SwordOfOccam
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User ID: 2777
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Mike Lindell has been ordered to pay up for his challenge to disprove some election interference evidence.
It’s a remarkable situation. Evidence of election interference should be investigated by law enforcement agencies, with no need for a bounty to disprove the validity.
The great thing is that the man who met the challenge voted for Trump twice. (I wonder if he will a third time.)
If Lindell didn’t trust government authorities to properly investigate election interference claims, he should have also known not to trust the courts to fairly (from his perspective) enforce an arbitration issue about it.
Had Lindell set the bounty to prove the veracity of the evidence (beyond a reasonable doubt), he’d still have his money.
This is like the inverse of the Balaji Srinivasan bet on inflation and Bitcoin. I think it’s great when the wealthy put their money where their mouth is. We need more bets taxing bullshit.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Covid-19 was a Chinese plot to screw with the US election or am I misunderstanding you?
Believing any of the things you mentioned amounts to sufficient evidence that the 2020 election was rigged as claimed by Trump and others, is silly yeah.
(Particularly in light of actions taken by Trump and co to actually screw with the election outcome.)
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Can you conceive a scenario where unrestricted immigration could lead to severe problems?
Personally, I’m a law and order libertarian. America’s past success with immigration at scale is not guaranteed to continue.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Did it meaningfully alter the outcome? Was it foul play?
For example, I can’t take seriously the whining over mailed ballots because I live in a red state that has long had them. I know there are other cases where “hey that’s not fair” was only brought up about some uncontroversial procedural change when it was judged to have perhaps disadvantaged Trump.
Does any of it remotely compare to the blatant, documented attempts by Trump and co to alter or evade the election outcome?
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Are you an anarcho-capitalist?
“Relationships” in the personal sense and the issues of immigration, including citizenship, are not really the same. In a better world, the whole world would be open borders (enforced by the one world government, of course) and the lamb would lay down next to the lion.
It’s not about the government being competent at it. Competent compared to what? It’s that it’s a situation where there’s no better alternative, similar to the related issue of national defense.
But then I’m a (bad) libertarian who thinks seat belt laws are justified on utilitarian grounds.
SwordOfOccam
2mo ago
Success rates matter.
If tarot reading worked as consistently physics or math then boy would that be something.
(Now social sciences, well…)
Science as a method frequently involves guessing and dumb luck and accidental discovery. But then the point is systematically testing findings and examining new evidence and ideas. Tarot reading doesn’t have iterative improvement going on.
SwordOfOccam
2mo ago
yielding justifiable nonzero confidence in universal natural laws may be zero
I’m failing to understand why this is a bar any epistemology needs to clear.
Science as a method verifiably works at improving our material lives because it produces sufficiently accurate information. The utility is the payoff, but the correlation to reality is what enables it.
if someone were to give a single universal natural law of the physical world -- take your pick -- and give an objective argument why we should have greater than zero confidence in its literal truth.
Where does math fit here under “physical world”?
The thing you seem to be doing is putting forth a standard no epistemology can satisfy. It’s not like pure math and logic don’t have identified paradoxes and limitations. Just ask Bertrand Russell.
How about the finding that nothing with mass can exceed the speed of light? This is something backed by math and logic, as well as experimentation. If it were otherwise physics would break, is my layman’s understanding anyway.
Is that sufficiently “universal”?
There are a lot of “universal” rules in physics, so long as you stay at the atomic level. (The quantum domain also has its rules, but they don’t break the atomic ones altogether.)
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
You’re abusing the concept of a weak man argument to shelter an unjustified position.
All there are here are weak arguments and so addressing any one of them is not a weak man approach.
You’re smart enough to recognize this instance is BS, and then failing to be consistent and extrapolate, and instead trying to claim this is a flawed approach because it’s picking on a dumb case.
It’s all dumb cases because every one falls apart upon close examination.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
I do understand the position I am mocking and I live in a red state that has long had mass mailing.
Doing fraud at scale leaves evidence. Where’s your evidence, not just the potential for fraud?
Actually, even if the election was stolen Trump’s actions were still blatantly illegal. Going through the courts is the proper approach, not calling up election officials to pressure them, or creating extralegal electors, or pressing your VP to use made up powers to simply deny the election result.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
I’m a utilitarian libertarian, not deontological. Seat belt laws are easily justified on a cost/benefit basis.
Restricting/taxing things with known severe downsides like alcohol and tobacco is also easily justified, though the details are much more complicated than mandating seat belts. Of late, I think broad legalization of digital sports gambling is a pretty bad idea.
Externalities and tradeoffs are real and ought to be addressed, in other words, and that sometimes necessitates government intervention and curtailing liberty.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
IME:
-Weakly justified beliefs resist close examination.
-Loose thinkers dislike rigor taking all the fun out of it. Theory is fun but details are a drag.
SwordOfOccam
1mo ago
You have things remarkably backwards.
The US and Israel only attack Iran because since 1979 Iran has been controlled by a theocracy that considers the US and Israel to be, unironically, “Big and Little Satan.”
Iran having nukes would be massively destabilizing to the region even if you take Israel out of the equation. Iranian ideology isn’t kind to basically any of its neighbors.
I have no idea what your preferred worldview is beyond disliking the US and Israel, but don’t pretend Iran is some poor oppressed country that needs to defend itself when it is the aggressor.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
The constitution does not provide the VP the power to deny election results.
The fact you can’t agree on that when Pence could (god bless him) doesn’t bode well for your ability to evaluate something more nuanced like say election integrity and reasonable standards of evidence.
Your avoidance of presenting evidence, instead of theories about what could have happened or dissatisfaction with how the election was run, remains telling.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
You’re thinking about this the wrong way.
The battle over gay marriage was won so fast both legally and popularly that progressives think they can repeat that with say trans issues.
I don’t think conservatives think they have a chance of ever reversing gay marriage. Best they can do is fight to have the freedom to not bake cakes for it.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
scientific materialism, the de facto worldview of the last few centuries, is also at bottom based on "supernatural claims."
Look I just want levels of evidence to match levels of claims.
If any belief system says “we have the power to meaningfully affect material reality” then let’s see the evidence.
For example, where’s the indisputable evidence faith healing works? Plenty of religions claim that one still today. Also the power of prayer to affect outcomes is very common.
Those are very testable propositions.
And yet.
Or, what exactly is a soul anyway? Not material, not energy, some strange third thing. Can’t quite measure it, but it’s definitely there because the scriptures tell us so.
How much of a given holy book is literal vs. figurative? How do we know? Who’s in charge anyway?
Not even the believers come to some strong consensus about the particulars of theology, let alone present sufficient evidence for an actual skeptic.
I’m not going to trust any ideology about “meaning and purpose” if it can’t address basic epistemological issues any small child should be able to point out. We can sort out our emotional issues without resorting to what sounds good.
I’ve been a devout believer and was told we had the Truth and that it could obviously withstand scrutiny. But really it relied upon strong emotions, group ties and peer pressure, motivated reasoning, and just so stories to protect faith from scrutiny.
If there is some higher power, it ought to have higher standards than the religions I’ve seen.
What’s really funny is plenty of Christians will take the opposite line you have and claim credit for the Enlightenment. And plenty of us will call secular ideologies we don’t like—say communism and wokeism—political religions.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Too bad nobody can provide an elephant.
“There’s a huge elephant in here you aren’t addressing but don’t ask for specifics.”
Vibes -> tall claims -> shoddy evidence -> vibes -> …
It’s a self-sustaining cycle of BS until good evidence can be provided, instead of dancing around that elephant-sized gap.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
“A bet is a tax on bullshit” is not meant to say “government fines are a good thing.” The guy who wrote that article is not really a fan of government power being used to decide such things.
Lindell choosing to place a bet is a good thing. He just made a bad one for himself. His “misfortune” on this particular issue is all self-imposed by him, it just took a judge to force him to comply with his own promise.
Lindell is not being punished such as he is for supporting Trump. One can, theoretically at least, support Trump and not engage in blatant lies and other violations that will attract the ire of social media platforms.
The super ironic thing is that Lindell lost his phone due to an FBI investigation over election tampering at the county level. Contrary to what a lot of posters here believe, the US government takes election issues quite seriously and Lindell trying to doing vigilante election security backfired on him a bit. Somehow I doubt if that Mesa County official ends up convicted it will change anyone’s mind, because the case hasn’t made enough of a dent in people thinking it’s not too hard to screw with county election results.
Not that it proves you wrong, but it’s hard to take your complaints seriously based on how say Hillary got treated. Both sides of the aisle do a lot of shit that is indecent.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
I’ll take issue with this bit because I encounter it a lot:
There's an oft-utilized but facile heuristic that claims that if there was a cover-up, then someone would've leaked it, and so therefore no leak = no cover-up. This is unreliable because there plenty of government cover-ups that were successful, at least for a while.
This is actually a very reliable heuristic regarding supposed US government plots in more recent times. The examples you cite regarding the CIA/IC/DoD are the classics in the genre. But the key context to keep in mind is that the Cold War was a very different time, with very different norms and processes. Significant changes for oversight were made in the 1970s and the Overton Window for acceptable behavior shifted a fair bit the last few decades. So when evaluating present claims of a plot you can’t over index on what took place so long ago. (The same dynamic goes for the medical study example you cite; it was a different era and if anything we’ve overcorrected on medical ethics.)
In other words, the half life of cover ups is shorter and the big crazy stuff is just not going to fly. Things like the Bush torture and warrantless wiretapping programs come to mind. Or the cover up around Pat Tillman’s death. Or the shoddy justification for the invasion of Iraq (the IC takes major efforts to avoid repeating the mistake of politically influenced/misused assessments after that). We had multiple broad, sensitive leaks under the Obama administration and the Trump administration was chock full of leaks and tell alls. And investigations of investigations.
If there are public allegations of some plot, then it’s already past the point where the plot, if true, managed to avoid being detected.
Everybody knows how easy it is for a leak or an investigation to happen and intelligence bureaucrats are strongly incentivized to avoid the very appearance of evil, or anything sensational.
The IC is a big place and mistakes and shenanigans happen, but it’s very different from the Wild West days of the earlier part of the Cold War and grand plots and cover ups are very, very hard.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
The legal theory that the constitution empowers the VP to unilaterally determine election outcomes is an utterly ridiculous one and Trump’s own VP refused to go along with it.
The VP’s constitutionally defined role in the election process is a distinct issue from whether there was significant fraud in the 2020 election.
This week’s thread is full of requests for evidence by me and others that the 2020 election was stolen, rigged, or otherwise plagued with widespread fraud.
None has been provided; mostly there is whining over the request and lawyerly approach by everyone’s favorite public defender.
You are welcome to step up and make the case.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Leaving aside the whole issue of government involvement in the institution of marriage and the court deciding things, the popularity battle was not won by lying.
I can grant your claims of some lying, but the biggest factor is that what the gays wanted was not that much of an ask, overall. It was about social acceptance, without too much of a real burden. The exceptions, of course, revolve around the trade offs with religious rights, because freedom of association and freedom from association are murky unresolvable problems.
This is not the case with trans issues. There are significant health concerns, as well as the major biological differences between men and women being pretttty difficult to overcome. It’s asymmetric of course; almost all the Culture Warring is over MtF issues.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
By “break serious laws” do you mean the email server? Or are we talking the theories out there about darker stuff?
If we’re talking about the email server, then I’d say the level of drama was way overblown relative to the actual significance. And, well, Trump has her beat with his personal presidential library he had going.
If you mean something more serious than the email server, then we are going to be in a disagreement about the evidence for those claims.
(If you bring up claims of general corruption related to the Clinton Foundation then I’m going to laugh at you, for reasons that should be obvious.)
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
I don’t think you’re engaging with the issues I raised.
I don’t disagree that a lot of HBD types are dumb and selected for disagreeability and/or liking racism, not better traits. But that’s what you get when social desirability bias really punishes witches or anything close to it.
“We deserve it really”
I mean yeah, inasmuch as anyone deserves the fruits of their labor and natural abilities. Believing foul play is involved instead seems well-proven to lead to bad outcome for the Jews. Open competition, markets, and meritocracy are going to let talent rise and we plainly see group imbalances all over, like in sports.
Ultimately, in the West at least, individualism and equality under the law seem like the best option, but denying reality seems unlikely to help.
(Also, it is socially acceptable to punch down at incels so maybe the status quo there isn’t great.)
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
Trump claimed Pence could unilaterally decide to decertify the entire election.
I decided nothing a priori about presented evidence.
Looking back on this thread, I’m not seeing where you presented evidence of specific cases of voter fraud or the like; I’m seeing you describe how it might have happened.
Those are not the same thing and the particular demand is for concrete evidence; we have an oversupply of theories here.
SwordOfOccam
3mo ago
The incredible thing here is that the report you cite from WILL concluded there was no widespread fraud, despite the documented issues being real problems.
Multiple cases and investigations did not find sufficient evidence to overturn the result.
So my priors are entirely reinforced here by evidence you presented: that while certain states were shitshows, there was no “rigged” or “stolen” election.
Richard Hanania writes we need to shut up about HBD.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/shut-up-about-race-and-iq
He defines HBD as believing:
Populations have genetic differences in things like personality and intelligence. (group differences)
Groups are often in zero-sum competition with one another, and this is a useful way to understand the world. (zero sum)
People to a very strong degree naturally prefer their own ingroup over others. (descriptive tribalism)
Individuals should favor their own ingroup, whether that is their race or their co-nationals. (normative tribalism)
And he goes on to criticize 2-4. I tend to agree with those criticisms, but I think it’s fairly common in these kinds of circles to believe a version of 2 focused on ideological competition, not between racial groups, where the social justice left and its preferred policies to rectify group differences can only be defeated by using the facts to explain group differences that won’t be rectified through policy.
While I accept Hanania’s point that the facts frequently don’t matter in which political ideas rise to the top, I still feel like Cofnas has a point (whom Hanania is responding to).
I’m quite philosemetic, for example. The best argument against antisemitism based on observing Jewish overperformance and concluding it’s due to some kind of plot is explaining that intelligence matters and the Ashkenazim underwent a particular history and we now observe them having very high average test scores.
Hanania himself wrote not so long ago about how Jewish personality traits might be needed to fully explain their political interest and influence, beyond just intelligence.
Using biology to explain overperformance but not underperformance seems like a strange compromise.
In much of today’s polite society, if one points out the achievement gap among groups, you’re a racist.
But if one doesn’t acknowledge the achievement gap between groups to justify affirmative action, you’re a racist.
And that’s without even mentioning biology! Watching lefties like Kathryn Paige Harden and Freddie deBoer try to (admirably) describe these kinds of issues while trying to remain in the good graces of polite society is enlightening.
Now, if you could guarantee me a return to a more race-blind culture and legal system if we shut up about genetics then I would take that. But we are on a path towards learning the murky details of (and being able to influence) genetics of both groups and individuals. I don’t think the elephant in the room will stay quiet.
It’s a bit remarkable to read Hanania write:
I think he means, “talk about something publicly” as opposed to at all, but actually I’ll easily bite those bullets and say we ought to understand the disadvantages short men face due to female preferences and that we ought to know just how much we expend society’s resources on the severely handicapped.
Social desirability bias is incredibly powerful and one should choose one’s battles. Polite society in the West went from being quite racist, in ways that didn’t always align with the facts, to correcting hard (thanks, Hitler) to race is only skin deep, which also doesn’t align. And then we got the influence of Kendiism.
Even ignoring immigration (where he doesn’t cover the Garret Jones stance), a lot of US politics comes down to this issue, and HBD was mostly in a quietist tradition the last few decades with little influence for being outside the Overton Window.
I know Trace doesn’t like HBD much, but wow is that like the whole story of his FAA traffic controller storyline. If you listen to the Blocked and Reported episode, he and Jesse aren’t shy about pointing out it was an insane policy to completely jettison meritocracy, but they dance around the general point that if you set a fairly high intellectual bar for a job, it’s going to look like the racists are right. If you allow self-selection, you also very well might make it look like the sexists are right.
The elephant in the room is only growing larger for anyone following the facts. Conceding the present Overton Window is unassailable is I think conceding defeat to the social justice left.
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