Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Not so much the crazy ones as the wildly-antisocial ones - there's lots of kinds of crazy that aren't nearly as disruptive, but there are benefits to getting rid of the worst, whether crazy or not:
In each generation from 1500 to 1750, between 1 and 2% of all English men were executed either by court order or extra-judicially (at the scene of the crime or while in prison). This was the height of a moral crusade by Church and State to punish the wicked so that the good may live in peace.
Meanwhile, the homicide rate fell ten-fold. Were the two trends related? In a recent paper, Henry Harpending and I argued that a little over half of the homicide decline could be explained by the high execution rate, and its steady removal of violent males from the gene pool. The rest could be partly explained by Clark-Unz selection—violent males lost out reproductively because they were increasingly marginalized in society and on the marriage market. Finally, this decline was also due to a strengthening of controls on male violence: judicial punishment (policing, penitentiaries); quasi-judicial punishment (in schools, at church, and in workplaces); and stigmatization of personal violence in popular culture.
These controls drove the decline in the homicide rate, but they also tended over time to hardwire the new behavior pattern, by hindering the ability of violent males to survive and reproduce. The last half-century has seen a dramatic relaxation of these controls but only a modest rise in the homicide rate among young men of native English origin.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
How many of these mass shooters have been men living with a wife and kids? 0?
Honestly I doubt that this would change much - cases where people go bonkers and kill their families are much less rare than they should be.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
The problem appears to be wider than that - from the same article:
Race, color, or national origin discrimination claims made up 3,329 of all complaints received in FY 2022, according to the civil rights office’s annual report, which was released last week. That’s up from 2,399 the year prior. Disability-related complaints comprised 6,467 of the total compared to 4,870 in FY 2021.
At the same time, age discrimination claims, which made up 666 complaints in the most recent report, were down from 1,149 the prior year. The office notes the majority of these claims were also filed by a single person in both years.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
In Accessibility law, this is the realm of ADA testers and their lawyers: a very small group of people who promise that they're at least theoretically interested in going to a far larger space of public or semi-public accommodations and making sure that anyone with similar disabilities can access them (and not coincidentally make a lot of money), who individually have hundreds or low thousands of complaints or even lawsuits.
There is a SCOTUS case coming on this. Last month the Supreme Court elected to take up an appeal from a 1st Circuit case questioning whether a self-appointed ADA "tester" has standing to sue for damages in federal court if they never intend to actually visit the place they're "testing":
The plaintiff, Deborah Laufer, has brought 600 lawsuits against hotels around the United States. Under the Americans with Disabilities Act, hotels are required to make information about their accessibility to people with disabilities available on reservation portals. In this case, Laufer – who has physical disabilities and vision impairments – went to federal court in Maine, where she alleged that a website for an inn that Acheson Hotels operates in that state did not contain enough information about the inn’s accommodations for people with disabilities.
The district court threw out her lawsuit. It agreed with Acheson Hotels that Laufer did not have standing because she had no plans to visit the hotel and therefore was not injured by the lack of information on the website. But the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 1st Circuit reinstated Laufer’s lawsuit.
That prompted Acheson Hotels to come to the Supreme Court, asking the justices to weigh in. The company pointed to a division among the courts of appeals on whether cases like Laufer’s can move forward; indeed, Acheson Hotels noted, courts have reached different conclusions about whether Laufer can bring these kinds of cases. And the issue has “immense practical importance,” the company stressed, describing a “cottage industry” “in which uninjured plaintiffs lob ADA lawsuits of questionable merit, while using the threat of attorney’s fees to extract settlement payments.”
Laufer agreed that review was warranted, although she urged the justices to uphold the lower court’s ruling. The justices will likely hear argument in the case in the fall, with a decision to follow sometime in 2024.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
"Firearm ownership is literally written into the founding document of this country as a fundamental right . . . "
That's just a set-up for the Cersei Lannister response: "This is your shield, Lord Stark? A piece of paper? tears paper to shreds"
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
No, but in the process of not living happily ever after, they made the lives of an awful lot of ordinary people who got caught in the crossfire very, very miserable. I want to avoid getting into the position where Cersei has to be violently removed from power via a horrifying and drawn-out war in the first place. So ideally, there'd be a better plan at the beginning than "you lose because this piece of paper says so."
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
IMO, lawyers are fucked. Clearly, indubitably fucked beyond redemption, you're better off joining the Writer's Guild
A couple contrary points:
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at least in the U.S., the practice of law is an upper class guild. Anything that would threaten the prosperity of the guild too much will be reacted against in the same way the medieval guilds reacted against competition - i.e. harshly.
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lawyers are disproportinately overrepresented in politics, and existing law gives the profession the right to govern itself and set its own standards. So regulatory or legally-mandated self-licking ice-cream cones which are well behind the technological curve are quite possible.
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the portion of the bar which actually wields power (judges, politicians, senior lawfirm partners, etc.) are disproportionately old, small-c-conservative about process and procedure, and notoriously tech-averse. I can't find it right now but I recall a brief back-and-forth I had with @ymeskhout about the absolutely pitiful state of courtroom computerized document- and record-review technology. The long and short of it is, I would not expect the top echelons of the legal profession to be best placed to make good use of the tools AI offers.
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not all portions of the legal field would be replaced well by AI. Contract drafting? Perhaps. Brief-writing? Also perhaps. But lawyers are also depended upon to manage interpersonal relationships (i.e. with regulatory agencies), negotiate, and advise clients about imaginative strategies and as to potential long-term consequences of various actions. While AI may may lawyers better at these tasks, I don't think LLMs as we currently see them can fully replace people. Also, lawyers are called-upon for record-keeping and compliance matters - as AI is shortly going to drastically reduce the cost of document generation, there's going to be a LOT more for lawyers to keep track of (assisted, of course, by other AIs).
Just my two cents - I'm also not that smart, so I could well be very wrong. But I don't have it in me to resign myself to the glue-factory just yet.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
for the record, my boss played around with 4.0 and over-optimistically reported on Monday that it had come up with three amazing cases with holdings that were perfect for a very tricky matter we're working on. When I and another associate actually checked the cites, two of the cases were complete fabrications, and the third cite was real but the AI completely fabricated the facts and holding.
I tried playing around with 4.0 today, and while I could basically get it to spew generally-correct answers regarding broad questions (i.e. "can law enforcement use under-age decoys in sting operations at licensed alcohol retailers?"), it does horribly when asked to summarize specific regulations or cases even when given the correct citations. Casetext is better, but we're not quite there yet.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Depends which law school you're going to, and what class you're taking. Bar-subject classes at middle-ranked law schools tend to hew pretty closely to bar-exam-style questions because they're not trying to train the next SCOTUS nominee; they're trying to make sure their bar-passage rate is high enough to attract more applicants.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Ditto - I mostly know the word as applying to normal gay men.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Was James Carville ever sued? He was the one that commented that "[i]f you drag a hundred dollar bill through a trailer park, you never know what you'll find," which seems far more insulting than anything I can think of HRC saying herself. Though it's probably too vague to be slanderous, legally-speaking.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Taking somewhat of a devil's advocate position (I'm not a fan of the current asylum system either), you're eliding a lot of ground in your last paragraph. There's a big distance between asylum which "impacts the living standards of Americans" and asylum levels which amount to "suicide." I think people can reasonably believe that society should be willing to accept some level of inconvenience/diminishment of living circumstance short of suicide in order to save people facing near-certain death (i.e. Yazidis fleeing ISIS, Russians/Ukranians facing conscription or displacement, etc.)
I'd also argue that not all asylee populations are problems in the U.S.; Cubans in Florida don't seem so harmful, and the Vietnamese diaspora that settled in southern California after US troops left Saigon has, after some initial friction in the 70's, settled in very nicely.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Eppur si muove - whatever the rhetoric, the result speaks for itself in this case.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Yes, because opening new frontiers of settlement with a literally once-in-a-thousand-years bounty of new goods (see "Columbian Exchange") tends to result in Golden Ages.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
If Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity mean anything
But we know they do not. We know they are nice-sounding mouth-noises that cover for rank in-group tribal advocacy (or, in other words, morally-loaded but vague marketing buzz-labels). So why bother to continue to engage with the concept on its own terms? Why buy into the marketing materials instead of the actual meat of the policy decisions the marketing is designed to cover for?
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Instead, I thought it was about the lack of clear evil intentions.
Slightly more complicatedly, it's about the way that things which would be wildly extraordinary in normal life (the uprooting and shifting of large populations, and the commitment of mass violence) and which would be shocking to bourgeois morality if committed on an interpersonal basis (shooting someone, or stealing their possessions while they scream) are normalized in the thoughts and discourse of policymakers by taking refuge in rhetorical generality and bureaucratic jargon, and then how everyone just gets on with normal things like office politics and lives completely boring lives even as the ultimate subject is the death and dispossession of millions. It's about how, notwithstanding all the hifalutin' things that the philosophers of liberalism wrote about citizens' exercise of reason and morality in public affairs, the quotidian swallows all of that even when it's the lives of millions on the line.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
What is the fucking point of this? What possible reason does a baseball team have to indicate a sexual preference? And why does this include mocking Catholics?
God this stuff is demoralizing. Is that the point?
You're focusing too much on the "baseball team" and not enough on the "Los Angeles." Pride is, for better or worse, a major secular holiday in the West Coast blue-tribe religion, particularly among those with disposable income. Every major institution in the area is expected to pay lip service to this. We have known this.
The Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence are a group which rose to prominence in the LGBT scene largely because of the work that a lot of their members did during the AIDs crisis - there's any number of other groups that do drag or religious-themed satire. I'd bet dollars to donuts that this history is why the Dodgers invited them. The idea that the Dodgers - a team whose most vociferous fans are Mexican/Centraco and overwhelmingly Catholic - did this thinking "Yeah, we'll stick an finger in the eye of Catholics" - doesn't pass the smell test. There's no reason to do it anyway; the local diocese has been liberal on sexuality and LGBT-issues for ages - at least since before I was born.
No, this isn't some sort of "power move." It was a big corporate body in a left-dominated City celebrating a lefty holiday, without relation to anyone else. For better or worse, trying to dictate how Los Angeles does Pride is pretty close to BoA and the HRC pitching hissy fits about not liking the Atlanta Braves' tomahawk-chop chant, or the more recent furore over the All-Star game and Georgia's voting laws.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
American racial politics is fundamentally blacks (and upper-class whites, and single women, and people still influenced by the slowly-dying "third-worldist" leftism popular in the latter years of the Cold War) vs everyone else.
FTFY
Long story short, I'm lost.
I think you are trying to do and understand too much. I do not believe it is generally productive to develop a theory on what "women" as a class do- or do-not like; the category is simply too large and too diverse. And even if some general trends can be discerned, they are not likely to be specific enough to be of more than marginal assistance in any given interaction with a random woman. Moreover, geographic and relational clustering effects (i.e., local, ideological, or subject-based sub-cultures or groups) can result in highly heterogenous pockets with unique and/or counterintuitive dynamics, separate and apart from the main trends.
Here is my advice to you:
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make yourself as interesting and capable a person as you can - whatever that means to you. Acquire skills. Get in good shape. Learn to dress and present yourself well. Ponder the mysteries of life until you have something interesting to say. Read great writers and prose stylists until you can command language well enough to express your thoughts clearly, concisely, and interestingly. Learn about (or, better, go experience) some interesting shit - not like "I went on holiday to Cambodia and man are the Phnom Penh temple complexes cool!", but instead put yourself in new circumstances that will test or surprise you. Push yourself to- and through- your limits. Get some interesting life stories, and then learn to tell them well. You should be doing this anyway, and if you are doing a good job it will have the happy side-effect of drawing other people to you. People like interesting, competent, attractive people.
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interact with women as individuals. Personally I've always found it much less daunting to talk to "Jessica, the receptionist who dotes on her baby brother, loves to go antiquing, and just came back from her cousin's wedding in Tennessee over the weekend" than it is to think about how to talk to Capital-W Women.
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put yourself in positions where you can meet individuals. Volunteer at a shelter, or take a pottery/stained glass/cooking class, or start going to church/synagogue/mosque/etc. Maybe join a professional networking association, or go to hobby conventions. Try to force yourself to be outgoing in other normal life situations - if someone is struggling to get a box off a high shelf at the store, ask if you can help. If you see someone at a cafe reading a book you're interested in (though this is a bit fraught with danger these days), ask if they'd recommend it. If you frequent a particular restaurant or store, notice whether or not you frequently get the same cashier or sales assistant - if so, greet them and maybe make some small talk as you order. This will make you more comfortable with other people and more outgoing, and with any luck at all will spring some friendships or casual acquaintanceships. Some of them might be women in your preferred demographic, but even the ones who aren't have relatives/friends/colleagues of their own. Build your social circle as wide as possible, to net as many contacts as possible.
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Be honest if you find someone attractive This one is pretty simple - if you find someone attractive, say so. Obviously not in an inappropriate way ("Hi, you have great tits, what's your name?" is unlikely to work outside of very particular circumstances). Knowing the object of your affection personally will help with this - thoughtful compliments that show that the giver is paying close attention are generally received better than generic ones.
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Be Prepared To Accept Rejection This is by far the hardest one - at least for me personally - but I swear to God that if you can somehow trick yourself into a zen-like belief that all the world is an illusion so rejection by a pretty woman is as meaningless and ephemeral as a wisp of smoke from a snuffed candle, you will have a fucking superpower when it comes to dating. Being able to keep your cool, accept "no" as an answer, and roll on, undaunted and unruffled, to the next thing not only makes it way easier to actually shoot your shot, but also makes you better at it because you're not stressing and pressing with the stink of desperation on you.
Alternately you can try the apps - others have left comments with good advice for those, but I retain faith in the old-fashioned way of doing things.
I certainly wish you luck.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Nevertheless, the issue is settled that the law is valid. Everyone now understands that it can and will be used that way and it is futile to even attempt to argue that it is unconstitutional.
Absolutely not. Courts at the trial level routinely vary in their analysis/implementation of various statutes. The issue is not legally "settled," and if this charging practice becomes more widespread I would expect plenty of constitutional arguments from defendants.
What might be settled is a pattern and policy in certain prosecutorial offices of charging disfavored speech as "intimidation" under this particular theory.
What certainly is settled is an increased willingness in PMC strongholds to weaponize lawfare and prosecutorial discretion to target conservative activists. Insofar as the process is the punishment, this has been successful. Forum-shopping trial courts has also brought trial-level successes. It remains to be seen how any of this does on appeal, (IIRC).
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
If you rob a Walmart, or assault someone, even if you are a repeat offender, you will go to jail but then eventually be released. A permanent ban from the public square is tantamount to a worse punishment than faced by many criminal offenders.
Only if you're a white-collar PMC. The underclass is not governed in the same way as the overclass. Do you think that being banned from Twitter would do anything to the people stealing random shit from Sephora? Most people are not on Twitter, or, if they are, use it to communicate shit-takes with their friends or as a mechanism to view various types of entertainments. Those latter functions are not part of "being in the public square" and can be done in any number of other ways, including passively consuming TikToks, Instagram Reels, YouTube shorts, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
Here's Biden's 2023 follow-on 'whole of government' "Equity" EO: https://www.whitehouse.gov/equity/
It's chock-a-block with the government's plans to:
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stuff every agency full of DEI commissars ("requir[ing] agencies to designate senior leaders accountable for implementing the equity mandate")
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giving those commissars increased control and oversight over the agency's policymaking and enforcement decisions ("instruct[ing] agencies to consider bolstering the capacity of their civil rights offices");
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directing the agencies to slant everything they do through DEI analysis ("direct[ing] agencies to produce Equity Action Plans annually and report to the public on their progress");
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ensuring that resources will be allocated to the DEI commissars to carry out this new institutionalized and systemic racism/sexism/heterophobia ("direct[ing] the White House Office of Management and Budget to support agencies’ Equity Action Plans");
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increasing the amount of racial, sexual, and gendered discrimination and graft in federal contracting ("formaliz[ing] the President’s goal of increasing the share of federal contracting dollars awarded to small disadvantaged business by 50 percent by 2025"); and
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carefully pruning the collection and dissemination of federally-collected data and statistics so that these progressive DEI shibboleths can't be challenged ("focusing [agency OCR] efforts on emerging threats like algorithmic discrimination in automated technology" and "further promot[ing] data equity and transparency").
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
No, part of being "more effective" includes, for example, drafting EOs with language that is less-susceptible to challenge than Trump's were, and avoiding explicit public statements which provide grist for the lawfare mill. Or being more familiar with the administrative process, and handling the promulgation of new regulations with the proper procedures. Or being more familiar with the wide variety of administrative and procedural tools that can be brought to bear against, e.g., rogue prosecutors, as DeSantis has been doing with Florida state's attorneys. Or being more dedicated to governing in an anti-progressive manner than in getting good press coverage (See, e.g., Trump firing Sessions, hiring Wray, appointing a special counsel re: Russia hoax, etc.)
Supah_Schmendrick
11mo ago
I agree that FBI opposition can harm an administration they don't like. However, I don't think that a more competent and audacious administration would have been nearly as harmed as Trump was by Russiagate. The FBI is nominally under executive branch control, and the President has the pardon power - an administration that doesn't concede to opposition pressure has ways of pushing back against rogue enforcement.
Most homeless people aren't violent, and don't have law-enforcement records as long as your arm. Most homeless people - even the drug-addicted ones - don't get in your face and scream at you about how they're not afraid to die today, and not afraid to go to jail (insinuating that they're willing to commit acts which would either result in their death or long-term imprisonment - i.e. violent ones). Most homeless people are not schizophrenic street criminals with 40+ arrests, including multiple serious batteries and at least one attempted kidnapping. Most homeless people are just trying to get back on their feet and avoid the shame of being seen in a destitute condition. I have no problem with them, nor do I think that most Mottizens have any problem with them. So no, there's no connecting this to "homeless people" or "undesirables" writ large.
It is a goddamn travesty that in American big cities, public spaces - including sensitive ones like public transit - have been abandoned to people who think it's their birthright to scream at, threaten, assault, batter, or otherwise harass ordinary people. Sometimes these people are obviously suffering from some species of mental defect; sometimes they are just cruel, entitled, and aggressive. Securing the public peace is literally the first responsibility of an organized state, and any state that can't or won't even do that is really no state at all. Moreover, if the state can- or will not do anything, people are justified in attempting to reclaim public areas, including by force if necessary. There is no affirmative obligation to suffer otherwise criminal harassment by others.
People who abuse public spaces in aggressive ways should be punished - not because they're inherently evil or "undesirable" (though they may also harbor genetic tendencies towards, e.g. psychosis that we would not affirmatively select for if we had the option) but because of their actions. Their punishment should not necessarily be death (i.e. no, don't just shoot annoying people on the subway), but I'm not going to categorically say that someone screaming threats shouldn't get cold-cocked (let alone someone who's assaulted or battered a stranger unprovoked), and when people get into physical fights, sometimes death results.
In such cases the death may be sad to the deceased's family and loved-ones, but it was not honorable. It was largely the result of their own bad actions, and (absent serious extenuating circumstances) was inflicted in defense of the public peace and welfare. Play stupid games, win stupid prizes. It shouldn't be that hard to not scream in random strangers' faces and threaten them day after day after goddamn day. It's generally sad that their life was wasted on such shitty, harmful behavior, but on the whole society is improved for their absence.
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