marinuso
9d ago
I think the overt politicization of the American judiciary makes it better in this case. Each individual judge may be biased, but since both sides get to appoint judges, and fight over it, the justice system as a whole ends up fairly representative.
In most of Europe on the other hand the justice system is treated as an apolitical, bureaucratic organization. The judges should be professionals, and leave their biases at home. The public shouldn't care about the judges, in the same way that we shouldn't have to care about minor functionaries in other random government departments, who are just hired on the basis of their skill set and are there to do a job.
So in the Netherlands: the Minister of Justice appoints the head of the Council for the Judiciary. This council in turn appoint the heads of the courts. The courts then hire judges. In practice even the ministerial selection is done based on a shortlist, and the courts too make shortlists. The minister could maybe ram through a political appointee if he really wanted (and get everyone to yell InDePeNdEnT JuDiCiArY), but that political appointee would have no institutional support and get nothing done.
This all sounds very nice in theory, but in practice everyone (except, depending on how the election went, the minister) is a fairly serious progressive by now, and they will always make progressive rulings, and hire more progressives. And there's no way to change that except by going full Orban.
prosecutors refuse to charge or hold criminals or the law is changed on things like felony shoplifting
I don't actually have much of a problem with this in the American context. The laws are made democratically, and almost everywhere in the US, the district attorney is also an elected position.
If a DA gets elected on the promise not to charge criminals, then indeed doesn't charge criminals, then gets reelected, then clearly the people actually want this. At that point I can't really disagree with it. I disagree with the stance, but not with implementing the results of the vote. If the median voter of e.g. Portland really is this progressive, then yes, so should the government of Portland be.
The problem comes when these people are appointed by "the system" and cannot be removed.
The problem is that judges are people.
For example, it used to be the procedure in the Netherlands that, assuming good behaviour, you only served two thirds of your sentence. The remaining third you'd normally be on parole.
This was removed in order to be tough on crime, and this changed pretty much nothing, because: judges are people. They're using their judgement. They also know the laws and procedures, including this one. So under the old system, if you really wanted to put someone away for ten years, you'd give fifteen. And now, if they want to put you away for ten years, they just give you the ten.
We also have that same law that foreigners who are sentenced to two years or more in prison, should be deported afterwards. This seems on the face of it like a very reasonable law. If you've done something that bad, we'll probably be better off without you around.
But again: judges are people. If the judge doesn't think someone should be deported, they are not going to hand out a sentence that automatically comes with deportation. They are going to hand out a lighter sentence. So now we're having Afghan rapists sentenced to 20 months.
The politicians are now talking about implementing mandatory minimum sentences in order to fix the problem. My guess is, it won't work. If a judge doesn't want to give a sentence, he won't. If he has to acquit the criminal entirely in order to avoid it, he will.
If you want tougher judgements you need to appoint tougher judges.
marinuso
16d ago
Surely we can generally expect people to act in good faith, at least in better faith than the average Redditor.
marinuso
17d ago
since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts
Partially. It's also just used on an individual level to see if the children are learning. If one of the kids doesn't pass the reading test, you know he can't read well enough and needs more effort. For example by having him repeat the year. If none of the kids pass the reading test, there's something wrong with the school.
Ultimately, the difference is between teaching the kids to read (even if for some kids this takes longer than average), or not teaching the kids to read. Surely we can all agree that the first option is preferable, and if that also leads to the statistics looking better, that just means the measurement is valid (for once).
The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%
Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important. You need to be able to read to participate in modern society. If the bottom 10-20% of people can't read, you get huge societal problems.
The geniuses can save themselves - they're smart. Ideally you have tailored education for everyone, but that's not possible.
marinuso
17d ago
In 2013 the Mississippi State Legislature enacted the Literacy Based Promotion Act (LBPA) which required kids to pass a reading test to be promoted from elementary to middle school or else be held back or forced to repeat a year.
It's crazy that this is considered cheating. You can't seriously let someone into middle school who can't read. What are they going to do there? Certainly not learn anything if they can't read the textbooks.
In the Netherlands it's normal to be held back if you haven't learned whatever you had to learn in a year.
marinuso
17d ago
Yes, suicide is bad. Ideally there would be no suicide at all. This is part of my point.
When we do something in an official manner, we thereby give it a stamp of approval. We should not approve bad things if we can avoid it. Because by doing so, we are saying that the bad thing shouldn't be considered as all that bad. We are shifting the norms and encouraging more of it. We can't always avoid this, but we should at least always try.
If someone's dying anyway, say with terminal cancer, and we artificially keep him alive at that point (which we've gotten quite good at), we are merely prolonging his suffering. At that point, sure, just end it humanely.
But this person (and see my other comment, there are more) was not actually dying. She was in fact physically healthy. There is no argument to be made that we are prolonging her suffering. We are not actively doing anything. There is no argument to be made about freedom either. If you are physically capable of killing yourself, you always have this option.
She could've ended her own life herself at any time. And that would still be bad, even if it truly is the least bad option it's still bad, but we would at least have avoided giving the act an official stamp of approval. And maybe she never would've killed herself, and then there would've been one less suicide. This is the point that I was trying to make.
And it does seem to be accelerating. I looked up the statistics (see my other comment for the sources). There were 14 euthanizations for purely psychiatric reasons in 2014. By 2024, this had grown to 219. In the same year, there were 1819 traditional suicides. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh.
marinuso
17d ago
she's earned the right to kill herself.
She's always had it, and never lost it. This was part of my point. It's the official approval that I disapprove of.
If you care to criticize this, then just about nothing in psychiatry remains standing.
This is not the way in which I meant it. By outsiders I meant the general public, society as a whole, not her psychiatrists, who I'm sure knew what they were doing and tried their best. Because even if I grant that this was the right decision in this particular individual case, I still oppose it because of the example that it sets.
The picture that is shown is of a (physically at least) healthy 29-year-old, who has people who care about her. When someone like that commits suicide, it should not get a societal stamp of approval. Let alone that we should do it for her. This will cause the societal norm around suicide to shift.
I think that we shouldn't be giving the general public the idea that society approves of just stepping out of life if you're not feeling it. I grant you that that's not actually what happened in this case. But that is what it looks like. You know what the fancy words mean, but remember that to a layman, "depression" means "not feeling it".
And in fact, I've just found another depressed 29 year old woman who was euthanized. I forgot the name of the first one, googled "euthanized depressed 29 year old" and immediately found another. This made me go and look up the statistics. Here they are, in Dutch, but summarizing: in 2014 there were 14 cases of euthanasia for purely psychiatric reasons. This is the first year for which there is data, so presumably the first year this was even done. By 2024 this had grown to 219. Line go up fairly quickly.
Meanwhile, there were 1819 "traditional" suicides in 2024. So by now, for every ten suicides we're adding an eleventh. More than that.
This really looks to me like official approval causing the social norms to shift, in turn causing the psychiatrists too (who are after all also part of society) to be more free in granting approvals, causing the norm to shift further.
Okay, not a train. That's an asshole thing to do. If you're going to commit suicide, don't involve other people.
I included it because it's the stereotypical thing to do (at least around here), but thinking a bit further, it's probably that way because when someone does it, everyone in the train knows. Probably most people have been on a train that's been delayed because of a train suicide. Other methods of suicide don't get that attention.
I do absolutely think we shouldn't be offering assisted suicide to people who are physically capable of unassisted suicide.
If she wants to kill herself that's one thing. She didn't need assistance. She was young and healthy and could've just hung herself, or jumped off a tall building, or in front of a train in some other way that doesn't involve someone else, please. The fact that she couldn't muster up the will to do this, honestly makes me question how suicidal she really was in the first place. After all, thousands of people in the Netherlands do this every year. But unlike the bedridden elderly people that are usually taken as an example in these cases, she certainly always had the option.
What I really think we shouldn't be doing as a society is validating or normalizing such a decision. That is not about the details her specific case, but about the example that's set for others. It doesn't even matter if her mental suffering truly were unbearable in some manner. Ultimately only she knows her inner mental state. To an outside observer, she was young and healthy, and she had people who cared about her. (We should all be so lucky!) And we're going to just kill her on request? That shouldn't be normal. It's what's observed from the outside that sets the norm.
marinuso
19d ago
In the ancient Germanic tribes, men would go around with a sword to show that they were free men. More than just a weapon, it was a symbol of freedom and agency. Decisions were made by free men attending the thing and voting by raising their swords. Women, children, and slaves did not carry weapons, and could not vote. (And I say "ancient Germanic tribes", but parts of Switzerland kept this tradition up into the 1990s, swords and all.)
I get the feeling that in parts of the US, going around openly carrying a weapon carries the same sort of symbolism, even if it doesn't give you the right to vote.
marinuso
19d ago
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue. To have separate communities you need a certain amount of space between them.
Nowadays, every Arab youth in Europe is on Arab TikTok, and people don't speak to their physical neighbours anyway, no matter if they share a language or not. With the disappearance of physical barriers, it's the language barriers that define the communities.
marinuso
25d ago
That's completely orthogonal to embryo selection though. We don't magically gain the tech to accurately scan these things from your DNA.
And even if we had it, and decided to use it, we'd look at people's actual results, and we could do that with naturally born people in the same way. Even if they would in general end up performing worse than people born from selected embryos, you'd still not have Gattaca, even though it would be dystopian in its own way. There's no incentive to start discriminating specifically against natural-born people specifically and checking that everywhere.
We already rank people by their traits and abilities, we just do it in a more fuzzy way. For sports it's the easiest. We have them compete and see who's best. Even if we could perfectly predict this using their DNA, nothing would change.
marinuso
25d ago
We've had screenings for things like Down's Syndrome for a while, and we do not (in general) oppose abortions in those cases. Even countries that ban elective abortions completely tend to allow it in cases of malformation, which Down's Syndrome would count as. And then you just try again. This doesn't seem too different in concept, just a lot easier and more flexible. In this case, too, the only people who don't do this are certain religious people. The genetic material is still coming from the parents, they're not actually making 'designer babies' or superhumans or anything of the sort.
We're not getting Gattaca. The problem there was that they put DNA tests everywhere in their society. That's the dystopian bit. And who would have anything to gain by doing that?
I don't think we are even functional enough as a society. If we're getting a dystopia, we're getting "Brazil". (With perhaps some shades of "Demolition Man".) We kind of already saw this during Covid with the half-working tracking apps and the like. Both in the fact that the government's attempt at oppression frequently hurt random strangers by accident while not even really dealing with the actual dissidents, and in the fact that the general populace mostly just shrugged about it all.
marinuso
28d ago
South Korea probably wants North Korea to remain exactly as it is.
If the NK government falls, the refugees will overwhelm South Korea. Even if the NK government peacefully reforms, the migrants will overwhelm South Korea - it will take generations for the NK economy to catch up, and in the meantime the North Koreans can travel.
South Korea would be forced to implement immigration control that would make Trump blush (or maybe even Netanyahu), and against what are technically their own countrymen to boot.
There's no way Israel could be anything different. They're surrounded by enemies.
They started out with a fairly "European" mindset back when Israel was founded. That's why they didn't just ethnically cleanse the area back when they could've gotten away with it more easily. A cynic would say that that was a mistake. They are becoming Middle-Easterners in order to survive among the Middle-Easterners. Again, a cynic would say they're not adapting fast enough.
The only other option would have been to do it in a different location. Hand them part of defeated Germany after the war, and move the Jews already in Palestine out. But of course, Germany isn't the Holy Land.
If they had genocided them in the 1960s, they would've probably gotten away with it.
marinuso
1mo ago
I don't know how reliable they ever were. Before the Internet, the traditional mass media were the only media. There were no other voices. They could easily have been as bad as they are now, and nobody would have known. If anything they might've been worse, as they had less scrutiny.
The structure of it alone practically demands an oligopoly. After all, how many people can afford to run a national TV station, and that's before we start talking about licensing and permits. The same goes for large publishing houses.
marinuso
1mo ago
On the other hand: if you aren't an asshole, then why are you wearing their uniform?
All of the groups you mention do "wear uniforms". Whether they are literal uniforms such as e.g. the Nazi would wear, or whether they are other visual markers such as the drug dealer tattoos, the principle is the same. Their appearance marks them as part of a certain group, which is why they adopted that appearance in the first place.
So it seems perfectly reasonable to me to judge people by it.
marinuso
2mo ago
There is an ongoing argument among non-American car nerds about whether they are unexportable because they are crap products produced for a protected domestic market, or if they are unexportable because they target a market segment (people who drive clean pickups to the office) that does not exist outside the US.
In most other countries, large personal cars are heavily discouraged through taxation, both of the cars and the fuel. If fuel is $8/gallon and the car tax is based on weight and engine displacement, a Ram is not a practical commuter car, for reasons of economy alone.
But I do see people driving gray-import Rams around. People are willing to pay easily double the American price, for a car that they know beforehand won't fit in any parking garage or even down the road in some places. (They get converted to run on LPG to save on fuel costs.) And they do drive their clean pickups to the office. I bet if it weren't for the regulations there'd be much more of them around.
marinuso
3mo ago
They're sitting on a $50b pile of money, surely they can bridge the Trump administration if they want to?
marinuso
3mo ago
Raising children is valuable to society. We're already seeing, in various ways, what bad effects we get when people don't want to do it anymore. And someone has to do the household work. Also, someone has to bring in money.
I would not call it grift. That's the same kind of take that radical feminists have when they say family life is nothing but oppression to women, just the other way around.
For all the political debates about who should do what, what cannot change is that it is ultimately a team effort, and what also cannot change (except through technological progress) is the list of things that need doing.
marinuso
7mo ago
Would you pay $396 per month if you were in return given two separate 45-minute blocks of extra time each day in which to read a book or go for a walk?
I mean, maybe if you're a high-powered lawyer who makes half a million a year but works 90-hour weeks, you might. Presumably that's the kind of person still driving and paying the congestion charge. Someone to whom money is nothing and time is very short, i.e. someone whose time is actually worth a lot.
In fact not many people are taking the deal. You can tell by how the roads are empty. Presumably they're on the subway now, which I can't imagine is going to save time, what with the delays and transfers. It still costs $132, and then there's the getting set on fire bit which I also can't imagine is giving them joy instead of rage. If the subway were a more pleasant experience than sitting in traffic, people would've been choosing that in the first place.
Even in Europe nobody takes public transport if they can avoid it. This is despite every American urbanist YouTuber squeeing with glee upon seeing it, and despite many people not being able to afford a car at all.
You're talking as if it's about sitting in traffic vs not sitting in traffic. That's not true. It's sitting in traffic, vs standing in a dingy subway station with a bunch of hobos wondering if the train's still coming, vs taking a worse job outside of the area, vs paying $396 per month.
marinuso
7mo ago
Consider, for a minute, the perspective of a person who is willing to wait an hour in traffic, but is not willing to wait 15 minutes plus pay $9. In a world of rational actors, this person should not exist.
Why shouldn't he exist? $9 per commute is $18 a day, is $396 a month assuming 22 working days in a month. Would you like to be out an extra $396 a month? I mean, I wouldn't, and I work as a software developer (albeit not in the US). And if you're still commuting to work 5 days a week you're probably not a software developer. And I'm not even counting other trips, though in a big city you can probably do your groceries on foot.
Yeah, but your time is worth $X an hour, where X>9! Not evenly, it isn't. My hours at work are worth ˜$25 after taxes but my hours outside of work are worth $0. Averaged over the day, an hour of my life is worth ˜$1, slightly more, which you will note is less than 9. If I had an extra 1.5 hour a day I wouldn't know how to use them to consistently make $18 after taxes to earn back the congestion charge. And you don't even get that, you get two blocks of 45 minutes.
Now, I wouldn't die if I were out $396 a month. It would just suck. But again, these people who are still physically coming into work 5 days a week probably aren't programmers.
Probably, lots of these people are just taking the subway now, which the Internet tells me costs $132 for a month, which is at least less than $396 albeit some crazy person might set you on fire. Notably, people would rather spend two hours a day in New York traffic than ride the subway if given the choice, which has to mean something. Others will have switched jobs, but again, that would be a job so much worse than their previous one that they'd rather spend two hours in New York traffic each day, when given the choice.
If the opponent keeps increasing Y, and you sit there decreasing X in turn according to this rule, eventually you become cooperate-bot and the opponent turns into defect-bot.
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