faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
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User ID: 884
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
I think you're using the term "political brainrot" to mean "has dumb political ideas" while YoungAchamian is using it to mean "spends a lot of mental energy on politics".
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Alex Jones? I mean I guess he didn't say "they deserved it" he said "they're faking it" (and in fact it was the factual claim that they were faking it that did him in, legally) but.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
It is an hallowed tradition in this country to call our political opponents mean names.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
The most popular cable news program is Fox News, and it's not a close race. Fox News is not an arm of the left by any reasonable definition.
you want to blame the twitter algorithm for the lack of left wing sympathy in anyone's feeds?
I do want to blame the twitter algorithm for the content of peoples' twitter feeds, yes. Twitter is a distributed adversarial attack on the minds of its users.
And I've never gotten a good answer on how "imminent" applies: can I promote a planned riot as long as it's more than, say, 12 months from now?
IANAL but my understanding is that, as long as your speech does not constitute a threat, and as long as you are not actively conspiring with others, that's protected speech. If you are planning the detailed logistics of a riot a year from now that might not be protected. But for a silly example, the whole area 51 raid thing a few years back - saying "that's based and I fully support this. everyone should go, they can't stop all of us" a month before is, under my understanding of the law, in the clear.
How much can I complain about "turbulent priests" before I'm responsible to the state when Thomas Becket gets murdered?
I think that one falls under criminal solicitation (intent that the crime occurs + request/order that some specific person commit the crime), because it was said to specific people who would be expected to take it as an order. The state would have to prove intent, but in the Thomas Beckett case that seems not too difficult.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Do you have a source on otherwise lawful (i.e. not threats or incitement) hate speech being unlawful in the US?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
That would also tend to mean that not many on the left are liking and sharing such content.
Not necessarily. The twitter algorithm is semi-public, and what they do is they take a bunch of features of a tweet, feed them into some ML models that predict how likely you are to like, bookmark, look at for [8,15,25,30] seconds, follow the author, etc, and then choose which tweets to serve to you based on those that are predicted to get the largest amount of engagement of the type they like (which they don't publish but you can kind of infer based on which metrics have the most granular predictions, like dwell time, video watch time, whether you will share / reply / quote / retweet).
Tweets that make people angry get more replies and quotes and dwell time than uncontroversial ones. That means those are the ones the Twitter algo will choose to show to you. If the Twitter algo thinks you'll engage more with a fedposter than you will with a call for deescalation, it will show you a fedposter. This is true if the ratio of calls for deescalation to fedposters is 1:1, 100:1, or 1:100.
I don’t see a ratcheting down of rhetoric, or even calls for such
In terms of what you see from Twitter randos, this is just a statement about what the algorithm thinks you'll engage with. As a rule of thumb, if you have not heard a person's name before reading a tweet of theirs, you shouldn't care what that tweet says no matter how many likes and replies it has. The number of likes a tweet has is more influenced by reach than by quality, and the twitter algorithm is out to get you.
mainstream professional broadcasters on the left
... seem to have pretty much universally condemned the attacks? It'd be nice if they also said "and also cheering for murder is bad, you ghouls" but I don't particularly expect it of them any more than I'd expect Rush Limbaugh to tell his listeners to stop saying the people who died in ICE custody deserved it. It's not really a thing professional broadcasters do. It'd be nice if it was a thing they did but it's not an unusual and surprising moral failure that they didn't.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
It does, though it strikes me as strange that (let's say for the sake of example) messenger pigeons have such high genetic variance compared to their parents. Naively if it were the case that most combinations of genes don't play well with each other I'd expect a population with less genetic variation to do better than one with more. Unless there's a bunch of genes where the heterozygous variant was advantaged (as happens with humans and sickle cell), but in the longer term I'd expect both alleles to migrate onto the same chromosome in fairly short order (hasn't happened yet in humans because malaria is a pretty new disease).
With the multi generational pigeon example it's even weirder - allele frequency shouldn't shift substantially across a few generations with minimal selective pressure in a large flock. And I can’t imagine the mutation rate is that high either. There's gotta be something else going on with these messenger pigeons.
It would have been murder one in a lot of states, just not NY which has an unusual definition of murder 1 under which "premeditated intentional killing" is not necessarily murder one.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Is there a reason you think that the reason that the specimens of this type of animal that are bred in captivity are worse than those that are captured wild is genetic, rather than environmental? Are the specimens of this type of animal raised from zygotes found in the wild higher quality than those bred in captivity?
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
what makes Dylan Roof or Tarrant or Breivek not "weirder than right wing"
They... are? I don't expect general pushback against right wing ideas would have particularly helped in those cases.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
cute
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?
The Zizian attacks are weirder than "left wing" - Ziz did some bad theorizing about decision theory and came to the conclusion that it was always correct to retaliate with maximal intensity against all threats, with a very broad definition of the word "threat", under the worldview that nobody would "threaten" you if you so precommitted. Moderating the general left wing wouldn't have helped with that particular flavor of insanity.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Lots of people at ICE proudly post that on their LinkedIn.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Seems like the root problem is the "technological bookkeepers can unperson you at any time" bit. Perhaps this admin should be focusing a little bit more on fixing the thing where the financial industry is secretly an unaccountable fourth branch of government.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
I propose taking "bioleninist" out of the one side (who even uses that term?) and adding "fascist" to the other.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Pro-lifers absolutely should be allowed to talk in general terms about how they think murderers should be punched, and also allowed to say that they think abortion is murder, and also allowed to say "you had an abortion so in my book you're a murderer". The current standard for where speech stops being lawful is when it is directed to inciting imminent lawless action and is likely to produce such action. I think that's a good standard.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
There are also lots of people on the left (e.g. Kelsey Piper) who posted condemning the Kirk murder without reservations. Those posts didn't get much engagement, and so didn't get amplified very much, so you likely didn't see them unless you were actively following these people. But they were posted.
And if you ask the HSE people responsible for those jobs what this risk of injury should be, they will say "zero"
And they will be wrong about that, because we live in a world where tradeoffs exist. I think this "if you knew a risk was nonzero but didn't eliminate the risk, you are culpable for anything that goes wrong" mentality drives a lot of the sickness of our civilization.
and do absolutely everything in their power to reduce it to that level in terms of procedures that they can identify/control
or at least enough to cover their asses, yes.
much higher than that of them dying of COVID
ICE agents are mostly young and in shape. Their risk of dying of COVID is pretty much zero. If we're spending any significant energy on trying to make sure ICE agents don't die of COVID (beyond "here's a vaccine, it's free under your benefits plan if you want it") we're being stupid and should stop. I expect vehicle collisions are at least 100x more dangerous to ICE agents than COVID, probably a lot more than that.
Considering that there are literally targeted hit attempts happening on ICE agents right now
To be clear, I do support coming down as hard as possible on anyone who tries to kill a law enforcement agent (including ICE) and any of their actual accomplices. But murder-suicides are just really hard to deal with and I don't think trying to come up with ways to disincentivize them is likely to be fruitful.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
"How much risk is reasonable" is a good question. I think a reasonable baseline to look at is private sector occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes the number of violent deaths broken down by industry (NAICS code, specifically), and the Census Bureau gives total numbers of employees by industry. Dividing the one by the other we find that the most dangerous "normal" occupation is NAICS 485 "transit and ground passenger transportation", with 392975 employees and 25 violent deaths (out of 72 total deaths on the job). I think if working on immigration enforcement at ICE is around the danger level of driving for Uber but your agents fear for their lives anyway, the problem is with the perception of danger rather than with the danger per se.
when does the risk get bad enough that cops or ICE or political figures are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk
This is the wrong question to ask. Consider the following questions:
- When does the risk of terrorism get bad enough that airplane passengers are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?
- When does the risk of school shootings get bad enough that teachers are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?
- When does the risk of police brutality get bad enough that black people are allowed to feel scared enough to protect themselves from said risk?
How I hope you answered all of these questions was "optimizing policy to address perceptions of danger is a fool's errand". This is particularly true in cases where triggering a destructive reaction is the point of the violence but even in cases where it's not, setting policy based of feelings of danger is still not productive.
That said, the US government should come down as hard as possible on people who attack law enforcement agents who are doing their job. The US government generally does a pretty good job of this already, I am not particularly worried there, but it's worth emphasizing that it is good and important.
That said, if someone is willing to take their own life to cause harm, we should go after those accomplices that actually exist and actually materially helped. Witch hunts for someone who is still alive who can be blamed, though, will not reduce the chances of further people looking to suicide-by-terrorism (and will likely hurt to the extent that the witch hunt increases the perceived glory of the person who wanted to be a martyr).
Side note, not important
there are no databases or tracking apps telling people where law enforcement is at every moment.
Funny you should say that because just yesterday the top story on HN was find SF parking cops, which took advantage of the fact that all parking tickets in San Francisco were published online in real time to make a map of where parking tickets were being issued across the city, and who was issuing them, in real time. The site has been taken down but the city is still publishing that data.
Not really an important consideration, the set of people who want to suicide by cop and the set of people who are willing and able to go through the inconvenience of taking slightly complicated actions like "look at where parking tickets are being issued to find out where the officers writing the tickets are" (or the corresponding action for other agencies, which I will not elaborate on) is basically an empty set. I just thought it was funny timing.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
That's not a policy goal I have so I haven't thought deeply about this, but probably something like "require employers to actually use the e-verify system we built 30 years ago to solve this problem, then do some high profile prosecutions of employers who failed to do so". Economic migrants are generally here for economic reasons. If the jobs go away the people who came here because there was work will leave.
I don't expect that'd fix any of the problems that the red tribe currently blames on immigrants but I bet it would lead to a bunch of undocumented workers leaving the US.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
Apparently there are only 6500 ICE agents in the entire country. Even paying them $200k / year would be $1.3B / year. That's $4 / year / US citizen. I would happily pay 10x, maybe even 50x that amount to live in an alternate reality where everything is the same except ICE does their job in a boring, effective, and professional manner.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
I vaguely expect that a central example of "assault" would have a >0.1% lethality rate, I could be wrong about that though. Humans are pretty resilient.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
9mo ago
FBI claims 79091 assaults on police officers and 60 officers killed in 2023. I expect most of those "assaults" are highly noncentral examples of "assault" but I'd expect the median ICE agent is at less personal risk than the median police officer in Baltimore (but probably much more risk than the median police officer in Boise).
I think "touch grass" is sometimes a useful thing to say to people who are in a doomscrolling spiral. Obnoxious, but useful.
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