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
3mo ago
My first thought is that there is absolute no tension or conflict between the Moms for Liberty position that parents should substantially control what schools teach and having leadership that is permissive with underage drinking and group sex. Contra the position that MfL is a group of lunatic right-wingers, I think they are actually sincere in their position that parents should be determining values rather than schools. Despite the snarky "family views indeed" from columnist Scott Maxwell, it is actually entirely possible to promote family values while having a personally kinky sex life or thinking it's fine for teens to play beer pong. If we weren't so deep into red-blue bullshit, pretty much everyone I know on the Blue Tribe side of things would think this is fine.
On your last point, I looked up the people involved, and... wow. Christian Ziegler is a rather dumpy fellow. Christian's wife, Bridget, is absolutely beautiful, particularly for a woman in her 40s. I don't know if this was supposed to be a hit piece, but the screencaps of her making faces at a board meeting sums it up. But now you tell me that not only does the portly fellow have a stunning wife, he was apparently regularly finding threesomes with her? I swear, if this whole thing was flipped around, the Blue Tribe would just be making fun of the Red Tribe for being jealous of Christian's life.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
Edge cases don't need to be the basis for how we construct our society.
They are, on the other hand, excellent tests for how we think about things.
What's the argument?
The most plainly I can state my position on the matter is that I don't think I should feel morally obligated (less still, be legally obligated) to respect people's stated identities. Instead, I think my obligation to respect someone's identity extends as far as that identity is reflected in the actual reality of the individual and what they seem to wish to gain from using that identity.
If you don't like trannies just say that.
I don't have a generalizable problem with trans-identified individuals. I know trans-identified individuals that are personally pleasant, have made an honest attempt to appear to be their chosen gender, and that require nothing onerous from anyone. As the saying goes, they just want to be left alone. I'm more than happy to provide them with the respect and decency that they want (and in my opinion) deserve.
My point is not that no one should have their stated identity respected, it's that there are examples of people who clearly have fake, illegitimate identification, and that this demonstrates that not all stated identities need to be respected by either individuals or the state. Where that line is will be a matter of legal wrangling and personal inclinations, but I reject the frame that allows a literal Nazi human-butcherer to convert to a Jewish woman when convenient.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I'm not clear what the problem is. Do you feel that it's just viscerally unfair that some people need to work and some people don't? That people who have wealth should have it confiscated until they're in a position of needing to work again? I promise, I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. Designing policies with the goal of enabling anyone willing to work to have a reasonably decent life seems like a good starting point to me, but that doesn't suggest that there wouldn't be or shouldn't be capital-holders that have arrived at a position where personal labor is no longer necessary for them to draw their living. If the problem is the unsustainability of the rate of return on capital, tweaking some of the more audacious tax policies seems like a plausible approach, but I would need to know what exactly we're trying to fix and what the goal is before really undertaking a discussion of where to go.
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
Direct discussion of drugging was missing from the first trial — which ended in a mistrial when a jury deadlocked on all three counts — with Mueller instead having to imply it through the testimony of the women, who said they were woozy, disoriented and at times unconscious on the nights they described the actor raping them.
Wow, there's no way that wooziness, disorientation, and passing out could be explained by mere alcohol, these women must have been drugged!
Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this other than simply replying, "uhhh, yeah, they might have been real drunk, we were indeed partying"? I keep looking at cases like this and trying to figure out how I could possibly exonerate myself if someone I hooked up with from a party 20 years ago claimed that I "drugged" her, and I've got absolutely nothing. In this case, one of them was evidently his girlfriend at the time; I really have no idea how I could defend myself if my wife decides a decade from now that having sex after we both got home bordering on a blackout drunk New Year's Eve was actually "rape".
Is there some steelman explanation I'm missing for how this could plausibly be a legitimate trial with legitimate evidence? It seems like it's literally some women that got drunk and had sex with Masterson that decided a decade later that they were actually drugged, without even the slightest bit of physical evidence for the claim. Never mind being sufficient for a reasonable doubt, I just flat out don't believe them at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
A US Airman lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy.In the video while he walked to the gate, he explained that he is protesting the actions of Israel. As he burned, he yelled, "Free Palestine". He is now dead. Two questions from me about the incident:
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Why would anyone expect these kinds of stunts work at all? I would expect that this only generates sympathy from people that are already on your side. For a neutral observer, I don't get how it generates sympathy. For a committed opponent, I don't understand being disappointed that your adversaries are literally killing themselves. Is the efficacy purely in generating pressure from international media that wanted to pick that side anyway?
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How the hell do we have soldiers that are suicidally committed to opposing American allies? Seems bad.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
When possible, wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants and skirts, which can provide protection from UV rays. If wearing this type of clothing isn’t practical, try to wear a T-shirt or a beach cover-up. Clothes made from tightly woven fabric offer the best protection. A wet T-shirt offers much less UV protection than a dry one, and darker colors may offer more protection than lighter colors. Some clothing is certified under international standards as offering UV protection.
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Should judges have any authority to impose gag orders?
I think not. If it's witness tampering, charge the appropriate crime. If it's obstruction of justice, charge appropriate crime. If it's interfering with government proceedings, charge the appropriate crime. If it's speech that nods in the direction of one of those but doesn't actually rise to the level of meriting a charge, tough shit, defendants do actually get to say mean things that aren't criminal.
I can recognize the difficult balancing act that some utterances would cause here, but ultimately just side with First Amendment rights dominating those considerations. Perhaps even more to the point, I don't trust judges to not thoroughly abuse their authority. To wit:
Practically speaking, it goes without saying that it's a terrible idea to talk shit about the court or prosecutor while your case(s) is pending.
Of course! I'm not dumb enough to do such a thing, but the idea that those that would affront a judge could be punished for offending rather than any actual criminal action is an affront to my sensibilities and leaves me disinclined to start granting additional judicial powers to remove constitutionally protected rights as they see fit. If we lived in a hypothetical world where Jack Smith was indeed engaging in a deranged witch-hunt and the judge was a biased, Trump-hating judge, it would be very bad to deny the defendant the ability to say so.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
Curiously, the two judges in the majority (Wynn and Thacker) are Obama appointees, whereas the one judge in dissent (Richardson) is a Trump appointee. As the preceding comment observes, the argumentation in the dissenting opinion is far better than that in the majority opinion.
I have to say, I do not find this curious. I have admitted previously to being legally unsophisticated and I remain so; in recent months, I've taken to reading more decisions than I had in the entirety of my life up to that point, and the experience has substantially shaped my view of left-leaning jurisprudence for the worse. There are, of course, decisions with sketchy logic running in either direction, but the number of times that I run into reasoning from left-leaning judges that aligns with that first comment you quote on the "bad man" theory of law is so, so much more frequent. Sotomayor and KBJ seem to have particular enthusiasm for explaining how a decision will have bad outcomes rather than focusing on whether it's, you know, legal and consistent with an ordinary reading of statute. For instances, [this Sotomayor dissent regarding Covid restrictions] or the recent KBJ perspectives on affirmative action. In contrast, Gorsuch seems the most likely of the justices to just read the text to mean what it literally means on ordinary reading.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people? While I admit to having limited first-hand experience, that limited experience is with people who made a sincere effort to transition across both cultural dimensions as well as physically. They don't go around shrieking at people, they actually don't seem to have interactions that involve anyone suggesting anything about their gender because they (mostly) look the part of their transition (notably, these are F->M, which does generally seem more physically convincing). When someone meets Mike, Mike doesn't have to insist up and down that they're totally a guy and explain their pronouns, because Mike has short hair, a beard, and tends towards flannel and ballcaps. Whatever the philosophical position might be on Mike's sex at birth, Mike really doesn't have to yell at people about the matter or make claims that seem completely misaligned with other people's observed reality.
Of course, I'm well aware of the public examples of histrionics, and the evident madness of quite a few non-passing trans people does complicate the conversation, but I think people like Mike are actually pretty analogous to stepmoms.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I stand by my previous sentiments:
One thing that really helps keep it this way is the illegibility of whether there's anything substantively relevant in the documents. My prior is that most classified documents are wildly overclassified and that nothing much would happen if they were handled carelessly and illegally. When I hear that Biden and Trump have handled them carelessly and illegally, my first instinct is to ask, "OK, but does anyone actually care and was there anything actually important there?". That the answer tends to be, "can't tell you, it's top secret" allows people to form more or less whatever ideas they'd like about how important the documents actually are.
...
Nonetheless, I still conclude that I would not like officious bureaucrats to have meaningful leverage over Presidents on the matter of classified documents (even if they tell me that they're actually DOCUMENTS rather than any mere documents). Additionally, I will see little or no legible difference between officious bureaucrats panicking and asserting such authority over Presidents and bad actors in the bureaucracy asserting such authority for the sole purpose of power.
Perhaps the claim that it's related to national defense will result in the prosecution attempting to actually establish that there was something there that anyone should actually care about, but I expect to be pretty disappointed.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
I unironically think land-owning was actually a pretty good Schelling Point, at least for state-level elections. The people who own land in a state have skin in the game and have demonstrated at least some level of competence and future orientation.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
The more I've learned about that era, the angrier I've become at the "Civil Rights" advocates and other leftists that implemented policies that destroyed American cities almost completely. This wasn't some force of nature, it was a set of deliberate choices by people that just hate bourgeois white culture and were happy to destroy it. There was always going to be some degree of shift and decline in Great Lakes cities that lost manufacturing, but the abject ruin that Detroit became wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Was Neely choked to death?
...
Penny choked Neely unconscious, and he then later died.
This seems a bit like saying that someone wasn't stabbed to death, just stabbed until they collapsed from blood loss, after which they later died. Yeah, if you choke someone unconscious and they proceed to never wake up, they were choked to death. I don't give a shit about Neely, I'm on the side that assumes Penny was a good Samaritan that had no intention of doing any harm beyond restraining the violent lunatic that was threatening people, but I also don't really see what I'm getting from the distinction above.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
This is probably because driving is treated as a "privilege" by the state.
Driving should be treated as a privilege. I'm more opposed to safetyism than the median person, but it still surprises me that we came up with a norm that operating one specific class of heavy machinery is basically a right that's hard to remove, even for individuals that are incompetent or repeatedly demonstrate that they will drive while inebriated. Tens of thousands of otherwise young, healthy people die in vehicular accidents annually and it remains an entirely niche issue to even think about traffic safety.
This doesn't get me to the point of favoring this particular sort of intrusion, but I generally think licensing is far too liberalized.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Maybe I'm not a 'substantial person' but 5k would be a pretty painful loss for me.
While I am not @FiveHourMarathon and he may feel differently, the part that makes someone utterly disreputable isn't that losing $5K gambling would be a disaster, it's that they would bet $5K that they can't afford to lose.
To be honest though, I generally don't have much respect for people beyond a certain age that would have trouble coming up with $5K. Yes, I know, people have various extenuating circumstances and even many of the people that don't have those circumstances are basically decent people even if they're kind of fuckups financially. I am disinclined to treat them as "substantial" if they're 40 and can't afford to buy a nice watch if they wanted to though. Being broke indicates either a lack of ability or interest in earning a decent wage or a severe inability to exercise financial discipline and planning. The latter is worse than the former; someone that makes $200K/year and lives paycheck to paycheck is much more disreputable in my eyes than a guy that just doesn't really have a marketable skill.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways
Not to be melodramatic, but I am once again reminded of Solzhenitsyn:
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis placements in our universe, and both· the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"
And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer sault from one state into another.
We have been happily borne-or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way-down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a'thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested!
And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?"
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"
When you're hauled in front of "Judge" Darkeh who articulates her spitting contempt for the American Constitution, the rational expectation would be that you're about to receive justice in a pretty similar fashion to what those victims of the Soviets received, but few of us ever learn that lesson, instead clinging to the hope that eventually there will be someone that sets things right.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out.
Not really, because we didn't actually get the generation being "radicalized by Trump being a bad president", we just got them radicalized by Trump being president, despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.
What I want doesn't really matter in any material sense, but I'm not going to base electoral politics on how whiny the loser will be about. I want Trump to win because I think he'll do some of the things I want a President to do and few of the things I don't want a President to do. My top priority by quite a bit is reducing the role of the federal administrative state in everyday life, which Trump's leanings and setup with groups like Project 2025 seem likely to do. His judicial appointments will also assist with deregulation and disempowering the discretion of petty bureaucrats. My other top priority is stanching the flow of immigrants, which Trump seems likely to do.
If you disagree with those positions, that's fine, but being willing to sign up for federal policies that you disagree with so that political obsessives whine less just seems kind of cowardly to me. You're getting crybullied!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
The whole thing just boils down to deontologists, consequentialists, and virtue ethicists failing to recognize that this is how other people think about morality, coupled with a layer of modern weirdness about just how destructive teenagers having sex is. The basic perspectives for those three branches are going to be:
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Deontology - Prostituting teenagers is awful, we have a duty to reject it and try to prevent it. The price doesn't matter, teenage prostitution is unacceptable.
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Consequentialist - Prostituting teenagers may harm them but receiving $10 million in the future helps someone a lot. This could be a significant improvement in total wellbeing and that's what to consider.
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Virtue ethicist - Do you really want to be the kind of guy that enables Jeffrey Epstein prostituting teenagers? The price doesn't matter, I'm not that guy.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
'Why is peepul thinking we wuz talkin' 'bout killin' peepul? Y they not get de IMPORTANT ENVIRONMENTAL CLIMATE CHANGE FIGHTIN' POINT?'
I thought this was going to be a post about the NYT fretting about "backlash" to the Kill the Boer song.
On topic, the climate radicalization I see forming is turning me into a "climate change denier". I am agnostic on the impact of human emissions on the climate and tend to assume that the basic described effect of CO2 upregulating temperature is probably right, but I am increasingly seeing framing of "climate catastrophe" and "existential threat", to which I think just outright saying that this isn't happening is probably closer to the truth than some middle-ground. In the same way that "Covid is just a cold bro" would get closer to my preferred policies than "Covid is a very serious emergency", I think "climate change is not a big deal and has always happened" will be closer to my preferred policies than "climate change is literally going to end humanity" and I probably have to pick a side.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
For me, he's a classic example of someone for whom it was a ridiculous, comical injustice and indictment of modern sensibilities that he wasn't executed within a few weeks of being captured. Despite my sympathies for his political points, the murder and maiming and completely innocent people should always be met with the swift application of the death penalty in the public square. That such a man died peacefully, as an octogenarian, but only after being caged for decades is a sick injustice that seems ironically fitting with his critique of hypersocialization.
It’s all dumb cases because every one falls apart upon close examination.
I want to focus on Wisconsin for a moment, because it's the state I'm most familiar with and I have never received a rebuttal from someone that disagrees with me about the quality of the election. This is a state with about 3 million votes, decided by about 20,000 votes, for reference. I think this report is a good summary of some of the known irregularities and mistakes.
This widespread adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes, not provided for under Wisconsin law, was correlated with an increase of about 20,000 votes for Joe Biden, while having no significant effect on the vote for Trump. WILL does not claim that the voters who used drop boxes were ineligible voters or should have had their votes rejected. But the ad hoc adoption of absentee ballot drop boxes without established rules, parameters, or security presents an election vulnerability and a challenge to state law.
More than 265,000 Wisconsin voters adopted the ‘indefinitely confined’ status, meaning they received an absentee ballot and were exempt from the statewide photo ID requirements. The number of indefinitely confined voters increased from 66,611 in 2016 to 265,979 in 2020. Given the substantial increase in the number of such voters, it is almost certain that many voters improperly claimed “indefinitely confined status".
Many of these votes were cast unlawfully. Additionally, clerks in Dane and Milwaukee counties used the presence of the pandemic to encourage voters to adopt an uncommon status called “indefinitely confined.” The Wisconsin Supreme Court unanimously rebuked the Dane County clerk for encouraging voters to adopt this status in March 2020. In November, it confirmed that a person who did not wish to leave home due to the pandemic was not “indefinitely confined.”
The votes cast by ‘indefinitely confined’ voters raise a number of red flags. While we cannot infer any malignant intent on the part of these voters, this means that many votes were cast without the requirement of photo identification. 54,259 ballots were cast by individuals who have never shown a voter ID in any election. 3,718 were cast from addresses that were on the 2019 Mover’s List. 7,747 failed their DMV check when they registered.[/quote] Another story I bumped into later was this one:
Wake is one of 95 people in Dane County who altogether cast more than 300 ballots in past elections despite being on the state’s list of people deemed incompetent to vote, according to a county clerk’s office review of more than 1,000 records from the state’s list. The state elections agency is reviewing all 22,733 entries to ensure the list is accurate, spokesperson Joel DeSpain said.[/quote]
“The system for identifying those voters and getting them out of the voter rolls is not working,” said Dane County Clerk Scott McDonell, whose office conducted the review of that county’s ineligible voter list at Wisconsin Watch’s request. McDonell said he has informed local election clerks of any discrepancies.
Presumably the first 1,000 were selected basically at random and showed a 9.5% voting rate among people that had been deemed mentally incompetent and weren't allowed to vote. If that rate held, that would be over 2,000 votes from ineligible, mentally incompetent voters, just in Dane County. I don't know if other counties are suffering from similar errors; if they aren't, that would suggest something about the direction of bias, if they are, that would tell us something about the total number of illegally cast votes.
In any case, I don't think it's plausible to arrive at illegal ballot counts that are lower than these. Throw in various other irregularities, such as reported behaviors at nursing homes where standard election policies weren't followed due to Covid, illegal ballot-curing procedures by clerks filling in witness information, and other shenanigans, and we're going to keep going up. I would personally feel comfortable saying that hundreds of thousands of votes were plainly illegal, as these people were obviously not actually indefinitely confined, but I understand someone objecting and saying that's a weird one-shot deal that won't happen again. That over 50,000 of those ballots were cast by people who have never shown an ID in an election makes that my absolute lower-bound for illegal votes though, which would put us around ~2%.
I haven't thoroughly explored other states, but I would be surprised to find that they actually did a lot better in 2020. In some of them, it wouldn't make a material difference for national elections, but I would expect that to only result in even sloppier procedures because there isn't going to be anyone taking all that close of a look at whether California's vote count is garbage when they eventually get around to delivering sometime in December.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
Raising an army is clearly and uncontrovertibly protected. The Amendment says it right there in the text! I'm genuinely baffled by the idea that there are honest people that can read as straightforward of a sentence as "A well-regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed" and come away believing that this doesn't protect ownership of light infantry weapons for the purpose of fielding a fighting force.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
And even if being fat were a moral failing, we shouldn't hate people over it, and even if we hated them, we shouldn't treat them poorly.
As discussed in the previous thread, I agree that having hate for fat people is a bad thing. I also think it's pretty uncommon and hardly the point. When people talk about "fat hatred", what they're typically talking about is things like people being pissed off that they have to sit next to someone on a plane that's spilling into their seat. The claim that we "should treat them poorly" is also doing too much work - what exactly is meant here? Sure, don't just randomly be a jerk to a fat person for no particular reason, all good and agreed. Are people obligated to feign attraction to them? Aside from just literally not being rude to people for no evident reason, I'm unclear what the expected standard of treatment is that people feel isn't typically met.
Why is it hard to believe that pro-lifers really, honestly think that abortion is murder? If they believe that it really is murder, the level of restraint they've shown in sticking to lawfare and eventually succeeding in some limited fashion is a pretty remarkable story. I disagree with their starting point, but that's hardly the point when it comes to their actions.
I still have no idea how anyone can honestly believe that the Supreme Court has any meaningful role to play in this at all. I suppose penumbral emanations are powerful things, but it seems pretty obvious to me that there simply no Constitution-based policy to be had.
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