pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
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User ID: 278
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Generally, rural areas are much easier to work with for several reasons. First, outside of incorporated municipalities, you generally only have to worry about permitting from the town or county, which generally are set up to default allow. Farmland is not especially valuable, and even inside a municipality or village, you have far fewer people to have to negotiate with, and who are generally starving for any kind of economic growth.
There are exceptions, of course. One is areas in which the state or federal government owns most of the land. In that case, your development will probably be confined to municipalities who can then afford to be a lot pickier about what they allow. Another is areas that are already wealthy and have little need or interest in further economic growth, like, say, Sedona. They will show a lot more resistance to changes that alter the makeup or vibe of the area. Combine the two and you get places like Aspen, well-established as a playground for the wealthy, with a moratorium on all new residential construction and renovation, and surrounded by unbuildable, wild, federally protected land.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
7
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
On the other hand, battleships can perform a function (armored mobile very large gun batteries) that is both useful and not directly replaced by other capabilities, but they were deemed obsolete anyways. It could also be the case that something is obsolete because the special capabilities they do bring are just not worth the enormous cost.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Just to add perspective since I was alive and watching the news during the Clinton drama, there were a variety of objections in increasing importance:
- He cheated on his wife
- He cheated on his wife with an intern over whom he was the clear superior
- He did the above in the Oval Office which is a government workplace
- He did all of the above, and then lied about to the public and Congress
- He did all of the above, and then lied about it in a sworn deposition
Characterizing the reaction to Clinton as being primarily about the sanctity of marriage is, I think, not remotely reasonable.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Well - do we know, actually, that this isn't what happened here? I think it's pretty likely they did in fact fly to an airport and not directly to a prison, and that it's pretty likely they did in fact turn them over to El Salvadoran custody at that point. Or are you making the stronger demand that we not deport anyone who is likely to be imprisoned in their home country? Unfortunately this amounts to a demand that we provide sanctuary and extra privileges to the world's criminals, which is outrageous.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
It's the same thing, unless you believe that it is not possible for El Salvador to prosecute their national for a crime committed in the United States. I'm not an expert on Salvadoran law, but I would be very surprised if there was such a statutory limitation. The U. S. certainly has none.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
What is your preferred term to describe El Salvador's role "imprisoning non-Salvadorians not accused of any crime in El Salvador, at the request of and and with payment from the USA?"
That might indeed be a circumstance where there is a clear contractual agreement with an obvious consideration. But that is not what has happened here: the prisoner is a Salvadoran national with no residency right in the U.S., in El Salvador. El Salvador has the right to prosecute him regardless of our opinion, so they are not clearly doing anything they couldn't or wouldn't do on their own.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Obviously the 6th Amendment does not apply if the government is not prosecuting them, and a deportation proceeding is not a criminal trial. Foreign nationals being tried by foreign courts have no 6th Amendment case with the U. S. Government.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I was asking an interlocutor. They are not bound by judicial rules.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Sure, but he's not under U.S. jurisdiction. I don't see that we have any obligation to bust him out of prison over the objection of El Salvador.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I would consider removal to a foreign prison, perhaps with access to petition the court via writing, to be a form of exile.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I wonder how long it will take for the real gang members (if there are any being deported) to wisen up to the fact that murdering an ICE agent (or just a random civilian bystander) will immensely improve their outcomes (if they survive the encounter). Then they get a nice long trial in the US.
Why? Is there something that would prevent the U.S. from deporting immediately and letting El Salvador prosecute the case?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Replying to myself that according to Grok it appears the Court has rejected denationalization only for natural citizens, but exile doesn't appear to have been discussed.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Why? Eighth Amendment? A cursory search did not find any case law on the matter.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I feel it is a necessary tonic to people who claim it is physically impossible for them to lose weight, choosing to blame the outcome on other people or nature itself. CICO is the reductio ad absurdum which proves that the ultimate locus of control cannot be found elsewhere.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Suppose that El Salvador decides he is rightfully imprisoned and doesn't feel like releasing him? How far do you think the court can go to mandate foreign policy to effect his return? Economic sanctions? Military blockade? War?
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Given that he was an El Salvadoran national, where else could he be removed to? Are there other countries stepping up to accept deportees on El Salvador's behalf? If the answer is a legal catch-22 where he gets to stay despite being eligible for deportation, then I have no choice but to reject the legitimacy of the process that produces that outcome.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
The motte version of CICO, which could be described as "any caloric input that isn't output is necessarily stored"
No, the motte is "it would violate the laws of thermodynamics to gain weight without consuming an energy-equivalent number of calories." CICO people don't deny that some people have metabolisms that permit them to consume excess calories without gaining weight. They only claim that someone who claims to have gained fat while restricting calories below that threshold is lying.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Someone convicted in a U.S. criminal court (and provided reasonable time to appeal) has been provided with ample due process.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
I've been thinking about whether there are some plausible underlying causes to the sort of political and social chaos that has blessed our recent times and whether there are some things that can be done to improve the health of the civic body. It seems to me that perhaps the biggest problem we face is demoralization.
What is the source of this demoralization? I'd guess there are several. The first is the fruition of a generational demoralization campaign run by the left against America. This started mainly as comintern agitprop and Soviet psyops, and has been gradually adopted across left-progressive institutions, including, critically, higher education. This is the source of a wide variety of anti-American memes, from America being a dystopian late-stage-capitalism hellscape, to America being the most racist and bigoted nation which owes its existence to slavery and can never be free of its guilt, to American bullying and anticommunism being the root cause of suffering and oppression the world over. Centrists who wonder how public perception of their economic well-being is so divergent from what the statistics show, need only watch and internalize that damned Newsroom speech.
There's also the role of the media to consider, which, aside from being heavily leftist to begin with, also has a completely separate set of incentives to create fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They owe much of their existence to people obsessively following the news out of anxiety and panic. Beyond even pandering to prurient "if it bleeds, it leads" elevation of the worst kind of daily grotesqueries, there are multiple cataclysmic "end times" narratives that almost every event can be linked to, from climate collapse to the rise of fascism to race war.
Then there are the entirely self-inflicted wounds. In multiple ways and in multiple places, incompetence is tolerated, failure is rewarded, and sloth is celebrated. While institutions may see their own self-preservation as an accomplishment entirely worthy to justify their own existence, outsiders do not. The conduct of the GWOT was bad, the handling of Covid was bad, the administration of local urban governments is egregiously terrible. That these things go not just unpunished but unfixed is corrosive to public confidence. When even public art is instituted not to enliven the spirit but to deaden it, loss of hope should not be surprising!
The symptoms of demoralization manifest in ways that will seem familiar to us, I think. As people lose faith in institutions, they will become angry, fearful, and paranoid. They will choose the defect option across more and more choices. Demoralization increases time-sensitivity, when the future is discounted as likely to be worse than the present. Socially, people become alienated and transfer that dissatisfaction to their own lives. Fertility decrease is, in my opinion, downstream of this as well. Internationally, isolationism and collapse in confidence is the inevitable result. Why would any decent person who has internalized that their nation and their society is fundamentally believe in actions taken by that government on their behalf?
So what can be done to reverse this demoralization? To a certain extent I am afraid there is no putting this genie back in the bottle, save for a sufficiently grave external threat. Certainly academics would never agree to not criticize America, no should they. Freedom of speech grants everyone the right to air their grievances. But would it not be a worthy effort, on the eve of our semiquincentennial, to counter this with praise? This would perhaps have to come from the government itself, and patriotic propaganda risks a slide into jingoism, but is it not, after all, a valid function of the government to advocate on its own behalf? We once did this as a necessity against the creep of communism, but since the fall of the Berlin Wall, efforts perhaps seemed unnecessary.
Some great works would also be helpful. Literal moonshots, Manhattan programs, monumental bridges and dams, mind-bending radio telescopes and supercolliders - these all seem like relics of a previous time. Even now when we decide we want to do something spectacular and potentially society-altering, like a HSR line or a solar megaproject, it fizzles out in a mire of bureaucratic planning, lawsuits, and safetyism. Wouldn't it be inspiring to set out to something amazing and complete it on-time and on-budget? Once people realize that such a thing is possible, might they not start supporting many more such works?
Sorry if this all seems melodramatic. I freely admit that it's not something I've researched and am confident has a factual basis. It just seems to me that what's missing in most of the discussion of our problems is hopefulness and confidence that the future will be better than the present and much better than the past. In the same way that many economic indicators are, at bottom, about confidence in the future, I think many social indicators are as well.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
But the motherboard wifi is not talking to the LTE tower. Presumably there is an LTE device that bridges your private network with the Internet. You should at least hardwire the connection from your PC to that device.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
Sure. But he also gets no points for making statements against interest.
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
3mo ago
A majority can vote to remake or suspend the rules at their discretion.
The answer is that there is no such assurance from the legal system and never has been, and that it's the "lawcucks" who have fooled themselves into believing their fortresses of sand were ever strong enough to stem the tide.
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