justmotteingaround
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User ID: 2002
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
I'm okay with any politician being thrown in jail for a decade for merely doing what Trump did on his call with Raffensperger.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
I think he is correct. I find HBD plausible in principle, but it's terrible political tool in practice. For one, its radioactive and attracts a high proportion of radioactive supporters. Second, many better tools already exist (standardized tests, colorblind policy, merit based immigration vetting). HBD is a worse substitute than existing policy frameworks. It purports to partially explain a wide variety of complex human behavior of ill defined groups. Interesting in principle; a bad policy tool for a nation that focuses so much on the individual (culturally and legally).
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
he believed those "results" weren't legitimate at all!
And that illustrates why the legal standard of "reckless disregard for the truth" exists. Such concepts put limiting principles on credulity. Without such limiting principles a future president could claim they believe they are legally Emperor for life, while amassing functionaries to carry out that goal. If if such an attempt were to fail, they could hide behind "well my lawyers were saying it was true, and I sincerely believed them, so I declared martial law." Elites have enough power, and I'm fine holding all rulers to something like a "reckless disregard for the truth" standard. At a minimum, they should end up in court.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
When the POTUS asks someone to overturn election results immediately after falsely notifying them that they are committing a serious crime if they don't, just chuck them in a jail cell for a decade to teach them about reckless disregard for the truth, and intimidating election officials.
justmotteingaround
2yr ago
thus they were far less secure
This doesn't follow from the given. Allegedly they were lost in some locked closed that nobody went in and out of for years. Something like that. The FBI had security footage from Mar al Lago of people going in and out of where the documents were stored.
The fact that team Trump was adversarial to the classification people doesn't make his conduct bad.
It course it makes his conduct worse. I mean, whats worse: unknowingly keeping a work laptop, then giving immediately when found; or, unknowingly keeping a work laptop, and refusing to give it back, and forcing the police to come get it?
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
Avoiding those bad things requires agency, and women demonstrate more of it than men in those contexts. This is true around the world. In general, males show greater impulsivity in both humans and lab animals. Nobody has argued for a broad societal reconsideration of whether men are adults. People would laugh that argument out of the room.
Is there a problem with women claiming a sexual encounter was consensual, and arguing for a take-back some time later? Absolutely. Does it follow that we should seriously consider whether women are adults? No. Thats insane.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
Of course the sexes are unequal. This is undeniable. But I have yet to hear any argument why basic rights should differ. What is being proposed here is an anathema to classical liberalism. Sure, people are free to debate the cultural inequality of agency or roles between men an women, so long as they're treated equally under the law. If it wants to fit into classically liberalism, the individual takes precedent over group based rights.
Women demonstrate more agency than men when it comes to getting romance or finance scammed, abusing drugs and alcohol, or murdering people. Of course, it doesn't follow that we should take the vote away form men, or consider them children. Men are full adults, and are responsible for their choices. So is Pavlovich.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
When the PODUS, or any higher ranking politician, calls someone to tell them "The ballots are corrupt and that's illegal... Its more illegal for you than it is for them. You know what they did and you're not reporting it, and that is a criminal offense. You can't let that happen. That's a big risk to you... And you're letting it happen. I'm notifying you that you are letting it happen. And all I want to do is find X votes" just put them in jail.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
I think this is where HBD is misapplied as a heuristic if the goal is a colorblind meritocratic society. There are 40M blacks in the US. Plenty have merit for various jobs, things get weird at the tails, but there is a skew is already roughly reflected in broad achievement. From a quora post "what is the IQ of blacks"
"It’s about one standard deviation lower than whites or about 85. In practice, this means that individuals at the upper end of the curve are massively underrepresented. Look at two rather meritocratic statistics: 1) about 1% of NIH grants are awarded to black scientists 2) about 1% of CPAs in America are black. In either of these examples, there isn’t a big push to have candidates get external support or preferences (e.g. medical school or Ivy undergrad) so blacks are underrepresented by about 10 fold, which is what would be expected by a bell curve shifted to the left by one standard deviation.
Tally for black achievements (14% of U.S. Population):
1% NIH Grants awarded 1% of CPAs 1% of Fortune 500 CEOs (19 out of 1,800 recorded over history) 1% of American billionaires 1.8% of Law firm partners (virtually zero 0% at big NYC law firms) 2% of U.S. Air Force pilots 0% of Nobel prizes in Physics, medicine, chemistry ~1% of Nobel prizes in Economics (1 in history, note some years multiple recipients creating fuzzy math) 0% of Fields Medalists (considered the closest to Nobel for math) Another way to look at the issue of black intelligence is to pick an IQ required for a demanding job and see how many individuals fall in that category. Some researchers have suggested it takes an IQ of 130 to become a professor, senior executive, physician, tech entrepreneur. One could argue this is a floor, not an average. In the general population, about 2.5% of people would have an IQ this high. If the distribution curve is shifted to the left one SD, only 0.13% or about 1/17th as much (1/17th of 2.5%) of the population reaches this level. This suggests only one out of 770 American blacks would likely be capable of such professions.
This is all explicitly legal (a non-arbitrary business necessity must be demonstrated for disparate achievement to be perfectly legal. Standardized tests are fine). So you'd want to build merit based coalitions which doesn't lump ill defined groups together. HBD is less useful because its too broad. Coleman Hughes has collected wildly disparate outcomes at the group level within the squishy race categories, and HBD misses all of that. There are certainly edge cases of unqualified candidates being pushed forward to everyones detriment (such as the Barpod sadfunny ATC episode), but such instances have been challenged in the courts repeatedly, with ruling which work with HBD anyhow (ie demonstrating the necessity of disparate outcomes for organizational functioning).
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
This still seems like special pleading. Perhaps you can argue/explain to me how its not. As I see it, we can figure out chess, engineer billions of transistors per sq in, manipulate genomes, program LLMs with billions of tokens, perform a million-trillion operations every second. Therefore its not unreasonable to suspect that we can make good climate models.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
I probably agree with you a lot here. But it would be laughable to argue that these outliers at the margins are a serious reason to question if men are adults.
Trump got 12M more votes vs 2016. Fraud? I asked chatgpt to make a table of voter turnout by year, % turnout for D's and R's, and voter registration rate - for the last 5 elections. It supposedly took data from here:
https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publications/2022/demo/p20-585.pdf
2020 had the highest values in every singly category. I think a lot of people voted in 2020.
justmotteingaround
11mo ago
So, like, the worst part about Humbert-Humbert is that he he didn't intend to marry Lolita?
I don't think "feminist notions of consent" have anything to do with protecting minors from their own voluntary decisions. The legal basis is cognitive. 12 year olds can't legally quit school, buy legal drugs, leave home, sign contracts, etc. But this is not because of feminism.
Would you be okay with a 19 year old having sex with an 11 year old? An 8 year old? And so on...Provided they intended to marry?
Its an interesting perspective, but I see some small potential for abuse.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
It is a defense to disparate impact along protected class lines if it can be shown that the discriminatory factor is a business necessity. I'm less confident in how this plays out in practiced, how many bullshit claims of prevailed since the CRA, and how much bullshit claims have trailed off since.
justmotteingaround
2yr ago
Which is most still do and
At the height of the violence, support for "reasonable" violence peaked at 22%. Without looking I'd be willing to bet fewer than 10% of congressmen endorsed violence at that time. Would also bet that the majority decried it when asked.
Claims that majorities genuinely want, will want, or recently wanted riots, violence, arson, looting, and violent criminals released by lunchtime does not comport with the data. Its an irrational belief in total contradiction to the lives claim they want.
justmotteingaround
2yr ago
I'm sure exceptions to the rule exist, but we should deal in probabilities and stive for accurate piors. The president ran on being against the death penalty, and was elected. In my examples, I'm talking about sub 20% popular support. I don't know what it was in France.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
My guess is the relevance is here:
2019 Background: PEPFAR (President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief) has used millions of tax dollars in a campaign to circumcise Africa under the guise of reducing HIV risks, based on some very controversial studies.
Links to a blog of an activists who writes books and makes documentaries to end circumcision. IME the intactivist bunch make radical claims well beyond anything the evidence supports, and bring up circumcision whenever possible in hope of ending what just might be the most barbaric practice mankind has ever conceived.
Do I support unnecessary circumcision of children? No, not really. But every time I look at the evidence, I can't see any reason to get worked up about the topic. I hope the bizarre practice dies out.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
Most of my critique revolves around extending a single instance of an unreliable narrator into viewing women as children, and questioning their right to vote. This is an insane extrapolation of the data, and wouldn't be accepted as a fundamental policy or philosophical argument.
Lots of people have been agitating to nationalize the credit card industry for this exact reason.
I know, and the govt heavily regulates lending anyhow, but less now than ever in terms of max ARP.
My point being that even the most egregious instances of usuary (ie pay day loans) do not portend the end of lending. Nationalizing the credit industry seems less fringe and hairbrained than not treating women as adults. However, neither are practiced anywhere worth living.
I'm sure there is bias in the law as practiced, and men and women suffer unfounded disparate impact, but AFAIK the laws theoretically apply equally wherever possible. Given men's propensity to fall for romance, finance, and gabling scams, its odd that I've never seen it argued that we should view all men as hapless children, and restrict their rights. A maximally insane take would be restricting unrelated rights like driving or, I dunno, voting.
justmotteingaround
11mo ago
The justification for the high costs will be similarly analogous. For the death penalty, you want to execute as few innocent people as possible. In principle, no innocent people would ever be executed. In real world practice, a legal death penalties always puts innocent people do death in rare circumstances (governments are incompetent, Juries composed of Everymen, etc).
Likewise, the real world of deportations are far more complex than a simply wishing that the correct people are deported in the correct way. Laws are frequently squishy. A few million cases a year are clear, and people are quickly deported (roughly 10k per day). The others have to be argued. Removing barriers before understanding why they are there is an understandable impulse, but a dubious policy.
Granted, in both circumstances activists are incentivized to run up costs. That seems like more a feature than a bug. The US government is set up to protect people from the government.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
We should give climate science whatever veneration it earns. AFAIKT, it has produced results and useful predictions, but this is largely immaterial to what I'm talking about.
If there was Blah Science, researched for decades by tens of thousands of smart people who overwhelmingly agree that X is true, I'd bet on X being true.
My point: most people would bet on X being true in normal circumstances. People seem to make an exception for climate science. I'm curious why people make this exception.
I'm also curious if there are any other broad fields where this pattern holds. Things surrounding nutrition come to mind. Perhaps there are many, and what I'm calling special pleading is quite common.
justmotteingaround
1yr ago
This article is an semi-coherent jumble of truth mixed together with ludicrousness.
That's basically my take on everything I've read on amren. Extremely well written and inspiring, but the claims and leaps of logic that follow are indeed ludicrous. I understand the allure of the narrative, but trying to map it on to the world as I know it leaves be utterly bewildered.
justmotteingaround
2yr ago
Imagine describing to an alien that the official policy of the US is to abolish the police, decrimnalize hard drugs, endorse looting, arson, rioting, the release of violent criminals, and the violent take over of streets. Do you think they would have a accurate picture of policy in the USA?
justmotteingaround
2yr ago
No, I mean that these positions are as likely to ascent to power as the Mises wing Libertarian party. Sure, some people probably want their neighborhoods looted and burned to the ground. I'm not especially worried about them gaining a consensus.
justmotteingaround
2yr ago
hell, all of education
Yeah. Something like 90+% are liberals, which is super unhealthy. I imagine its not that different in Hollywood.
Also what do you mean by this?
I think echo chambers like themotte have a skewed perception of reality ie lots of doomerism over the intellectually bankrupt ideology that can broadly be described as "wokeism". It's a problem, but polling suggests its near the fringes.
The nation is approximately 50% Democrat; 50% Republican. The commenter I was responding to was hesitant to endorse legislation he agrees with because it is too ideologically aligned with people who want to see more arson, looting, and violent crime. This strikes me as insane, and, at the very least, is contradicted by whatever data we have. Unsurprisingly, only a small minority of people want their neighborhoods burned to the ground while they are hunted by violent criminals.
If you feel consigned to your home after sunset, you're more likely to need psychiatric medication than moving boxes. On average, people are moving to cities, and aren't afraid of the dark. I've never known a city dwelling woman to carry any means of protection. Fertility rates have remained about 10% lower in large metro areas than rural areas for over a decade. Not being able to imagine something 10% less frequent is caused by a broken imagination.
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