I'd go Hanlon's Razor here, a video of violent thrashing is pretty evocative evidence if you don't bother to do further research, and most people don't.
Also I don't know why this is the most humane method, I would think something like 'detonate large c4 brick under their pillow while they're asleep without prior warning' would be most humane, just more aesthetically upsetting to everyone else.
And sure, rebuilding the cell is probably expensive, but the entire nation does less than 20 executions a year. Compared to the court costs, it's probably a minor expense on the overall system.
guesswho
2yr ago
What always trips me up about sentiments like this is that I agree with them... and that's a big part of why I'm a prison abolitionist, you can't trust the justice system to deliver real justice and shouldn't premise everything on it's ability to do so.
But most people expressing these sentiments are not prison abolitionists, many of them among Republicans want to be tougher on crime with harsher sentencing and so forth, and I don't understand the epistemic state that lets someone dismiss the justice system as obviously corrupt when it works against someone they like, but reliable enough to throw people in jail for life willy-nilly otherwise.
guesswho
2yr ago
But why would you outsource your vote to the jury pool of Georgia?
The same reason anyone outsources any judgements to anything: a level of epistemic humility, and acknowledging that other people and systems may know things you don't.
Republicans are the Tough on Crime party after all, Back the Blue and harsher mandatory sentencing and all of that. Their policy positions wouldn't make a lot of sense if they didn't think that criminal convictions had at least some pretty high correlation with actual states of guilt.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think I take your meaning, but, 'how accurate were we at predicting his presidency when he'd never held an elected office before' vs 'how accurate are we at predicting his presidency after he's been president for 4 years' should intuitively not be the same number, if we're updating on evidence at all here.
guesswho
2yr ago
I doubt that it would be that much like his first term.
As I see it, his first term was characterized by him wanting to do wild stuff, and a bureaucracy dedicated to impeding or distracting him, leading to an overall sedate and reasonable tone in terms of actual policies and state actions, if not in terms of rhetoric coming from the Oval Office.
And my impression now is that the Republican party and many parts of government have since then been hollowed out and replaced by Maga true-believers o hangers-on, who will not want to moderate or distract him, and who will apply actual institutional competence and energy to doing the things he's always talked about but never done.
So I'd expect it to be very different in practice, and much much worse from at least my perspective.
Of course, I could be totally wrong about all of that, I acknowledge it's a particular narrate that progressive sources are trying hard to sell me on right now. I think it's more plausible from the outside view than a lot of other things they try to sell me on that I dismiss as silly, but it could also be sillier than I'm seeing.
guesswho
2yr ago
You're right that Biden doesn't have a winning position going against immigration crackdowns at the moment.
But when you're in a losing position in politics, your options are either to change your position, or change the conversation.
The 'children in cages' narrative was a big win for Democrats on immigration, even if the policy wasn't much different from what Obama was already doing. Drawing attention to the bad parts of the system while your opponent is in charge of it, getting some good pictures about it to go viral, shaping a narrative and conversation on the issue that centers those bad parts and nothing else, that's how you flip enough people that the issue s in your favor again.
'Razorwire' has such a cruel sound to it that it's appealing as a possible fulcrum to do that again. If reporters could get a few pictures of immigrant children with gashes over their hands an faces (unlikely unless staged, but who knows), or Texas border guards getting into a shootout with a migrant caravan where a kid gets winged, or whatever, then Dems could flip public opinion again real fast.
Painting Texas border security as cruel and fanatical is a prelude to something like that showing up, prepping the narrative to look for stuff like that and pounce on it. Or if nothing like that ever does pop up, it may still serve as an inferior but sufficient narrative all on it's own, if heated up with a clash between state and federal agents, and tied to Trump's 'fascist' vision for America when he inevitably comments.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think in theory the principled way is Occam's Razor, 'whichever model fully explains the observed data and is most simple is the null hypothesis'.
But of course that's an abstract metric, humans can't actually calculate that correctly in complex systems.
guesswho
2yr ago
I think the correct fully-nuanced way to understand this is in reference to Occam's Razor:
'Moving from a less complex explanatory model towards a more complex explanatory model cannot be justified without the introduction of new data which the less complex model cannot explain.'
I think that's the fully general and correct formulation of who has teh onus to provide evidence in any situation.
The problem, of course, being that people will disagree about which of their models requires a less complex explanatory model, and the average person is ussually not qualified to judge those claims.
Is it less complex to say that we assume all races have the same genetic component of intelligence because it's only positing a single set of intelligence factors instead of multiple ones for different races, meaning there are fewer bits in the theory?
Or is it less complex to say that genetic drift and mutation and so forth are all things that we already know are parts of the model, so we would expect some random differences just based on noise, and having the values be exactly the same would require some mysterious extra factor countering that type of drift and forcing them to be the same?
(and then there are 10 more layers of nuance after that on both sides, of course)
So what naturally happens is that different people on different sides of an issue each feel that they have the simplest explanation that requires additional evidence to overturn, and therefore the onus to provide evidence is on the other side.
A lot of people will come to that conclusion because they are already on a side, and it is convenient for them if their side's views are the logical default, so they easily convince themselves that this is true.
On the other hand, we shouldn't be so cynical as to rule out the fact that many people encountering an issue will have thoughts or intuitions about which side's model is more parsimonious first, and join that side for that reason. They may still be wrong, but it's still epistemically virtuous if that honestly wrong interpretation of the actual question at hand is what guided them to choose a side. It's really about all we can ask for.
guesswho
2yr ago
Gonna cause a ruckus once we get immortal cyborgs though.
'Why is our race of immortal super-minds only allowed to be governed by infants?!?!?!?!'
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean, in theory it's good if you can't imagine any Constitutional Amendment being passed, because it means that there aren't any that obviously should exist but don't?
The last one was 30 years ago and was about changing Congressional salaries, the one before that was 50 years ago and lowered the voting age to 18. I think they're generally supposed to be very rare and about dry procedural stuff, it would be bad if that weren't the case.
guesswho
2yr ago
When has Trump ever implied this kind of animus toward black Americans?
In 1973, in 1989, in 1992, and very often in between and since then?
I have to sometimes remind myself the most people didn't grow up in New York, and didn't have Trump as a looming political and cultural figure in their life for many decades before he showed up on The Apprentice or a ballot.
When you ask questions like that, it just strikes me as ignorance, of the type anyone who grew up with Trump in their local news on a regular basis would be baffled by. Yes, he has a long and well-documented history from before he started making campaign speeches. Yes, a legacy of racism, both structural and verbal, has been a part of that history since the very beginning.
guesswho
2yr ago
On that, a surprising number of the establishment Republicans have kids married to black people. Haley, McCain, Boehner, etc. What's with that?
I mean, more or less than 13% of all establishment Republican kids?
guesswho
2yr ago
I mean were the Confederates not that? Most people believe that what they are doing is for a good cause. That's certainly never been a criminal defense in any other situation, AFAIK.
Also I'm not sure it matters what the average useful idiot on the frontline thought, if it was being organized and armed by people with a different motive. If there was a plot by anyone to defraud the election, even if it's only a minority of organizers behind the overall movement, that's still a set of insurrectionists that were aided and comforted.
It was definitely an armed invasion of the capital while votes for President were being counted with the intention of disrupting that process, in which legislators were evacuted by security and held in a secure location, in which property was damaged and stolen, in which people were injured and killed.
People were prosecuted and imprisoned for an assault on the capital, that kinda feels like the legal system views them as enemies of the state. However you feel about it personally, it was a pretty big deal and the legal system obviously takes it more seriously.
guesswho
2yr ago
He's certainly given aid and comfort, the question is whether the people he gave aid and comfort to were insurrectionists.
guesswho
2yr ago
Reasoning?
To my knowledge that's never happened before since the first televised debates.
Of course a lot of weird stuff is happening but that level of confidence still requires a story.
guesswho
2yr ago
Also, as I understand it, Colorado's case is based on a Republican-led Originalist reading of the relevant law, which is exactly what the conservative justices who lead the court have staked their entire careers on, and is pretty open-and-shut obviously correct on that reading.
They may well abandon all their claimed principles and make an activist ruling of some type, but I think people are too confident that they will. I think people assume that because what Colorado is doing seems surprising and weird and motivated it must de facto have no strong basis in law, but I think that's just not true.
guesswho
2yr ago
My understanding is that 1. The Supreme Court isn't in a position to decide whether Trump is ineligible, just whether or not states are individually allowed to make that decision for themselves, and 2. You can run for and become President from jail, and then just pardon yourself.
guesswho
2yr ago
I expect that the main outcome of this is that Trump gets more attention before the end of the primary than he otherwise would have, and this is bad for him in the General because it gives him more time for gaffes and senior moments.
Of course, it could also free up more attention for Biden, giving him more time for gaffes and senior moments as well.
Seriously, whoever hosts the first Trump/Biden debate could save us all a lot of time and energy by just asking both candidates to draw a clock. It's all pretty sad.
But I guess we'll see what happens. VPs are going to be a lot more important this cycle.
guesswho
2yr ago
Yes, just like the person with the gun represents all voters rather than a single concerned citizen, the rich person represent all capitalists rather than a single moneybags.
guesswho
2yr ago
Sure, but we were talking about extrajudicial killings here.
I agree that those other things exist, but so do liberals. I and they have lots of proposals to fix those things, which conservatives have variously opposed for decades or centuries. That's not a blind spot, at most it's policy disagreement.
Hlynka was using a specific discussion he had with a specific person about a specific killing to say that liberals have a blind spot about why a private citizen might need to kill someone on the subway and why that's justified and heroic. I don't see a connection between that and public urination, unless you can explain it more clearly.
guesswho
2yr ago
I am not saying “anything someone finds disgusting should be illegal”, and in fact no such law has ever existed, rather that what a reasonable person finds disgusting should not be done in public. This is how eg indecency laws operated.
I think this is just wrong? Sodomy laws have certainly existed to outlaw things happening in private, for example. I'm pretty sure there have been banned books that it's not legal to own private copies of. To the extent that restrictions on pornography exist they've applied to private spaces. Etc.
At any rate: Yes, the public/private distinction is relevant, asking for things to be kept out of public spaces is being less of a utility monster than asking for them to be eradicated entirely. Although the modern world has complicated that distinction profoundly; are social media sites public or private? If you do something in a private space that gets recorded and then broadcast in public (maybe by an enemy), was the thing itself ok? Is Netflix or Cartoon Network 'public'? There's a lot of room to stretch the definition of 'in public' into every corner of our private lives, which seems to be the tact used whenever you allow 'disgust' as a policy-relevant factor for people to manipulate.
But you're also ignoring one of my central points here:
If we choose to ignore disgusting things you run the risk of causing serious harm (disgust) to reasonable people which in some cases can be worse than a slap.
You're still reifying 'disgusting things' as if that were an ontologically basic category, rather than a subjective individual judgement which is contingent on culture and upbringing and which people can train themselves into or out of or just lie about.
If you think being gay is a sin and should be illegal, I can point at separation of church and state and tell you to screw off. If you say that gay people are disgusting and you shouldn't be forced to see them holding hands in public, suddenly you've appropriated the power to take away their rights to act normally and be regular people across huge swaths of daily life, plus all the other knock-on effects of making things invisible and hidden.
And again, the point is that 'disgust at seeing gay people holding hands' is not a universal or primitive qualia the way 'pain at being slapped' is. You can train yourself into or out of it, culturally if not individually, which means that allowing it to be a factor in forming policy turns it into a weapon that you're incentivized to encourage.
guesswho
2yr ago
Saying that voting is irrelevant because it is interpreted by government feels like it's missing the point of democracy.
I can't tell if this is just a 'letting the perfect be the enemy of the good' thing; sure, the government could conceivably subborn democracy in a way that makes it irrelevant (at which point it's not democracy), and it certainly always does subborn it at leas at little bit (see: electoral college et al.). But those imperfections don't actually make democracy functionally identical to dictatorship, it's still actually a lot better than that in practice.
It's pro-Trump if you want Trump's policies to be implemented, and anti-Trump if you don't want them to be implemented. Dems have pushed really really hard for the better part of a decade on convincing their voters that it would be disastrous for Trump's policies to be implemented and only his incompetence and inability to push things through saved us the first time, so saying that won't save us the second time is an effective scare tactic.
I probably have a similar blindspot for the conservative side of the narrative - I would have guessed that conservatives can't say 'Trump will actually get things done this time' because it would be acknowledging that he didn't get much done last time (beyond his constitutional right to propose SC appointments), and no acknowledging of weakness or failings for Trump is allowed. Maybe it's allowed if they wrap it in 'the deep state stopped him form getting things done' or w/e.
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