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
7mo ago
Direct discussion of drugging was missing from the first trial — which ended in a mistrial when a jury deadlocked on all three counts — with Mueller instead having to imply it through the testimony of the women, who said they were woozy, disoriented and at times unconscious on the nights they described the actor raping them.
Wow, there's no way that wooziness, disorientation, and passing out could be explained by mere alcohol, these women must have been drugged!
Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this other than simply replying, "uhhh, yeah, they might have been real drunk, we were indeed partying"? I keep looking at cases like this and trying to figure out how I could possibly exonerate myself if someone I hooked up with from a party 20 years ago claimed that I "drugged" her, and I've got absolutely nothing. In this case, one of them was evidently his girlfriend at the time; I really have no idea how I could defend myself if my wife decides a decade from now that having sex after we both got home bordering on a blackout drunk New Year's Eve was actually "rape".
Is there some steelman explanation I'm missing for how this could plausibly be a legitimate trial with legitimate evidence? It seems like it's literally some women that got drunk and had sex with Masterson that decided a decade later that they were actually drugged, without even the slightest bit of physical evidence for the claim. Never mind being sufficient for a reasonable doubt, I just flat out don't believe them at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
All else aside, I think the trend of people that didn't have any apparent drinking problem proudly announcing that they've quit drinking and feel so much better is really weird. I'm really not clear what they're optimizing for or what they're experiencing that is ostensibly so much better in their post-alcohol phase. I guess Andreeson spells it out a bit:
Since I stopped drinking, I feel much better. I don’t need as much sleep, but my sleep is better. I’m more alert through the day. I’m cogent and focused at all times. I have more energy when I exercise, and it’s easier to control my diet.
I can buy the sleep portion of things and sleep certainly has downstream effects, but I also think that you have to drink a lot for these to be all that noticeable. I drink more than I probably should, but do no meaningful experience any problems with energy for exercise or controlling my diet. Are the people that say that they feel much better sans drinking just even heavier drinkers than me or are they experiencing the world very differently?
As irritating as people that make drinking their identity are, people that make not drinking into an identity are even more irritating.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
The Independent goes a bit further still:
The Guardian branded the series “the most dangerous show on Netflix”, while historian Greg Jenner referred to it as “absolute nonsense which fails at the most basic level to present convincing evidence” – and yet the series has sat in Netflix’s Top 10 list for several days, currently resting at No 7 across all of film and TV at the time of writing. The documentary has raised concerns over Netflix’s own complicity in disseminating dubious or misleading information. More than this, however, it has made a compelling case for the value of the UK’s publicly owned broadcasters.
...
That’s not to say that the BBC and Channel 4 are completely without sin, of course. The BBC – in particular, BBC News – has been criticised for a perceived right-wing political bias in recent years; its handling of transgender issues has been condemned by LGBT+ rights activists on multiple occasions.
...
But who is holding it accountable for these decisions? As a streaming service, Netflix isn’t even subject to the same regulations that regular UK TV channels are: when viewers are offended by something on traditional TV, they can always complain to the broadcasting regulator Ofcom. Because Netflix is based in the Netherlands, it falls outside of Ofcom’s jurisdiction.
...
Perhaps Netflix jumping on the pseudoscience bandwagon was an inevitability. But it’s a stark reminder of exactly what’s being lost in television’s pivot to privately owned streaming services. It’s an issue that’s threatening to swallow social media platforms whole, too: how exactly the spread of (mis-)information is regulated. Modern companies must start drawing from the lessons of the past – it might help to understand why the BBC has lasted as long as it has.
Not only is this show bad and dangerous, it stands as an example of why we probably just shouldn't even allow private television production at all. If we're going to insist on having private television, we should probably at least turn curation of it over to the government to make sure that communication there is appropriately reviewed and approved for public consumption, less the public start getting into all sorts of wrongthink. It's impossible for me to not jump immediately to the control of information around Covid and the desire "fact check" all sorts of things that were branded "misinformation".
Anyway, all of the people telling me that the show is simply terrible and probably shouldn't even be allowed pretty well ensures that I'll give it a watch.
All in all, “red wave barely a ripple, Trumpism refuted, cope and seethe more” will once again be met with “y’all cheated, just give us a year to figure out how.”
I expect more of the usual retarded 2000 Mules stuff and more forwarded emails from my boomer parents about how THOUSANDS of people born BEFORE 1850 participated. This stuff tends to be so stupid that it seems like it must be a deliberate distraction, but a lot of people keep falling for it. I don't discount the possibility of hard cheating (certainly the security measures aren't very strong) and I basically agree across the board with Darryl Cooper's take on stolen elections, but I am indeed not looking forward to the coping and seething.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
A US Airman lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli embassy.In the video while he walked to the gate, he explained that he is protesting the actions of Israel. As he burned, he yelled, "Free Palestine". He is now dead. Two questions from me about the incident:
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Why would anyone expect these kinds of stunts work at all? I would expect that this only generates sympathy from people that are already on your side. For a neutral observer, I don't get how it generates sympathy. For a committed opponent, I don't understand being disappointed that your adversaries are literally killing themselves. Is the efficacy purely in generating pressure from international media that wanted to pick that side anyway?
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How the hell do we have soldiers that are suicidally committed to opposing American allies? Seems bad.
Zooey Zephyr, a Montana State Representative has been censured for comments made regarding a bill state policy on gender transition services. Zephyr is now suing, as reported by the AP. There's much that could be discussed here, but this is the small-scale thread, and I want to do a quick survey on the aesthetics presented by Zephyr in this photo that seems intended to be iconic for Zephyr's supporters. What do you see? What feeling does that photo summon for you?
I'll be blunt - I see a ridiculous man, a parody of someone playing dress-up as a woman, attempting to evoke the imagery of the Civil Rights movement, but succeeding only in creating a repellant and somewhat pitiable facsimile thereof. I suspect that my ideological opponents on this are intended to see a brave woman, standing up to the bullies on the other side of the aisle. Do they see that? Sincerely and honestly? I don't know how I would ever be able to determine if they honestly see that or if they've just conditioned themselves to say that this is what they see.
This probably doesn't rise to the level of being a scissor image, but it's in that direction, not just polarizing due to different views, but having people literally processing the image differently.
Edit: Let's add another interesting piece of optics that I see going viral. I continue to be surprised that my opponents are embracing people that I think make them look maximally weird.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
When possible, wear long-sleeved shirts and long pants and skirts, which can provide protection from UV rays. If wearing this type of clothing isn’t practical, try to wear a T-shirt or a beach cover-up. Clothes made from tightly woven fabric offer the best protection. A wet T-shirt offers much less UV protection than a dry one, and darker colors may offer more protection than lighter colors. Some clothing is certified under international standards as offering UV protection.
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Should judges have any authority to impose gag orders?
I think not. If it's witness tampering, charge the appropriate crime. If it's obstruction of justice, charge appropriate crime. If it's interfering with government proceedings, charge the appropriate crime. If it's speech that nods in the direction of one of those but doesn't actually rise to the level of meriting a charge, tough shit, defendants do actually get to say mean things that aren't criminal.
I can recognize the difficult balancing act that some utterances would cause here, but ultimately just side with First Amendment rights dominating those considerations. Perhaps even more to the point, I don't trust judges to not thoroughly abuse their authority. To wit:
Practically speaking, it goes without saying that it's a terrible idea to talk shit about the court or prosecutor while your case(s) is pending.
Of course! I'm not dumb enough to do such a thing, but the idea that those that would affront a judge could be punished for offending rather than any actual criminal action is an affront to my sensibilities and leaves me disinclined to start granting additional judicial powers to remove constitutionally protected rights as they see fit. If we lived in a hypothetical world where Jack Smith was indeed engaging in a deranged witch-hunt and the judge was a biased, Trump-hating judge, it would be very bad to deny the defendant the ability to say so.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
Curiously, the two judges in the majority (Wynn and Thacker) are Obama appointees, whereas the one judge in dissent (Richardson) is a Trump appointee. As the preceding comment observes, the argumentation in the dissenting opinion is far better than that in the majority opinion.
I have to say, I do not find this curious. I have admitted previously to being legally unsophisticated and I remain so; in recent months, I've taken to reading more decisions than I had in the entirety of my life up to that point, and the experience has substantially shaped my view of left-leaning jurisprudence for the worse. There are, of course, decisions with sketchy logic running in either direction, but the number of times that I run into reasoning from left-leaning judges that aligns with that first comment you quote on the "bad man" theory of law is so, so much more frequent. Sotomayor and KBJ seem to have particular enthusiasm for explaining how a decision will have bad outcomes rather than focusing on whether it's, you know, legal and consistent with an ordinary reading of statute. For instances, [this Sotomayor dissent regarding Covid restrictions] or the recent KBJ perspectives on affirmative action. In contrast, Gorsuch seems the most likely of the justices to just read the text to mean what it literally means on ordinary reading.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Does this actually match any experience you personally have with trans people? While I admit to having limited first-hand experience, that limited experience is with people who made a sincere effort to transition across both cultural dimensions as well as physically. They don't go around shrieking at people, they actually don't seem to have interactions that involve anyone suggesting anything about their gender because they (mostly) look the part of their transition (notably, these are F->M, which does generally seem more physically convincing). When someone meets Mike, Mike doesn't have to insist up and down that they're totally a guy and explain their pronouns, because Mike has short hair, a beard, and tends towards flannel and ballcaps. Whatever the philosophical position might be on Mike's sex at birth, Mike really doesn't have to yell at people about the matter or make claims that seem completely misaligned with other people's observed reality.
Of course, I'm well aware of the public examples of histrionics, and the evident madness of quite a few non-passing trans people does complicate the conversation, but I think people like Mike are actually pretty analogous to stepmoms.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
I stand by my previous sentiments:
One thing that really helps keep it this way is the illegibility of whether there's anything substantively relevant in the documents. My prior is that most classified documents are wildly overclassified and that nothing much would happen if they were handled carelessly and illegally. When I hear that Biden and Trump have handled them carelessly and illegally, my first instinct is to ask, "OK, but does anyone actually care and was there anything actually important there?". That the answer tends to be, "can't tell you, it's top secret" allows people to form more or less whatever ideas they'd like about how important the documents actually are.
...
Nonetheless, I still conclude that I would not like officious bureaucrats to have meaningful leverage over Presidents on the matter of classified documents (even if they tell me that they're actually DOCUMENTS rather than any mere documents). Additionally, I will see little or no legible difference between officious bureaucrats panicking and asserting such authority over Presidents and bad actors in the bureaucracy asserting such authority for the sole purpose of power.
Perhaps the claim that it's related to national defense will result in the prosecution attempting to actually establish that there was something there that anyone should actually care about, but I expect to be pretty disappointed.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Well, this is embarrassing. I didn't realize 2000 Mules was more about harvesting than fake ballots or similar. I personally regard ballot harvesting as a form of corruption that obviously shouldn't be allowed.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
I unironically think land-owning was actually a pretty good Schelling Point, at least for state-level elections. The people who own land in a state have skin in the game and have demonstrated at least some level of competence and future orientation.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
Without the increased crime rates, race riots, and domestic terrorism of the 60's and 70's, America's cities would probably look much more similar to those in Europe.
The more I've learned about that era, the angrier I've become at the "Civil Rights" advocates and other leftists that implemented policies that destroyed American cities almost completely. This wasn't some force of nature, it was a set of deliberate choices by people that just hate bourgeois white culture and were happy to destroy it. There was always going to be some degree of shift and decline in Great Lakes cities that lost manufacturing, but the abject ruin that Detroit became wasn't a foregone conclusion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Was Neely choked to death?
...
Penny choked Neely unconscious, and he then later died.
This seems a bit like saying that someone wasn't stabbed to death, just stabbed until they collapsed from blood loss, after which they later died. Yeah, if you choke someone unconscious and they proceed to never wake up, they were choked to death. I don't give a shit about Neely, I'm on the side that assumes Penny was a good Samaritan that had no intention of doing any harm beyond restraining the violent lunatic that was threatening people, but I also don't really see what I'm getting from the distinction above.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
There's not a lot of fence-sitters when it comes to this question.
I'm a fence-sitter. The amount of material and disturbing nature of it is so utterly beyond the pale, so absolutely ridiculous, that it's impossible to just shrug it off as nothing. On the other hand, I still find it plausible that it's just art-school, shock-the-normies, absolutely cringe bullshit. If it's the latter, these people are merely gross and pathetic rather than unbelievably evil. I guess that's a pretty weak form of fence-sitting, in which the object of the conspiracy is definitely awful in some way, but it does make a pretty big difference when thinking about what sort of people are actually in the ruling class.
That MartyrMade thread you linked originally had a podcast episode associated with it, discussing the Pizzagate conspiracy, that I don't see on the Substack anymore. Hmmm...
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I think it's possible to criticize the article for potentially harboring a barely detectable prejudice in favor of Abrams
This would seem barely detectable a few years back, but it's absolutely glaring at this point. A similar article about a Republican candidate would absolutely spam phrases like "falsely claimed", "conspiracy theory", and "election denier" to describe Abrams and her refusal to admit that she lost in 2018. I guess I'm glad the NYT is at least giving a neutral-tone report on Abrams funneling millions of dollars to her buddy to do nothing much, but the difference in valence is unmistakable.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
This is probably because driving is treated as a "privilege" by the state.
Driving should be treated as a privilege. I'm more opposed to safetyism than the median person, but it still surprises me that we came up with a norm that operating one specific class of heavy machinery is basically a right that's hard to remove, even for individuals that are incompetent or repeatedly demonstrate that they will drive while inebriated. Tens of thousands of otherwise young, healthy people die in vehicular accidents annually and it remains an entirely niche issue to even think about traffic safety.
This doesn't get me to the point of favoring this particular sort of intrusion, but I generally think licensing is far too liberalized.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
Maybe I'm not a 'substantial person' but 5k would be a pretty painful loss for me.
While I am not @FiveHourMarathon and he may feel differently, the part that makes someone utterly disreputable isn't that losing $5K gambling would be a disaster, it's that they would bet $5K that they can't afford to lose.
To be honest though, I generally don't have much respect for people beyond a certain age that would have trouble coming up with $5K. Yes, I know, people have various extenuating circumstances and even many of the people that don't have those circumstances are basically decent people even if they're kind of fuckups financially. I am disinclined to treat them as "substantial" if they're 40 and can't afford to buy a nice watch if they wanted to though. Being broke indicates either a lack of ability or interest in earning a decent wage or a severe inability to exercise financial discipline and planning. The latter is worse than the former; someone that makes $200K/year and lives paycheck to paycheck is much more disreputable in my eyes than a guy that just doesn't really have a marketable skill.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
the ones who would still want to mask up, keep up restrictions
One thing that I think (or at least hope) comes from this is for the people who were more moderate to see that when the anti-lockdown people said "for how long?" and the Covid-cautious replied "as long as it takes", they really meant it. There have been a bunch of sardonic exchanges that opened with something like, "are you going to wear a mask the rest of your life?" and the answer is apparently that this is exactly the plan for people that take continue to take Covid seriously. Their retorts seem to be along the lines of "I also intend to continue wearing bike helmets and seatbelts", which is consistent with this just being something that they think should be a permanent feature of society going forward.
My hope is that this looks crazy enough to the median person that it is effectively politically impossible to mandate masks any time in the foreseeable future. Biden's statement that it's over seems consistent with that, but I tend to think politicians give whatever answer is consistent with the timing of elections rather than generally held principles.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways
Not to be melodramatic, but I am once again reminded of Solzhenitsyn:
If you are arrested, can anything else remain unshattered by this cataclysm?
But the darkened mind is incapable of embracing these dis placements in our universe, and both· the most sophisticated and the veriest simpleton among us, drawing on all life's experience, can gasp out only: "Me? What for?"
And this is a question which, though repeated millions and millions of times before, has yet to receive an answer.
Arrest is an instantaneous, shattering thrust, expulsion, somer sault from one state into another.
We have been happily borne-or perhaps have unhappily dragged our weary way-down the long and crooked streets of our lives, past all kinds of walls and fences made of rotting wood, rammed earth, brick, concrete, iron railings. We have never given a'thought to what lies behind them. We have never tried to pene trate them with our vision or our understanding. But there is where the Gulag country begins, right next to us, two yards away from us. In addition, we have failed to notice an enormous num ber of closely fitted, well-disguised doors and gates in these fences. All those gates were prepared for us, every last one! And all of a sudden the fateful gate swings quickly open, and four white male hands, unaccustomed to physical labor but none theless strong and tenacious, grab us by the leg, arm, collar, cap, ear, and drag us in like a sack, and the gate behind us, the gate to our past life, is slammed shut once and for all.
That's all there is to it! You are arrested!
And you'll find nothing better to respond with than a lamblike bleat: "Me? What for?"
That's what arrest is: it's a blinding flash and a blow which shifts the present instantly into the past and the impossible into omnipotent actuality. That's all. And neither for the first hour nor for the first day will you be able to grasp anything else.
Except that in your desperation the fake circus moon will blink at you: "It's a mistake! They'll set things right!"
When you're hauled in front of "Judge" Darkeh who articulates her spitting contempt for the American Constitution, the rational expectation would be that you're about to receive justice in a pretty similar fashion to what those victims of the Soviets received, but few of us ever learn that lesson, instead clinging to the hope that eventually there will be someone that sets things right.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
Scott was absolutely correct here in how it played out.
Not really, because we didn't actually get the generation being "radicalized by Trump being a bad president", we just got them radicalized by Trump being president, despite him not doing anything all that radical or harmful.
What I want doesn't really matter in any material sense, but I'm not going to base electoral politics on how whiny the loser will be about. I want Trump to win because I think he'll do some of the things I want a President to do and few of the things I don't want a President to do. My top priority by quite a bit is reducing the role of the federal administrative state in everyday life, which Trump's leanings and setup with groups like Project 2025 seem likely to do. His judicial appointments will also assist with deregulation and disempowering the discretion of petty bureaucrats. My other top priority is stanching the flow of immigrants, which Trump seems likely to do.
If you disagree with those positions, that's fine, but being willing to sign up for federal policies that you disagree with so that political obsessives whine less just seems kind of cowardly to me. You're getting crybullied!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
The whole thing just boils down to deontologists, consequentialists, and virtue ethicists failing to recognize that this is how other people think about morality, coupled with a layer of modern weirdness about just how destructive teenagers having sex is. The basic perspectives for those three branches are going to be:
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Deontology - Prostituting teenagers is awful, we have a duty to reject it and try to prevent it. The price doesn't matter, teenage prostitution is unacceptable.
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Consequentialist - Prostituting teenagers may harm them but receiving $10 million in the future helps someone a lot. This could be a significant improvement in total wellbeing and that's what to consider.
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Virtue ethicist - Do you really want to be the kind of guy that enables Jeffrey Epstein prostituting teenagers? The price doesn't matter, I'm not that guy.
I'm not clear what the problem is. Do you feel that it's just viscerally unfair that some people need to work and some people don't? That people who have wealth should have it confiscated until they're in a position of needing to work again? I promise, I'm not being deliberately obtuse here. Designing policies with the goal of enabling anyone willing to work to have a reasonably decent life seems like a good starting point to me, but that doesn't suggest that there wouldn't be or shouldn't be capital-holders that have arrived at a position where personal labor is no longer necessary for them to draw their living. If the problem is the unsustainability of the rate of return on capital, tweaking some of the more audacious tax policies seems like a plausible approach, but I would need to know what exactly we're trying to fix and what the goal is before really undertaking a discussion of where to go.
In the most pithy form - is retirement just plain immoral?
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