justmotteingaround
No bio...
User ID: 2002
justmotteingaround
4mo ago
Whatever role you thought licensing boards were doing, they're not doing that.
Hey now, I'm sure plenty of people here hated occupational licensing before it was cool. The Institute for Justice has been suing some of the more absurd boards around the country for 15 years, but its still common for a cosmetology license to require 1500 hours of training vs 300 for an EMT. Louisiana famously had an onerous flower arrangement license, scaled back since 2010ish. Not until 2020 did Florida scale back its ~1000hour license for interior residential decorating. There was a country-wide movement to pare back licenses for braiding hair. The ring cam anecdote is new to me.
The Gist recently had an interview with a journalist looking into occupational licensing. Might be the same author you referenced. They got into the weeds about how doctors who become drug addicted, drug peddlers, or do some patient related sex crimes maintain there licenses, often going to work in prison jails when nobody else will hire them.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
Its not dead and there legal challenges were always going to happen. For the curious, the tweets in question were from this summer.
“You could not pay me to marry outside of my ethnicity,”
“Normalize Indian hate” in reference to a post noting the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley
“Just for the record, I was racist before it was cool"
“I would not mind at all if Gaza and Israel were both wiped off the face of the Earth.”
Not sure how that last one is conceivably racist. The now-deleted account was @nullllptr but previously was called @marko_elez - the staffers name.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
A lot of people on the right saw Kanye as
How people see him as anything other than mentally ill is beyond me. He constantly expresses delusions of grandeur, and he's freaking Kanye West! His beliefs and values are tied to reality by gossamer threads. I don't mean to dismiss or demean him. I think he is very talented. He thrives in the spotlight, and seems to enjoy it. But he behaves like a lot of people with bipolar disorder. Who knows why he does what he does sometimes.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
If you truly want a steelman you have to be maximally charitable, so a premise that Trump was "dumb or crazy" for his possible sincere belief that the election was stolen is a non-starter. Imagine asking for a steelman for the Earth being flat. A premise that flat Earthers are just dumb or crazy, and therefore shouldn't be doing science, doesn't steelman the assertion that the Earth is flat.
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Trump sincerely believed the election was stolen. At the time, he found Sydney Powell, Mike Lindell etc more convincing the Attorney General, his Chief of Staff, White House council, the head of election security, etc
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Armed with their information, Trump and Chesebro formulated a plan to make sure the true winner was certified. They proactively organized uncertified electors as the state governments had certified electors based outcome determinative fraud.
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So the fake electors were intended as a contingency plan. Trump and his team truly believed that, by the time everything was sorted out (perhaps with some more aggressive fact-finding or legal victories), these electors would reflect the actual will of the people; the state certification being erroneous.
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When Trump informed Raffensperger that certifying the votes with Trump losing was illegal and likely to cause problems for Raffensperger, this was simply true. This wasn't norm breaking, but ensuring election integrity by exhausting every means available.
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When Trump pressured Pence, it wasn’t a violation of norms but rather a push to consider what might have been the correct electors in the contested states. After all, if Pence had simply agreed, it would have allowed more time for states or the Cyber Ninjas to review and verify their results. Trump’s belief was that this action wouldn’t have overturned the election but simply delayed it for the truth to come out.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
Sometimes you can just do stuff.
That was my main take away, and probably where all the substance lies. That, and pondering how much time Petro wasted penning his reply. 20 minutes?
I highly recommend giving it a read. Its fairly beautiful. A chiding message from a particular kind of nationalist/ humanist who clearly thinks highly of himself. Delusional in parts, but oh so delicious to read knowing that all Petros hot air was rendered into farts when he capitulated a few hours later.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
Trump has been a brand for decades that has been plastered on buildings, steaks, planes, bottled water, casinos, vokda, perfume, sneakers, and more.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
I'm very happy about the direction and I hope it represents a sea change. However, I have strong reservations in this case specifically. He was recently hand-picked to rejigger the government, ostensibly on behalf on the American people. This past summer he tweeted "Normalize Indian hate", and "I was racist before it was cool." At best, this belies his immaturity. He already had a job at SpaceX, and he now has the sympathies of the richest man on the planet. He wasn't cut out for public service, and he'll be fine.
Vance said "I don’t think stupid social media activity should ruin a kid’s life". I totally agree, but Vance is being your typical disingenuous politician. Either Musk is hiring kids to oversee the government, or this guy isn't a kid.
In principle, I'm against this specific re-hiring because I think he earned his firing more earnestly than he earned his hiring. It would have been better to issue an apology and do nothing. In practice, I'm just hopeful that more sympathetic cases become the norm. The left will continue to eat their own for some time, so this is a competitive advantage on the right. And the right is probably closer to a humanistic, empathetic understanding of people on this issue. My point is that it has limits.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
In modern parlance its an ironic reappropriation of a word, now used to describe a hostile intolerance to differing arguments for a more fair, just, and prosperous society, all while cowering behind the words original meaning.
For example take Ana Kasparian revealing that she was sexually assaulted by a homeless person. Brain-rotted wokies tore her to pieces for disparaging homeless people, and called her racist for some unknown reason. One of her collogues quit because Ana wanted to be called a woman, not a birthing person. Or the 1619 Project by Nikole Hannah Jones, a Pulitzer winning piece of historical revisionism. Noticing its factual errors and/or flaws reasoning got you branded as a racist Nazi by the woke. Or the coverage surrounding the shooting of Jacob Blake, who was under arrest yet tired to flee in a vehicle with children before attempting to stab an officer before being shot. If you so much as pointed out what the video showed, you were called a racist. Its worth noting that Blakes shooting precipitated the attempts to burn down sections of Kenosha WI for some reason, where Kyle Rittenhouse shot 3 people on video, the lone survivor of whom said in court that Rittenhouse did not so much as aim at him until he pointed his own gun at Rittenhouse - who was obviously a white supremacist despite shooting only white people.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
Trump has been riding the podcast circuit recently (Theo Vaugh, Logan Paul, Andrew Schultz, Lex Friedman). They're all very, very soft, but he comes out looking decent from what I have seen. Rogan is usually a bit longer, but he is likewise in business of making his guests look good and to show them a good time. They'll probably have a lighthearted chat about things Rogan is interested in: corona, wokeness, men in womens sports, aliens, pot, veterans, the UFC. Rogan won't offer any pushback when Trump makes asides into how everything he did was the best ever; everything his critics do is the worst ever.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
The influence of US media narratives on crime has been especially distorting outside the US. Total gun deaths and police shootings between the UK and US are almost impossible to compare as the rates are respectively 60x and 150x less common in the UK.
I haven't heard of this case until now, but was there any claimed reason he didn't just get out of the car? Do I have the facts correct: the car and plate number were reported to have been involved in a shooting the day prior, the car was registered to someone other than Kaba, and nothing was found in the car? When pulled over, rammed several cop cars and tried to run the shooter over. Unsurprisingly he had been charged with attempted murder days prior.
justmotteingaround
3mo ago
An inherent problem with populism that skepticism goes out the window. People are placed in power based on what they say, and the electorate is hesitant to criticize what they do. Sure, populists don't talk or govern like effete Borgpeople, but their competence, effectiveness, and leadership should receive no less scrutiny. Musk has been positioned like a Soros fever dream: way more money, more involved in government, less oversight, more in control of media.
Its probably too early to tell if Musk's signature DOGE program will be a success like Tesla, or a total failure like Hyperloop or The Boring Company. I'm guessing it will be somewhere in between. He's overpromising and underdelivering with wild claims. This is a pattern. Second human crew to Mars by 2024, self driving LA to NY parking lots with no supervision by 2016. For DOGE he set the mark at 2T in cuts, revised down to 1T, apparently by July 2026. They've already published a bunch of erroneous stats and stories, and people are swallowing the narratives wholesale. USAID is suddenly and obviously bad, and everybody knows it. We shouldn't infer anything from the fact that every other developed nation has an analogous agency - who usually spend more as a % of national income - just ax the whole program, its 100% waste, fraud, and abuse.
I can be optimistic, but that needn't lessen my skepticism. Politics is a game of promising the world and delivering an atlas. Usually there is pushback. Granted, most major political media is now decidedly right leaning (at least podcasts, cable, and youtube), but for a group that rightly (if hyperbolically) showed interest in Bidens Ukraine dealings, The Twitter Files, Bidens mental decline, there seems to be no appetite for investigating the worlds richest man plugged in to the backdoor of government by an agency that tried to permanently dodge FOIA requests, run by what Vance insinuated were "kids".
justmotteingaround
11mo ago
Sure, this is how their zealous defenders should frame everything, but I think the prosecutors and video evidence will provide a much more convincing case. In BWC #1 you hear the report of the first shot before water is seen. In BWC#2 (no audio), you see the officer point the gun at her face well before she raises the pot (which they had just advised her to attend to). The cop then advances on her. So it went, unambiguously: "I'll shoot you in the fucking face" --> officer points gun at her face --> only then does she pick up the pot and cower --> cop advances on her --> she either throws water because she was just shot, or throws water, then gets shot, perhaps reasonably fearing for her life.
They cops seem unfriendly and somewhat rude from the outset. In an absolute sense, it's incredibly rare for a cop to get attacked for any reason, and I'm willing to bet money that the K:D ratio for 2 cops vs 1 woman is greater than 100:1. If grievous bodily harm could be measured, I'd bet on that too. I loath safetyism, and cops hide behind the lingo as much as SJW's. Okay, that is perhaps an exaggeration, but I constantly see cops going to the well of safetyism to justify any and all actions they might take. Any two armed men that felt threatened in that situation probably don't have what it takes to do jobs with even a modicum of risk.
I fully expect people to go wild with screen grabs of the pot being emptied at the officer and act if that makes the whole case. Dems will hopefully just be quiet, but will probably wildly exaggerate and overinterpret this incident until the end of time.
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
Because of the 1A. Fox News and OAN should be allowed to broadcast their opinions. The regime shouldn't be in the business of telling them what they can and cannot say. Trump is arguably a public figure, although some people are saying he is a Marxist born in Kenya. Big if true.
justmotteingaround
11mo ago
Their intuition for recognizing that is going to be top 0.1% in the country.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Factually speaking, US cops receive far less training, with less g loaded selection, than peer nations. There exists no validated training for detecting when a "crazy" person is about to turn violent, so I doubt they receive any. The shooter bounced around as many as 5 departments in the last 5 years. By the data we have, he's possibly top 0.1% at creating lethal interactions from nothing.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
rehiring this guys is probably the strongest at to say, no we don’t do cancel culture anymore.
Yeah, I actually love this aspect of it. I might even be glad it happened overall. I do fear the monkeys paw with this one. I'm unsure, and I don't want to get swept up in the moment.
My principle and practice / ideals and realpolitik are in conflict. I could hew to my ideals (ie "yes, its totally reasonable to fire a brand new hire to visible public service who you just found out tweeted 'I'm racist' over the summer"), or embrace the realpolitik ("cancel culture is so toxic that it needs to be destroyed, and a morally ambiguous case is the most effective weapon").
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
He is running a massive, multivariate, and esoteric experiment with an N of 1. Its not possible to say what's useful other than stuff we knew beforehand from actual studies: eat well, exercise, sleep well.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
People choose to take on too much frivolous debt and destroy their lives. Is the whole lending project dead? Should the media no longer write op-eds about payday loans with a 400% ARP? The average person no longer seems to be convinced that this is just a cultural problem which will go away.
That Pavlovich bird does not a summer make. There are global differences in median male and female traits, but I see no reason to treat them differently under the laws of a free society. Globally, men are vastly more violent, more likely to abuse drugs and alcohol, get into gambling debt, fall victim to romance and finance scams. We somehow manage to treat them like adults. I've never even heard it argued that we should do otherwise which is weird.
justmotteingaround
7mo ago
This mirrors issues in Bill Bishops 2009 The Big Sort - Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart. Worth a read or re-read. Its been visible online for as long as I can remember. Outrage and polarization maximize quarterly metrics. In the long run, people mostly want to hear news that confirms their priors.
Twitter (assuming its a business) has the lead and should allow seamless experience filters: default, left wing, right wing, no mod, heavy mod, institutional truth, conspiracy truth, puppies, etc. It wont solve the problem of information siloing, but it would keep people on platform while maintaining neutrality.
I've read the Skrmetti case and the amicus brief, and I really hope the petitioners fail.
That said, I'd bet money that the amicus brief (an inherently one sided argument) is broadly accurate in its claims, and is far closer to ground truth that the current US medical consensus. IMO the APA, AMA, and WPATH are completely out to lunch with regard to gender care, peddling harmful anti-science bullshit. I think trans insanity is waning slowly but surely, but the remedies proposed in Skrmetti set a precedent I don't like on principle. And principles are occasionally bitter pills to swallow, otherwise they're not principles.
If Skrmetti prevails (and I think it will), the effect will be a long standing precedent in case law that legislatures can eschew a medical consensus. Science will be decided in the courtroom; then the legislature. Granted, I think the US scientific consensus is wrong in this case, but I'm hewing to my principles, which sucks big fat amputated cock in this case. I want doctors, not legislators, to determine medical care. I don't want legislators deciding if mifepristone is safe, if my doctor/psychiatrist can prescribe me therapeutic ketamine, testosterone, MDMA, a lethal dose of whatever if I'm terminal, etc.
I loath safteyism, and won't clutch my pears and "think of the children" because other avenues of justice are available, namely torts. Suing doctors for negligence will change medical standards without opening a wider door permanent legislative intrusion. Torts have worked before. Anyone remember when fake tits were (erroneously, in retrospect) deemed unsafe for a period in the 90's? (In re Dow Corning Corp, 1996).
justmotteingaround
4mo ago
The European CFR recently conducted polling on US/EU relations. Warm relationships have lowered, shifting towards a necessary relationship. The combined support for necessary and aligned relationships is still ~75%. So thats pragmatic and strong. Other polling shows about a 60% favorable rating of the US by Europeans.
I couldn't find American views of Europe. My guess it leans favorable, but there is an attitude (especially in the administration) that the US is getting screwed. (I believe Trump once quipped that "the EU was created to screw the US"). I think roughly half of Americans want to put American unambiguously "first", but will also accept pragmatism.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
justmotteingaround
8mo ago
Specifically, did we ever see these threats? I hit bedrock here
On reddit Zorba:
Alright, so the admins are paying attention to us now. Not going into details, they aren't relevant and I don't want to draw their attention more; ask me again once this is done and I'll vent.
Poster:
Ok, it's a year later. Spill. I'm really curious about the fucked-up internal politics of Reddit.
Zorba
I am confused why this is coming up so often, you're the second in the last two days and I'd totally forgotten about it for months before that.
But anyway, out of a possible overabundance of caution, I'll PM it to you.
AFAICT, the threats were never discussed openly. I could be wrong. I only ask because this new threat rang some bells. Lots of arguably paranoid cloak and dagger stuff in the Meta: the motte is dead thread. I'm still grateful for all the hard work that goes into this place. Its the kind of place I can ask: does this place exist here because of a persecutorial complex; or was the move, like, justified...
justmotteingaround
11mo ago
I also found Trump's interview with Logan Paul quite humanizing and worth a watch. It made him look normal and sane compared to his usual public behavior. Granted, these are both very low stakes situations, but he rarely shows or grants access the normal side of himself. Perhaps his campaign is trying to clinch moderates. His brash, equivocal, and uncompromising rhetoric was often touted as his genius. Was he serious, or literal? Who cares? Hes Trump! But I think his base can still count on that, so his rhetorical style has been normalized.
One thing I never understood about TDS is how little attention is paid to the other side of the coin. In answer to a question nobody asked is a paragraph pointing out Trump's golfing bonafides, admonishing all who doubt as deranged. Trump is the most fervently worshiped US politician in my lifetime; the only political lifestyle brand I've ever known. He'll call your wife is ugly to your face, and then you'll stump for Trump as expected. With how little this even gets noticed anymore, I think TDS has become normalized.
justmotteingaround
5mo ago
I'm happy with this EO but I think calling Trump an idiot who couldn't govern was reasonable during his first term. He spent like a drunken sailor on non Covid stuff (more than double Biden!) to purchase a tax cut, a trade war, remain in Mexico, Space Force, and he warp sped a vaccine. Negotiated with the Taliban to end the war. No new wars. Pressured NATO to up the price of admission. And as an indefatigable culture warrior, he got the ball rolling on a vibe shift. Okay, all great.
But no wall. Lots of illegals regardless. No Trumpcare. Domestic manufacturing barely budged. People in his orbit regularly went to prison, were disbarred, or quit. The trade deficit remained the same. No critical infrastructure. No strategic industrial policy. Covid was a disaster despite him publicly saying it'd be gone in a few months, while saying on private tape he knew it wouldn't be. Initiated the stimulus stairway to inflation. Total of 8.4T added to the deficit (also double Biden). Nationwide riots under his watch. Historic amounts of golf. Told Brad Raffensperger 'I'm informing you that certifying the current GA votes is illegal, so certifying them will cause big problems for you' thus igniting the embers of J6. All this while The Blob remained unaffected.
I think its fair to ask for better, and notice that Trump 1.0 wasn't the most effective leader. Trump 2.0 could deliver, but a victory lap now is retro causal. Trump is energetic and with it for a 78 year old, and JD Vance is sharp and hardworking. Here is to hoping for a golden age!
Worst. Deal. Ever.
The US gets: blowback, military escalation, and debt. The US receives: sand. Id rather they send a blank check and let Israel take all the flack.
Islamic terrorists have told the US for decades that the primary reasons for 9/11 and other attacks was US support of Israel, AND military boots on the ground in "Muslim lands". This comes from a straightforward reading of the Quran/Hadiths as understood by hundreds of millions. They sincerely believe that the creator of the universe wants them to dedicate their lives to killing US troops in Muslim unless they pay the jizya and "live in humiliation".
Saudi Wahhabists found Bin Laden so extreme on this issue (as they has made deals with the US gov't) and basically sent him to Afghanistan, where he was armed by the US and famously praised a freedom fighter.
Israel is doing pretty well. They're far from dire straits. The US should be hands off as possible. Financial support is quite tolerable as it goes to a small, stable democratic ally in a hostile region.
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