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
11mo ago
The statute allows simply mailing ballots. There is no problem here that needs solving.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
-The cop advances, ordering her to drop the pot.
Seems like an odd choice if your interlocutor has a weapon with a maximum effective range of approximately six feet while you have a firearm.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
Justice Jackson has already shown herself to be an unsophisticated jurist who simply votes for whatever seems Wokest, and Harris would appoint more of the same.
I don't think this is true. The only time I genuinely couldn't comprehend where she was trying to go in terms of jurisprudence was her questioning in Murthy v Missouri. Aside from that case, she seems fine to me in oral arguments and writes opinions that I just disagree with. She's not stupid or unsophisticated, she's just wrong. Do you have an example of what you're referring to?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
I'm personally willing to bite the bullet and say that I think foreign nationals should generally avoid making themselves part of American politics.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
In fact, it's not even being "banned" at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I noticed this yesterday as well. My wife was working from home, so we grabbed lunch together, and I just could not shut the fuck up about the Kremlinology of what exactly Nancy meant by the "easy way or the hard way" and the third shooter in Butler, and all sorts of other esoteric bullshit. All of this is interesting, but at some point, I need to just drop it and talk about what toy we're going to get the dog instead. My wife's patience for my babbling is near infinite, but I must be testing it at this point.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Do you consider the presence of a Melissa McCarthy lookalike in Trump's personal detail to be evidence? I can't imagine an institution with healthy masculinity allowing this slob to occupy any highly visible position.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
Not at all. I view Russia as an adversary, although more of an annoying one than a serious threat at this point. In stark contrast, I view Europe as a loveable older brother that's a bit of a fuckup and needs to straighten themselves out. Many of my criticisms of European pathologies also apply to the United States though, so it's a bit like my loveable older brother that's kind of a drunk and doesn't really want to hear about it from me because I've been known to knock back a few myself. The only thing I genuinely dislike about Europeans is the tendency to smugly believe that there is some sort of superiority to the United States when I find such a claim absolutely laughable. Now we're at the point where my loveable, drunk, fuckup older brother still thinks of himself as better than me because acknowledging that he's broke and about to go bankrupt is just too hard to accept.
Huge caveat - I don't actually like to think of "Europe" as a single entity all that much because my experience with different places is very different. The Dutch aren't actually fuckups, for example. Also, to be clear, I really do mean that I find these places and peoples loveable.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
I guess, to be fair, he really is a Texas man rather than someone from Saudi Arabia with thin ties to Texas. Details are still emerging, but this is an African-American born in Beaumont that served in the US military and was later converted to Islamist ideology. He is probably also a literal crazy guy. I'm as quick to blame Islam as just about anyone and I'll certainly do so again here, but it isn't misleading to refer to him as a Texas man as long as you also include the ISIS information alongside it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Would you feel particularly encouraged to engage in a discussion with an opening post like this? What if it were upvoted at +40 and bathed in supportive responses?
Yeah, I'd be fine with it. I have, in fact, argued in venues where I'm on the opposite side of the prevailing mood. I wouldn't say I feel welcomed, but my conviction on the matter is quite strong and I think my positions win on the merits. To wit:
I think I could take a shot, just for the impression: "The way I see it, the pro-death-penalty crowd has more in common with the common murderer than their supposedly 'pro-crime' opposition. They both agree that some of their problems are best solved by killing, and only disagree about the right targets. What they have is essentially a coalition of the bloodthirsty (as seen by the correlation between the pro-war, the pro-death-penalty, and the pro-gun-rights who get giddy fantasizing about shooting a black kid running away with their TV) and the victims and their relatives. I have nothing but contempt for the former, who cynically seduced the latter at their morally weakest."
I have no problem biting the bullet on that and saying that I agree that some problems are best solved by killing and we only disagree about the right targets. From there, I'm comfortable proceeding with the reasons that I think it is qualitatively different to execute men that have been tried by a jury of their peers and convicted of murdering a half dozen children than to fantasize about vigilante justice. I expect that some people will disagree. I even expect that some would do so passionately! This does not much dissuade me. I think that my actual arguments and the specifics of the individuals involved serve to clarify that claims of bloodthirstiness are just not correct.
What principle is fairly argued in a hostile frame like this? This is as much of a concession of space for disagreement as it would be if someone posting an anti-gun-rights diatribe, based on several instances of contemptible people being sold guns after some pro-gun decision (and perhaps some people disliked by the pro-gun group still not being sold one, too), invited people to argue for the wisdom and civic-mindedness of selling a gun to the most repulsive instance of a gun owner.
I'll again bite the bullet and say that I think this is a fine argument tactic. If someone doesn't want to defend legal firearms ownership for convicted child rapists, then we're getting somewhere! They're agreeing that there are constraints to their position, that it's not categorical. Likewise, if someone that is generally against the death penalty agrees with me that maybe it's bad to offer categorical commutations for the worst people you've ever heard of, well, we're getting somewhere! Alternatively, they can bite the bullet and say that their only real problem with Biden's decision is that he didn't extend the same mercy to the remaining three, we are at least clarifying where we all stand. I am not actually willing to extend a friendly welcome to that position, but it exists and people can argue for it if they wish.
To return to your original objection:
I don't understand the point of this post, apart from venting about your outgroup.
The point is that the United States President just did something that I consider morally abhorrent as a discretionary executive action. This raises the salience of the issue and highlights special cases of it. Regardless of where someone settles on death penalty policy questions, this action should absolutely merit discussion. If you think I'm the wrong person to bring it up because I'm going to say that I'm pissed off and the people doing this are evil, I just disagree.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
There is a relevant in that first sentence. Let's try it out with different subjects and objects to see if we would call that a ban:
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The law signed in April mandates a ban on liquor sales at Total Wine if bottles are not labeled.
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The law signed in April mandates a ban on Toyota produced in Japanese-owned factories rather than American-owned factories.
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The law signed in April mandates a ban on cheeses if the milk is not sourced from FDA-inspected farms.
I would not describe these as "bans". They impose requirements (divestment from ownership by an adversarial government in this case). Perhaps they're bad regulations, but they aren't bans on the products in question. That ByteDance is apparently going to elect to sunset the application rather than take the money and run is strongly suggestive of the real value being non-monetary advantages to the Chinese government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I think this one was always going to stick because Trump doesn't like booze. Annoying, but here we are.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
I'm friends with many people that I disagree with, including on this topic. I wrote that I'm not willing to extend a friendly welcome to the position, and I stick by that. As covered, I don't think it's a simple difference, but one of the worst, most immoral positions that is within the realm of normal beliefs in the United States. I'm fine with being friendly with people that hold very bad positions, but I am not inclined to dress up my opinion of the position in niceties. My reaction to is comparable to my reaction to someone saying that minor-attracted people should be allowed to satisfy their urges or that it's actually fine to rob someone if they have more money than you. I'm capable of having the discussion, but my reaction is that these positions really are just evil and need to be defeated.
Continuing my theme of thinking American election processes remain sketchy, the House just passed the SAVE act, ostensibly to prevent non-citizen voting. We all know how the battlelines are going to be drawn on that with the usual wailing and gnashing of teeth about how all of the totally legitimate citizens wouldn't actually be able to show that they're citizens and would be unfairly disenfranchised, and honestly, I suppose that's right to some extent. What's way more annoying is the drumbeat of people that say this is already illegal and doesn't happen. In a piqued fit of curiosity, I thought I'd take a look at what exactly California's process is for making sure only citizens are able to vote. Here's their registration application. It includes something a bit odd, checkboxes to simply indicate that you don't have a driver's license or social security number.
Well, if you check those boxes, there isn't really going to be sufficient unique identifiers to be crosschecked with a database to verify citizenship. Surely that disclaimer means you'd need to bring proof when you vote though, right? Well, here's what they say you need:
However, if you are voting for the first time after registering to vote by mail and did not provide your driver license number, California identification number or the last four digits of your social security number on your registration form, you may be asked to show a form of identification when you go to the polls. In this case, be sure to bring identification with you to your polling place or include a copy of it with your vote-by-mail ballot. A copy of a recent utility bill, the sample ballot booklet you received from your county elections office or another document sent to you by a government agency are examples of acceptable forms of identification [emphasis mine]. Other acceptable forms of identification include your passport, driver license, official state identification card, or student identification card showing your name and photograph.
Really? You can register with nothing that would identify you as a citizen, then show up to vote and identify yourself with the mailer you got when you signed up to vote. I have no idea how this process would stop a non-citizen from voting even in theory. Am I missing something? This seems like you can just straightforwardly vote in California as a non-citizen and the only thing that would stop you is a fit of conscience about checking the box that says you're a citizen. Are other states doing better at actually verifying the citizenship of voters? I would guess that some are and some aren't, but the claim that verifying citizenship would prevent quite a few people from voting kind of suggests that there isn't currently much of a process to do so.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I find that I agree with you across the board, but one footnote on my annoyance with the current state of affairs:
I argue we can reasonably say you're being extremely negligent (and therefore at least partially responsible) if you didn't provide people with adequate warnings, safety equipment, and AT LEAST a guardrail around the edge to keep people from sliding in.
I feel like these online services already do this. They advertise, but they close with a line about gambling addiction. Everyone is simultaneously bombarded with advertisements for gambling and admonishments about how you need to be really careful. To me, this feels like the worst of both worlds, where we legalized something that's apparently quite destructive for quite a few people, but with the caveat that everyone has to be antagonized about how dangerous it is. I bet $2 on Josh Allen to score a rushing touchdown because I think it's fun. Leave me alone. Stop telling me over and over and over that I'd better watch out about how addictive it is. Either let people ruin their lives or don't, but don't do this stupid in between thing where we all acknowledge that it's ruining lives and therefore everyone needs to hear about that.
Overall, I guess I just increasingly believe that the typical person should pretty much not be extended credit on much of anything. They just don't seem to be able to conceptualize how credit lines work, what interest is, and so on.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
To illustrate my point, there was a Chinese national in Michigan that voted because LOL apparently? And when he went out of his way to report that he shouldn't have been allowed to vote... well he's in trouble but the vote is still going to count.
My whacko conspiracy theory is that he did it to sow chaos. It's obviously very easy for non-citizens in Michigan to vote. So easy, in fact, that the only way they'd ever get caught is if they turn themselves in. This is pretty obvious, but people insist it isn't so. Some Chinese guy saying, "yeah, I voted, can I get my vote back?" exacerbates the obviousness.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
I'm aware. I'm not being cynical or manipulative when I say that this is a very bad thing and is exactly why secret ballots are an important piece of social technology. Mail-in ballots enable coercion, manipulation, theft, and vote-buying. That this claim is controversial when it's mechanically obvious is a product of partisan propaganda.
This is a drum I've been banging for a while, but what struck me here was Marcotte walking right up the edge of it, even using the words "secret ballot", but not even mentioning the solution.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
Effective Altruist Amos Wollen published a defense of PEPFAR on the 29th, which doesn't steelman the programs' current critics, but does address the current politics of the programs.
Man, that's pretty charitable to just say it "doesn't steelman". To wit:
In response to a tweet by right-wing PEPFAR advocate Richard Hanania, many of his followers expressed their grievance at the country with the largest share of the world’s GDP shelling out a small sliver in foreign aid to do something unambiguously good:
As for whether the US has reason to set aside a skimpy sliver of its budget for a programme that has saved easily more than 20x the lives that the Iraq War stole, the most important justification for PEPFAR funding is that saving that many lives is straightforwardly morally good, and failing to engage in a baseline, easily-affordable level of Christian charity when that many lives are at stake is Satanic.
OK, well, I'm not Christian, so that line of defense isn't really going to work for me. More importantly though, this doesn't actually meet the argument head on, it just insists that you have to agree that it's morally good because it's such an eensy-weensy-teeny-tiny expense that does so much good. Without arguing about just how eensy-weensy the program is or how much good it does, this prompts a couple immediate thoughts:
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If it's so tiny, why is it critical for American taxpayers to cover it? Things that are so tiny and so good should be pretty easy to convince people to participate in voluntarily rather than via confiscation.
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In the event that there's really a coordination problem, that it can't be done via charity for some unclear reason, why isn't it an internationally shared expense? It's super-duper tiny, barely costs anything at all, and does so much good, so it should pretty easy to get the UN to fund this instead of it just being a responsibility for the United States.
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This argument is fully general for anything that you just think is good in the federal budget. It precludes ever cutting anything if its advocates say that it's really important and doesn't cost that much anyway. If it's true that nothing that supporters think is good and costs less than eleventy bajillion dollars can ever be cut, fine, I'm probably just going to oppose more or less all new programs since they can apparently never be ended or shifted to the private sector.
At the end of the day, my real question is why the hell HIV spreads so well in Africa. I've read the explanations and they just don't really make much sense to me. In the United States, Europe, and Asia, HIV just spreads really poorly among heterosexual populations that don't use intravenous drugs.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
If the intent was to ban TikTok, they would have just banned TikTok. The intent was to stop having one of the most used social media applications in the United States owned by the chief adversary of the American government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:
a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition
This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.
To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.
violence
The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
What's maximally red-coded? Probably Jack Daniels?
I feel like an upscale liquor shelf kind of supersedes the tribes. I would be equally unsurprised to see BTAC bottles at a car dealer's home in the suburbs as an academic's bungalow in the city.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I consider this pretty strong evidence that the sloppiness of just spamming mail-in ballots to just about everyone successfully increased turnout in 2020. Whether you consider that rigging, illegal, totally fair, a desirable state of affairs that should be permanently implemented... whatever, it just seems like that's actually the explanation. If that's not it, we need to explain the big fluctuations in the Trump vote as well.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I have a deep loathing for the Indian ethos of bending the truth or just straight out lying about things.
The power of just nodding in agreement, affirming that you understand, and then refusing to actually do it wins again and again.
I still don't understand how "a Montana voter living in the UK" isn't a scandalous notion in the first place. Why do UK residents need to vote in Montana? You don't live there! It's not your place of residence! I can see exceptions for American military and other foreign service roles, but if you're just an American that voluntarily elected to live in London, I find it baffling that anyone thinks you should be voting for the mayor of Missoula.
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