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
8mo ago
Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.
I wonder if Bezos intended the layer of Straussian reading that's available here? Perhaps it's just because it's my pet issue, but I remain surprised at how hard it is to get people to agree with me that electoral legibility is an absolutely crucial part of legitimating democracy. It's not enough to have very serious experts tell people that it's the safest and most secure election ever, it must be genuinely hard to imagine how the election could be rigged.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
A lot of never Trumpers (like Vance) are coming to the conclusion that Trump is actually not all that bad. We saw what a first term looked like. It was pretty middle of the road, with some modest successes in foreign policy and taxation.
This is exactly why I have zero trouble believing that Vance is a genuine convert. I share quite a few demographic attributes with Vance. In 2016, I did not vote for Trump, I condemned him as a personally immoral man and worried in text messages about his potentially destabilizing impact on the country. By early 2020, I still thought he was a personally immoral man, but a decent enough President. After Kavanaugh, Covid lockdowns, Floyd riots, and so many more things big and small, I was dead-set against the Democrat Party and voted for Trump, the first time I had ever voted Republican. After what I consider four years of awful governance and an attempted assassination, I'm ready to don a red hat. Maybe Vance is just seeing where the wind blows, but it's not hard at all for me to think that a white guy in his late 30s from the Midwest thinks the things Vance articulates.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
At recess I read books. I opted out of gym as much as possible, it was humiliating and vulgar. The only post-puberty phys ed class I was forced to take was sex segregated so I wouldn't have had any opportunity to see differences. In earlier gym classes I didn’t look around much. Why would I? Are people comparing themselves to see how many jumping jacks they can do? I just wanted it to be done with.
This seems to be pretty much the universal experience of people that advocate for trans participation in women's sports. They have no idea how large the gaps are between men and women because they have somehow managed to take pride in avoiding anything to do with physical fitness. I guess I can kind of, sort of squint and see how that happens, but the part I don't understand is their willingness to jump into arguments about a topic that they just don't care about at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
I have no trouble acknowledging that there are many people that support a bunch of Democrat policies that I don't like much. If, for example, someone just doesn't think they should have to pay their student loans, they're probably going to vote Democrat.
On the flip side, the enthusiasm for Harris is genuinely hard to understand. I accept that the firmware update worked as intended and people really mean it, but it is genuinely puzzling to me what they're seeing that they're excited about. The answer is apparently as simple as the fact that she's 60 and lucid rather than 80 and comatose, which is fine as far as it goes, but doesn't really get me to understanding excitement.
As a bit of an extra point, I think if you'd told me this was how it was going to go down a few years ago, I would have thought a bunch of Democrats would be annoyed that they didn't get a say in picking their candidate. Instead, everyone just happily agreed that they're coconut-pilled now, that they're not going back, and that it's time embrace what can be, unburdened by what has been. That, above all else, is why I can't stop thinking of the situation as embodying the NPC meme. It is very hard for me to believe that people authentically watched some teleprompter speech and thought, "wow, now I can't wait to get out there and campaign"; I don't think it was astroturfed, but I do think that this is almost entirely an exercise in groupthink.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
I am open to the idea that this is actually the best policy given a number of realistic political constraints. This does not move me to find it less galling that I'm stuck paying for people to live degenerate lifestyles. Avoiding HIV is absolutely trivial, but the "community" in question apparently insists on spreading HIV.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8mo 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
11mo ago
I am once again reminded that I do not need to pick a good guy in any given engagement. I can think of quite a few off-ramps and alternatives that the police could have selected at any point, such as turning off the stove themselves rather than commanding the resident to do so. I can think of approaches after that mistake that likely would have worked. I can suggest that screaming that you'll shoot someone in the face is probably not a great approach regardless of the situation you're encountering. None of that actually moves me to be all that sympathetic to the victim, if I'm being honest. I look around that house, look at the interaction, and just feel some gross combination of pity and contempt for the deceased. I wish the police would do better and I generally don't like them very much, but that's pretty easy for me to say when I don't have to deal with this bullshit a dozen times a day.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
That's absolutely wild that someone could look at a chart where reasons 3 through 6 are directly stated as housing and slap a label on that says "few cite cheaper housing" as though they've made a serious point. There are basically three reasons on the whole chart - jobs, housing, and family. Surely the poster is just an amateur shitpoaster though, right?
@AzizSunderji
Analyzing American housing at http://home-economics.us
14 years of Strategy Research at Barclays Investment Bank (credit/macro/EM).
OK, seriously, how do "experts" keep being experts in absolutely nothing?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Yeah, there are many scams where the scammer isn't actually doing anything illegal, they're just relying on people's anxiety with saying, "no, fuck off". All the way down to beggars trying to guilt people into giving them money for gas with a ridiculous sob story, all the way up to patent-trolling and blackmail. For the party being harassed, there is both the cost-benefit analysis of what it takes to get your harasser to go away to the skillfully crafted guilt or anxiety inducing attack on their conscience.
As an addendum, one small thing that I really hate about this is how developing the hardened shell of being quick to tell people to fuck off subverts judgment and charitable behavior towards people. Years ago, maybe about a decade now, an indigent looking man in a wheelchair tried to stop my wife and I on the sidewalk. I ignored him on the basis that he was almost certainly trying to get money. My wife stopped; it turned out all he wanted for someone to pick up his lighter that he'd dropped (there was no add-on begging, he thanked her kindly and everyone went about their day). I felt bad about that and still do, but my alternative would be hearing approximately 38 bullshit stories that end in, "so I need $20" for every one disabled guy that just needs a hand with something real quick.
Aside from the egregious, aggressive, absolutely blatant 14th Amendment violation that makes this anti-constitutional, the most glaring thing to me is how incoherent the idea of a "forgivable loan" is. That's not what a loan is. Per Merriam-Webster, a loan is:
an amount of money that is borrowed, often from a bank, and has to be paid back, usually together with an extra amount of money that you have to pay as a charge for borrowing
If you're informing someone up front that you don't expect the money back, you are extending them largesse or patronage, or perhaps you are providing them a fee for service, but you are not offering them a loan. There were many things that were terrible about Covid spending policies, but this might have been the absolute king of them. The PPP "loans" were never really intended to be paid back, they were always a handout to keep things moving and allow businesses to skip out on doing actual commercial transactions. Framing them as "loans" was intended to attach a couple strings, but these were mostly just helicopter money dispersed with the knowledge that there would be a huge amount of outright fraud and even more casual fudging of the program to collect money. Maybe that was a good idea, maybe it wasn't, but these weren't loans in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, because they were called loans, now everyone that just took a totally normal loan with a totally normal expectation that they would pay it back thinks that PPP loans being treated that way justifies "forgiving" their loans too.
I could see this becoming a more frequent tactic, just calling handouts to fake businesses, affinity groups, and other favored constituents "loans" that are explicitly designed to never be paid. Really, it's a brilliant tactic, because the recipients don't even feel like they're just welfare cases, they feel like they've received a totally valid loan that they have met the terms of. I do wonder if there's an exploitable tax loophole here - no direct payments for me, thanks, I'll just take the money as a loan with no required payments until June of 2250.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo 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
2mo ago
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question...
It's not. One cannot turn the question of whether international trade policy that costs some fractional percentage of production is worse than promoting racially discriminatory college admissions policies. Hell, one can't even reliably determine which economic policies are better or worse in a strictly empirical question. Most political questions are values questions, not empirical questions, and you should immediately distrust anyone that claims that their preferred policies are just The Science.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
Sometimes, yeah. We tacitly acknowledge this with all punitive justice - we may not be able to make a right, but the best we can do is visible punishment of transgressors.
Additionally tit-for-tat is a better game theoretical strategy than cooperating with a defectbot.
In any case, the situation can't be addressed with cliches, at least not adequately. The response like what @satanistgoblin is expressing above is largely about the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of people that have excused all manor of political terrorism in the past (including the recent past, when BLM rioters killed dozens and destroyed billions in property) suddenly deciding that a riot that got out of hand requires tracking down everyone present and charging them under novel interpretations of statute that had never previously occurred to anyone.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo 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
6mo ago
Mechanics have no trouble telling you what it will cost to take a look at your car. They'll post their hourly rate and let you know that if it's just [X] they'll figure it out pretty quick, but it might take [Y] hours if it winds up being the transmission instead. Ask a physician what their hourly rate is for diagnostic services and you will be likely to receive much less transparency and possibly a look of indignance that you'd be so gauche as to reduce their priestly actions to mere labor.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Were these Pakistani monsters worse than the Japanese during WWII? Were the British toffs who let it happen worse than the genteel Germans who looked the other way?
The Brits that allowed it might or might not be worse, but they're more pathetic. Collaborators are often held in even lower esteem than invaders. The Pakistani gangs are an alien, evil group of invaders. That's horrible, but it's intelligible. If you could find a Chinese guy that was worrying about anti-Japanese sentiment on New Year's Eve of 1937 in Nanking, I'd probably hate him even more than the Japanese soldiers raping their way through the city.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
It doesn’t take a coordinated blitz of friendly op-eds, since my parents were getting this straight from the TV.
Is this not just the visual version of friendly op-eds? Outside of the explicitly right-wing media entities, everyone else has granted Harris what seems like fawning coverage to me. I hear that she's running a great campaign but haven't actually seen her do anything other than read a couple speeches off of teleprompters. I quite literally haven't heard a single word that's actually a thought that occurred in her head rather than something that someone else wrote down for her to say.
I'm not doubting that there's a vibe shift, but I do absolutely marvel at how people's vibes shifted so much when nothing actually happened. As I covered a couple days ago, I thought it was a good speech as far as such things go, but I really have trouble relating to people that treat these sorts of things as decisive factors for themselves.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
This is a good example of a bigger point, which is that "efficiency" isn't just referring to the direct costs of spending. When you get rid of the guy that's in charge of regulating showerhead flow, you don't just save the $100K per year on the useless regulator, you also save compliance costs for every company that makes showerheads and create additional consumer surplus for people that can get showerheads they actually like. To not put a thumb on the scale, it's worth mentioning that you also (putatively) increase costs for water and whatever environmental costs are associated with it. Each choice when it comes to getting rid of regulators has significant externality impacts, both positive and negative, that are part of the picture of "efficiency".
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:
-
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.
-
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.
Last week, during the discussion of the Marcellus Williams execution we had a brief aside discussing my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil. That got me to thinking about the topic more and with the spate of executions last week, my social media feeds had a lot of discussion of them. Much of the commentary are sentiments that I find repellant, like this:
rest in power Emmanuel Littlejohn
may your memory drive us to continue fighting for the abolition of the death penalty
To be clear on who Littlejohn was:
On the night of June 19, 1992, a robbery occurred at a convenience store in Oklahoma City, resulting in the death of the store owner, who was gunned down by two robbers.[2]
On that night, at around 10:15 p.m., 31-year-old Kenneth Meers, the owner of the convenience store, was working with two employees, Tony Hulsey and Hulsey's brother, Danny Waldrup. While they were still doing their work, 20-year-old Emmanuel Antonia Littlejohn[a] and 25-year-old Glenn Roy Bethany entered the store and held Meers at gunpoint, with the intention of robbing him.[3]
…
In a separate case, together with William Arnold Penny, Littlejohn was also charged with robbery with a dangerous weapon, two counts of first-degree rape and kidnapping.[9]
To be clear on the arguments for clemency, it seems to be almost entirely based on uncertainty about which man pulled the trigger. This sort of hairsplitting, about who pulled the trigger is the kind of thing that I was referring to in the previous discussion as being about as close to just plain evil as any relatively normal, common policy position could be. Two men walked into a store with no intent other than robbing the owner at gunpoint. One of them shot him in the face. I could not possibly care less who pulled the trigger, they were both responsible and should both hang. I see no plausible moral case to the contrary. Perhaps one adheres to a generalized claim that the state should just never execute anyone, which I still strongly object to, but the idea that the case hinges on who pulled the trigger is either ridiculous or in completely bad faith. The latter possibility brings me to the second example of a post that caught my eye:
I was a witness for Alabama's execution of Alan Miller by nitrogen gas tonight. Again, it did not go as state officials promised. Miller visibly struggled for roughly two minutes, shaking and pulling at his restraints. He then spent the next 5-6 min intermittently gasping for air
Readers will probably immediately spot what I think is in bad faith. Am I to believe that Ms. Gill’s objection to what she saw is that this method of execution is simply too brutal? That if only we could figure out some way to end Alan Miller’s life without suffering, she would agree that it’s appropriate to execute a man that “shot and killed two of his co-workers, 32-year-old Lee Holdbrooks and 28-year-old Christopher Yancy, at a heating and air-conditioning distributor, then drove five miles to a business where he had previously worked and shot and killed his former supervisor, 39-year-old Terry Jarvis”? No, of course not. Nonetheless, I want to treat this, for a moment, as a serious objection on the object-level to make a point in favor of execution that I don’t see made with much frequency.
How do you feel hearing that Miller may have spent five or ten minutes suffering before he died? Some may extend a degree of empathy to the monster on the table that I am not personally capable of, but I feel the same as many of the people replying on Twitter do - Miller deserves much worse than a few minutes gasping for breath. In fact, I’ve sometimes seen people argue that the death penalty is too good for the worst people, that life in prison is a worse penalty. This is presumably because they’re imagining a life in prison that’s filled with brutality, misery, and possibly rape and torture for decades. What this highlights to me is that the death penalty is not the worst punishment that a society can mete out - far from it, a swift execution is a cap on the amount of suffering that the justice system may inflict on someone. Truly, I think people like Dahmer deserve much worse than a simple firing squad, but putting some cap on it is a good way to prevent people from exacting revenge in a dehumanizing fashion.
I don’t really have any coherent argument to piece together here. I’m mostly expressing my frustration with empathy that is so misplaced that it seems like faulty wiring to me. Seriously, a man walks into a store with his buddy, shoots an innocent man in the face, is finally executed decades later, and people say, “rest in power” because it might have been his buddy that shot the innocent man in the face. How can I describe that other than evil? The only miscarriage of justice in the Littlejohn case is that the system allowed him to live for decades when no one even had any follow-up questions about whether he was one of the robbers. Other policies are more consequential, but there are none that I feel more conviction about my opponents being just plain wrong than the question of what to do with men like Littlejohn.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
The initial reaction to George Floyd was universal condemnation. I watched Sean Fuckin' Hannity talk about how terrible it was and how his MMA training (lol) would never have allowed him to do that kind of blood choke for that amount of time the night it happened. This did not succeed in preventing riots. The riots preceded the right coming up with reasons that it's actually fine for cops to kneel on necks for nine minutes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I am increasingly sympathetic to the idea that systems too complicated for stupid people are deeply unfair, even if I personally have no trouble understanding and even benefitting from these systems. When we look at something like credit cards, smart people can gain an edge in convenience and even a net profit from gaming the points systems. People in the middle with sufficient executive function will get the convenience benefit without too much trouble. People that either don't really understand what credit is, don't understand how interest works, or lack impulse control will purchase things they can't afford, accumulate more debt with compounding interest, and ruin their lives. In my previous, more callous thinking, I basically thought, "well, tough shit for them, it's not that hard to understand and they should just do better". Observing people's behavior, that's just not true. No matter what they do, they're not capable of understanding how compounding interests works, even if they grasp it during a conversation, that's going to be right out within a couple days.
This also extends to student loans. While I still have antipathy for people that absolutely can grasp what they're signing, it's just obvious that many people really don't understand what they're signing up for and don't understand the basics of financing. We can see people posting stories about how shocked they are that they've already paid the amount they owe, but the principal is still the same. People think "cancellation" is something that can be done without any impact on the other side of the ledger; they have no idea that there even is a ledger, they literally believe that the only reason their debt isn't cancelled is because some people are just mean and hate them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3mo ago
From what I can tell, most of the accusations here are very minor, though. Using immigration laws to sidestep due process is wrong, though.
In many of these conversations, the term "due process" is doing a ton of work that isn't consistent with my understanding of it. Without looking anything up and prior to these arguments, if someone asked me what "due process" meant, I think I would have said that it refers to having a clear and legible legal standard that can't be circumvented to achieve an end goal. That doesn't actually mean that it must take particularly long, that there is no discretion involved, and that there must be some remedy to having it executed. In the case of the Hamas-sympathetic immigrants, I do not interpret "due process" as meaning that they're entitled to anything other than the explicitly laid out statutory considerations, which include discretion for removal at the behest of the Secretary of State's judgment. That's it, that's the due process, it's that when you're a non-citizen in the United States, the Secretary of State has discretion for your removal. If you think that's a bad law, that's fine, but the law exists and was passed legitimately by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President.
As a matter of principle, I am completely fine with the due process leading to deportation being pretty short and shallow. You just don't have any actual right to live in countries that you're not a citizen of (Schengen and other arrangements notwithstanding). If the host country simply thinks you're really annoying, they can tell you to leave.
federal enforcement of 21 as the drinking age
When I was young, I wondered if I'd stop caring about this one once I was well beyond the age that it was directly relevant to me, but no, the further I get from it, the dumber it seems. The arguments are so cliche that we've already all heard them a million times - these people are old enough to vote, old enough to fight in the military, but not old enough for a beer? Self-evidently ridiculous! We can even easily visit other countries with lower drinking ages and observe that nothing much happens differently without these dopey laws. Worse still, the effect isn't just on the underage, it's in pointless enforcement up and down the age spectrum. Nearing 40, I still need an ID to buy beer at a grocery store. Everyone involved has to pretend as though this isn't a completely retarded ritual, we all agree that there's really nothing to be done about it, the federal government decided that you need to card everyone and the company dutifully implemented a system where it's not even possible to sell a beverage without doing so. A small thing, really, but a constant reminder of how much I despise the petty, authoritarian weasels of the American federal government.
I'll once again note that various excuses about how a treating physician probably can't really know what things cost ring hollow for anyone with a decent veterinarian. That end of things is admittedly a newish experience for me, but when I take my dog to the vet and he presents treatment options, I can inquire what they cost and his reply is, "about [$X], but I can get the exact number for you if you want". That physicians cannot do this for much narrower ranges of practice indicates an incentive structure for not knowing what things cost.
I genuinely believe this is the part that triggers so many people to feel the way they do about Luigi. Guys like Brian Thompson make tens of millions of dollars and if anyone has a problem with it, they can get their lawyers to take it up with his lawyers, who will all make a shitload of money arguing with each other, lying for hire and making arguments that no one actually believes and that most laymen can't even understand. I'm surprised that others are surprised that profitable Kafka rituals occasionally trigger rage.
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