benmmurphy
6mo ago
i think giving any kind of attention to the shooters increases the probability of future shootings. i think there is very strong evidence that a similar thing happens with suicides. i'm not sure how big of an impact it is or if its worth the trade off to suppress such things but in a free society it is difficult to suppress such things.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
it seems to me that this kind of mass attack will always succeed to some extent. maybe it was made worse in this particular situation for a bunch of reasons but even if everything went right for the israelis i think hamas would have had some kind of success. unless you have some kind of massive DMZ and large permanent deployment of troops an enemy will always be able to surge at a critical point and have some short term success.
benmmurphy
7mo ago
No leaders said that the idea was divisive, would create special "classes" of citizens where some were more equal than others, and the new advisory body would slow government decision-making.
that sentence is kind of ambiguous. i guess the last 'and' makes the reading a bit more clear because you would expect that to be an 'or' if the 'No' at the start was not part of 'No leaders'.
benmmurphy
9mo ago
sam brinton must have read the alt-text on that comic
benmmurphy
1mo ago
I guess there are few mainstream politicians that believe in free speech as a principal. Most of them believe in free speech when restrictions on speech are used against them but happy to put forward restrictions on speech when they think it benefits themselves. Conservatives might look like they support free speech at the moment but its because they are the ones that mostly being screwed.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
Even if the petitioners win is it going to meaningfully impact what the government can do or are they just going to find work arounds like in the affirmative action decision. Presumably, the government is allowed to write to a newspaper and say I disagree with this OpEd/article here is our opinion on the matter as long as they make no demands or threats. Now if the courts say to the government you are not allowed to make requests for censorship then the government has the option to just ping the social media companies saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X our opinion is Y". Certainly, this is an improvement but maybe the end result ends up being the same with social media companies assuming there is some kind of implicit threat or demand. Though, I think some of the requests were already using a dodge around explicit censorship. For example they were saying, "BillyBob made this post stating X and this appears to violate your terms of service". So not explicitly asking them to censor BillyBob but bringing to the attention of the company that BillyBob may have been violating the terms of service for the social media site. If the court comes up with something to prevent this then maybe it will also be a solution to other work arounds the government might come up with.
benmmurphy
1mo ago
ubiquitous TLS + ESNI/ECH does make it harder to perform some forms of censorship. for example if someone controlling the network wants to ban you from a particular site hosted on cloudflare or another CDN then they will need to ban ESNI/ECH connections to the whole of the CDN. more people using TLS/etc increases the collateral damage from certain blocking technologies.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
68% of elite ivy league graduates support banning private air conditioning and non-essential travel to fight climate change? I just do not believe that, there's clearly something wrong with the poll.
i think this is a reasonable possibility. i've heard it claimed there is a strong social desirability bias when answering surveys and the 'correct' thing to do is to fight climate change. just because they answered positively in a survey doesn't mean they would actually support the policies if it came to a vote. the cheating question is very weird and I suspect somehow they worded the question without explicitly saying cheating and claimed they question meant cheating in their summary.
benmmurphy
2mo ago
in their opinion they also made a reference to the problem of congress being able to remove the disqualification which is something i brought up here on the motte: https://www.themotte.org/post/801/colorado-supreme-court-thread/172633?context=8#context
not exactly the same argument tho.
Its final sentence empowers Congress to “remove” any Section 3 “disability” by a two-thirds vote of each house. The text imposes no limits on that power, and Congress may exercise it any time, as the respondents concede. See Brief for Respondents 50. In fact, historically, Congress sometimes exercised this amnesty power postelection to ensure that some of the people’s chosen candidates could take office. But if States were free to enforce Section 3 by barring candidates from running in the first place, Congress would be forced to exercise its disability removal power before voting begins if it wished for its decision to have any effect on the current election cycle. Perhaps a State may burden congressional authority in such a way when it exercises its “exclusive” sovereign power over its own state offices. But it is implausible to suppose that the Constitution affirmatively delegated to the States the authority to impose such a burden on congressional power with respect to candidates for federal office. Cf. McCulloch v. Maryland, 4 Wheat. 316, 436 (1819) (“States have no power . . . to retard, impede, burden, or in any manner control, the operations of the constitutional laws enacted by Congress”).
benmmurphy
2mo ago
i thought 42 might have been a deliberate reference but it looks like they invited 43 and there was a no show. i'm sure these numbers are just coincidences and not deliberate numerology.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
coincidentally massie is talking about the pipe bomb on his twitter again: https://twitter.com/RepThomasMassie/status/1750114583476404350 and 5 days ago blaze media are claiming the person who found the pipe bomb at the DNC was a plains clothes capitol police officer.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
there is also potentially something weird with USD inflation. i've heard a large proportion of physical US currency (up to 50%) is held overseas. however, i'm not sure what % of the higher money supply is held by foreigners. its possible that foreigners could be helping to pay for a significant portion of seniorage which incentivises the US government and US voters to inflate the money supply.
benmmurphy
3mo ago
That would be higher than average because people tend to marry intra-race at a higher rate than the population mix.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
its interesting that part 2 mentions the pipe bombs. the fake pipe bombs were very weird. apparently, they were placed the night before and there is video of someone suspected of placing of the bombs but one of them (or both?) used a 60 minute kitchen timer as the pretend detonation source. now, its gets weirder because apparently someone 'found' one of the bombs at a point in time where the timing made it look like it would explode around the time of certification. this was partly covered by an interview in congress: https://judiciary.house.gov/media/press-releases/republicans-release-new-information-january-6-pipe-bomb-investigation and FBI Director Wray's testimony: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DaL5RM-ZYt0 the cell phone data from the area was also mysteriously corrupted which impeded any investigation.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
Probably, everyone is happy with the status quo. Even though it doesn't really make sense you can come up with a rationale why both Trump supporters and Trump detractors in Congress/Senate both don't want such a resolution. Trump detractors in the houses don't want it because their supporters would be unhappy they supported it (perhaps irrationally). Trump supporters in the houses don't want it because having the Colorado Supreme Court railroad Trump and then having the Supreme Court smack them down is good strategically. Maybe it would be good for Trump supporters if a vote was put forward, Trump supporters could support it but the vote still failed.
benmmurphy
4mo ago
It’s probably based off some narrow technical claim from an agency that is true. For example I’m guessing the number of electronic voting machines with no paper trail has decreased. So if you have a bunch of things you have been trying to improve and they have all improved since the last election and are the best they have ever been then you can claim it is the most secure ever. There might be other things that you don’t measure that have been going in a negative direction but because they aren’t part of the improvement plan they don’t exist.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
there is a good summary here as well: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/events/morgpie-topless-twitch-livestream
somehow i ended up in looking at this youtube channel: https://youtube.com/@hausofguns/videos but it has not been active for 7 years and a similar story for the guys twitter: https://twitter.com/HausofGuns. what do you think happened to the guy? it seems a bit weird that he just fell off the map.
-- this is just me being crazy. i guess maybe his business didn't work out. he still seems to be around.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
the situation is weird because the allegations are part of the text of the indictment but Trump is not actually being charged for incitement or anything else in regards to the Jan 6th riot. his lawyers tried to get that part of the indictment removed because they believed it was irrelevant and potentially prejudicial to a jury but the judge did not agree and let the text stand as-is. here is the text of his motion: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/24078250-motion-to-strike-inflammatory-allegations
The indictment includes repeated references to the actions of independent actors at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. See: ... The indictment does not charge President Trump with responsibility for any of these actions.
And here is the judges opinion for reference: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.158.0_1.pdf
An uncharitable reading as to why this text was included in the indictment could be so that third parties reporting on the indictment could muddle things for their audience and give the impression that Trump was being charged for the Jan 6th riots. I believe a similar thing may have happened with the statement by former intelligence officials about the Hunter Biden laptop. If you read the statement on the hunter biden laptop it doesn't actually say anything useful but other people could then portray the statement as saying something meaningful. The way the media works is kind of similar to chinese whispers but if you are aware of this then its possible to manipulate it for your benefit.
benmmurphy
5mo ago
riots are just a schelling point for dickheads
This is kind of how policing was meant to be historically in the UK as I understand it. Police were meant to be just citizens that were being paid to do a job but having no special powers. Even now I think citizens can bring private criminal prosecutions to court. The Peelian principles (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peelian_principles) article on Wikipedia has some of the background on this. Also, due to historical fears UK police are generally unarmed except for special units. However, I guess as time has gone on the UK has drifted from policing from consent to a more policing by the state model.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
also, if the US fights China how am I getting my new iPhone
benmmurphy
6mo ago
and suddenly all the open border people are policing the heritage of a people. to be fair i have no idea what your position on this issue is.
benmmurphy
6mo ago
i thought this was referred to as 'mood affiliation' in some circles but i'm not sure if that's the right term. maybe it's just confirmation bias. see: https://www.econlib.org/mood-affiliation-or-confirming-evidence/
sorry, i edited my post so you replied to the pre-edited version so it looks a bit odd. i think the original petitioners made the appeal but i'm not sure if they are addressing just the 14th amendment issue or the 1st amendment issue as well. i've seen in some media reports that trump wants to challenge the 1st amendment issue.
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