As others have indicated it's something of a floating signifier which, in the same vein as 'Black Lives Matter' is very useful for shutting down opposition without having to lay out a fully articulated position of your own.
If you raise any sort of critique or resistance you're clearly okay with trans children being harmed! Shame on you! Or we could say "protect all kids" which will probably be received about as well as "all lives matter." I kinda favor the term "protect kids" myself, but in that context the rhetoric loses most force because it's a completely unremarkable sentiment.
I do have my questions about how 'trans kids' are defined, since the whole debate these days seems to center around whether one's gender identity can be reliably ascertained at an early age. The use of the term 'kids' definitely implies that prepubescents are included in this group.
And of course what are they being protected from? Abuse? And if it's abuse, does that include from parents who are skeptical that their kids are actually gender dysphoric? Or maybe it's more a generalized 'protect their right to express their preferred identity (i.e. their right to transition).'
At which point, the statement 'protect trans kids' roughly translates to "ensure that children of all ages are permitted to have gender reassignment surgery on demand and without apology." And "over the objections of their parents, if necessary" is implied in there too.
Which I think is pretty damned controversial in mainstream discourse, so it remains more palatable to collapse it to "Protect Trans Kids" and let the onlookers guess at what you actually mean.
I ultimately think the goal is to have this particular rhetoric stretch to it's logical conclusion where children can be removed from their parents' care and undergo gender reassignment surgery without parental consent or even knowledge if some 'expert' is able to ascertain that the child is gender dysphoric, as this is the only true way to 'protect' trans children to the fullest extent possible. You have to be able to identify them all as early as possible and enable them to medically transition at the earliest opportunity and thus remove any social or legal barriers that might prevent these kids from transitioning.
The actual implications of how that might all work in practice I will leave unexamined for the moment.
faceh
11mo ago
If you left race entirely out of it, there is zero doubt that it is MORE plausible for a gang of teens to randomly confront a female nurse to pressure her into giving up a rental bike (which I gather don't cost much to rent) than the reverse.
Because the story that some random pregnant nurse decided to intentionally confront a gang of teenagers to steal one of their bikes is utterly absurd on it's face. Not impossible, but in the world we live in, 99/100 times you bet the other way.
Bringing race into it doesn't update one's priors that much, but it definitely updates them in the same direction.
faceh
1yr ago
If anything it's the opposite. The progressives are running scared. For every year since 1972, that's for half a century now, Gallup has run a poll on institutional trust that asks people to what degree they expect the media, the government, academia, etc... to report facts "fully, accurately, and fairly". The available answers are; a Great deal, a Fair amount, Not very much, and Not at all. Well the results for 2022 have just been released and people who answered "not at all" for trust in mass media is at 38%. This has been characterized by the talking heads, and many rationalists as "a crisis of sense making" but I don't really see it that way. Sounds more like healthy skepticism if you ask me.
And this hasn't actually caused the progressive agenda to slow down one iota.
Indeed, it has accelerated in the past couple decades, even as institutional trust declined rapidly!
I think the point is that evidence that people are skeptical and resistant to institutional control is weakly associated with the conclusion "Progressives are in a materially weaker position than they were 50 years ago."
If the progressives/elites/establishment are less trusted now, they are still capable of exercising increasingly naked power to bring about the outcomes they prefer, and they are still capable of preventing red tribe from actually using the levers of power if they gain access to them.
Progressive voices, even when completely, utterly, batshit insane and called out as such, are still elevated and given positions of authority over policies that effect 'normal' people. Any nominally right-wing voice that crosses a few particular lines is nigh-instantly silenced and in some cases all their possible platforms are obliterated in one go (shoutout to Alex Jones as the canary in this coal mine).
Will this always remain the case? Not necessarily, but the idea that a progressive tide is somehow receding and leaving room for right-wingers to rise doesn't seem borne out by the evidence.
I suppose you can defend the heavy-handedness if your overriding priority is primarily to tamp down on the handful of actual voter fraud that takes place.
Perhaps we can gain some insight into Desantis' mindset by looking at the 2018 election:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018_Florida_elections
Desantis won by the veritable skin of his teeth by 33,000 votes out of 8 million cast.
Rick Scott won his Senate race by about 10k votes.
Nikki Fried, the ONLY Democrat to win an executive office, won by 6,000 votes.
These are outcomes that could be swung, potentially, by one county in the state being manipulated or screwing up a count.
And guess what happened in Broward County in 2018?
Half of Broward County’s election precincts reported more ballots cast than the number of voters. Backlogs in processing mail ballots snarled reporting of results.
Confusing ballot design may have led thousands of voters to inadvertently skip an important contest.
Money was wasted on unneeded blank ballots, which weren’t adequately tracked and were eventually destroyed.
After election day, auditors found the recount was plagued by poor planning, inadequate staffing and equipment, and poor quality control.
And the money quote:
“We conclude that the November 2018 election was not efficiently and effectively conducted,” Melton wrote in to county commissioners. “Based on the totality of these issues, we are unable to provide assurance over the accuracy of the November 2018 election results as reported.”
Oh, and lets not forget that Rick Scott very directly claimed the election was being stolen. He and Stacey Abrams were two years ahead of Trump on applying this tactic.
Broward singlehandedly delayed the final outcome of multiple races and from the look of things had gaping holes in their system that COULD have been exploited. Oh, and it's heavily and reliably a blue county.
Actually, Palm Beach County also delayed it. Also another heavily blue area.
One of Desantis' first actions upon taking office was removing and replacing the Broward and Palm Beach County Election supervisors.
And, 'strangely,' Broward and Palm Beach County had no discrepancies or delays in the 2020 election. Further, Florida went more heavily Republican than usual, including more towards Trump than expected.
Broward County has almost 2 milllion citizens, this is not a small podunk area that we're talking about. Palm Beach has 1.5 million.
And while Desantis is going to walk to an easy victory this time, I can't imagine he wants to allow ANY room for doubt in the sanctity of the election should any races come down to the wire.
So in light of all this, perhaps it makes sense why Desantis might conclude that arresting 20 people is worth it for the possible upside of dissuading electoral shenanigans throughout the state?
Is dissuading a handful of bad actors worth putting some innocent people in jail? Worth dissuading large swathes of the population from legally voting? If so, say so.
I dunno. I think he cares very little that those twenty guys got misled, but cares a lot about ensuring he doesn't have to worry as much about catching electoral fraud after the fact.
So this action is a cheap way to possibly pre-emptively solve an issue that could arise.
Going along on the premise that because voter fraud has not been detected in the past and therefore is not likely to occur in the future seems like an unwise tactic in an environment as adversarial as this one.
It's not like there's not ample historical precedent of organized efforts to fraudulently influence election outcomes. Oh, also recent precedent.
In June 2022, the defendant admitted in court to bribing the Judge of Elections for the 39th Ward, 36th Division in South Philadelphia in a fraudulent scheme over several years. Myers admitted to bribing the election official to illegally add votes for certain candidates of their mutual political party in primary elections. Some of these candidates were individuals running for judicial office whose campaigns had hired Myers, and others were candidates for various federal, state, and local elective offices that Myers favored for a variety of reasons. Myers would solicit payments from his clients in the form of cash or checks as “consulting fees,” and then use portions of these funds to pay election officials to tamper with election results.
Just because it's 'rare' doesn't mean, when it happens, it won't have significant impact.
Can't imagine why you'd want to chance it in a state where races can be extremely close.
faceh
3mo ago
I can say that at the state level, there is a tactic law enforcement uses with regards to confidential informants/insiders/undercover officers to avoid blowing their cover is to put them through a prosecution that inevitably results in probation, on paper, which means as long as they don't get arrested again they'll never be in a jail but at least it looks like they got punished along with the rest.
To be a proper Bayesian I'd need to hear the base rate for how many J6 Defendants got probation sentences, but this does nudge up my belief that Ray Epps was, in some sense or another, involved with the Feds.
I don't hesitate to say that the Bruen decision was a masterstroke, especially in the context of advancing an Originalist interpretation of the Constitution.
It 'sneaks' in the idea that the rules mean what they people who wrote them intended them to mean, since presumably the people who wrote the Constitution did so with the intention of making it comply with those other rules and regulations that existed around the time all of this was written, and further if they tolerated a particular rule after the Constitution was ratified, you can certainly argue they didn't intend for the Constitution to contradict those rules, regardless of any ambiguities that may exist.
I'm more of a pure textualist myself, but I do agree with the idea that the rules were written with a particular meaning in mind, and that the proper way to 'change' the rules is... to follow the procedure for changing them. So taking the approach that the rules can just be reinterpreted over and over again, especially in ways that generate greater ambiguity is, in my view, completely antithetical to the idea of having written rules in the first place.
And just about the only way to reduce ambiguity is to ground your interpretive standard on something firm enough to form a valid premise for further legal reasoning. Yes you will never be able to reach the perfect a priori premises from which all else will flow, but anything that doesn't at least directly build off of the original text is way too ad hoc to provide a predictable/reliable jurisprudence, especially as your system of interlocking precedents gets more complex. In my genuine opinion, anyway. This is why I agree with Dobbs overturning Roe irrespective of my beliefs about abortion.
So in short, Bruen's requirement that government has to demonstrate that their restrictions on firearms rights are in keeping with traditional, long-accepted regulations going back to (ideally) the original founding of the country puts the burden of proof in the right place. The State doesn't have a heavy burden, it's just a very restrictive framework to work within... which to me is the point of having those restrictions.
And if we (i.e. the people of the country) can't agree that looking at the rules in place when our Nation was formally founded is at least a guideline for figuring out what the actual words in the document meant, then we're fundamentally questioning the validity of the document itself. Which is fine with me, but for some reason people want to maintain the validity of the document whilst changing the rules it contains to suit their purposes.
If Bruen is carried through to its logical conclusion, we should probably expect that we'll be getting legal machine guns (new ones, not grandfathered) in the not-too-distant future.
If the logic behind Bruen is applied to other aspects of the Constitution, a lot of precedents that are nearly a century old are potentially on the chopping block. And oh boy Justice Thomas seems positively GIDDY to start swinging that axe.
And being clear, I think this creates an interesting double-bind if you want to keep some of those precedents in place. "You can't touch these cases, they've been around for decades!" is easily rebutted by "the standard we're now using to examine those cases goes back a whole century or so before those cases were decided, so if age is the question, this standard wins." You'd have a hard time arguing "the older a judicial precedent is the more deference the Court should grant it!" AND say "but times change and the law has to change with it."
Hence the progressive Justices tend to appeal to more nebulous concepts when reaching a decision, allowing for reconsideration later.
The win for the left here was to house the migrants for a while, refuse to raise a fuss about it, quietly find new accommodations for them and send them along, meanwhile make certain changes to ensure that no more migrants flights could land without forewarning.
The actions they're taking seem to be revealing that they REALLY take it personally when the GOP manages to slip a trick by them that doesn't get leaked in advance and so puts them on the defensive. As well it should, since this indicates that Desantis has REALLY solid OpSec, unlike Trump. This is also keeping the issue of illegal immigration on the forefront of the national discourse, which may be preferable to them to avoid talking about the economy but also makes the issues at the border more salient for voters.
This is free publicity keeping Desantis in the national spotlight. He doesn't really need it to win his election this year, that's all but a foregone conclusion.
But they're absolutely helping him build his legend for 'future endeavors' and they're insane if they think he didn't account for this particular reaction and doesn't have a countermove already prepped.
But as we have seen, the left's rule these days is that they NEVER have to take an L, even when doing so is the sensible route. Doubling and tripling down to prove they're not owned is the tactic du jour.
See also: the Supreme Court handing down a ruling that strengthens 2A protections and New York and California immediately implementing more firearms restrictions which are mostly going to be struck down (and strengthen the legal precedent) and do little but piss in the eye of the pro-gunners who might otherwise vote Blue. Not to mention Biden talking up an assault weapons ban.
Lex is also a fucking moron throughout the whole conversation, he can barely even interact with Yud's thought experiments of imagining yourself being someone trapped in a box, trying to exert control over the world outside yourself, and he brings up essentially worthless viewpoints throughout the whole discussion.
So yeah. This was the first time I ever listened to/watched one of Fridman's interviews. He seemed to burst onto the scene out of nowhere around a year ago. And everything I gathered from secondhand testimony and snippets of his content, and his twitter feed, led me to make an assumption:
The guy is basically trying to bootstrap himself to become the Grey-Tribe version of Joe Rogan.
And after hearing this interview, I updated MASSIVELY in favor of that model. It wasn't quite like he's just cynically booking 'big name' guests who appeal to the nerdy corners of the internet, and doesn't care about the actual quality of discussion. He appears to be making an effort.
Yet his approach to the interview seems to be MUCH less based on engaging with the thoughts of the guest but more pressing them on various buzzword-laden 'deep' questions to see if they'll give him a catchy soundbite or deep-sounding 'insight' on a matter that is, to put it bluntly, pseudospiritual. He's in there asking if 'consciousness' is an important feature of intelligence and whether that is what makes humans 'special' and if we could preserve conciousness in the AGI would that help making it friendly? Like kinda playing with the idea that there's something metaphysical (he would NEVER use the term supernatural I'm sure) and poorly understood about how human thought processes work that gives them a higher meaning, I guess?
And EY has basically written at length explaining his belief that consciousness isn't some mysterious phenomena and it is in fact completely explainable in pure reductionist, deterministic, materialist terms without making any kind of special pleading whatsoever, and thus there's no mystical component that we need to 'capture' in an AGI to make it 'conscious.'
As you say, his blatant dodge on the AI box questions AND, I noticed, his complete deflection when EY literally asked him to place a bet on whether there'd be a massive increase in funding for AI alignment research due to people 'waking up' to the threat (you know, the thing EY has spent his life trying to get funding for) betrays a real lack of, I dunno, honest curiosity and rigor in this thought process? Did the guy read much of EY's writings before this point?
Its almost the same shtick Rogan pulls where he talks to guests (Alex Jones for example) about various 'unexplained' phenomena and/or drug use and how that shows how little we really know about the universe, "isn't that just crazy man?" But avoiding the actual spiritualist/woo language so the Grey Tribe isn't turned off.
At least the guys in the Bankless Podcast noticed right away they were beyond their depth and acted more like a wall for EY to bounce his thoughts off.
As for EY.
Man. I think the guy is actually a very, very talented writer and is clearly able to hold his own in a debate setting on a pure intellectual level, he's even able to communicate the arguments he's trying to make in an effective manner (if, unlike Lex, the other party is conversant in the topics at hand).
He even has an ironic moment in the interview, saying "Charisma isn't generated in the liver, it's a product of the brain" or some such. And yet, he does not seem to have done much beyond the bare minimum to assuage the audience's "Crank detector." Its not clear that his persuasive powers, taken as a whole, are really up to the task required to win more people to his side.
Of course, for those only listening in rather than watching, that won't matter.
I'm not saying EY should just bite the bullet and work out, take some steroids, get 'jacked,' wear nice suits, and basically practice the art of hypnotizing normies in order to sneak his ideas past their bullshit detectors.
But... I'm also kinda saying that. He KNOWS about the Halo Effect, so within the boundaries set for him by genetics he should try to optimize for CHA. Doubly so if he's going on a large platform to make a last-ditch plea for some kind of sanity to save the human race. MAYBE a trilby isn't the best choice. I would suggest it would be rational to have a professional tailor involved.
But I do grok that the guy is pretty much resigned to the world he's been placed in as a fallen, doomed timeline so he probably sees any additional effort to be mostly a waste, or worse maybe he's just so depressed this is the best he can actually bring himself to do. And it is beyond annoying to me when his 'opponents' focus in on his tone or appearance as reasons to dismiss his argument.
And to make a last comment on Fridman... he clearly DOES get that CHA matters. His entire look seems engineered to suggest minimalistic sophistication. Sharp haircut, plain but well-fitted suit, and of course the aforementioned buzzwords that will give the audience a little bit of a tingle when they hear it, thinking there's real meaning and insight being conveyed there.
I think to me, the 'problem' is the increasing dissonance between the signal that young women seem to be intentionally sending, and the actual reaction they have to anyone whom responds to that signal at 'face value.'
Throughout most of history, okay, being precise I'll limit it to the last century, wearing clothing that showed more skin than the average person in that area was almost universally a sign of sexual availability. It was considered, largely, an invitation to approach (politely) and engage in a repartee that had a nontrivial chance of ending in sexual contact, or at least a peek at the goods and a pleasant mental image to store in the spank bank.
So in other words, wearing a skimpy bikini in contexts where a bikini is not standard attire (so contexts other than the beach, pool, strip club) is basically saying "please pay attention to me, and if you find me sexually appealing I am open to being approached."
You can of course have guys that read that message into almost ANY clothing a female wears, I'm not trying to pretend that the messaging mismatch is the sole fault of the sender.
There are other messages that could be mixed in there but I daresay they're completely dominated by THAT one in terms of how men will interpret it.
Except that if you were to take that message at face value and approach, you're not just more likely than not to experience rejection, you're probably going to get ridiculed if you don't match some arbitrary criteria, and in the absolute worst case you'll get dragged on social media.
Dave Chapelle said it best: "You are wearing a whore's uniform." Actual prostitutes wear these outfits specifically to attract clients, and they aren't engaging in false advertising, you CAN get sexual contact with them if you approach. And have money.
But increasingly, especially with the way dating apps currently work and the seeming prevalence of Onlyfans, women are sending out messages that are, I'd guess, intended for reception by a very small subset of the actual male population, and while they're willing to accept attention from the remaining contingent, it'd be better if they had fullish control over who they were required to interact with, and can accept material support from ones they aren't interested in and pursue the ones they are.
And in a world where women are empowered to wear whatever they want and control who they can respond to at will, then there's literally no reason for them not to send out the LOUDEST, MOST BLARING signal they can even if it is to the detriment of the vast majority of onlookers.
The one big problem with looking at prices by themselves is that they're a function of demand AND supply.
And so when you see a plunge in price, it's worth trying to notice if it is due to an increasing abundance of something, or a sudden drop in the demand for the thing. And why the demand might decrease.
And the big thing I notice is that European Manufacturing is decreasing in relative and absolute terms.
So it seems like a completely plausible interpretation for an overall decrease in energy prices is that manufacturers are shutting down and less stuff is being produced and thus there's less demand for energy inputs... even if the amount of available energy remains relatively constant.
Pretty similar to how gas prices fell hard in 2020 BECAUSE FEWER PEOPLE WERE DRIVING CARS.
So if you completely ignored anything else that happened that year, and just tracked the gas prices, you'd say "hah, anyone thinking we were in an energy crisis are stupid!"
But anyone actually living through 2020 would note that they couldn't really enjoy the low gas prices because they were literally unable to work or vacation or do various things they would normally buy gas for.
Economic activity being reduced is generally a bad thing even if it means we see energy surpluses.
I strongly suspect we're seeing a similar impact here, which will shake out over the next year or so.
Also, you might notice that the price of Bud Light is at all-time lows too but it sure ain't because we've made breakthroughs in light beer productivity.
faceh
1yr ago
I'm not sure how the answer isn't soaring corporate profits.
If corporations could maximize their profits at their leisure with simple policy changes, it's awful convenient timing that they started right around when Covid hit, isn't it?
And let's ignore all the companies going under/declaring bankruptcy:
Does that seem like maybe the causal arrow doesn't point the way you're implying?
The whole "corporate greed" explanation doesn't work because corporate greed has been a constant for decades, and massive inflation is more transitory and recent.
We need to examine what changed.
I always get amused, darkly, when these people happily place benefit of the doubt on the person demonstrating their disregard for other people's interests and safety. The guy asking for $100 is assumed to have a nigh-angelic nature, while the other person must be either greedy or murderous to refuse?
Other forms as well:
"So what if they broke into your house? They just want your stuff!"
"If someone tries to take your car, let them. It gets worse if you fight back!"
"Shoplifting is a victimless crime! If someone needs something so badly that they'll steal it, it's probably better to let them go."
There are certain lines that are generally understood that, if crossed, means other people will assume you mean them harm or otherwise pose a threat. And they ain't going to try to read your mind to figure out if you are merely crazy or desperate or in need or have the will to do them grievous bodily injury or even kill.
And as soon as I've updated to believing that you pose a significant risk of harm to me or a loved one, the calculation in my mind isn't a binary between "Pay $100 or strangle them to death." Its "Do I have to fight this guy? Can I escape? What will he do if I try to walk away? Does he have a weapon?" and "how quickly can I incapacitate him?"
I'm reasoning under uncertainty here. If I thought that handing over $100 would be guaranteed to de-escalate the situation, and the guy would go on his way and bother me no more maybe that's the better option.
But there's literally no way for me to know that, so I have to work off the evidence I have in front of me, which is someone acting erratically and making demands which is evidence that they are probably dangerous, and may escalate if I try to placate them.
So yeah, fuck false dilemmas.
Leftists have long claimed that the statement "It's OK to be white" doesn't mean only what it appears to based on a literal reading, but is in fact a white supremacist dog-whistle.
I was around when this stuff first came up.
The whole reason it became a dog whistle is because leftists were and are categorically unable to just say "yes, that is correct" when faced with that statement.
Which was the reason it was deployed in the first place. If lefties/SJWs were capable of reacting to this statement as if it were an uncontroversial nonissue, it would have no power whatsoever. Anytime they want, the lefties can take this 'debate' completely off the table.
But they cannot agree to the statement "It's okay to be white" because that runs counter to their ideological tenets. And so they react poorly to it in a way that is completely disproportionate to the actual semantic content of the phrase. Their interpretation of the phrase is where the controversy comes from, so it's only 'white supremacist' to a particular point of view that is not universal.
So sure, you can characterize it as a dog whistle, but it's a whistle that is only audible to lefties and the only reason it is used by far-righties is because the left erected the framework within which the statement is controversial.
faceh
1yr ago
Really says something about how unpopular his opponent(s) were, doesn't it?
Imagine how bad things have to get for voters to actually be willing to vote for the guy over various experienced political actors.
Like, there really was an undercurrent of loathing of the political class that Trump tapped into.
a major pandemic, mishandled in some critical regards.
Hah, I think that's a fair phrasing in context but holy cow does it undersell the damage this mishandling did to institutional trust across the board.
The pandemic became politicized almost immediately, the government seemed to have very little plan for a structured response once "two weeks to flatten the curve/stop the spread" was done, guidance from the CDC was ambiguous or flat-out contradictory at times, the FDA was responsible for delaying all kinds of reasonable measures for responding to the crisis, and at no point did anyone in any position of authority admit to making a mistake or otherwise being incorrect about it.
And that last point I think is where the focus should be. Because across all of those previous grievous institutional failures he mentioned, you'd be hard pressed to name any authority figure who paid any significant personal cost for their role in the events. The Iraq war, the 2008 crisis, the botched Afghanistan withdrawal just last year. A point of comparison I sometimes seen brought up is Iceland, which actually put bankers on trial for fraud stemming from the 2008 meltdown and put many in jail, vs. in the U.S. where they got bailouts and golden parachutes. I have no clue as to how justifiable those convictions were, I just note that they happened.
It really starts to look like the task of classical liberalism is mostly spreading around blame and responsibility enough that no particular individual need be held accountable for any failures. And in the process, giving cover to the people who made the mistakes, or lied, or otherwise created huge failures and yet.... were allowed to continue to hold power and continue to make mistakes.
"Oh but you can vote out politicians and hold them accountable that way." Sure. And then they retire to a cushy lifestyle often paid millions for book deals and speaking tours and may even get to continue to have a say in public affairs. And classical liberals find this just peachy because 'peaceful transition of power' is important and once someone exits the political arena they are free to enrich themselves, right?
I think the "New Right" seems to get one thing correct, albeit by accident: its the need for reintroducing serious skin in the game for the powers that be. In their mind this seems to imply mass arrests, trials, and hopefully prison or possibly execution of 'traitors' to the country. I think this implies a government that is a bit more tyrannical than we'd like.
If I thought there was one solution that might actually improve our existing institutions and MIGHT be within the real of political reality, it would be the introduction of actual consequences for malfeasance on the part of public officials. Some personal stakes that actually makes them have to care about the actual impacts their policies have and that they can't escape merely by leaving or switching offices.
Note, he is using a fairly broad definition for his "New Right" concept:
In its stead are rising alternatives that don’t yet have a common name. Some are called “national conservatism,” and some (by no means all) strands are pro-Trump, but I will refer to the New Right. My use of the term covers a broad range of sources, from Curtis Yarvin to J.D. Vance to Adrian Vermeule to Sohrab Ahmari to Rod Dreher to Tucker Carlson, and also a lot of anonymous internet discourse. Most of all I am thinking of the smart young people I meet who in the 1980s might have become libertarians, but these days absorb some mix of these other influences.
Maybe Classical Liberals need to absorb a bit in return. After all, I thought the great strength of the classical liberals was the ability to identify and implement good or innovative ideas from elsewhere. I don't see how implementing rules, procedures, or institutions that hold authority figures directly accountable for their decisions violates any of the rules of liberalism.
I feel this goes doubly for sexuality, too. Defining someone by who they prefer to have sex with feels reductive in the extreme. Yes, it is an aspect of their personality as an individual. No, they (probably) shouldn't be discriminated against for it. They also shouldn't require public recognition of it in order to feel fully validated and functional.
And it gets really absurd when they start naming concepts of sexuality that have been accepted for nigh-centuries as if they've discovered and elevated them for the first time. "Demisexual" meaning someone who doesn't form attraction from mere physical observation but from getting to know someone deeply? My friend that used to just be called 'not being shallow.' It is very, very unclear why this needs to be recognized as a unique sexuality that defines you as a person. Don't even get me started on "Sapiosexuality."
I happen to like ample-sized breasts on my possible sexual partners. I don't go around calling myself a 'mammosexual' who only feels attraction to persons with big breasts.
I call myself a 'boob man' and leave it at that. And I wouldn't bring it up in any conversation where it wasn't obviously relevant and appropriate. And it doesn't even go very far in describing my preferences anyway!
I'm going to take something completely unintended from this article and ask:
Hasn't the official narrative for the past couple decades been that the reason schools in the U.S. underperform is due to lack of funding?
And thus, shouldn't the suggested solution to Yeshivas underperforming state requirements be to give them more money?
I could swear that the argument regarding, e.g. Baltimore, St. Louis, and yes, New York was that there was simply a large gap between how much money the schools needed and how much they actually received.
Perhaps it is fair to peek into how that money is being spent and closely examining the type and quality of instruction being provided to judge the value of such spending?
I'm not trying to make any larger point with this besides noting how interesting it is that the NYT takes up a story which tacitly admits that funding is, itself, not the end-all be-all for improving education outcomes, as the state tends to measure such outcomes.
If the fear is that organized groups with goals orthogonal to those expected of the school system may be seizing too much control and funneling that money towards priorities other than education on the topics society generally considers important, then we can certainly open this debate up to other groups with similar power.
4chan was massively toxic but the anonymity and completely ephemeral nature of the threads meant you could just... walk away and nothing would follow you.
No long-term social consequences. No need to worry that someone would e-mail your boss (well, minimal, if they captured your personal info it could be merciless). You could get trolled into an incandescent rage and then the thread would fall off the board and that was that.
The current version of social media is putting your personal identity next to every opinion you ever uttered and storing it for years on end, often making it trivial to search it up later.
Which lends itself to people policing themselves and each other more heavily, and empowers targeted, relentless bullying.
faceh
5mo ago
I don’t really see how a DeSantis or a Ramaswamy presidency would amount to anything either.
Desantis would be bringing over a seasoned and loyal team from his Tenure as Florida governor, and a knowledge of how to use the powers of an executive office in a precise manner intended to bring about specific results in short order.
A huge part of Trump's issue was finding people both willing to serve on his staff and would be loyal enough to carry out his wishes in a competent manner. I expect this would hurt him in a second term.
Part of Desantis mythos is based on the fact that prior to taking office he did a long read into the entire 'rulebook' of what authority he actually possesses as Florida Governor and then, day one, flexing certain powers that had been long unused by the Governor to immediately establish himself as the new boss, and get doubters in line. Then he proceeded to strategically use those same powers in a judicious manner whenever it was needed.
Presumably he'd bring the same tactics to the Presidency.
Now, in Florida he had the benefit of full GOP control of the legislative branch to back up any decision he made. So unless that also applies to the 2024 election then those same assumptions might not carry over. And of course the Federal Congress is a different animal altogether.
Suffice it to say, Desantis at least recognizes the nature of the threat and the size of the task and is capable of both creating and carrying out a plan to deal with it with the assistance of other competent staff who aren't going to turn on him the very instant they leave the administration.
I'm not sure going from being the Mayor to the third largest city or a District Attorney to teaching at a college is failing up.
Let us be clear: he's a "founding executive director" for a program at a Law School Ranked NUMBER 10 IN THE COUNTRY, and probably making around $300,000/year if he's paid similar to their professors. He was making About $140,000 at his previous job.
EDIT: He was making $210,000 in 2023
Calling it "teaching at a college" is GROSS understatement.
Failing.
Upward.
Teaching his tactics and ideas that have already failed in practice (although perhaps not by his definition), no less! The message here is "we don't care that your ideas got roundly rejected when actually implemented, we want to teach a whole new generation to do the exact same thing everywhere!" Literally ENDORSING the ideas that the people who actually had to endure them decided to reject.
And in all likelihood, this is just a temporary position and he'll be called up to some other high position of authority in a few years. It is completely possible that a future Democratic president appoints him as head of the DOJ, because why not?
I think it's pretty unreasonable to expect one term politicians to sink into ignominy.
I think it is unreasonable for politicians whose track record demonstrates they're incapable of leading well to be given a position teaching leadership. But of course her entire claim to fame is being the first LGBT and Black Female Mayor of Chi town, so it's easy to explain this all as simply keeping her around as a useful example of how well they treat their people so long as they check the right boxes.
It really wouldn't do to throw her under the bus if they're trying to claim they're committed to diversity and inclusion even at the expense of maintaining functional institutions.
It is GENUINELY FARCICAL at this point, when the voters express their intense displeasure and yet the elites decide that such outcomes don't matter and simply shuffle a failed politician off to a position where they don't need voter approval to keep their job, making them EVEN MORE INSULATED than before.
I'm not asking for them to 'fade into ignominy,' just... go away? Like, you had your shot, you blew it. Go try something else. Maybe come back after you've had some time to contemplate and come up with better ideas, beg forgiveness, see if they'll let you make another go of it.
Being a high ranking politician is low paid compared to the other options available to those with the skills and connections to get elected, and attracts considerably more unpleasant scrutiny and stress.
What other options do they have? Be explicit. If you lack any technical skills or knowledge, if your background is in law or activism, and if you've spent most of your career in the public sector, how can you expect to thrive in a private sector job without a truckload of nepotism?
What high-paying role would you slide into that ISN'T directly related to your connections in government?
I think you're missing the part of the equation where political positions bring significant status and often power over some particular area of interest, which can usually be converted into renumeration, and can definitely be used to push forward you own ideological goals even if you don't personally benefit. Especially if you lack any real talents that might get you such status outside of the halls of government.
The overarching issue is that no matter how much damage an elite causes through their decisions, no matter how foreseeable that damage was, no matter how incompetent and unsuited for their position they are, the system as it currently operates does not allow them to actually suffer in any way that matters. There's no 'feedback loop' or filter that catches bad elites early on and keeps them from advancing to positions of greater power or enacts harsh consequences when needed to dissuade others from misbehavior.
This is exactly what Nassim Taleb was getting at in his book. We don't just want properly aligned incentives, we want sufficient negative incentives that bad actors are deterred from entering critical positions, and bad actors that slip through are filtered out rather than sticking around indefinitely, causing increasing damage by their mere presence.
Elites are basically acting with impunity because they've got a safety net for their wealth, and status below which they cannot fall. If you crack into the ranks of the elite, there is literally all upside available to you and no downside, so your decisions need not consider the needs of anyone outside your bubble.
If the worst possible outcome for screwing up an entire fucking city is you get to teach at one of the pre-eminent educational institutions in the country making a comfy six figure salary, what possible motivation is there to take actions that will make things better for others when you could instead focus on enriching yourself and boosting your cronies' careers to create a self-perpetuating wealth siphoning machine that allows you to live the good life regardless of what happens to everyone?
This is what happens virtually EVERYWHERE ELSE in history when the incentives become so asymetric. We're just at the point where it is impossible to hide and ignore, and they're quite openly favoring themselves to the point that they consider voter sentiment irrelevant to the operation of government.
The situation with Trump's latest indictment is also indicative of the issue. If mishandling classified docs is indeed a criminal offense to be punished, regardless of whether there was any harm resulting, then we KNOW both Hillary Clinton and, eventually, Joe Biden should face the exact same consequences.
But they won't.
They know they won't.
We know they won't.
We and they know there's no mechanism available to us through which we can impose consequences within the system they control.
Everyone who sees this happen is going to make certain calculations based on this knowledge. I expect the elites will realize that as long as they don't upset the gravy train as Trump tried to, they are protected. The proles, however...
Lots I could say about that officer, but from the culture war perspective:
Just last week there were some interviews released regarding the Uvalde shooting and discussion about how they were allegedly scared to go in because the shooter had an AR-15, making it too big a threat to them. Apparently some claimed this was a sufficient excuse.
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/20/uvalde-shooting-police-ar-15/
As per usual, gun control is the proposed remedy.
Can't think of a greater refutation to that argument than this very video, where decisive action and coordinated aggression ended the threat quickly.
There's really no reason to be surprised that utilitarians could be right-wing if you accept that some people will genuinely end up having different terminal values by which they calculate utility.
There is also a strong intellectual tradition of objecting to centralized government actions on the basis of their pure inability to deliver superior results compared to simply leaving things alone and declining to act at all. On top of the occasional tendency to genocide, wage wars of conquest, and steal from their own population. China is currently doing a genocide, Russia is doing a war of conquest, and seems both Lebanon and Sri Lanka governments were robbing their citizens blind, so these are clearly not relics of the past.
Some observed problems that government programs tend to contribute or be vulnerable to:
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Increasing fragility
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Black swans
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Unintended consequences
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Calculation problems
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Lack of skin in the game (i.e. who suffers consequences for failure?)
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Principal-agent problems
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Regulatory capture
to name a few. Most of these have to do with the pure lack of reliable information about the sectors they're trying to govern and the inability to effectively use that information towards the best ends.
Most of these can be solved or mitigated by decentralizing and localizing governance, rather than depending on a single 'point of failure' which can drag everyone down.
In short, there's a fallacy that often occurs when analyzing most government-sponsored programs where the costs are hidden but the benefits are obvious. One of the scarier things about government is it's ability to shove those costs into the medium-term future so nobody in the present notices them OR to slough them off onto one particular subset of society so that anyone outside that subset doesn't really care about the costs and ignores them. Governments which have to periodically win elections particularly have an incentive to do this so as to maintain their rule.
Lets use the obvious example with all those direct 'welfare' payments during COVID, where money was sent out directly to everyone, and many employers got 'free' loans to maintain their payrolls.
Back at the time I'm sure you'd say "The utilitarian case for making direct payments to citizens and employers is strong on its face!"
And then two years hence, we have 8-9% inflation which eats up everyone's wages and makes EVERYONE poorer than they would have been otherwise.
Whoops? Are you, the good and faithful Utilitarian, tallying these costs up against the previous welfare program, or are you treating these new problems as completely novel and utterly unrelated to the earlier actions the government took, and thus still believing that the previous programs were obviously the correct and best action?
Utilitarians should care about ALL costs and benefits, even (especially?) the hidden ones.
So if you're being an honest utilitarian, and you are doing an honest assessment of a given program, it is completely possible to conclude that the overall impact of a given program was in fact a net negative and the world would have been better off had said program never been implemented.
This is especially true if you're a Free Market fundamentalist and believe that in the alternative scenario where the market had been allowed to act we would have landed on a vastly superior solution.
So perhaps the right wing utilitarians are doing a very comprehensive census of all of the detectable pros and cons in our current system and are seeing a very, very large locus of dis-utility centered around the government where it becomes clear that almost all of the functions it serves are throwing off negative externalities and causing dead-weight loss and only gets worse over time.
And thus, the conclusion becomes that if most government programs are a net negative and should not exist, this logic also applies to the government as a whole.
Honestly, I'm increasingly surprised and disheartened that utilitarians have lived through the years 2020 and 2021, got to observe the government interfering and bungling EVERY SINGLE STEP of the pandemic response, from lying to people about the nature of the disease to delaying deployment of vaccines to shutting down schools even after danger had passed.
And some of them still somehow conclude that Governments ought to be primarily responsible for disease and pandemic response.
faceh
1yr ago
In much the same way that having a tire jack, air compressor, and spare tire in your trunk might make you feel secure enough to embark on a long drive through relatively rough conditions where assistance might take a long time to arrive.
That is, if you didn't have these tools available you might not take a particular course of action.
And if they become necessary, you thank your respective Gods for having them.
Just note that this difficulty in separating them is the point.
They want to be able to claim that any backlash or counterarguments against their advocacy for trans people is hurting actual trans people.
Meanwhile, I can't trace a single actual harm to any trans person that could be attributed to JKR, who is apparently the final boss of transphobia.
I, too, could easily accept a "live and let live" posture and would happily advocate for protecting trans persons from violence from bigots.
But I just notice that once you grant the motte of "trans people are people and should be accorded full human dignity" then the advocates aggressively pull you down to the bailey:
"That means you have to let them use whichever bathroom they choose;"
"AND you have to let them into womens' sports leagues;"
"AND you have let them into womens' prisons;"
"AND you should be arrested if you misgender them;"
"AND you can't reject sex with them just because they're trans;"
"AND you have to permit pubescent children to get hormone blockers and invasive surgery:"
"AND you have to let us teach your kids that they might be transgender;"
"AND we don't have to tell you if they decide they're transgender, that would put them at risk."
And if you suggest that maybe it would help to slow things down a bit and discuss the implications of all this and set up some reasonable policies this gets you accused of transphobia or maybe even fascism.
And of course there ARE legitimately transphobic people out there who genuinely do see trans people as less-than-human so being lumped in with them is incredibly distasteful to say the least.
I just find it even more distasteful to be gish-galloped into a position that doesn't follow from the premises I actually agreed to.
Amazing how consistent the pattern is these days.
Iowahawkblog said it best in 2015
Identify a respected institution.
kill it.
gut it.
wear its carcass as a skin suit, while demanding respect.
Some small news/analysis outlet will find some audience and gain traction for producing quality, mostly unbiased, and interesting/unique content, which forms the reputation on which its' appeal rests.
The outlet hits a critical mass of audience/attention, then some known lefty/prog investors buy out the brand, and in short order remake it into left-leaning opinion mouthpiece #418210, BUT they try to demand everyone treat it as just as reliable and quality as before, and maybe they even make a vague attempt to retain what made it unique in the first place.
In many cases, it dies not long thereafter.
Happened to Axios most recently, also happened to Vice. Also the Onion but I can't count them as a 'reliable' media brand.
FiveThirtyEight ALWAYS had a detectable liberal bias and yet the analysis they did, the actual numbers, at least seemed to reflect underlying reality and they weren't afraid to report conclusions that were disfavorable for Dems. My 'problem' with them was usually their intentional selection of issues to analyze that were pretty much only relevant to left-leaning readers, and the framing of everything as "we all know that [progressive opinion] is the best one, but the polls show that support for it is weaker than we'd like..."
Unless I'm misremembering, Rasmussen was one of the most accurate predictors of the 2020 election results (as reported by The Washington Post no less):
Even FiveThirtyEight itself finds them overall rather accurate. Indeed, seems like their tilt towards the GOP often counteracts whatever factor seems to make certain conservative opinions appear underrepresented.
So it seems absurd to select THAT ONE of all the options to question their reliability and literally threaten with expulsion if they don't explain themselves.
The only thing that could make this situation more farcical as a culture war issue is if the whole point of this move was to drive the value of the Rasmussen brand down so that it can be purchased by lefty/prog investors and they can pull the exact same game by converting Rasmussen itself into a prog mouthpiece.
I actually 100% believe that is at least part of the intent, if they thought they could acquire it and use it to their ends, they already would have.
Anyhow, Conquest's Second Law remains an excellent heuristic.
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