guajalote
1yr ago
The Onion filed an amicus brief a few days ago in a case called Novak v. Parma. It's been making the rounds on social media lately because it's a legitimately funny and well-written document. It may well be among the best briefs I've read in my ten years as a litigator. Attorneys often seem to forget that job one of writing is to produce something readable. Nowhere is this more important than in amici, since judges are not required to read them in the first place.
What's the culture war angle here? Surprisingly (to me, at least), the brief is an unreserved and unapologetic defense of free speech by a respectable mainstream organization. This wouldn't have been so strange a few years ago, but it seems like the mainstream line on free speech has recently shifted from "free speech is important and must be defended" to "free speech is important and must be defended as long as it's not that kind of free speech." The ACLU has famously moved away from its robust defense of free speech, and nearly every publisher and platform has caveated any pro-free-speech views with disclaimers that carve out "bad" free speech like "disinformation" and "speech that causes harm."
But the brief doesn't even allude to caveats, and in some ways can be read to expressly repudiate them. One heading is titled "A Reasonable Reader Does Not Need A Disclaimer To Know That Parody Is Parody" and boldly proclaims "True; not all humor is equally transcendent. But the quality and taste of the parody is irrelevant." Nowhere do words like "harm" or "hate" or "disinformation" appear in the brief. Nowhere does the brief even allude to the popular idea that free speech can be used to "punch down" or "marginalize."
What makes this perhaps even more remarkable to me is the fact that Novak v. Parma isn't primarily about free speech, it's primarily about qualified immunity. It would have been extremely easy to dodge the free speech issue and emphasize a much woker angle, e.g., qualified immunity prevents people of color who have been harmed or killed by police from recovering damages to compensate them and therefore qualified immunity contributes to systemic racism, etc. I suppose this theme would have made for a dour and un-funny document, but given how woke schoolmarmery has tended to destroy humor over the past decade (see, e.g. The Daily Show), it's still a pleasant surprise to see they didn't go this route.
Maybe my optimism is unwarranted, but I'm marking this down as one small data point in favor of the theory that the woke tide is receding. I don't think it's going away completely, but I do think people are getting tired of it and I'm hopeful we'll start seeing a bit less of it in our daily lives.
guajalote
3mo ago
I predict if her numbers continue to climb, he's gonna mention her daughter's married to a black guy. Way too tempting for a guy like Trump.
I think it's very unlikely he will do this, simply because neither Trump nor most of his supporters care about this. I think you are making the same mistake as the media by assuming "Nimra" is a racist dogwhistle. It's not, it's serving a different set of purposes:
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It calls attention to the fact that she doesn't use her real name, which makes her seem fake and insecure.
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Like all Trump nicknames, it's a power play. If you can give someone a nickname and make it stick, it reveals a kind of power you have over them. And I think it's clear that Haley could not do the same to Trump in reverse -- all prior attempts at nicknames (Drumpf, Cheeto, etc.) have failed to stick.
guajalote
9mo ago
The question for the floor is: why the high degree of correlation? Is there an underlying principle at work here that explains both positions (opposition to AA plus opposition to debt relief) that doesn't just reduce to bare economic or racial interest?
In practice, I think things like party affiliation are the driving factors behind the correlation. But I also think there's a rather simple "underlying principle" that ties both decisions together.
Let's do a thought experiment. Imagine you find an intelligent person who's fluent in English but totally ignorant of American history and law. You hand this person a copy of the US Constitution and have him read it carefully. Then you ask him to answer two questions based on his understanding of the plain text of the document:
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Does the Constitution allow the government to treat people differently based on their race?
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Does the Constitution allow the president to spend money without congress's approval?
The answer to both questions is clearly "no" if you're just reading the text of the document without bringing any external knowledge or biases to bear. In order to answer anything other than "no" to both questions, you either need to come up with complicated interpretive arguments or you need to just not care about the text of the Constitution.
So I think a rather simple underlying principle unifying both decisions is: "the plain text of the Constitution is binding."
guajalote
1yr ago
I had the same reaction to this post. OP's experiences are extremely atypical. I'm 6'3", in good shape, and conventionally attractive. I'm married now but was always plenty romantically successful when I was single. Still, I've been approached romantically by no more than five or six women in my life (I'm 35). Even when I was approached, it was always indirect and more of a hint than an actual approach. One time a girl asked me out on a date, but even then she didn't call it a date and I didn't realize that's what it was until it was in progress (I thought she wanted to get coffee to discuss some things about an organization we were both members of). And these women who approached me were, to put it bluntly, not as good looking as the women I would normally date. If you're a man getting regularly approached by good looking women, you're an extremely rare outlier.
guajalote
6mo ago
In my experience most high-level US politicians have an unreal level of charm in person that is almost impossible to fully describe unless you've experienced it firsthand. I've met several politicians who I intensely disliked from afar, only to find myself instantly charmed by them in person. Never met Clinton, but he probably takes this to another level.
guajalote
4mo ago
I think you are conflating two issues that are mostly unrelated. Housing costs are probably being driven up slightly by increased demand due to immigration, but the effect is tiny compared to the supply-side problems caused by excessive red tape that makes housing expensive and difficult to build. The population of Houston, Texas is about 20% foreign-born immigrants, yet housing is extremely affordable because there is no zoning, no rent controls, and few regulatory hoops to jump through if you want to build housing.
Nobody worries about immigrants buying up all the food, or all the cars, or all the cell phones. If demand goes up, the economy will just produce more of these things to meet demand. It doesn't make sense to worry about immigrants buying up all the housing either, unless there's a problem on the supply side that makes it impossible to meet demand. Fix the supply side problem if you want to fix the housing problem.
I say this as someone who's mostly convinced of Big Yud's doomerism: Good lord, what a train wreck of a conversation.
Couldn't agree more. In addition to Yud's failure to communicate concisely and clearly, I feel like his specific arguments are poorly chosen. There are more convincing responses that can be given to common questions and objections.
Question: Why can't we just switch off the AI?
Yud's answer: It will come up with some sophisticated way to prevent this, like using zero-day exploits nobody knows about.
My answer: All we needed to do to stop Hitler was shoot him in the head. Easy as flipping a switch, basically. But tens of millions died in the process. All you really need to be dangerous and hard to kill is the ability to communicate and persuade, and a superhuman AI will be much better at this than Hitler.
Question: How will an AI kill all of humanity?
Yud's answer: Sophisticated nanobots.
My answer: Humans already pretty much have the technology to kill all humans, between nuclear and biological weapons. Even if we can perfectly align superhuman AIs, they will end up working for governments and militaries and enhancing those killing capacities even further. Killing all humans is pretty close to being a solved problem, and all that's missing is a malignant AI (or a malignant human controlling an aligned AI) to pull the trigger. Edit: Also it's probably not necessary to kill all humans, just kill most of us and collapse society to the point that the survivors don't pose a meaningful threat to the AI's goals.
guajalote
1yr ago
This is what surprised me about the brief. If a "transgressive" comedian like Dave Chapelle or Matt Stone and Trey Parker had filed this amicus brief I wouldn't have batted an eye. But the Onion has obediently toed the party line for quite some time. And the party line has been hostile to full-throated defenses of free speech. The fact that a politically correct institution is defending free speech with no disclaimers is a positive sign.
guajalote
1yr ago
There are three main reasons, as I understand it, why many economists think rent controls drive up rent:
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When renting to a new tenant, the landlord has to set the rent based on the expected market price over the next, say, 10+ years the tenant may occupy the property, instead of setting the price for the coming year knowing it can be raised later. This raises rents.
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A rent controlled apartment is effectively an asset that gets more valuable the longer the tenant holds onto it. This reduces apartment turnover, which reduces supply, which increases price.
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Rent control makes building new housing a less attractive business model, so fewer apartments get built, thereby reducing supply and increasing price.
guajalote
1yr ago
What blows my mind is how anyone can think the whole word method is a good idea. If someone suggested driver’s ed classes stop teaching traffic laws and instead just put kids behind the wheel until they absorb how to drive by osmosis, everyone would realize that’s dumb. If someone suggested teaching calculus without explaining the concepts but instead just showing the equations and hoping the funny symbols eventually make sense, everyone would realize that’s dumb.
guajalote
5mo ago
I think your sister's stated explanations are simply an attempt to rationalize her feelings. They're not a description of her actual underlying reasoning.
I think for a lot of everyday liberals who haven't thought carefully about this stuff, the reasoning goes like this: trans/NB people are oppressed, and oppressed people are good and virtuous. Therefore if someone (in my estimation) is not good and virtuous, then they are not "really" trans/NB.
You see this a lot. When a trans person is in the news doing something bad, then they're not really trans, they're faking it. Similarly, if a member of an oppressed minority group doesn't hold the right opinions or vote the right way, they're self-hating or not "really" an authentic member of their race, etc.
guajalote
1yr ago
Even if I thought there was a 99% chance of AI destroying humanity, creating a massive totalitarian world-state that tracks all private behavior and is willing to start nuclear wars to enforce its power doesn't seem like an improvement. What Yud is proposing is probably not possible, but if it is possible it's one of the worst futures I can imagine for the human race.
guajalote
1yr ago
The short answer is that Musk has positioned himself as red tribe or at least anti-blue-tribe, whereas Chappelle has positioned himself as more like heterodox blue tribe.
The average view I hear about Chappelle from blue tribe people I know is something like "his latest stuff has been in bad taste and his quality has gone downhill lately, but he's still a comedy legend and Chappelle's Show was amazing." This type of person would still go to a Chappelle standup show, in the same way someone might go to a Paul McCartney concert even if they don't like any of the music McCartney has put out since the 70s.
The average view I hear about Musk from blue tribe people I know is "he's a narcissistic rich manbaby whose family owned slaves or something." In other words, just uniformly negative.
So I think there's a decent sized slice of the blue tribe that likes Chappelle but hates Musk.
guajalote
1yr ago
It is possible that millennials are becoming conservative at exactly the same rate as previous generations even though they are not voting for conservative parties at the same rate as previous generations. Parties are not static ideologies or sets of policy goals. Parties compete for voters, modifying and triangulating their platforms and rhetoric over time.
In the US, Republicans and Democrats have fought each other to a pretty consistent 50/50 stalemate in nationwide votes for several decades, modifying their views on all sorts of issues along the way to maintain that equilibrium. As the overall population has gotten older over time, the equilibrium "stalemate age" (the age when a voter is equally likely to vote for either party) also gets older over time. To put it another way, as the electorate ages it becomes increasingly "cost effective" for the Republican party to cater to older voters, which makes it easier for the Democratic party to attract and retain people in their 30s who might otherwise be potential Republican voters.
guajalote
1yr ago
I think it's an example of the simplistic political thinking most people have, where they assume a regulation to prevent X will actually prevent X, and repealing such a regulation will cause more of X to happen. Most people think rent controls reduce rent and repealing rent controls will cause rent to rise, despite mountains of empirical data suggesting the opposite is true. It's just much easier to assume that laws do what they say they do, rather than thinking about all the complex ways that stated intentions can fail to manifest in the real world.
guajalote
11mo ago
All of the output I've ever seen from ChatGPT (for use cases such as this) just strikes me as... textbook. Not bad, but not revelatory. Eminently reasonable.
There was a post from Scott, can't recall which one at the moment, where he made a point along the lines of "maybe the reason therapy seems to help some people a great deal while not helping others at all is because some people benefit from hearing reasonable, common sense feedback, whereas that kind of feedback is completely obvious to other people." Sort of like how some people lack an internal monologue, others lack an internal voice of common sense and reason. I wonder if that's what's going on here.
guajalote
4mo ago
In my experience, things like low housing costs and a robust economy are far more conducive to poor people's standard of living than a robust wellfare state. Houston, for example, has a homelessness rate of around 30 people per 100k residents. The country of Canada has an average homelessness rate of at least 90 per 100k residents, with cities often much higher than that; for example in Toronto the rate seems to be in excess of 322 per 100k.
So while I would agree that Canada is more "concerned" about poor people, it's not at all clear to me that Canada is actually providing a better standard of living for poor people.
guajalote
8mo ago
At least in some recorded cases the Romans seemed to feel quite sorry for the Christians they killed. There are a bunch of accounts of Roman judges basically pleading with Christians not to make them sentence them to death, saying things to the effect of "listen, nobody cares if you want to worship your god, just go through the motions of paying obeisance to the emperor's genius and be done with it." The Christians would often be given long periods of time to reconsider their obstinacy and save themselves from the lions. The Romans generally didn't see true belief as a necessary component of religion, it was all about the ritual, so couldn't understand why Christians wouldn't just go through the motions like everyone else.
guajalote
4mo ago
I admit that there are areas where my model breaks down - my Steam library can't really be considered physical, it barely touches the physical world excepting that CPUs and GPUs are needed to make use of it.
I think your model breaks down all over the place. Obviously raw materials are not irrelevant, but they represent a tiny fraction of the wealth of a modern developed economy.
Go dig up a shovelful of dirt in your backyard. That dirt contains most of the raw materials needed to build a CPU. But there are many, many orders of magnitude difference between the value of that dirt and the value of a CPU. Almost all that value comes from intangible things:
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The knowledge and time of skilled electrical engineers and chemists figuring out how to design and fabricate CPUs.
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The university system that educated them and provided the foundational knowledge they built upon.
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A legal system that enables companies to enter into and enforce contracts with one another in a reliable way
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Systems of IP protection that incentivize R&D expenditures in CPU development.
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Consistent law enforcement and property rights that allow companies to invest billions of dollars in semiconductor fabrication equipment without worrying a government or criminal organization will take it away from them.
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Financial institutions that will lend money to these companies if they don't have billions of dollars sitting around to build semiconductor fabs.
On and on. It's intangibles (almost) all the way down.
Healthcare is about using physical goods like surgical equipment and drugs.
Like CPUs, surgical equipment and drugs are mostly made out of cheap-as-fuck raw materials that are then synthesized into useful things. It's engineers, chemists, biologists, lawyers, etc. that make it possible for this stuff to exist. And of course much of healthcare is made up of other sorts of intangibles, like medical training. Surgical equipment isn't of much use without surgeons.
Yes, you need to have ways for savings and loans to be allocated - but savings and loans are just claims on real goods.
You act like this is trivial, but it's not. There exist countries in the world today where you can't trust banks to hold your savings and the average person can't get loans because the economy is too unstable and risky. These are the so-called "shithole" countries, and they're shitholes not because of a lack of natural resources but because of a lack of the kinds of intangible goods I've been talking about.
guajalote
8mo ago
It seems plausible that the absence of affordable housing for the first type of person creates a pipeline whereby they are more likely to become the second type of person.
I have to say I don't find this line of argument persuasive at all. Your arguments could just as easily used to justify and support youth transition. "Given all these massive biological and social differences between men and women, it's critical you socially transition your five-year-old as soon as possible and get them on blockers and hormones so you can minimize the mismatch between who they feel they are and how they are perceived by others."
To me it's the opposite argument that's far more persuasive: society today treats men and women pretty much equally and allows them to express themselves how they choose. Given this freedom and flexibility, there's no reason why a boy who wants to wear dresses and play with Barbies needs to become a girl. Just let him be a boy who wears dresses and plays with Barbies. Teach your son he can be as masculine or feminine as he wants to be without getting hung up on sex and gender.
guajalote
1yr ago
In recent years being a "2000s liberal" who is "generally progressive, but not to the point of speech controls or whatever" has been increasingly labeled as right-wing or "right-adjacent" (e.g. Dave Chappelle). The fact that the Onion is able to occupy that space without getting tarred for it is a good sign, I think. Progressive friends of mine who have previously denounced people like Dave Chappelle and who opposed the Musk purchase of Twitter on the grounds that it would result in too much free speech are now sharing this Onion amicus with approval. I've seen literally no criticism of the brief from anyone. It feels like a subtle, yet tangible, vibe shift on free speech.
guajalote
1yr ago
Complicating this is that both facial claims are probably always at least a little true.
Yeah it's a pretty trivially silly distinction. Even if something is "100% genetic," environment is still hugely important. For example, let's imagine math ability is 100% genetically determined. Nevertheless, a math genius born in a modern developed country is going to have a much different set of life outcomes than the same person born in a hunter gatherer society.
guajalote
4mo ago
They believe it’s important to explain their reasoning to their kids.
I think it's really valuable to explain your reasoning to your kid whenever possible. My parents did to me all the time. However, they made it clear that my obligation to obey them was not contingent upon my agreement with their reasoning.
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.
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