Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
No bio...
User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.
And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.
I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “fuck you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.
As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.
There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
When I read this, I think to myself, "yeah, this is why I hate Marxists". Openly admitting that it doesn't even matter who is right, they'll just always side with whoever they think is weaker is a recipe for the dissolution of civilization.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I’ve previously written about how much I dislike student loan forgiveness policies and framing college education as a public good. Now that the Biden administration is attempting to implement the policy, the discourse has shifted away from whether it’s a good idea to whether it’s a legally valid policy, with two challenges currently going to the Supreme Court. For a defense of the policy that extends all the way to declaring that the challenges are completely illegitimate, we can look to a Voxsplainer from Ian Millheiser:
The legal issues are straightforward: A federal law known as the Heroes Act explicitly authorizes the program that Biden announced in the summer of 2022, as the Covid-19 pandemic persisted. Under that program, most borrowers who earned less than $125,000 a year during the pandemic will receive $10,000 in student loan forgiveness. Borrowers who received Pell Grants, a program that serves low-income students, may have up to $20,000 in debt forgiven.
And yet, while this program is clearly authorized by a federal law permitting the secretary of education to “waive or modify” many student loan obligations “as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency,” it is unlikely to survive contact with a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees.>
I suggest a full readthrough, but that does get to the heart of the matter. The full text of the Heros Act is here and is about as clear as Milheiser suggest above. After some initial throatclearing, the act says:
SEC. 2. WAIVER AUTHORITY FOR RESPONSE TO MILITARY CONTINGENCIES AND NATIONAL EMERGENCIES. (a) WAIVERS AND MODIFICATIONS.— (1) IN GENERAL.—Notwithstanding any other provision of law, unless enacted with specific reference to this section, the Secretary of Education (referred to in this Act as the ‘‘Secretary’’) may waive or modify any statutory or regulatory provision applicable to the student financial assistance programs under title IV of the Act as the Secretary deems necessary in connection with a war or other military operation or national emergency to provide the waivers or modifications authorized by paragraph (2).
I don’t see anything in the ensuing paragraphs that would narrow this meaningfully, although I welcome input from anyone with a sharper legal eye than I have. Nonetheless, I find myself looking at this as an utterly dishonest exploitation of a law that was written with a clear purpose in mind. The Heros Act was created to handle soldiers being sent abroad to fight the War on Terror; whether this was good or bad policy, it had a clear purpose and a somewhat defined cost cap based on how many people are actually affiliated with the military or meaningfully economically impacted. The Biden student debt cancellation takes advantage of the “or national emergency” provision by declaring that everyone was impacted by the declared Covid emergency and therefore all student debt was subject to cancellation per this bill.
This, I suppose, is where I rediscover that whatever judicial philosophy I adhere to looks more like originalism than textualism, but really looks even more like I adhere to my own You Must Be Kidding Doctrine. I don’t buy for a moment that the people that drafted this legislation intended to empower the executive branch to declare an emergency that affects all Americans and that this would grant the power to cancel as much student debt for as large of a group of people as they like. Had they intended to do so, they probably would have just done that explicitly rather than spending a page clearing their throats about the importance of the United States military.
I see many speculating that the ostensibly conservative Supreme Court will use the Major Questions Doctrine to overturn the policy:
In the last few decades, the Supreme Court has placed another limitation on the Chevron Doctrine’s scope. The “major questions doctrine” holds that courts should not defer to agency statutory interpretations that concern questions of “vast economic or political significance.” The Supreme Court justifies this limitation with the non-delegation doctrine. According to the Supreme Court, courts are supposed to interpret “major” legal questions, not administrative bureaucrats.
I have to confess that I personally despise student loan “forgiveness” so much that I would be enthusiastic about nearly any convoluted reasoning that the Supreme Court comes up with to reject it as a legitimate policy. I am further bolstered in that attitude by what I perceive as decades of utterly ridiculous, lawless rulings that build on the time honored principle of deciding what I want and figuring out why the law agrees with me later. In this particular case, I think it’s actually fairly reasonable to say that this $400 billion policy and license for trillions more is not a legitimate use of executive authority delegated by Heros act, but I don’t think I can actually prove that through looking at the language in the text.
What say you?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?
YesChad.jpg
Seriously, I'm perfectly willing to bite that bullet. Even in the case of treatments almost certainly being useless, denying people the option of trying to do something for themselves in the face of a terminal disease is telling them that they must learn to die on the state's terms.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
Put another one down for my claim that "most political violence is right-wing" is a lie generated by people that just elect to not classify violence as political when it's bad for that narrative.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
I want to emphasize the flip here once again, because I feel that many people either fail to remember how extreme it was or claim that it was exaggerated. In back-to-back blog posts, my county public health department went from this school-marm scolding:
What we do know is that there are asymptomatic carriers out there, and while we may feel perfectly healthy, and the person we want to get together with feels perfectly healthy, if one of us is an asymptomatic carrier, we have now spread the virus. One of us will take it home from hanging out at the park, the backyard get together, or the Frisbee game, and pass it on to someone in our household who may actually get sick with the virus. That household member may pass it on to others as they go about their essential errands before they know that they have it. And suddenly we are right back where we started.
We know that the weather is getting nicer, and backyard parties and picnics are calling. Memorial Day weekend is calling. Kids are tired of being inside and want to hang out at the park, or sit 6 feet apart and do sidewalk chalk. But now is the time for patience and perseverance, and keeping up that stamina so we can all cross the finish line together.
To this endorsement of mostly peaceful protests:
Fighting for racial justice is essential, even in a pandemic
Communities across the country--including our own--are reeling from the murder of George Floyd. The past several days have been devastating as we grieve for George and the long line of people of color who have been killed while in police custody. The anger and frustration isn’t new, nor is police violence against black people and other people of color. During this time, we remember the lives of so many who have senselessly lost their lives, including Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Philando Castille, Tony Robinson, and many others. Together we strive for a future in which black lives are valued and protected.
...
Racism is a public health crisis, and unjust policies and systems have created and perpetuated the inequities that persist everywhere in our country, including here in Dane County. Public Health Madison & Dane County has a commitment to being anti-racist, and we will continue to grow as we work with our community to build a more just Dane County.
There's some pro forma muttering about continuing to wear a mask, but it is just absolutely wild to imagine the shift from telling people that playing Frisbee is too dangerous to saying that the protests are "essential".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
Nate Silver has been one of my favorite commentators for a long time, since well before he was primarily in the politics business due to his clear writing on baseball analytics. Every time he comes up in a controversy of some sort, I'm reminded of why I'm a fan - whether I agree with him or not, I think he really, truly does his best to get things right via careful, non-partisan analysis. Silver has been incredibly consistent on how to use pollsters predictively, part of which is including pollsters that have known house effects and simply correcting for that when incorporating them into the analysis.
As a result of his insistence on avoiding partisan hackery, Silver takes a ton of shit from people on Twitter and other elements of the commentariat that are just less competent at actually analyzing things than him. Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people. That Silver is now more controversial on the left than the right is another example of what I view as American progressives dissociating themselves from ground truth, with that phenomenon accelerating aggressively with Covid, Summer of Floyd, and gender ideology.
Well, yeah, obviously. I don't think I have a better example of the whole two movies thing that the way people see Clinton's emails. While there are admittedly some blank spots that I can't fill in with details, the outline of the story is so incredibly damning, so plainly the acts of someone engaging in corruption that I have a very difficult time understanding how anyone could believe otherwise. The act of setting up a private server rather than just using legitimate State Department resources should straightaway result in adverse inference regarding any follow-up action; perhaps not legally, but certainly from a political understanding of motives and behavior. Likewise for the deletion of approximately 32,000 emails that putatively were just personal emails. What, exactly, was she hiding? I don't know and that part barely even matters to my evaluation that her behavior was the behavior of someone that's trying to hide what she's doing.
That other people don't just disagree, but think the whole thing is so made-up that it should just be flippantly mocked is wild to me. Accusations of "whataboutism" aside, I just think it's plainly obvious that she acted like a guilty person trying to cover-up their actions. I can't even imagine someone behaving this way in my personal or professional life and being able to just say, "no, I checked them and they were just personal emails, we're all set". Everyone would assume the worst!
The legality probably hinges on technical details that I frankly don't care about very much. The obvious wrongdoing does not hinge on anything other than the weirdness of a government employee diverting their emails to a private server and deleting them when they're requested by the government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Lots of people, (Midwestern Americans and Canadians, in particular) have a niceness reflex; when you, say, trip on someone else's foot, the kneejerk assumption is that you were being inattentive and just stepped on a person's toes; you say "sorry" and yield to them, it taking a moment or two to realize that you've been intentionally tripped. Other people do not have this reflex, either because of their cultural background or because they're dicks; either way, these people notice the niceness reflex of others and try to exploit it.
Of note - this is highly adaptable. When I lived in the DC, the mental strategy that I developed for exploitation of niceness or just general belligerence was advice that I'd picked up from (oddly) Adam Carolla - always have a "go fuck yourself" chambered. I employed this a decent number of times and I don't think it was ever at an inappropriate target, but being inclined to respond to someone with a well-earned, "go fuck yourself" was something I had to actively cultivate. Then I moved to the upper Midwest and discovered that this skill was no longer useful, I just didn't need it for anything, and the mental tension of being ready to tell people to fuck off was a poor tradeoff here.
Once again, I encourage decent people to abandon the hellholes on the coasts unless you're personally dedicated to the political project of trying to reform them. There's three thousand miles of country that doesn't require you to assume the worst of everyone you encounter.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
...the central (and not at all secret) component of Holocaust education is that Jews (and other groups killed by the Nazis) should not have been treated the way they were simply because they were Jewish.
I'm not the best person to answer since I'm not a Holocaust denier (or even questioner), but the constant drumbeat on the Holocaust doesn't seem like the central thesis here is merely that Jewish people shouldn't have been treated that way, but that they are unique and distinct in having been treated this way. There are Holocaust museums and memorials in many places that really have nothing much to do with the Holocaust and education generally includes significant chapters on the Holocaust specifically. If these things were about the horrors of genocide and used the Holocaust as one particularly nasty example of what humans are capable of, that would make perfect sense to me and wouldn't seem like propagandizing.
Let's concretize that a bit with an example. I recently had the great opportunity to visit the Imperial War Museum in London, which has one floor dedicated to World War 1, one floor dedicated to World War 2, and a third floor dedicated to the Holocaust, with a couple higher levels for temporary exhibits. Surely we can all see why the world wars would take such a place of prominence for a British History Museum, but what exactly makes the Holocaust stand out such that it gets it own floor? There are many horrifying examples of human suffering inflicted by governments, including governments that still (at least nominally) exist. To me, understanding that the Chinese Communist Party murdered so many would have much more modern significance than the Holocaust. Given the current year news, learning about the Soviet genocide of Ukrainians in Holodomor seems fairly relevant. The Killing Fields of Cambodia have always held a special horror for me due to the targeting of professionals and academics. Perhaps a look at Indonesia's genocide could convince me that I'm too harsh on communists and that my attitude is dangerous as well. If ethnic strife is the thing that horrifies us so, Rwanda stands to be mentioned. Alternatively, perhaps each of these examples is roughly equally horrifying and say something important about the human condition and its relationship to governments, so we should present a story of genocides through the ages and their common threads.
But no, that's not what we see. Just the Holocaust, only the Holocaust, and anything else is a footnote. In fact, suggesting that the Holocaust isn't that special is apt to get you called anti-Semitic. So the objection isn't to teaching the Holocaust, it's to teaching only the Holocaust as an example of how Jewish people are oppressed in a special fashion that separates them all the way up to the modern day.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
My prediction is that the most vocal coverage will be conservative Twitter/substack trying to make this about Democrat hypocrisy with regards to crime.
Yes, I agree with this prediction. The most common take will be something along the lines of, "see Democrats believe that shooting people that steal from people that matter is good, they just think you don't matter". For my part, I agree that shooting thieves is good, but I expect that most of the soft-on-crime left will maintain ideological consistency and say that it's bad that the Secret Service would shoot at someone that wasn't even a threat to anyone.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
To add even more spice, California just approved unemployment for striking workers. No matter how ridiculous I think we've gotten, there's always a new vanguard to subsidize people that refuse to work with funds from people that are working.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
In the same ninth district of Budapest where two years ago a BLM/LGBTQ kneeling statue of liberty was installed and destroyed soon after,
Amazing story. The American Empire's cultural reach is truly beyond anything I'm aware of existing in all of history. I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.
Unknown people repainted the bench back to the original brown with a sign saying "I just want to be a bench. Which is good for everyone. For you, for him/her. For us."
I like these guys, but I think Auron Macintyre is correct that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I'm usually in the bucket of people saying that there is actually something wrong with men that aren't able to find partners, but this time, I've got to say that your experience of being approached by attractive women is so far outside the norm of what I see that you've got to be wildly underestimating your own attractiveness. I would say that I've been pretty romantically successful, including casual encounters, long-term relationships, and a happy marriage, but I've initiated about 90% of the successful encounters I've had, in addition to being rejected in quite a few more advances, and basically never rejecting a woman that I was attracted to. My personal observation is that my experience is pretty common, at least for men under 6'2".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
At 3:00, Joy Gray repeatedly asks whether a car is worth more than someone's life. I'm more than happy to bite that bullet and say, "yes, my car is much more valuable than the life of a robber, the robber's life has negative moral value and ending their life is a net good". I don't really know where to proceed from there in any conversation with someone that doesn't share that moral intuition because it seems entirely clear and obvious to me.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
...is eventually going to be made obsolete by people getting their information from LLMs, especially the ones hooked up to the internet.
For things that are uncontroversial and just require ELI5 explanations, this will probably be an improvement. For things that are even the slightest bit controversial, turning the information source and how it's written into more of a black box than the current Wikipedia situation is apt to be pretty terrible for people's information diets. Existing sources like ChatGPT are heavily modified to deliver what I would most accurately describe as the "midwit lib" answer to many questions. Trying to get factually accurate information that doesn't include endless hedging like, " I must emphasize the importance of using respectful and appropriate language when discussing social issues and vulnerable populations" is already like pulling teeth. This isn't a big problem in and of itself, but if most people come to believe that they're actually getting accurate and authoritative answers there, this is going to be pretty bad. There's already enough, "ummm actually, that's been deboonked" without people relying on regime-influenced AI to deboonk for them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo 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
1yr ago
Confession - I am a NIMBY (Part 1/2)
There, I said it. In the circles that I reside in, calling someone a “nimby” comes with a clearly negative connotation, such a strong negative connotation that it stands alone as an argument in favor of any given development or policy change. To make sure that I’m thinking clearly and not just embracing the term because I’m a contrarian (although I am admittedly a contrarian), I turned to Wikipedia to make sure I had a sound working definition:
NIMBY (or nimby),[1] an acronym for the phrase "not in my back yard",[2][3] is a characterization of opposition by residents to proposed developments in their local area, as well as support for strict land use regulations. It carries the connotation that such residents are only opposing the development because it is close to them and that they would tolerate or support it if it were built farther away. The residents are often called nimbys, and their viewpoint is called nimbyism. The opposite movement is known as YIMBY for "yes in my back yard".[4]
Well, now that I’ve got a clear definition, yes, that’s exactly me. I support good things in my neighborhood and I’m against bad things in my neighborhood. I even embrace the implied hypocrisy of saying that I don’t care if other people want to have bad things in their neighborhoods, it’s really up to them whether they accept or refuse those things. In the event that such a thing is truly necessary for both neighborhoods to succeed and that one of us must accept the bad thing, I embrace Coaseian negotiated handling of the externalities.
Let’s move on to some concrete examples of my nimbyism. The first one that pops to mind are the frequent local proposals for homeless shelters, family shelters, and similar structures and aid organizations. One of my best friends used to live in a condo that was seated next door to one of these, which gave them a rather first-hand and literal application of what it means to say, “yes in my backyard” to this sort of project, and it was about as unpleasant as you’d expect. The frequency of parking lot fights, ambulances in the middle of the night, and police presence were, again, about you might expect. Without regard to whether such organizations are actually helpful or not, should I want to accept such a similar proposed structure in my backyard? The answer that I give is a fervent no, that inviting the indigent to my neighborhood will make it a worse place to live in just about every conceivable way. I want indigent populations removed from my neighborhood as soon as practicable and legal for the police to do so, for the incredibly obvious reason that this makes my neighborhood a better place to live. Some people feel quite differently from me on this - perfect! Since I don’t want drug addicts and crazy people in the park across the street and others say they don’t mind, we have a Pareto optimal solution. If they actually do feel that there is a cost, we’ll have to come to some sort of Coaseian handling of externalities, but I’ll at least have extracted the concession that it actually does suck to have hobos in your park.
Moving on to one that’s a little less plain to see and that is even more galling to those that think the nimbies must be stopped, let’s talk a bit about housing density. Madison currently faces a housing crunch, caused by economic opportunity and geographic constraints. The city has an unusual abundance of high-skill job prospects as the state’s capitol, home to a large and prestigious university, and large software and biotechnology sectors that have spun off of that university. Geographically, the heart of the city is the largest American city situated on an isthmus, just about one mile wide, running between a picturesque pair of lakes. The city has an ordinance protecting the prominence of the state capitol building, keeping the overall aesthetic of the skyline as it has been. It is also famously tedious to deal with when it comes to historical preservation; if you’d like to enjoy some ridiculousness, check out this recent argument about a bar that Al Capone apparently went to. As a result of these factors, that slice of land is a surprisingly expensive place to live for the Midwest.
Despite the prices, I elected to settle here anyway and I really do love this city. I love the beauty of the city, the historic skyline, the lakes, the biking, the fitness culture, the breweries, the cheese, the parks, the huge farmer’s market, and much more. I even love that it’s the kind of place that a fake Indian nonbinary lunatic would set up shop for fun and profit.Others in my city share that love, but think it should be a cheaper place to live, that we should increase housing density, and this is basically a human right. One recent opinion piece on this has a decent enough piece on a rather villainous and peculiar bit of law here:
An ordinance the Madison Common Council adopted in 1966 defines a “family” as “an individual, or two (2) or more persons related by blood, marriage, domestic partnership, or legal adoption, living together as a single housekeeping unit, in a dwelling unit, including foster children,” though city ordinance does carve out some exceptions for roomers, children, group homes of people with disabilities, and so on. The implication for renters is that, depending on the zoning of an area, it might be technically illegal for more than two unrelated people to live in an apartment together. Restrictions are also tougher for renters than for people who own homes. In our scenario, if one of us had been able to buy a home, it would have been legal for us to live together, but as renters, it would be illegal in most residential districts to share a home.
…
The neighborhoods with the greatest opposition to this change are already some of the most expensive in the city. Homes currently for sale in Dudgeon Monroe, Vilas, Greenbush, and Wingra Park range between $625,000 and $1.3 million for a 4 bedroom home. They’re not your typical target neighborhoods for student housing. UW-Madison undergrads are a smart bunch, but likely very few of them have the time, money, and energy to hollow out your neighborhood of expensive homes. Most of them are perfectly decent neighbors, too, by the way.
…
The fact that the current ordinance doesn’t relate to use, but is more about who, is an indicator that it is designed to be discriminatory. While more explicit restrictions against poor people, young people, unmarried people, or students living in certain homes would certainly violate fair housing laws, these thinly-veiled discriminatory ordinances seem to fly under the legal radar. Still, one could argue it does violate city protections based on marital status, income, as well as student status. It actually could be cause for a lawsuit. Some municipalities’ family definitions have been struck down by courts in various locations around the US, and the Attorney General of Wisconsin in 1974 wrote an opinion that these ordinances “are of questionable constitutionality” under the Fourteenth Amendment. It’s discriminatory enough that housing is so gosh-darned expensive—do we really need unjust zoning ordinances on top of the price tag?
Here’s where I bite the bullet and go full nimby - yes! I am in favor of exactly that in my neighborhood. I want to live next to married couples with decent careers. My experiences with poor people and the transiently coupled have shown me that they’re lower quality neighbors. Even aside from trustworthiness, transience, investment in the property, and quality of friends and relatives, we simply don’t share the same cultural norms and preferences. I would rather be around the petit bourgeois. Back to the distinction between being a nimby and having a broader policy recommendation though - I don’t care if someone else in some other neighborhood would like to get rid of this sort of restriction, it’s not like I have some moral prohibition on there being poor people with roommates, I would just rather that my neighbors be a nice married couple that is going to stick around a while. I’ll even cop to the even more villainous take that I rather like the high property values here in part because they serve as an effective barrier against living around the kind of people I don’t want to live around.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
From Boingboing:
If you research Graham Hancock and look at his books over time, as I have, one of the things that you discover about him is that he self-edits. He doesn't use the word Atlantis now except very sparingly. He has also edited himself since 1995, when, in Fingerprints of the Gods, he came out and said that it was an ancient white civilization. He no longer says the "white" part in the series. If you pay careful attention, he does talk about "heavily bearded Quetzalcoatl" who arrives, according to myth, to give the gift of knowledge, but he doesn't mention the other part of that trope, which all of us know about, which is that this visitor supposedly had white skin.
It's similar to the way that Donald Trump operates. He will get to the edge of something, but he won't say it, because he knows that his followers already know it. He can say, "I didn't say that," and he didn't say it, but everyone knew what he said because it was already known, right?
File under "demand for white supremacy continues to exceed supply".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Scott has a piece up on SBF's drug use. Unsurprisingly, the writing is clear and informative. It's Scott doing Scott things - go read it!
That said, I can barely get through it. This latest bout of examining SBF and his crew just fills me with a sense of absolute disgust and contempt. I rarely feel what people are talking about when they see some public figure do something they don't like and refer to it as "gross", but this has to be what that sensation is. We're talking about a guy that essentially committed fraud to collect billions of dollars, funneled tons of money to preferred political causes, played dress-up as being highly altruistic, and still might well get away with the whole thing. But none of that really triggered the disgust reaction, all of that just seems like the sort of thing that I predict the scions of Harvard finance law professors get up to - scamming money in maybe-legal fashion just seems incredibly on brand for such families, even if the specifics of effective altruism spice the story up.
Against the odds of anything that I would have thought years ago, the part I'm disgusted by is the drug use and treating it as just a bit of biochemical calculus to work out whether it's a good idea. I cannot even begin to relate to the idea of thinking about things like this:
Milky Eggs reports a claim by an employee that Sam was on “a patch for designer stimulants that mainlined them into his blood to give him a constant buzz at all times”. This is a hyperbolic description of Emsam, a patch form of the antidepressant/antiparkinsonian agent selegiline.
...
Everyone wants “magic bullets” - drugs that can increase dopamine in one of these ways, but not any of the others. Treat attention problems without causing hallucinations. Cure tremors without causing hypersexuality. But it’s tough. There are dozens of dopamine-based drugs, and all of them succeed in some ways and fail in others. Adderall mostly helps attention but sometimes causes a little paranoia on the side. Antipsychotics mostly prevent hallucinations and delusions, but also cause anhedonia. If a good doctor carefully chooses the right drug and dose, you’ll mostly get what you want. Otherwise, choose 2d4 random side effects from the appropriate side of the table.
Using things like this when you don't actually have anything wrong with you, when you just wish your mind worked differently viscerally disgusts me. I'm not exactly a Mormon over here - I start the day with coffee and often finish it with whiskey. I don't care if people smoke weed or even have the occasional bump of cocaine. Something about this though, medicalizing your very existence and taking psychoactive drugs all day, every day. Of course, Scott gets more into the pros and cons of the drug, whether it induces compulsive gambling, and so on, but I keep returning to the simple prescription to just not pump yourself full of psychoactive drugs in your quest to embezzle more money to send it to "good" causes.
I'd drifted away from rationalism, effective altruism, utilitarianism, and other ideas in the same constellation over the years, but nothing really quite put a bow on it like this SBF story in its full ridiculous caricature of how utterly bankrupt of basic morality and humanity the whole suite is. Scott closes with:
If I were one of the psychiatrists who will one day buy second houses from the money they make as expert witnesses on this case (DON’T EVEN THINK ABOUT ASKING ME TO DO THIS9), I would focus on what doses were involved. Adderall 10 mg will help treat ADHD and give you a nice motivational boost. Adderall 200 mg will cause paranoia and sometimes hallucinations. There are similar considerations for modafinil and Emsam. All of these drugs are compatible with “probably didn’t matter” or “probably the main cause of everything” depending on what doses we’re talking about.
(and of course there could be other drugs I don’t know about)
The other free advice I would give these witnesses is to think about sleep. The most common way stimulants cause psychosis (this is my personal opinion, I haven’t checked if the literature agrees with me) isn’t by some kind of direct dopaminergic agonism. It’s by making it feel possible to operate on two hours of sleep a night. This is not actually possible and will land you into some kind of very exotic and maladaptive mental state. Someone who takes lots of stimulants during the day and then manages to sleep fine at night might do better than someone who takes the same amount of stimulants in order to work 130 hour weeks.
As someone that's not a credentialed psychiatrist, I have free advice that has served me and people close to me well - just don't do any of this. If you're ever having to consider whether you had a psychotic break because of meth or the lack of sleep caused by the meth, and the putative reason was so that you could work really long hours moving financial chips around while creating absolutely nothing of any value, you're doing everything wrong. These shouldn't be critiques on the margins, they should be wholesale repudiation of such a lifestyle. If I were part of the EA community, I'd be getting out in front of this and rejecting everything about how these people behaved, not saying that maybe they should have just used lower doses of their drugs.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Which, judging by the Breitbart comments and replies I expect here, laughing at my pearl clutching is absolutely the point. You want me to be mad, you want me get up on my soapbox and bleat some self-righteous Soyjak lines about muh poor illegals so you can get mad right back and it feels good.
No, I want the people that live in Martha's Vinyard to admit that living around illegal aliens fucking sucks and everyone knows it. I want them to admit that despite having way more than enough wealth to handle 50 people, they don't want to, because they know that it's bad for their community. I want the people that utter platitudes about how diversity is our strength to deal with even the slightest bit of personal consequence for their ideology.
Of course, I don't have any illusion that any of these things are going to happen, but putting it as blatantly front and center as this does might at least make it apparent to fencesitters that the empathy of the very wealthy for illegal aliens only extends as far as some other neighborhood.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
It's interesting to see a certain weird tic that's become common in various American stories make its way into this one:
Western officials paid tribute to his courage as a fighter for freedom. Some, without citing evidence, bluntly accused the Kremlin.
Without citing evidence. Without. Citing. Evidence. Are you people fucking kidding me? Who is doing the editing for this that they feel the need to inject that phrase into every claim that isn't bibliographically footnoted and addended with appropriate Bayesian odds? Yeah, when the leader of political opposition to an autocrat dies in a prison colony at 47 years old, the default is that they were murdered by the regime. Even in the event that they didn't do anything in particular to him that day, any reasonable person looking at the basic facts would conclude that the regime is responsible for his death, because that's the whole point of sending to him to a Russian prison colony in the Arctic Circle called the Polar Wolf.
On the flip side, I had assumed that this stupid editorial tic was mostly just directed at the American right, but it seems that it's now standard practice.
It made me ask myself: is it fair to say that elderly care in the US and Western countries in general is based on the unstated rule that you as a frail and elderly person pretty much only deserve to have a quality of life worth a damn if you have loving, caring children and grandchildren living nearby, visiting you regularly and looking after you if needed?
On the contrary, I think you're building a big assumption in here, that countries could simply provide "quality of life worth a damn" to everyone living under their umbrella and are electing not to out of spite. Instead, as that thread covered, even providing a low-quality of life for someone that can't fully care for themselves is incredibly expensive and a massive burden on nations that are dealing with inverted population pyramids. I see this sort of thinking with regard to various supposed positive "rights" and it just seems utterly fantastical to me to think that there is sufficient state capacity to give everyone a nice life if only the affirmative choice were made.
As a practical matter, it is true that the main way for someone to have a quality of life that's worth a damn if they grow feeble is to have loving, caring children and grandchildren nearby. That this won't happen for everyone is a reminder that aging is cruel.
Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track
There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science insisting arguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.
This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.
I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:
LGBTQI advocacy groups say excluding trans athletes amounts to discrimination but WA President Sebastian Coe has said: "Decisions are always difficult when they involve conflicting needs and rights between different groups, but we continue to take the view that we must maintain fairness for female athletes above all other considerations.
First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.
Approximately none. Black on white violence isn't uncommon and doesn't generate much in the way of outrage at all.
I will register a prediction that the full story will not be very similar to a kid rang a doorbell and was then racistly shot for no reason at all. I don't know what happened, I don't have a specific hypothesis, and I am not jumping to blame the injured teen, I just bet that this is not what happened.
Agreed, it harkens back to Martin and Arbery, which is exactly why my inclination is to not believe that he was just an innocent jogger, armed only with Skittles, ringing a doorbell and being shot by an evil old racist for no particular reason.
More options
Context Copy link