Tiber727
2d ago
Stop the drug trade? I have no illusions of doing that. A hypothetical successful scenario is not one that stops all crime, it's one that turns the drug trade from a $10 billion/year industry to a $2 billion/year industry (numbers pulled out of my ass because it doesn't matter here). Instead of 10 people signing up to join the cartel in a given time, 2 do because the other 8 had middle class parents and lead middle class lives. Instead of the cartels being able to tell the Mexican government what to do, the Mexican government has the resources to push the cartels into the shadows.
Is this all pie in the sky? Absolutely. I'm embellishing things to make a point.
"Prosperity" isn't a switch that gets flipped and once it gets flipped everything gets fixed forever. It's a slider. The more the prosperity slider moves to the right, poverty reduces a little (and poverty itself becomes less severe), crime reduces a little, infectious diseases get treated better and spread less, and happiness increases a little. The more it slides to the left the more those bad things go up. In line with that, the idea of international aid isn't to end all the bad things. The aid is because without it, things can always get worse. Improving society is a matter of bringing the poverty rate from 10% to 9%, not the idea that you're going to get it to 0%.
That's the humanitarian angle. The government angle is that by doing humanitarian things they establish positive ties to another country, and positive ties mean influence. Influence isn't a direct quid-pro-quo, it's adding one more reason to choose X instead of Y where X is the option that benefits the U.S.
Tiber727
2d ago
Blame has nothing to do with it. The cartels don't sell drugs out of some blame for America. They want money and selling drugs gets them money. If your other options are shit jobs for shit pay, the less scrupulous choose the path they see to success. Maybe we can stop some percentage of them from contributing to the drug trade in America by making Mexico not a shithole. Is it "unfair" to bail them out for failing? If you want to look at it that way I suppose. But criminals have a way of making their problems everyone else's problems, and butterfly effect still reaches America.
Soft power isn't a straightforward conversion of money to influence, but it always ends with money. Another country has a natural disaster and you show up to offer help? That's respect. But you know what disaster support is? It's money. Treating diseases in other countries? Money. Trade? Money.
Tiber727
2d ago
My goal is that I think the lion's share should be on the cops. There are about a million cops in the U.S. There are 340 million non-cops. Training 1 million people seems easier, plus just learning something once doesn't mean much until you've put into practice, whereas the cop puts his knowledge into practice every day.
In Castile's case, he did tell the officer he had a gun. The officer still gave him a predictably stupid order to present his ID and not consider the gun. Could Castile have taken a different line and said he couldn't comply? With the benefit of hindsight, sure. But for the crime of not knowing the perfect thing to do, he ends up shot.
Or John Crawford. John holds a BB gun he plans to purchase and starts talking on his cell phone. Someone calls the cops and claims he was waiving a gun around. The cops show up while he's talking on his cell phone and pretty much immediately shoot him. Here's their testimony and here's the video (Sorry, best I can find). He doesn't know cops have been called, he panics and gets shot despite the first thing he does before running is drop the gun.
Tiber727
2d ago
Has a nation-state ever started a war or funded terrorism against another nation-state simply because the richer state was richer and refused to provide charity to the poorer state?
Simply because? No, unless you're counting warlords who want more stuff. But gangs and terrorists find poor places fertile breeding ground. If you have nothing, what are you supposed to do about them? And it's easier for the cartel to recruit a poor kid from the street than a middle class child. Life is all about contributing factors.
Alleviating poverty does not prevent anti-Americanism, it just alleviates poverty and creates a culture of dependency.
It does though? Are you going to tell me you aren't nicer to someone who gives you stuff? It's no magic bullet, but it helps. That what soft power is - influence.
And again I will point out the value of preventing disease outbreaks.
Tiber727
3d ago
I've seen a decent amount of bad cop interactions (as in, the interaction went bad). It often times is,
-
Cops have different information than suspect, making the cop think the suspect is dangerous
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Suspect doesn't know what to do.
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Cop interprets innocent thing as bad thing, shoots.
What I think is most practical is a playbook for cops that assumes civilians will sometimes do irrational things but aren't necessarily dangerous. I keep thinking back to Philando Castile. A cop is informed of a situation involving a black guy with a white shirt (in other words, a very broad description). He stops a black man with a white shirt. The man informs him he has a gun and the cop tells him not to reach for it. The problem being that his gun is on his right hip, and his ID is in his right pocket. So how do we prevent this?
Let's say the cop stops Castile, and is informed of the gun. He is told to step out of the car slowly and put his hands on the hood of the car. The cop takes the gun and explains he will return it at the end of the stop if there are no issues. Proceed from there.
At the end of each bad interaction, do a root cause analysis if there is a reasonable way to prevent the issue from happening again. Have a database where districts can compare policies.
Tiber727
3d ago
Why not both? Gaining a good reputation for doing good things is the system working as intended. There's also downstream effects. The benefit of disease control activities in Africa is lower risk of eventually spreading to Americans. Alleviating poverty helps prevent anti-American terrorists from gaining power.
Tiber727
1mo ago
The plot of the game revolves around lunafilament, a pretty much magical material with the potential to replicate anything.
But in all honestly, the plot of the game is super thin. Just enjoy your robot kid that does all the enjoyable things kids do with none of the parts that make you want to punch something.
Tiber727
1mo ago
If nothing else, I would argue that the people who are racist against blacks are more likely to be found in the Republican Party and less likely to be actively criticized. In addition, if the Republican Party keeps discriminating against them as a group for the reason that they are usually Dem, it doesn't exactly endear them to the Republicans even if said discrimination would go away if they became solidly Republican.
Tiber727
1mo ago
As far as I can tell, even the alleged racists themselves don't think it will happen. As far as I can tell, the people here see themselves not unlike a country about to fall and barely holding on. Conversely the left is culturally dominant, held back only by squandering power on absurd causes.
Tiber727
1mo ago
You have to think of The Motte as a zoo. There are dangerous animals here, but they're in cages and can't do anything unless you jump in the cage.
It's not like the people you think are awful cease to exist based on the existence of the Motte. And yes, I certainly think some people whom I won't name are awful human beings. But sometimes I want to know how they tick. I want to know how they react to evidence which contradicts them. And often not responding is the best course, because there's nothing to be gained.
My question to you is what does "fighting" entail? There's never going to be a magical utopia where everyone gets along. There's always going to be some percentage of assholes. "Progress" is just a reduction in the number of assholes and the degree of their assholishness. But it can never reach zero.
There has to be a balance between advancing your beliefs and realizing that caring too much about the mere existence of distasteful things just makes you unhappy. There's no "killing" in debates, so the end result of debates is 1% of the time someone changed their mind and 99% of the time nothing changed.
The people here are extremely used to being told by other people they're bad people. They don't care. What are you hoping to accomplish?
Tiber727
1mo ago
It's anchored by the cost of replacing that guy with the next available alternative. Since sweeping the floors is a job a lot of people can do, that cost is fairly low compared with the cost of a rocket scientist.
That cost is low, yes. But how much is the next guy asking for? He's basing his salary expectations on what he thinks he can ask for, and that's where anchoring effect comes in. If every prospective janitor is able and willing to hold out for $50,000 rather than accepting $25,000, then likely the company will end up having to pay $50,000.
That's why an equally productive factory laborer in India asks for way less than one in America. Tariffs are another form of restricting the labor supply to increase one's bargaining position.
There's also the disparity between labor and capital. If a company is twice as productive, the stockholders and executives make bank. The employees maybe get a bonus if it's in their contract or the company is feeling generous. You might say they don't assume the risks, but the risk is called layoffs. Even in bankruptcy, executives often walk away fine. Trump's businesses have declared chapter 11 six times.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I'm aware that Musk has multiple ventures. I'm also sure people are aware that higher taxes would affect people like Shotwell.
My point is that people act like more wealth maps out to more contribution to society. Rather than:
The current richest people created many of the good things in society.
I would say usually they organized the labor and provided the material to the people who created many of the good things in society. That organizing the labor has value, but so does actually performing the labor. There's an entire chain of work to building a rocket, from organizing the labor to designing the rocket to producing the parts to sweeping the floors. Each of them deserves some of the cut of success, but who decides the amount? The answer is the people with resources.
The trick to this is that the contribution of the guy sweeping the floors is anchored by society's expectations. When setting the salary of janitor positions they look at the going rate. Meaning that even if they generate $50,000 in profit from having a janitor vs not having one, they can get away with only paying $25,000 by not competing. And the guy with nothing to his name has far less leverage to hold out for more.
That's how we got robber barons and sweatshops. The people then fought to give themselves a bit of influence on their own pay, by organizing unions and getting wage laws enacted.
Tiber727
1mo ago
I'd say the argument isn't that Elon Musk didn't do an impressive thing by creating SpaceX. Musk + a bunch of people that worked with Musk did all that. No, not everyone should get an equal slice of the pie, but when multiple people created it and one person ends up with a slice that's 1,000 times bigger then maybe the "meritocracy" model isn't producing the output it should.
As someone from the left, watching Trump voters has often felt like watching someone meet their idol, seeing said idol punch them in the face, and then the fan explains to onlookers that it was just a friendly greeting.
Iran has thus far felt that if anything can end MAGA's love affair with Trump, it's watching "no new wars" fall apart. And that has certainly had some impact, but the Teflon still hasn't completely come off yet. As for all the "little things" up to and including blasphemy, I've long given up on the idea of the camel's back being broken no matter how much straw is added to it.
Tiber727
1mo ago
The counterpoint is that it's not just "Trump vs a Dem." The more reasonable expectation is that the Republican primary is where Republicans would be expected to offer better options to a right-leaning voter. Trump won that by a mile.
Tiber727
1mo ago
Bungie is a master at epic sounding names.
Treads Upon Stars
One Thousand Voices
Patron of Lost Causes
Thistle and Yew
Extraordinary Rendition
Tiber727
1mo ago
I'd like to go into a little more detail about C. C can be broken up into C1 and C2.
C1: Trump knew that Epstein was a pedophile and was unbothered by this fact.
C2: Trump may have suspected something, but wasn't sure.
With a crime as emotionally charged as pedophilia, there's a legal aspect and a moral aspect. People aren't just interested in whether he has legal culpability. This is something that both left and right would generally expect you to stop associating with that person.
There's a middle ground theory where everyone knew he was a pedophile but neither participated nor reported him. Or facilitated him in tiny ways that technically aren't illegal so long as they can plausibly claim "they looked like adults to me."
Tiber727
1mo ago
Cognitively vulnerable Trump? Now it sounds like we're going on the Biden dementia ride again, only this time the people who once rightly criticized the Dems are acting like it's no big deal.
Every party in politics has biases. Yes, the people within the party should try to hold their biases in check, which if the article can be believed some of them did. But a third party like Israel will always have their interests in mind and any advice they give should be considered with that fact in mind. The job of the President is to filter out the bullshit and make the best decision despite the people trying to manipulate him. If he can't do that, he should never have been allowed in that position.
Tiber727
2mo ago
The problem with this analysis is the belief that nothing happened between 2014 and 2022. For pretty much the entirety of that time Ukraine was fighting with "separatists" armed with Russian weapons. Europe had arranged ceasefires, with Russia negotiating for terms which benefited the separatists, but those ceasefires were repeatedly broken (each side of course blames the other for violating it). Hell, in 2017 Putin announced that he was issuing passports for citizens in Eastern Ukraine.
Trump did send some weapons, but that's about the extent of it that I remember.
Tiber727
2mo ago
This response reads like a congressional hearing where the person being grilled is asked a very straightforward question, and the person responds in a way crafted to be technically true but is obviously trying to avoid the thing they don't want to admit.
Trump's specific interpersonal style is called being unprofessional, the very thing you are calling out others for being.
The easy answer is that other people don't see Trump's plans or deals as positively as you do. Trump's particular way of negotiating is usually to frame it that you need something he has, and he will try to extract as much from you as possible in the process.
So now Trump is trying to sell something most people don't want - a war with unrealistic objectives - after pissing them off. He's not in a position to play his usual games so now he needs to be the one to learn a new trick.
The U.S. is influential, but their boss he is not.
Tiber727
2mo ago
You are ignoring Hawaii with a 115 vote difference in 1960.
I'm not ignoring it, I'm treating it as a freak occurrence. It's the closest state in the closest election in the last 80 years. That's the platonic ideal of cherry picking. I copied the chart into Excel and took the average, and the average is 56,514 (median is 28,713) of a data set already filtering for the closest elections.
I notice that you neglect responding to the part where the fraudsters don't have to cast only 115 votes. They have no idea at the time they're doing it how many they need.
Note that you are ignoring senatorial and local elections
I focused on the Presidential election because:
A) it's where we have the most data
B) it's what most of the people talk about, like Trump is still out here claiming he won in 2020.
C) It makes the topic even more unwieldy to discuss.
In polling, 25% of some broad groups approve of using violence for political ends:
I've seen that poll before and I think the question is shit. I would say yes to "political violence can sometimes be justified?" because I'd consider a hypothetical random civilian who tried to assassinate literal, actual Hitler a hero. The question didn't ask what my limit would be.
your entire premise is flawed anyway. To get people to commit fraud, you would logically convince them that their fraud is justified, or not even fraud.
Two problems with this. First of all, doping is a crime you perform in private. Pretending to be someone else you do in public.
Second of all, the limiting factor of conspiracy is not finding like-minded individuals. It's finding like-minded individuals without failing to recruit someone and that someone tipping off authorities.
According to your link, the software is (also) used to identify people "who were eligible to cast ballots but were not registered to vote." But this is publicly available information and registering presumably doesn't require an ID check either in any states without Voter ID. So all it takes to create a list of exploitable people is to get a list of residents of a state (easy to get from data brokers) and then check whether they are registered.
Who is our modal fraudster anyway? To figure out who is eligible to vote you need their name and some other detail, usually birthday or partial SSN. You're talking about getting data from data brokers, but they're using it to just wander around a city casting votes in person? It's like assembling Ocean's Eleven to rob a liquor store. If you are smart enough to try to farm citizens to impersonate, I'd think you'd be smart enough to come up with a better plan than this. I think every person we have prosecuted for voter fraud at the polls was just trying to impersonate a single relative.
Except that there is an obvious purpose, to increase trust in the system.
The lack of trust in the system is not the problem of the system. It's a problem of people distrusting the system. To put it bluntly, to the Democratic party places a very low importance on this benefit, and doubts they can earn it even by following instructions. Georgia was a big part of Trump's 2020 claims of election fraud, and Georgia already requires photo ID.
If anything, it increases distrust in the system because it just opens the doors to further claims of fraud seeming plausible. Trump has just tried to restrict mail-in voting, which I predicted Republicans would do.
So why is the question not whether voters all get the needed information to make sure that they can get an ID in any (valid) circumstance?
I wouldn't be opposed to voters being given more info, but it doesn't remove my complaint that voter ID is a waste of time. But not all states use ERIC, and Republicans are the ones who seem to want to leave the program.
Presumably this was a study that looked at the effect directly after implementing such a law?
Yes, this was a government analysis done in 2014 covering the change in turnout in states before and after voter ID. It's mentioned right in that general section.
Did Democratic canvassers include information about IDs in their canvassing efforts?
From the page right after it, it was too soon to examine the effects. But I still object to putting everything on canvassers to fix the problem. Part of voter ID isn't just "whether voters need to provide some proof vs none at all." It's that Republicans change the laws to arbitrarily reject perfectly valid ways to identify people.
Tiber727
2mo ago
I don't think that's an issue related to quality of arguments so much as what happens in forums that are heavily slanted but don't actively ban heretics.
For instance, I came from /r/moderatepolitics . It has a similar nature to The Motte, but with a different moderation style. You can argue almost anything if you do it in a very specific way, but the mods are both hypersensitive to and arbitrarily define what is and isn't a personal attack. It leads to things like not being able to accuse someone of being disingenuous even when they do things like repeatedly attribute a belief to you that you've explained is wrong. Even though the sub was created for debate it still ends up with a consensus belief - IMO anti-Trump, somewhat left-leaning but right-leaning on guns and immigration.
That said, in my experience the people in the minority who stayed weren't necessarily better debaters, they were just people who were completely undeterred by downvotes and often just repeated the same argument and ignored reasons why their argument was bad.
Of course I'm sure The Motte would say that about the left-leaning people here. Like I remember in the not too-distant past where magicalkittycat was farming downvotes arguing something, and had to respond to an accusation of ignoring someone with "You know I get 20 responses to every comment right?"
As far as the heretic goes, the experience is "Why are you booing me? I'm right!" Your good arguments will just go ignored and be buried. The difference between a friendly forum and a hostile forum is you can say the same thing but in the latter it feels like you are talking to a wall.
The 'Watergate' conspirators had no trouble finding people who were willing to go much further than this.
Watergate involved about 15 people according to a quick wiki check?
At minimum you need one, depending on how close the election is, in a state.
Here are the narrowest statewide Presidential victories in the last ~approx 80 years. In the vast majority of them it was still tens of thousands of votes. The closest 2024 victory in a state that does not already require photo ID is either New Hampshire (which requires photo ID but student ID is allowed) by 22,965 or Nevada by 46,008 votes. Imagine how many people and hours it would take to fraudulently cast 46,000 votes in person.
And again, very importantly, the would-be fraudster(s) do not have precognition and does not know how many votes he needs to cast or where in our massive country he needs to cast them! Even professional pollsters are often wrong.
Let's imagine that it takes you 15 minutes to vote and drive to another polling station. In 12 hours you could cast 48 votes. Early voting varies wildly, but let's take a rough average of states and say you can vote in person 8 hours a day M-F 2 weeks early. That puts you at about 370 fraudulent votes, with a wildly optimistic 15 minutes per vote and taking 2 weeks off your job to run around casting fraudulent votes.
So to flip the 2024 popular vote in Nevada, the closest state that does not require voter ID, you'd need at least 125 people in your conspiracy. That's 125 people running around for 2 full weeks each pretending to be 370 different people.
Being (self-)selected for being a partisan in one direction, seems like it would make someone very unlikely to seek fame from the opposite political party.
We're talking about getting 125+ people into a conspiracy without one of them thinking cheating is morally wrong, or wanting to be famous for any reason. Or some third party seeing the 125 people talking and getting suspicious.
But if this is never seriously investigated, then we can only say that this is the minimum amount. Also, we could see a big upsurge in attempts.
30 states use ERIC which both helps identify eligible voters who have not registered and identify people who have moved or died. Though there are allegations this system has false positives.
They don't regularly check, but they sometimes do. Here's a check of 5 states where after investigating, there were no more than 200 suspected cases per state. Bush had the DOJ investigate, and they turned up with a handful of felons who claim they thought they could vote. Kris Kobach ran on alleging 100 known cases of fraud, and by the end of it scored 4 convictions of people voting in 2 districts.
This kind of stuff is also on par with people forgetting how to register for voting, not knowing how, etc; which is one of the reasons why canvassing happens anyway. So if Democrats are worried about black people being more disenfranchised, they have every opportunity to combat this by asking whether people have an ID during canvassing and helping them get one if they do not. If the Democrats are right about their allegations, then this would make a big difference, so they would do it. If they don't, this suggests rather strongly that their rhetoric is false and just intended as a marketing exercise.
It suggests nothing rather strongly, as "Why are you making me fill out this form? It's a waste of time!" is a perfectly coherent and rational response to someone trying to make you fill out an extra form that provides no useful purpose. The way I see it, removing the need extra pointless busywork is better than trying to find a way to get the pointless busywork done. At best you've explained that they could do something else, but no reason why they should feel they should do so when they feel their current method works just fine. The Democratic position is that not being able to vote because you forgot to register is bad, and that voting should be as easy as possible while still being secure (and that it is currently sufficiently secure). Your fix isn't a good fix, since people don't canvas everywhere, as you yourself acknowledge.
As far as my claim about closing DMVs was concerned, I admitted I hadn't looked into it enough and I wasn't claiming it as true. I was using it as an example of how one could do something that looks innocuous but intentionally create a catch-22.
I'm pretty sure that Republicans are much less prone to canvassing, and there are in fact quite a few poor white people living in Alabama, that presumably would also have a relatively large percentage of no-IDers and would live far from DMVs (especially since they tend to live rurally). But these people are consistently erased from the conversation. So on the one hand we have the speculative racism from one side, but we also have the definitive racism from the other side, which also taints all the evidence from that side, because they are not even looking at poor whites as a group, even though there are a lot of similarities with poor blacks. Hmmm.
What? That's a rather interesting attempt at a reverse UNO. First of all, according to a 2014 study voter ID reduced white turnout by 1.5% and blacks by 3.7% in some states (pages 52-54 of the report). Second of all, your argument makes no sense. Democrats are taking the side of the issue that benefits those 1.5% of whites in terms of easy voting. Democrats are neither preventing Republicans from canvassing nor are they trying to make canvassers solve the problem they created.
Tiber727
2mo ago
I guess it depends which action you're criticizing. I don't ask for anybody to be banned for instance. It's quite easy to simply not respond to the people I find odious.
But it is easy to notice that bad comments that agree with the Motte consensus end up fairly highly upvoted even as they get a modhat response, and if you go against said consensus you will often end up in the negative regardless of the evidence you bring. I would be pleasantly surprised if I changed even one person's mind, but usually you either get downvotes and no response or some response that boils down to belief that a nebulous outgroup is evil and acting out of malice. Not exactly intellectually stimulating debate.
To me, crime is to some degree a personality type. Your common thug is a guy who equates respect with fear, and he demands respect. Who thinks playing by the rules is a sucker's game. Who tends to not think ahead. Once you get higher up, crime is a business, just a horribly brutal business. Different environments tend to produce different personalities. Any traditional conservative will tell you a two parent home with loving but disciplined parents will usually produce healthy and productive kids.
Middle class kids generally do not become gangstas, because their parents drilled into them healthy visions of respect and success. The parents themselves share those values because those values enabled them to become middle class. You do the right thing, you get rewarded. You do the wrong thing, you get punished. A successful society does that, in part because it has the resources to reward people for doing good. A failed society is one where doing the bad thing gets rewarded instead, because bad people have power. In a successful society, even amoral people at least feign doing the right thing. Trump also loves respect and power, but even as someone who hates him, his vision of respect and power is very different than a cartel member. Even when committing crime, middle and upper class people usually commit white collar crime.
As far as the Mexican cartels are concerned, sure they can intimidate people into not opposing them. But I'm talking about recruitment. You can't intimidate someone into becoming a loyal thug. Would you join the cartel? No you wouldn't. Your moral compass and personality makes that life disgust you. A successful society isn't just one that has a lot of money; it's a high-trust place that produces fewer people in total that would have the personality that makes them want to go into that kind of life. And if fewer people want to go into that life, then by extension the cartel has less manpower, and less reach.
I'm not talking about 8 of 10 men who want to live middle class lives and whether they fear the other 2. I'm imagining 10 children, and how many of them would ever develop the personality the leads to them being willing to join the cartel, and how many of them could have parents actively involved in their lives, who can lead them to develop a personality that would be disgusted by the thought of ever joining the cartel.
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