kky
11mo ago
Listen, man, Donald Trump the New York Democrat managed to convert the Republican Party (organization of “pretend to care about Christianity so we can deliver tax cuts for the rich”) into a bunch of bootlickers and imitators that are seriously if sometimes ineffectually trying to deliver the platform they were elected on. It’s patently possible to take advantage of deliberate sandbaggers and repurpose their organization to your own ends.
Not saying it’s easy, duh. But if it matters to you…
kky
11mo ago
I still don’t get it. That sounds like regular silliness to me, not idiocy. Intelligence doesn’t preclude goofiness; good comics tend to be pretty bright, because they need to put their finger on the audience’s pulse.
But people seem to be talking, sometimes, about feeling attracted to “tee hee math is hard” kind of nonsense. And I don’t get it.
kky
11mo ago
But college, reparations, and progressive values are the same package as hard work, family values, and Christianity- just with different components.
I’d disagree that these are comparable, in line with your 85 IQ observation. The urban intellectual model of advancement is through education and a high-skill career, which is simply not in the cards for people under 120ish IQ. That’s the equivalent to family values and hard work, respectively, which targets a different demographic. So what can those urban intellectuals offer blacks? In this case, I think it’s race-based action and reparations (welfare etc). The final item is what’s expected of each group once they’ve advanced - for the urbans, it’s progressive values, like you note, and I’d place patriotism (especially local) over Christ for the workers (of course the individual workers have their own priorities - but this appears to me to be what the system, the tribe, wants out of them). And from the blacks, the only thing needed is the vote. This is what consistently pisses me off about the Democratic plans for black Americans. It reduces them to a client class. They get treats, the party gets votes. This is intensely degrading. Shouldn’t they get something to be proud of in themselves, the power of their work, things they acc do beyond asking for more?
So that’s why I don’t think they’re comparable. The rule system that urban elites hold themselves to is different from the rules they require of others.
kky
11mo ago
A fresh and youthful attitude is lovely and joyous. Is that what people mean by retarded, do you think? What, do you have to be jaded and brooding to be intelligent?
Well, whatever. I’m in agreement with you in any case.
kky
11mo ago
I dunno, feels pretty fair as an opinion. The book-cookers get blocked from business, Trump gets a shorter-term injunction for orchestrating it, but because no real harm was done, the penalties are struck down as deranged and vindictive. I don’t see a better way of threading the needle between condoning fraud if you’re important enough and deciding on damages based on how much our feelings are hurt.
kky
11mo ago
It’s a strange sentiment to me… I’ve never really thought it or felt it. Idiocy in a girl kind of gives me a sinking feeling, “oh no… ugh.” Intelligence is interesting and makes me want to stick around. I guess I’m the odd duck if people are stating it so confidently, though.
kky
11mo ago
Yeah, I’m not very sympathetic to Roberts here. This precise case is, I believe, best read as a naked power struggle between the voters and the legislators. The latter had a privilege the former believed was being misused and wanted stripped from them. The defense of the legislature was best read as “you don’t have the right to tell us what to do, only we can decide whether we have this power (or Congress with an amendment), and we say no.”
Given this, what recourse would the voters have? They’d have to make this a single issue or else give up. And I’m really not sympathetic to the idea that a certain class - and politicians are by now definitely a class - deserves inalienable privileges over the rest.
Finally, his example of senator elections is trite. The question for senators was formally, how those elections should be operated. That obviously requires an amendment, since it’s changing a specific process. The point of the section on state elections is that the details are deferred to the state. Nothing more is specified beyond “the legislature.” Would Roberts have objected to a legislature voting for their own independent districting body on the basis that the Constitution forbids it? Or if you want something even wackier - the US Constitution does not specify the political structure of the states (beyond saying that the federal government will ensure they can have a republic, which was not defined as the American structure prior to America)! That is done by the state constitutions, individually. It is convention that they all resemble one another. But if a state rewrote its constitution to move the legislative power to something like, say, a series of elected bureaux, what in the Constitution would forbid this? Is this not a power delegated to the states? And then would “Legislature” in the Constitution refer to the legislating bodies, or to nothing at all, rendering the point moot? Or what if, oh, I don’t know, the state had rewritten its constitution to allow voters to legislate through the ballot? Does that include them in the legislating body? If not, then was the ballot initiative law unconstitutional? How can there be one without the other, when the Constitution does not state explicitly what structure it wants the states to have?
Roberts’ dissent is beyond specious. I rest my case.
kky
11mo ago
Gerrymandering as a term dates to 1812. Some gerrymanders are more egregious than others, but the practice is very hard to expunge. It’s also limited by the fact that the canvas these districts are painted on, and the political parties themselves, are ever-shifting. A gerrymander can only ever be a temporary success. If a party gets too strong, and too unrepresentative, people will successfully organize to take it down a notch. That’s how it’s always been.
I’d relax about this particular problem. Unless your specific qualm is that you’re a Democrat in Texas and are worried about being disenfranchised. In that case I fully understand your concern and would recommend you view it as a personal issue (and move states) or a local issue (and organize with state Democrats to undermine Republican rule by adopting a more Texan-palatable local platform). I wouldn’t think of this as the end of Democracy in America. It’s just the usual political grift. Unpleasant but sustainable.
kky
11mo ago
Amusingly, I disagree with pretty much all of your premises. But #1 is interesting as a jumping-off point, so I’ll address it.
There’s a broad concept that left-wing sentiment is pro-black and right-wing sentiment is anti-black, and the two forces battle over how nicely to treat blacks. I think this is a misconception. Neither side, from what I can tell, really likes blacks, and both surface their antipathy in different ways which wind up being one and the same larger system.
By blacks, I don’t strictly mean people of African heritage. What I’m pointing to here is a subculture in America that is descended from slavery and which exists substantially outside the main drive of society. It has its own norms, doesn’t intermarry too often, doesn’t economically interact that much, watches its own TV, listens to its own music, and so on. This is what is disliked in its actuality by the political wings, because it’s not really part of either of them. The reality is, of course, more nuanced than this, but this is a good overview.
The left nominally likes blacks, until it comes to the problems that really do exist in black communities. These can be broadly described as symptoms of poverty, or of an underclass. I'm talking crime, of course, but homophobia is a pretty serious repellent here. The left response to these is to pretend they don’t actually exist, or are somehow caused by systemic pressures, which of course is besides the point. The left loves blacks who have integrated thoroughly into their cultural milieu.
The right is simpler. They just don’t like ‘em. There are some good ones, but the rest are bad. Best to stay away as much as you can.
So, neither wanting to get deeply involved, a fairly predictable pattern emerges. First, the left tries to support the “black community,” or at least the image they have of them. This tends to be through charity and lenience towards crime. This generally does not go well, and without seeing any positive outcomes, the general public starts getting sick of crime. Then the right wing sweeps in, declares the problem in racial(-ly coded) language, and cracks down hard. It doesn’t take long to notice that this policy rests on practical elements of prejudice against blacks, and so the general public starts swinging the other way…
So you get this effect, where first the left comes in and says: listen, you don’t need to work, have these handouts, shoplifting isn’t that big a deal, neither are drugs, no we won’t stop the violent gangbangers, we believe in community justice… so black people take that at face value, huh, guess dissipation and petty crime aren’t a big deal, and if anyone disrespects me I’d better deal with it myself. Then the right comes in and says, HA! You idiots believed that? Nope, it’s prison for you. And we know you’re all like that. So now obviously a lot of blacks are in jail, but also the kids start to learn: this is what it means to be black, they all see you that way… and maybe start thinking it’s right.
So I see these two movements as the greater American ambivalence towards blacks. There was a great injustice done to them, and they are suffering from it generations later. This is felt on a wide scale. It makes people uncomfortable. So people aren’t willing to see blacks as other people, and instead hide their individuality under the label. When a white person does something, or feels something, it’s because of who they are, but when a black person does, it’s because of who blacks are. But if you want to change a group’s behavior, you need to change the behavior of the individuals in that group, one by one. There is no other way.
Any serious attempt to deal with the troubles afflicting black Americans, and those they inflict on others, has to start with this view on individuality. “Blacks” are not like you and me, but individual black people can be. Others might not, and they might be criminal, and if so they need to be dealt with, but this is a fact disconnected from the rest. Some might need more explicit inculturation. That will require generations, and the removal of any privileges for being black. The end result of this must be the destruction of a uniquely black culture in America. This is inevitable. If we’re all alike, then there will be nothing left to distinguish that unique culture, except in superficial and vague elements. Anyone know what it means to be Irish besides wearing green on St Paddy’s? Or Italian besides having prejudiced views of different brands of San Marzano tomatoes? Or German besides living in the Midwest? Neither do I. And with intermarriage the distinction breaks down further.
So the current Trump thing is more of the same… except that politics is becoming less racially split. A lot of black men voted T last time. This means they’re not voting as a bloc, that they’re not voting for historic reasons, that there’s something they want past their race. Class is up, comparatively. Maybe that’s the end of black America: in our workers, uniting against the Man. We’ll have to see, I guess.
kky
11mo ago
Two small notes. First, you are almost certainly being heavily subsidized on that $20 plan. All the evidence points in that direction. You may be paying 1-2 orders of magnitude under cost. Second, the most interesting part of the METR paper was that the devs thought they were being sped up, but the opposite was true. Provably so. Intuitions on AI efficacy cannot be trusted prima facia. Many people find them enjoyable and interesting to use, which of course is their right, but we should not trust their estimates on the actual utility of the tool. Both of these facts seriously undermine the boosters’ case.
kky
11mo ago
Depends on the contract, I guess. But at minimum you’d have to pay the difference. So if you’ve already sunk the money and your devs aren’t even bothering to use something you’ve spent a cool few million on… well, that’s a pretty natural time for a desperate VP to start the mandates.
kky
11mo ago
Often AI deals require a promise to spend X tokens over Y time period. It’s like promises to spend a certain amount of money on a company’s services without specifying the services to be bought. So if the buyer is under the spend count, they encourage people to use more tokens.
kky
11mo ago
Speaking briefly on ultimata.
The primary purpose of an ultimatum is to force the listener to accept the form of the argument: A or B. The argument then splits out along lines of A-support, B-support, A-opposition, B-opposition... etc. It begs the question on whether A and B are in fact linked.
Take your PATRIOT example. The post-9/11 question is: how can we protect ourselves from future attacks? Supporters of the PATRIOT Act alleged that the only effective method was curtailing the rights of Americans. But this is not obviously the only way to protect ourselves from these kinds of attacks. Suicide terror attacks are, and were, overwhelmingly favored by a certain type of extreme Muslim on the world stage. Governments and mafia (i.e. small governments) don't really like them, as they expend valuable trained human resources on frankly trivial strategic goals. (Unless they can convince a third-party stooge to do it, like Iran.) The only time people favor suicide terror attacks is when they kinda want to die (or have their people killed) as a side effect. Consider Japan's suicide bombers. They were very clearly a statement more than a strategy. So, taking this all into account, you could theoretically solve the problem by tightening the visas you give to foreign Arabs substantially, or some other form of discrimination against the highest-risk group. In practice, I think this is what we did. There were lots of racism complaints during the Bush admin. But as far as the PATRIOT debate went, it was about the ability to spy. It's not obvious that this had any bearing on the real problem, and was instead about the ability to spy itself. Call me cynical, but I think that if there were more guys in the White House with strong prejudices against Islam, we'd have been having a different Constitutional debate, one about outlawing a certain religion.
OK. Taking a look at the feminism/fertility debate, or the environmentalism/survival debate, and so on, I believe the not-so-subtle move is that the two are necessarily linked and we must "choose." I call bullshit. Around the world, patriarchal societies still have cratering birthrates. This is easy to find information. Similarly, a ruined environment has explicit costs to human survival, as we undermine our own productive capacity through poisoning ourselves, wrecking good farmland, denuding the seas, etc etc. The existence of those binaries can only be understood as a deliberate attempt to link these unrelated topics for the purpose of controlling the debate, steering it towards one's desired outcomes.
For feminism/fertility, I think the real move is getting attention off of fertility itself. Lots and lots of women want to have kids, and yet they don't, or put it off until the numbers just go down. Why? The feminist (or anti-feminist) answer is to hide it behind the "right to choose," but it's pretty obvious in context that it's only a (colloquially) feminist choice in one direction. (Not all feminists believe this, but it's what dominates the conversation.) I suspect the real reason is a confluence of factors, mostly cultural (lower respect or understanding for the importance of reproduction) and partially material (increased life expectancy screwing with wealth movement and life stages relative to fertile windows). But as long as it's about feminism, which everyone has already made up their minds on as a matter of principle, we don't have to think about maybe changing our individual values and cultural practices to reflect this new reality. Almost the same description can be applied to environmentalism with some mad-libs substitutions.
That's why I'm so skeptical of simply accepting the frame on these things. OP, for his part, didn't actually frame any of this as an ultimatum. He was actually just negating the antecedent, showing that (for him) the presented argument was insufficient. Sure, I happen to disagree with his stance quite fervently, but reading him closely - he doesn't say that he values certain things above the survival of the species, he says he does not value the survival of the species at all, one way or another. There's no ultimatum there, Therefore, one had to be provided for him.
(As far as the OP is concerned, all I can make is a value statement: that it is ugly and sad to have nothing to recommend one's time on Earth to posterity, be one's contributions ever so humble. We are all destined to die, and pleasures are fleeting, and the march of old age makes the immediate world increasingly bitter, it behooves one to seek value in something a little more distant and external. Say, the future in which one is invested. People who do this seem in my experience to die more comfortably.)
Does he? I certainly didn’t find that when reading it. He certainly doesn’t present a compelling case that the US Constitution provides for any specific organization on the part of the states beyond assuming that they all must follow a familiar pattern. Well, now they don’t. So what now? Rule the very practice unconstitutional because it was not anticipated by the initial authors? He doesn’t make that claim ever. Why not?
His whole initial section on the definition has a particularly laughable moment where he undermines his whole argument, if he had been aware of it. Quoted in full:
That is, in the initial definition of legislature, THE KING OF ENGLAND was a necessary component. We obviously don’t have that. The institutional body of representatives was ONE house of Parliament. The Lords Temporal and Spiritual were institutional, but not representative. The King was not a body in the sense he intends at all. Yet “the voting public when they select a ballot initiative” is somehow excluded from a definition of “legislature” that is obviously descriptive as to how the laws are passed in the country of concern? On the basis of THIS paragraph? Did this guy read what he was quoting?
Like I’m telling you, specious in its entirety. Come on, you can’t read this and tell me the guy doesn’t come off like Sotomayor.
More options
Context Copy link