Clinton's ginned-up "collusion" theories in 2016? Those managed to derail half a presidential term.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
Well, usually a politician would have quit in disgrace before getting to this point. So kind of.
Except that what's happening here isn't actually unusual. Hillary Clinton's campaign and the DNC got fined $100k by the FEC for the exact same thing (i.e., misreporting campaign expenses - in this case, the "Russia-gate" dossier - as "legal expenses"). The unusual thing is that state legal systems got involved (in cooperation with the White House and under the direction of former White House lawyers, for admittedly-political reasons.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
A prediction market as I view it is ultimately just a systematic way to keep track of who makes errors the most and who makes them the least, so you can put the people who make them the least into power.
Goodhart's law. You're only optimizing for the ability to game a prediction market, not the ability to be a wise ruler.
Calling something like the USSR or Nazi Germany just a regular human mistake isn't an acceptable conclusion to me.
Why not? Totalitarianism and militarism are pretty common human modes of social organization. Look around the world and you'll find more dictators than not, and even putatively democratic countries can sure be repressive when they want to be (e.g. UK speech offenses, Canadian asset-freezing the trucker protests, etc). There's also a lot of military aggression even today (it just tends to take the form of gangs or paramilitaries in third world countries rather than stomping around with flags and tanks, but even there see Russia/Ukraine, Armenia/Azerbaijan, Saudi/Yemen, China/India/Pakistan's periodic kerfuffles, North & South Korea, any number of insurgencies in Africa and SE Asia, etc.) Totalitarianism and militarism are even more common if you look back more than 70 years in the past. Same for genocides. The Nazis only stand out because they came along right when mass media was first becoming a thing. The Soviets too only stand out because they were a geopolitical rival for half a century.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
There's a reason that "to err is human" is a truism. People aren't omniscient, and are going to make mistakes. You don't escape that by delegating to a committee, or prediction market. So long as people are involved, there are going to be mistakes and errors.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
What is really the best way for a government to decide policy?
To have virtuous and wise people doing the deciding, and public-spirited and moderate people doing the implementing. Personnel is policy, and all the procedural gilding in the world won't save a government made of the petty, venal, and stupid.
Supah_Schmendrick
1yr ago
It was the nature of the work. Sugarcane is a thick, tough grass with similar dimensions to adult bamboo.
During planting, the slaves hade to dig 4-6 ft. square holes half a foot deep (60-100 squares per slave per day, or between 1k-2k cubic feet of earth each), use that earth to build up banks/causeways between the squares, then emplace cane seeds in the squares, surrounded by a few dozen pounds of manure (which had to be collected from cattleyards and carried to the fields by hand or basket as well).
During harvesting, the slaves had to (1) cut down the stalks by hand, (2) strip and de-leaf the cane stalks, and (3) carry bushels of the cut and stripped stalks from the squares to the processing stations. They then had to (4) see the juices extracted from the stalks via milling, (5) carry away the pulp, (6) boil and render the cane juice through successive sets of boilers and pans down into syrup, tempered with lime juice just before the crystallization point, then left to cool into molasses (distilled in turn into rum) and semi-refined sugar crystals.
Harvesting was especially brutal because once cut, the juices in the cane would spoil and rot incredibly rapidly. As a result, plantations during harvesting seasons ran around the clock in two 12-hour shifts, as fast as the workers could go. This led to many deaths from exhaustion in the fields, loss of limbs from crushing underneath millstones, and all the other types of industrial accidents that can happen in large-scale agriculture. Slaves also died in large numbers to all the ordinary tropical diseases and malnutrition endemic to the early-modern Caribbean.
This was the standard method basically everywhere that sugar was grown on New World plantations, and was absolutely brutal.
As a former employee of a convention center adjacent hotel which hosted an annual furry event, I can attest that imo the furries are better-than-average tippers.
More options
Context Copy link