Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13hr ago
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there's food that you can eat without cooking it. I mean, they -- and they could could get a handout from the -- from a -- from an individual that, you know, people can beg for money. I mean, there are -- there are ways that this works out in practice.
To me, this gives away the whole game. Bums aren't sleeping outside because it is literally impossible that they could find a place to shelter, they're sleeping outside because they've failed to do so. If the hypothetical options one could avail themselves of to avoid starting a fire to cook suffice to eliminate a claim that it's cruel and unusual to prevent people from starting fires, the same must apply to sleeping. Someone having failed to talk others into cooking for them or paying for them sleep at a hotel shouldn't result in them being granted some putative "right" to sleep where they like.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A number of us, I think, are having difficulty with the distinction between status and conduct. You'll acknowledge, won't you, that in those terms, there's a difference between being addicted to drugs and being homeless? In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter.
On the flip side, despite everyone trying to be careful with language, it's pretty obvious that what the town is concerned with isn't "homelessness", it's bums. Someone that is homeless may sleep in their car, they may sleep on a friend's couch, they may stay in a shelter for a couple nights. If you're sleeping in the park, you're not just "homeless", you're a bum, and that is very much a real status that's going to be difficult to change for quite a few people. In the same fashion that many addicts cannot simply elect to stop doing drugs, many bums cannot simply elect to start doing the things necessary to maintain shelter.
Personally, I'm with you that the whole question of status is pretty ridiculous here. Kudos to you for making it all the way through the oral arguments, I simply couldn't bring myself to do it after they started doing laps around whether a stargazer that fell asleep was also criminal. Everyone in the conversation knows the conversation isn't about stargazers and isn't about falling asleep in public, it's about bums and all the trouble that comes with letting bums camp in your park.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
17hr ago
I have to confess that I simply do not care about the day-to-day litigation of whether such-and-such attack or finding constitutes a "war crime" or not. The present conflict is the direct result of choices made by Gazans. The conflict can be brought to a close with the snap of the fingers of Gazan leadership, they're simply unwilling to accept the terms of surrender. Arguing about whether a given incident is an example of Israelis behaving badly seems about on par with someone in 1944 arguing that the American response to Pearl Harbor has been wildly disproportionate, and they've sank way more warships than Japan ever sank of the Americans, and it would be terrible to hurt any innocent Japanese civilians. Anyone arguing this would rightly be seen as an anti-American agitator. By all means, sort out whatever you can when it comes to conduct of your soldiers after the war, but I just do not care about the claims of the side that picked a fight that they can't win, particularly when that side's chief tactic is trying to get civilians killed to create international pressure. I am completely fine with Israel inflicting misery until their enemy surrenders.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
Where some folks on the right said the census bureau was cheating as they redefined poverty to include food and housing aid, to make it seem like we've made progress eliminating poverty when really all we've done is increase government handouts?
Supplemental poverty is the alternative measure that includes transfers.
Conservatives and progressives both seem to vassilate on what exactly they mean by poverty when it's convenient to do so. Conservatives claim that transfers don't work because they haven't pulled everyone up to a middle-class earned income, but they also note that America's "poor" are housed, clothed, fed, and have entertainment budgets. Progressives claim that transfer programs work and we can tell because supplemental poverty figures tell us we've pulled people up, but then insist that tens of millions are "food insecure". To the extent that the concern is actual material impoverishment, welfare spending works and we do a lot of it.
I do try to be consistent - I occasionally get annoyed by the size of these programs, but the reality is that spending $183 billion per year for the hungry instead of for space has resulted in Americans having entirely too much to eat rather than any issues of "food insecurity".
Do you think that the anger at elites is unfounded (given nobody falls below your definition of poverty anymore), more related to status than income (although definitionally 49% of people will also be sub-median statuswise...) or are you more sympathetic to discourse around income inequality than poverty?
I am completely unsympathetic to inequality discourse. Part of the reason is that it's often couched in the language of poverty, insinuating that the relatively deprived are absolutely deprived. Really though, I just generally don't buy that inequality is a real problem. I'm fine with anger at specific elites for specific reasons, but some fuzzy claim that Jeff Bezos just has too much money because Amazon is wildly successful is just annoying to me.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
Probably a similar amount to what we'd expect if American glazers were responsible for replacing all of the windows broken in Israel. But yes, I grant that these are largely wealth transfers within the United States as much as they are funding for Israel.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
I won't pretend to know the solution to poverty...
My proposed solution is to pick an absolute standard of what "poverty" is and try to solve that. When poverty is defined as a percentage of median household income and explicitly excludes food and housing aid, the problem simply cannot be solved. I believe this is intentional, but it doesn't really matter to the point whether this is just a mistake or not. If we can define "poverty" by absolute standards of access to the basic necessities of life, I think we will find that the United States has already solved poverty or needs to do very little to fill in the last couple gaps.
If, instead, "poverty" just refers to having less than the median, well, the poor we'll always have with us, I suppose.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
It’s a will question, like a hoarder who lives in filth because they just can’t throw anything away for psychological reasons even though there’s a dumpster right outside.
Your core point is correct, but it's worth noting that there are principle-agent problems within this. Plenty of people do have the will to simply remove vagrants, but the United States is home to people that will take it all the way to the Supreme Court insisting that bums have a right to camp in your parks if you don't just give them housing. The threat of litigation and the fact that there are lunatic judges that will rule in favor of the bums means that it takes a lot of will to proceed with something as simple as telling bums not to camp in your park. Some of the hoarders don't want to live in filth, but there is a powerful federal government forcing them to at gunpoint.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
While it doesn't cash out to legible living standards outcomes, the waste and fraud in government spending is meaningful. The illegal alien might not be who receives that $350 per day, but someone is getting $350 per day and they like it that way. This should cause some hesitance in proposing government spending as solutions to problems more broadly.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
Relatedly, eliminating corporal punishment in favor of just modulating the length of prison sentences is one of those things that strikes me as a solution someone could only like if they're basing their policies on squeamishness rather than genuine care. There is simply no way that most people would prefer years of incarceration to caning or similar physical punishments.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
On the other hand, if your skill points are in wrangling nature, as is probably the case for most people here, the dangers and missing utils of nature are another engineering challenge to overcome with Yankee ingenuity, Bayes and game theory, while the schemers world is like that time in high school you tried to join the cool kids table with Bayes and game theory and got shoved in a locker, except now your life is on the line.
I remain unconvinced that there's much overlap between smart, competent people and the social outcasts that got shoved in lockers. I think the outcasts cling to this narrative as a coping mechanism rather than genuinely being all that competent. In my experience, the smart kids also tended towards being popular and good at sports. If your proverbial skill points were more intellect than charisma, you might get shit from your buddies about it, but I really doubt the framing of the highly competent being routinely bullied.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
...the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders.
While I don't expect a total fix anytime soon, this is why I'm hoping for rollback on Chevron deference and related doctrines. To oversimplify, I want to shift from a position of tie goes to the government to tie goes to the private party. If a court can't figure out whether the regulatory body is correct and the regulatory body can't providing compelling factual evidence for their assertion of power, they should just lose, not get to claim that they have special expertise that's just too special for a non-expert to understand.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
I think you're overfitting different phenomena into a limited number of buckets. All of the following are true (IMO, of course):
- The self-immolator is probably schizotypal and connected a lot of dots that aren't connected.
- There are many schizotypal conspiracy theorists that believe very weird things about the world as a result of their lack of reasoning ability and overly aggressive pattern matching.
- Some people lean towards conspiracies because randomness bothers them.
- Some people lean towards conspiracies because humans have a tendency to pattern-match and attribute causality. They're not bothered by randomness, they're just not very good at understanding it, so they see intentionality everywhere.
- There are substantial conspiracies that actually exist, including those by intelligence agencies, big corporations, non-governmental organizations, and more.
- Some of these conspiracies will include trying to discredit people that notice what's going on.
- There probably isn't a shady cabal that secretly controls everything - the most powerful people are probably the people that appear to be the most powerful people.
This set of positions allows plenty of space for some pretty wild conspiracy theories to be true without needing to add unnecessary moving parts to my understanding of the world. The CIA really does organize coups, but the guy that lit himself on fire is a garden-variety nutter.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.
This is one of those things that actually playing any sport at all really shifts your perspective on. Guys that are D1 scrubs are still really, really good at their sport. Guys that are capable of having one shining moment on the biggest stage of their sport in college are a whole other level.
As it fits with the Supreme Court, I've had this argument with a few conservative friends that think KBJ is "stupid" because she's an affirmative action appointment and couldn't answer the "what is a woman?" question cogently. They're wrong, just plain wrong. I could give a lengthy rant on how much I dislike her, how utterly dishonest I think her jurisprudence is, and what a mistake I think it is to explicitly promise a SCOTUS seat to a demographic group, but it remains true that if you listen to an oral argument that she's participating in, she's obviously a smart person. Listening to the recent Missouri v Murthy case made me genuinely angry, but it wasn't like Jackson was struggling to keep up with the conversation or doesn't understand the relevant law - she's just wrong. As off-brand as it is for me, I am inclined to think that insistence that she's actually stupid has quite a bit of racism built into.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Scalia's death seemed out of left field
He was a 79-year-old portly guy - actuarial tables are what they are and you're basically rolling a d20 to save against death every year at that point, even if there's nothing in particular wrong with you.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
But unless they're exceptionally rude, most girls won't say to your face that your height isn't good enough, so you might well be missing out on those, especially since you say you've only dated the ones shorter or just very slightly taller.
Oh, sure, I accept pretty much without question that genuinely tall girls are right out. They don't want me and I don't want them. Nothing personal. That just doesn't eliminate enough of the pool to really be much of a problem.
To be clear, I'm not claiming that height isn't a distinct life advantage, just that it's a sliding scale rather than categorical. Being doomed to date women that are mostly median height and below isn't really much of a problem. Like a number of other things in life, the good news is that if you get it right even once, you're all set anyway.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
Manchin has said that he won't vote to confirm anyone that doesn't get at least one Republican.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
I know being tall has been incredible for me, I have my charms regardless, but even average men are often hard countered by women setting 6' in their bio, or even implicitly in person or social settings (though women are certainly not the best at gauging it, hence so many guys who are 5'10" getting away with, they just recognize "tall").
Anecdotes being anecdotes and all, but I my personal experience makes me believe this whole thing is just wildly overrated. I'm just a bit over 5'8" and this has literally never been a problem with women. I have never met a woman I was romantically interested in that seemed even remotely put off by my relative shortness, including a couple hookups that were a shade taller me than me. Height is certainly an advantage, but it seems more like an advantage in the same way that social status, income, good looks, and physicality are rather than just a categorical one. I'm sure my predilection for dating petite women has helped on this one, but I really do think that treating height as an insurmountable obstacle has more to do with coping and excusing other personal failings than anything else.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
I agree with so much of this, but want to offer one piece of gentle pushback - there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis. I'm someone that absolutely despises Sotomayor and the view that the Constitution should be highly malleable to current-year preferences, and what I want is absolutely for her to keep her seat for the moment. This is my preference for purely strategic reasons - if she stays, she may well die and be replaced by someone that views the law much more like I do. If she retires now, it'll be an incredibly stupid spectacle with people insisting that we need another Wise Latinatm and it'll probably be some crank for the Ninth Circuit or something. Regardless of whether you take a Moneyball approach or a trad gut-feel approach, you should generally not give your opponents what they want.
For me, the best argument for her not retiring cynically would be that the goal should not be to game the institutions and that you should stand on the business of insisting that this type of institutionalism should be taken seriously. The problem there is that the left already views the right as having defected from that equilibrium by refusing to confirm Garland and then replacing Ginsberg almost immediately on death.
Your argument for the growth and influence of justices over time makes sense, but the problem really does come down to the object-level justice in question - it doesn't seem like anyone, left or right, sincerely believes that Sotomayor is an intellectual giant that's going to change hearts and minds. I'm sure there's a spin on this from her fans, that it's just that her detractors are a bunch of stupid racists, but it doesn't seem like there's any real disagreement that she's never going to be treated like an important intellectual figure in shaping future courts. This argument would work much better for Kagan, who generally is treated as a serious and influential colleague with incisive perspective by both friends and foes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
Oh, sure, I completely understand why it's an excellent move for Estonia to join NATO. If I were running Estonia, that would have been my absolute top security priority, a dream almost too good to be true. Even in the event that NATO didn't have the resolve to actually provide for my full defense, the strategic ambiguity could easily be enough to make Russia look for an easier target. The situation that NATO finds itself in now is that it must fulfill that commitment or it loses strategic credibility.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
Of course, this brings us full circle to whether it was a good idea to add a country like Estonia to NATO when they offer almost nothing in return. The reason to add Estonia isn't to improve the alliance, it's to put a thumb in Russia's eye and attempt to create a definitive anti-Russian border rather than keeping the buffer-state model in place. Is that a good idea? I don't know, that's above my pay grade, but it's definitely a stupid idea if you're not actually willing to bleed for Estonians. Any time you lack the resolve to keep a commitment, you should not make that commitment.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
I'm in the middle - I think megacities (e.g. New York, Tokyo, even Chicago) are terrible places to live, but nice places to visit. Likewise, I enjoy visiting isolated, rural areas, but have zero desire to actually live in one. The sweet spot is a decent-sized city that has all of the amenities that I want, but also has plenty of space for parks, not too much traffic, and that is easy to get outside of either by car or bike ride. In Australia, I'd be thinking of a place like Cairns.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
For me, this highlights what a terrible idea it was to accept Muslim immigrants to Western nations in large numbers. Resolving the irreconcilable differences between Muslims and Christians is much, much harder than agreeing that they're actually quite different and would be happier living separately. I don't care if Muslims want to pray five times a day and refuse to eat pork, more power to them, but I want English kids to just be able to eat normal English meals without someone from an alien culture taking offense. If you want to move to England, learn to be English rather than demanding accomodations.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
Quick story of long-distance relationship success - I started dating my wife about three months before she was scheduled to move to another city. Within a month of us getting together, I had her just move in with me since she was at my apartment nearly every day anyway and could save on a couple month's rent by leaving early. She moved, then we flew back and forth for two years before I finally got a job in her new city. We still live in the new city a decade later and have happily ever after.
I'm going to be corny and say that while your math might be wrong on the specifics of the 22, if you're actually infatuated with her, it's entirely possible that you'll never meet another one like her, or that it'll take years to do so. Unless you have a history of demonstrating unusually poor judgment in relationships, I say fuck it, do everything you can to be with her. I did and it made my life immeasurably better.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
"False imprisonment by rioters" has been a talking point on the right for years now, but it took urban liberal Jewish/* lawyers to deploy it in practice?
These sorts of actions only happen in left-wing places, so it pretty much requires urban, liberal lawyers to deploy it. The "protesters" wouldn't really get anything out of blocking a road in rural Kentucky and the extent to which it would go poorly for them would be fairly immediate, hence no red-tribe prosecutors needing to deal with them.
Potter Stewart, writing the controlling opinion in Robinson v California. I find it amusing that @netstack linked it to approve of the argument - when I read that portion of the case earlier, I couldn't believe the levels of idiocy or dishonesty that Stewart was engaging in by analogizing a common cold to "catching" narcotic addiction.
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