guajalote
15d ago
Christians generally believe humans have free will that enables them to act contrary to God's will. Those bad actions are still "part of God's plan" in the sense that he anticipates them and "plans around them" so to speak, but those sinful actions are "contrary to God's plan" in the sense that he does not want them to happen.
guajalote
4mo ago
Judges are almost never impeached because the federal judiciary has an internal process where if a judge is found to have done something bad after an investigation, the judiciary will recommend that the judge voluntarily resign. The judge will almost always comply with the resignation "suggestion," because if he does not, the judiciary will recommend impeachment to congress. Such a recommendation carries a great deal of weight when your own colleagues in the judiciary think you deserve to be impeached. So the impeachment rate is low because there is an internal process that pushes judges who would otherwise get impeached to voluntarily step down.
guajalote
1mo ago
I am confident there are many insights out there that remain to be "discovered" that will seem obvious in retrospect. So much of the history of human progress is discovering obvious (in retrospect) insights. Even something as simple as wheels on luggage. People pushed luggage around on wheeled carts for decades before figuring out we should just put wheels on the damn suitcases. Insights from Taleb and Mandelbrot about tail risks and black swans are another good example of something "obvious" that it took smart people a long time to come to terms with. It's really hard to see obvious things until they are pointed out.
guajalote
3mo ago
I agree with what you're saying but I also agree with cjet79's central point that "if someone is going to make a claim contradicting [most people's common sense about medicine] they need to have a lot of evidence and some damn good explanations."
I think this is true in general, not just in medicine. If you're going to make claims that contradict peoples' common sense, then you need to be prepared to carry a heavy burden of persuasion, and you should empathize with (rather than attack or belittle) those people who are unpersuaded and trust their (perhaps incorrect) common sense. This is where the medical establishment really messed up. Even on issues where I think the establishment is correct (e.g., the covid vaccines are effective, adults should be allowed to medically transition) I still think the establishment has done a horrible job of messaging, and has blamed its failures on the people it failed to convince.
guajalote
1mo ago
When people refer to the "woke right" they're referring to right-wing people who behave like woke people in the sense that they try to censor, cancel, and thought-police those who disagree with them. They aren't saying the woke right is politically woke, they're saying they use the same illiberal tactics as the woke.
guajalote
1mo ago
Airports and train stations have always been perfect use cases for wheeled luggage, but nobody started using them until the late 90s/early 00s. I remember as a child in the early 90s every airport had huge racks of carts you could rent for $0.25 because nobody had wheels on their suitcases.
guajalote
3mo ago
I have to disagree with the premise that too much liberalism created the problem. The solution is more liberalism: legalize gun ownership and deregulate housing. This approach has proven itself effective in the real world, it doesn't cost anything, and it doesn't require an authoritarian state.
guajalote
3mo ago
I think they mean "Her fiancé gets a license to keep selling his soul to big corporations for money while they retain their virtue in their social circles." But personally I doubt this. Most top lawyers run in elite blue-tribe social circles where "selling one's soul" to corporations is not really frowned upon to begin with.
guajalote
8mo ago
It's one of the biggest libertarian "viral moments" I can remember. Not only is it terribly authoritarian, it's a ridiculous inversion of priorities and waste of resources. We can start talking about euthanizing squirrels over "rabies" concerns after the government has successfully euthanized every rat in NYC. And treating a squirrel as some kind of dangerous exotic pet makes zero sense. There's a long American tradition of owning pet squirrels; Warren Harding had one named Pete living with him in the Whitehouse. This whole thing is just quintessentially un-American.
guajalote
6mo ago
I am pro-choice, but it seems like pro-lifers have a number of easy retorts to this argument:
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Most pro-life people do care about and help prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, etc.
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Why would it make sense to prioritize the wellbeing of "morally uncomplicated" unborn children lower than the wellbeing of "morally complicated" people (i.e. people who bear a non-zero amount of responsibility for their circumstances)? Shouldn't the former be a higher priority, or at least an equal priority?
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He is making an apples-and-oranges comparison. It is already well-established and widely agreed that it is wrong to kill prisoners, immigrants, the sick, the poor, etc. Pro-lifers simply seek to extend these protections to unborn children. If the law permitted the killing of immigrants or poor people without due process, I am sure pro-lifers would be just as upset about this as abortion, if not more so.
guajalote
3mo ago
Public statements of support for organizations (including bad ones) are protected by the First Amendment. I can't see how this would survive a constitutional challenge unless he did something more substantial than "express support" for Hamas.
guajalote
4mo ago
In addition to the "no step on snek" crowd, many evangelicals consider a federal ID to be the biblically prophesied "mark of the beast." There has been a strong consensus among the republican voting base for a long time that a federal ID would be one of the worst things that could possibly happen, and I don't see that changing soon.
guajalote
1mo ago
This is how engineering, science, and law are already tested at all decent universities. It's only the humanities that don't grade this way.
guajalote
9mo ago
Let's assume for the sake of argument that alcohol prohibition reliably reduces the murder rate in the long run. This is worth taking into account, but it's hardly conclusive of whether we should have alcohol prohibition. Reducing the speed limit on all roads to 25mph will reliably reduce traffic deaths; outlawing TVs and bookshelves over a certain size will reliably save the lives of several hundred young children each year who are killed when furniture falls on them; not to mention all the lives that would be saved by banning candles and fireplaces; etc. Personal liberty has a great deal of value and I think we should be skeptical of prohibitions even if the data suggests they are "good" for people.
guajalote
4mo ago
The process is generally used for criminal/corrupt behavior or failing to do the job (like failing to show up to court, failing to issue opinions, failing to resign when no longer mentally competent for the job). The complete set of arcane procedures are here, I believe.
I don't know whether the process is ever invoked for judges who are "wrong as a matter of law frequently." Often this is the result of a political or philosophical disagreement rather than a failure to do one's job. For example, imagine a conservative district judge pre-Dobbs who consistently holds that Roe was wrongly decided and is not good law, and therefore keeps getting reversed. It may seem that this judge is constantly getting the law "wrong," but in fact he is getting the law "right" and will later be vindicated by Dobbs.
guajalote
3mo ago
Yeah there are a bunch of jobs where hiring works the "normal" way. I work at an IP litigation firm. If someone emails me their resume I look at it to see if they meet the qualifications we're looking for. If they do I circulate it to the other partners and recommend an interview. Then we have an interview and if we like the person we hire them.
guajalote
5mo ago
Wokeness only appealed to a segment of the elites and was unappealing to most non-elites. So wokeness gained power quickly but ran out of steam because it lacked any grassroots support. On the other hand, Christianity started out as a religion of the proletariat and by the time it trickled up to the elite of Roman society it had massive grassroots support. I think that's a key difference.
guajalote
3mo ago
I am focused on empirical evidence rather than theory. Houston, with no zoning and few impediments to building housing, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. Canada as a whole has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents. Vancouver appears to be something like 728 per 100k with 4,821 homeless and a population of 662k.
guajalote
4mo ago
Banning all travel to and from places millions of Americans visit each year would be costly to the economy so while it might be cheaper for the government it would surely be more expensive for the country. Also, I want freedom to travel where I please. We shouldn't impose travel bans that aren't actually necessary.
The places in the US with high rates of homelessness (e.g. San Francisco) are places with restrictive gun laws and restrictive housing and building regulations. The places with liberal gun laws and liberal housing regulations have low rates of homelessness. It's very consistent.
Houston's housing first policies are good, but they only work because the baseline rate of homelessness is already extremely low. This is mostly due to cheap housing. When the lowest tiers of housing are so affordable that someone with drug and mental health problems can afford to live there, you end up with far fewer homeless people. You also avoid negative feedback loops where, once someone becomes homeless, their lives tend to spiral and their issues get worse. When housing is attainable for even the lowest income people, it provides a sort of "ladder" people can climb to get their lives in order.
Also, just to clarify, I am not arguing that liberal gun laws reduce homelessness. I'm arguing they make homeless people far less likely to hassle or assault people because you never know who's packing heat. For example, you will see some homeless people on public transit in Houston, but I have literally never seen one approach other riders to ask for money, make a bunch of noise, or threaten anyone, all of which are common behaviors in other cities.
guajalote
3mo ago
My wife and in-laws are Mexican and I've come to learn that Mexicans love to toast all forms of bread and find it a bit weird to eat untoasted bread. It seems like basically all forms of bread taste good toasted, but I still prefer sourdough and good french breads untoasted to preserve their chewy texture.
"Men need to feel intellectually superior to women and I got sick of playing dumb a long time ago."
A bit off topic, but I've heard this sentiment from a number of women, yet I've never seen it in real life. I strongly prefer smart women, and no male friend or relative has ever told me (or acted like) they prefer dumb women. Where do women get this idea? It must be rooted in real experiences to some extent, but it's completely alien to me.
My candidate hypotheses:
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Most men like to discuss niche topics of particular interest to them, and women interpret this as a need to feel intellectually superior.
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Most men dislike argumentative or combative women, and such women interpret this as men disliking their intellect rather than their attitude.
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Most men would choose a hot, dumb woman over a smart, ugly woman, and women interpret this as men needing to feel intellectually superior.
guajalote
10mo ago
Isn't this a fully general argument that applies to everything? "People are too stupid to make good decisions, so the government should make those decisions for them!" And yet despite the fact that many people are very stupid, the government almost always seems to do a worse job at making decisions than those "stupid" people did. It's the same intuition that leads people to think communism is a great and flawless idea that "just hasn't been implemented properly." It's important to judge policies by how well they work, not how good they sound.
guajalote
1yr ago
But what I can't really put together is the third option, the narrative that will be told if SJ is indeed just a passing phase, either because Red/Grey defeated it or because it wins and then turns out to be unsustainable.
The narrative will be: "why did anyone ever care about this shit?"
Think about the big protestant/Catholic culture war that waged in Europe in the 1600s, which was extremely bloody and widely agreed by its participants to be a big deal and today people (even devout Catholics and protestants) largely look back with bewilderment on that time period and have a hard time understanding what the big deal was. People were getting burned for saying the consecrated host is just a cracker. Today, Catholics still believe in transubstantiation but most have a hard time understanding why anyone would be punished (let alone killed) for holding a contrary view.
When talking about current culture war issues, it's hard for us to imagine how they could become irrelevant to the point that future generations would be baffled that anyone ever cared. But that's how people would have felt in the 1600s; it was a literal battle for immortal souls, how could this battle ever become irrelevant? Yet it did. I think our current battles will eventually suffer the same fate.
I grew up around many Christian Zionists. I think they would agree that "the Second Coming is going to happen when God plans it to" but would add that (1) God puts his plans into motion largely through the actions of people and (2) the Bible sets forth the outline of what that plan looks like. Because people have free will, it's therefore important for them to choose to follow God's plan as laid out in the Bible.
To them, your critique would sound a little like if someone said: "What's so bad about murder? Everything happens according to God's plan, therefore if someone commits murder that must be God's plan."
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