guesswho
2yr ago
If I'm paraphrasing correctly, your point was 'why spend hundreds of pages pretending to justify your actions with evidence and legal theory when you were just going to lie and cheat to get this outcome no matter what'.
That doesn't sound like someone who has carefully read through the entire document and carefully considered every argument and weighed it against legal precedent and come to the conclusion that this is lying and cheating. It sounds like someone who has decided that they don't need to bother doing that analysis because they've already concluded it's lying and cheating in advance of considering that evidence.
That's not 'seeing them lying and cheating', that's interpreting things to be 'lying and cheating' before actually demonstrating that to be the case.
But correct me if I'm wrong about your process here.
(And if your point is just 'anything that is unusual/unlikely on baserate priors and also disadvantages Trump will be interpreted as lying and cheating because my prior on that is already high and thus it's the highest-probability explanation I have for rare events like these,' then that could be a reasonable position but you'd need to state it and argue for it explicitly)
guesswho
2yr ago
Exactly correct - the rhetoric will be like that no matter who is on the ballot, that's what campaigning is like these days, but it won't actually energize Dems to get out the vote if it's not aimed at Trump, meaning it's an advantage to Reps.
guesswho
2yr ago
"Convicted of a felony" is just another way of saying "the people currently in power,
Welcome to the Prison Abolitionist movement, we have pamphlets.
If 'convicted of a felony' is enough reason to be kept in prison and used as slave labor for your entire natural life, it's enough reason to not be on a Primary ballot.
I'm perfectly happy saying it's not enough reason for either of those things, but I will be a stickler about consistency on this one. Anyone who wants to treat the law and courts as reliable arbiters of Justice on a Monday had better do the same thing on a Tuesday, or else expect a finger-wagging.
guesswho
2yr ago
I feel like as long as I have been paying attention to elections there have been screwups by the major parties that should have had them disqualified from major state ballots.
Republicans are not barred from the General Election ballot in Colorado.
Trump is barred form the Republican Primary ballot.
Republicans will still be on the Republican Primary ballot in Colorado, no party is being kept off of anything.
And Trump will still win the Republican Primary and be teh candidate, and nothing in this ruling says he won't be on the General Election ballot in Colorado.
(and of course, it wouldn't matter if he wasn't since he was never going to win Colorado, but in terms of the symbolism that's not a thing that's currently happening)
... But yeah, the two party duopoly absolutely conspire against third parties, and it's bad. Not too bad, though, since first past the post voting pretty much guarantees a two-party system at a macro level anyway, even without the thumbs on the scale. We need something like Approval voting to make third parties viable in single-winner elections.
guesswho
2yr ago
In what way does the observed evidence differ from what we would see in a world where these officials genuinely care about and want to preserve democracy, and genuinely believe that the Constitution has been violated and that this is the appropriate legal remedy?
It feels like your bottom line is 'My opponents will lie and cheat to beat Trump' and therefore it doesn't matter what actually happens in reality, if it's something that hurts Trump then the explanation must be lying and cheating.
That's the type of totalizing philosophy that can't actually learn from new evidence or predict things with a causal model. It should be avoided wherever possible.
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean yeah the rhetoric is always going to be that whoever is on the other side of the ballot is pure evil, that's just campaigning.
But what matters is how much the voters viscerally feel that rhetoric to be true, and how motivated they are by it. I absolutely do not believe that Democratic voters would be equally motivated to hate and turn out against any other candidate the way they are for Trump, there's a long shared trauma around the Trump name at this point that other candidates lack.
I sort of feel like maybe there's a blind spot here among the anti-democrat crowd, where they believe (or need to believe) that Trump is pretty normal and unremarkable and everything the other side tries to throw at him are lies and exaggerations. And that's a perfectly reasonable position to take, but I think it can blind people to teh fact that the other side does not feel this way, and actually believes and feels the things they are saying about how much of a unique and horrible threat he is.
If you believed that your opponents believed that Trump was perfectly normal and unobjectionable, then the only conclusion you could reach is that the other side is happy to lie outlandishly and histrionically about whoever is heading the GOP in order to get power, and the entire act in insincere from the highest halls of power to the lowest level voter. And it feels like some people are coming to that conclusion, implicitly or explicitly.
But as usual for cases like this, what's actually going on is that the other side doesn't believe what you believe, and is actually acting pretty normally in ways that you would recognize and probably do yourself, if you did believe what they believed.
Disagreements about matters of fact are a far more common and parsimonious explanation than one half of the country suddenly diverging from human nature to become elaborate liars larping every moment of their political engagement for a decade.
guesswho
2yr ago
The problem with DeSantis is that his record of legislation, rhetoric, and stunts is 'evil' enough by progressive/Dem standards that once they were educated about him in the General election, he might drive up Democratic turnout at the polls almost as much as Trump does.
What the Republicans should do if they want to win is put up some boring bog-standard fiscal conservative. Run Mitt Romney again or something. Republicans won't be excited about him, but it's not like they're going to vote for a democrat.
Political pundits have been wondering for years how Democrats have such low approval for Biden and really don't want him to run, yet also turn out to vote for him and his party consistently and plan to support him 100%. The cause for this unusual state of affairs is the hatred and fear of Trump, serving as a rallying point to turn every election cycle into a crusade. No Dems are going to step out of line or tolerate their friends doing so while a second Trump term is on the table.
Take away that rallying point, and the whole thing could collapse. Dems could remember how much they are uninspired by Biden, and not show up to the polls. The long-expected fight for the soul of the party between the old-guard classical liberals and the young progressives, which has been suppressed by mutual hatred of Trump for most of a decade, could finally boil over into open conflict in the middle of an election, ensuring an easy win and Congressional landslide for Reps.
There's been lots of talk over the last 7 years about how Trump and MAGA represent a major realignment for the Republican party, and how the chaos of that realignment has fractured and weakened the party in ways that turned expected wins into losses. Democrats are also long-overdue for such a realignment, Republicans just need to get out of the way.
guesswho
2yr ago
If we’re really going to deny opposing parties the right to be on the ballot
Just to clarify, you understand that he's barred from the Republican primary ballot, not the General Election ballot, right?
Who do you think the Republicans have who would have a better chance of winning the general election than Trump does?
I think the answer to that question is basically 'Anyone else on the stage at the Republican debates'.
It's not as if voters need to like a candidate in order to vote for them, polarization is too high for that to matter. Either side could run a sack of potatoes with an 'R' or a 'D' sewn onto it and get 45% of the vote (and this isn't even irrational, which party's priorities the candidate will be a conduit for has a much greater impact than variance in individual competence/character).
The problem with Trump is the same as the problem with Clinton - the other side hates and fears him so much that running him drives up turnout on the other side. Anyone who doesn't do that will likely have a better electoral outcome.
... that the other side will eventually defect, like Democrats are doing now.
I called that any form of trust-based equilibrium was toast way back when Reps stole a Supreme Court seat. I cannot overemphasize what an effect that event had in re-framing what politics was about and what the Republicans were like for politically engaged Dems who weren't already maximally cynical.
At the time I hoped that Democrats would defect in ways that merely rebalanced the court to correct for that theft, and let things return to a stable equilibrium otherwise. But, no, touching the court was considered beyond the pale by the highest levels of the Democratic party, so instead it's the lower levels of the party defecting in various corners in a decentralized way.
New hope is 'defeating' Trump would be enough to pacify those elements and get back to equilibrium. Not holding my breath though.
guesswho
2yr ago
My position has been and remains that it's really stupid that the government has any interaction with primary elections at all.
The government should oversee the General Election, and that's it. Any organization or individual can put whatever names they like onto the General ballot, using any method they want to arrive at those names; the government should have no say or complicity in that process whatsoever.
That said, it's kind of funny to me that it looks like the sequence of events here was (as far as I can tell, not a lawyer), there was an earlier trial to see whether the board would consider these actions to be insurrection, the Republican side successfully argued 'well maybe it was insurrection BUT the constitution doesn't apply to teh President so it's ok' and that earlier court agreed, now a higher court says 'WTF no the constitution does apply to the president, so if you found that it was insurrection then he is off the ballot.'
I don't know whether Trump had his personal legal counsel involved in that earlier trial, but it just feels humorously in line with all the other stories about his lawyers being awful and doing really stupid and reckless things.
You can literally make the numbers do that, yes, but they won't necessarily mean the same thing.
40 is twice as much 20. 170 is not twice as much as 150.
A scale may cut off the tails in either direction after enough standard deviations because it is not able to accurately measure those extremes, or because the testmaker doesn't have any use for measures beyond those limits. In that case, cutting off your scale at 130 properly implies that there's lots of lower numbers you could get but are not measuring; anchoring the bottom of your scale to 0 improperly implies that this is the lower bound of possible performance.
Etc.
Again, I don't know how these scales are designed or what they're supposed to mean. But it's very possible that relationships like these (probably not these specific ones, but other things that do not survive translation) may be intended in their scale.
guesswho
2yr ago
Why did the US end up with this system?
As per usual, capitalism. These are all private companies with high profits, including entire ancillary markets for practice tests and tutoring and cram schools and etc.
guesswho
2yr ago
Pretty sure the tests were scored like this decades before people cared about affirmative action.
If they're trying to artificially boost anyone it's the people who pay them for practice tests and tutoring.
But more likely it's just some obscure thing about how the scoring works. It's definitely not just a number of points for each question, some computerized versions have adaptive questions based on how well you're doing, etc.
The MCAT sections are balanced to add up to 500, which is just a nice round number I guess.
guesswho
2yr ago
I agree that there are people looking for spiritualism but just as a fun hobby, they wouldn't be interested in anything that requires them to change their behavior as drastically as Christianity would.
I dunno, I definitely know a lot of pagans and new-agers who spend more time and money on that than the average Christian (not a highly devout one), but agreed that's a much smaller demographic at that point.
guesswho
2yr ago
As far as I can tell, the letter of the law is this:
The U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) defines sexual harassment as “unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, and other verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature constitutes sexual harassment when:
Submission to such conduct is made either explicitly or implicitly a term or condition of an individual's employment; Submission to or rejection of such conduct by an individual is used as the basis for employment decisions affecting such individual; or Such conduct has the purpose or effect of unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance by creating an intimidating hostile or sexually offensive work environment.”
That doesn't sound like it is too broad or should have a chilling effect on benign behaviors, 'unreasonably interfering with an individual's work performance' seems like a pretty high bar that's hard to do by accident, and you should have plenty of warning before meeting that bar if you're paying attention. In particular, I don't think any individual comment (especially a marginally-benign one) can meet that third standard alone, it would require a pattern of behavior to interfere with work performance that severely, so you should get warnings along the way.
Of course, IANAL, I don't know if there are other statutes that apply or how this one has been interpreted, but like I said my impression is that the actual in-trial application is even more stringent than this might imply, not less. Open to anyone with more info though.
I do think, again, that a lot of the problem here is another meta-layer removed; not what a clean reading of the statute says is sexual harassment, but what people imagine the statute might refer to based on popular media discussions of the topic (or, perhaps more perniciously, discussions by corporate lawyers trying to avoid any possible liability, or discussions by for-profit 'educators' on this topic trying to create business for themselves).
guesswho
2yr ago
There are plenty of women with each of those types of intelligence.
Either society does not recognize them and promote them to places where you can see them, or you do not recognize them when you see them. They may certainly present with different aesthetics than the men with those types of intelligence, and may not be members of the same social clubs. They may not point out that they're women when participating in anonymous online forums. They may not use their intelligence to show off, dominate rooms, or manipulate people at the same rates or in the same ways as men do.
But yeah, women are people, things that are true of people are true of women. We just don't always notice that underneath our cultural narratives about them.
guesswho
2yr ago
Of course that distinction is subtle and the mainstream media mostly appears to be either misunderstanding it or intentionally misrepresenting it as allowing the blessing of the union itself.
My question would be, will significant numbers of liberal priests also 'misinterpret' it that way and actually bless those unions? And could the Pope have predicted they would do that?
(legitimate questions, I don't know much about it)
Assuming yes to both questions, it's still technically inaccurate to say 'The Pope is allowing priests to bless unions', but only very technically. If that was the predictable-to-him outcome of his actions, that's kind of what he did, regardless of what he said.
So in a time when most Catholics are already essentially apostates the Pope is doing his best to guard against zealotry and intolerance. It's hard for me to believe that this will lead to anything good for the Church. The future is clearly in the more conservative faction with large, churchgoing families. A move like this will discourage them but do nothing to bring in more liberals who will applaud from a distance but aren't going to start attending Mass.
Again, not my area, but this feels wrong to me. I've heard lots of stories from people who left the church because it wasn't tolerant enough for them, not because of some more fundamental theological dispute. The most socially progressive people in the world fall into witchcraft, astrology, tarot, crystals, psychics, etc; I think there's actually a pretty huge demographic of people who are hungry for a spiritual organization in their life, and just need it to clash with their worldly values less.
At least, in blue states in the US. I certainly have a biased sample that I'm drawing from here.
guesswho
2yr ago
"comments about the amount of clothing a woman is wearing" is a very broad category of statements, multiplied by a very broad range of contexts.
The vast majority of that space of events is definitely not sexual harassment.
If you precisely described the content and context of a specific comment in enough detail to determine which category it fell into, I think the 'why' would ussually be a lot easier to explain and most people would agree most of the time.
I think the biggest problem here is the part of that space where someone imagines that if they said a specific thing in a specific context, it would be considered sexual harassment by someone. I've never been accused of sexual harassment, but I share the experience of thinking carefully about the thing I say and holding back sometimes out of worry of giving offense, and can sympathize with people who are frustrated by it. But if you've also never crossed that line into actually being accused, consider the possibility that you're just wrong about where the line is, and the category of things that you think of as 'someone would accuse me of sexual harassment if I said this and that's absurd' are actually mostly things that no one would accuse you of sexual harassment for.
(In point of fact, I am involved in managing the ban list and safety complaints for a rather large social club with mostly young people, and I've never seen a complaint that didn't involve physical contact or explicit threats of violence lead to any disciplinary action. I really just think the situation on the ground isn't as dire as people imagine, as is true for most things in the modern world)
The second biggest problem is all the ambiguous parts of that space where the judgement isn't entirely clear-cut and some people may disagree, and how that space gets exploited by the typical culture-war driven mess of toxoplasma, ragebaiting listacles, 'engagement' reporting, inaccurate anecdotes, etc. etc. etc., same as every other topic we talk about. This has several parts to it:
-I don't think the laws against sexual harassment are actually dangerous in the way these comments imply, and in fact I think they're still heavily skewed towards defendants (as may be correct!). Not my area of expertise, but I definitely have the lived experience of, every time someone says that someone got sued for sexual harassment and lost and it was a crazy absurd thing that should have been fine, when you actually go to look at teh legal documents detailing the case they are much much worse and more justified than the anecdote that's being shared online (think the McDonalds coffee lady). Exacerbating this tenfold is the fact that many of these cases are settled in settlements where the victim signs a nondisclosure agreement that doesn't bind the defendant, ensuring that only one side of the story goes public (yes, even in states where those agreements are unenforceable, victims don't know that and are scared to push it)
-The online ecosphere has the usual incentives to lie, cheat, and steal on this topic. One side pushing absurd standards and stringency as a costly signal about how seriously they take this and how seriously you had better take it, the other side promoting absurd cherry-picked anecdotes to the forefront in an attempt to ragebait for clicks and to paint a skewed picture of the actual situation on the ground. People on tiny sights making outrageous claims in order to get attention, people on other tiny sights excoriating those claims out in order to get attention. Typical stuff.
-The actual idiots and bad actors, from young people with no perspective talking about things they don't understand, to manipulators and opportunists taking advantage of this range of charges for social or economic gain, to genuinely ill or disturbed people pushing their own distorted views or perceptions, to etc. etc. Again, the typical stuff.
guesswho
2yr ago
Of course, on seeing this news I immediately wondered why it would count as "punishing" women to prevent them from doing something men don't generally have the option of doing (that is, making money by flashing breasts).
Was it previously against Twitch TOS for male streamers to be topless? That is news to me and surprises me if true.
Anyway, I think you're maybe misreading the second policy here, it seems to be aimed at art streams and/or people showing NSFW art on stream. The concern about 'realistic AI images' I think is about basically showing 'deepfakes' (realistic faked porn of actual people) without the subject's consent on-stream.
guesswho
2yr ago
Welcome to my world. At least I have the courtesy to respond in good faith when it happens to me.
guesswho
2yr ago
The degree of carelessness that is effective in a child trafficking ring is much narrower than that of a fraudulent ebay listing scam.
I mean, maybe?
The first time one of Jeffrey Dahmer's drugged victims stumbled out of his home nude and managed to make it to the police to beg for help, Dahmer assured them it was just a drunken lover's dispute and the police turned the victim back over to him without further investigation. He wasn't caught until the second time that happened years later.
There do exist competent police task forces that investigate their area of remit hard and track down the criminals, but my impression is that there's a rather small number of them nationally and they are pretty narrowly focused on one or a few cases at a time. I expect it's not actually that hard to fall into the cracks. But I could be wrong.
Not to say that the average child trafficker is as safe as the average small-scale pot dealer in a white neighborhood, or anything. Just that I'm not sure the magnitude of the difference is that great, or that it depends on the trafficker being orders of magnitude more competent and careful.
... No, that's not what happened.
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