quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Of course that organized religion will meddle in matters of state. There is no other possibility, as organized religion impacts moral stance and worldview of adherents who in turn then apply these ideas in their lives - including things like how to vote, which laws to pass etc.
Granted. It would be weird if a moral framework never influenced how people vote.
However, there are different stages.
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The religion teaches tenets (love thy neighbor, blood for the blood god, etc) and leaves it to the individual member of how to interpret them in the voting booth.
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The leaders of the religion routinely endorse political candidates, and their followers mostly vote for them.
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A religion or groups of religions form a large voting block.
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Religious organizations are a load-bearing part of the countries power structure. (Think medieval Europe, Iran, Taliban).
In short, I think that the Christian wall between liberalism and state protects liberalism as much as it protects the state.
It took me a while to parse that sentence, because I took "liberalism" as a founding principle of the US, not as a group of political ideologies such as democratic socialism or social justice progressivism.
My reply is that SJP is just a political ideology. If its proponents do not meddle with politics, there is no point to it at all. And of course that means that it attracts plenty of sociopaths who play status games. But they have literally nothing worth protecting by keeping out of politics.
By contrast, the founders of the US had experienced life under a state religion, and they knew that this was not what they wanted. I would guess that their thought process went something like this:
Even if we enshrine my favorite flavor of Christianity as a state religion, as a state religion, its dogmas would be subject to pressure from realpolitik. In a few generations, it will become watered down and corrupted to be morally indistinguishable from the Church of England, and because it will be a load-bearing part of society, religious dissent will not be tolerated. It is much better to suffer an Union with heretical sects than to end up in a situation where heresy is state-mandated.
The tenets of a religion being twisted under the pressure from realpolitik the way the SCOTUS has twisted the text of the constitution (e.g. commerce clause, Roe) is not something I would wish on my worst enemy.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that one advantage that Christianity has is that in the beginning, it was not married to temporal authority. Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's, and unto God the things that are God's. Early Christianity thrived in an environment much more hostile to it than anything the SJ or MAGA people are likely to inflict on it.
It rising to a position of temporal authority only came later, starting with Constantine. As an atheist watching from the sidewalk, I have to say that I liked the version of Christianity before the sociopaths took over better.
It might be illustrative to compare Christianity to the other religions of the book. Judaism started out as a tribe/state religion, but thanks to the zealots picking fights they could not win, they got a head start of 2ka in learning to live as a religious minority. (Again, from the outside view, diaspora Judaism seems a lot more palatable than whatever orthodox factions are bent on Making Israel Great Again.) Islam started out with strong claims to temporal authority, Muhammad was a warlord as well as a prophet, after all. While there are certainly Muslims who are good citizens to secular nation states, my feeling is that it is that they have an even harder time justifying that stance theologically than Catholics do.
In short, I think that the wall between religion and state protects religion as much as it protects the state. If organized religion meddles in matters of the state, the consequence will be that it will attract the kind of people who look for temporal power, and before long your religion will be run by sociopaths who sell indulgence to their believers, burn heretics and organize crusades.
It helps that (from my understanding), in Christianity you can be saved even if you live in a sinful state in this fallen world. If you believe that eating seafood or gay/unmarried sex or abortions condemn you to hell, liberalism is very compatible with not committing any of these sins. (Things do get a bit hairy around religious objection to military service though, or if you object to paying taxes which finance what you consider to be sinful behavior.)
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Austria might even be closer to Germany than the Netherlands.
I am the first to admit that borders are accidents of history. There is no good principled reason why Austria should be its own thing but Bavaria should be part of Germany. The status quo is sacred merely as a Schelling point. If people want to move borders through democratic means, such as the Scottish movement to leave the UK, that is fine. But after two big industrialized wars, the world has largely realized that moving borders through military action is not worth the effort any more. Eventually, such actions became seen as defection from the club of civilized countries.
For Europe, "stick to the borders however stupid and unfair they are" has been a marked improvement over the ancient, previous method of resolving land disputes, "bash your neighbors heads in every 50 years to see who gets to own the disputed territories".
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
TIL that Galicians have trouble with gaining independence from their cultural overlords from Iberia to Eastern Europe.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
In Germany, we had a natural experiment of being either a client state of the US or Russia. The outcome makes it very easy to understand why a lot of former Warsaw pact countries desperately wanted to join NATO as the cold war ended.
For all your whining about Jews enacting the Great Replacement of the White race, I would wager that orders of magnitude more have fled from Kiev to the safety of London to escape the war than have fled from London to Kiev to escape the Great Replacement.
In general, one would think that Belarus would be some White supremacist utopia. No Black or Brown people ruining everything. Nobody replacing anyone. No social justice types pushing gay, immigrant or women agendas (at least outside the labor camps). High religious conformity, in particular 0.1% Judaism and 0.2% Islam. Strong political decisions instead of endless bickering. They would probably let in White guys in exchange for a few years of military service.
But for some reason, while people in most wartorn countries are generally willing to emigrate or seek refuge in a safer country, the victims of the atrocities in London you mentioned are generally reluctant to do so, compared to Ukrainians or Syrians.
The only hope the Ukrainian people have of surviving as a people as opposed to a label on a map is with Russia.
I think the party line of Moscow is that culturally there is no such thing as Ukraine, and that they are just a cultural splinter group of Russia which has to be brought back home into the Reich. At best, Ukrainians under Putin can hope to survive as 2nd class Russians with a weird backwater accent.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
This is Putin being better at playing chicken than the West.
Putin will not start WW3 over some Taurus hitting his infrastructure. It is not exactly on par with Kennedy's fear of Cuban nukes hitting US cities. Of course, it does not help that the commander in chief of the largest nuclear NATO power is seen as an unreliable ally, especially for a non-nuclear country like Germany.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that your view is too cynical by half. Your view, which I would paraphrase as
Strong countries sometimes invade weaker countries, so the international rule-based order is obviously fiction and we are still living in interstate anarchy.
is not so different from
US residents murder each other all the time, some even get away with it, so any claim that we have a rule of law can be disregarded, and we are still in a Hobbesian nature state of perpetual war of all against all.
Both the IRBO and the state of law in the US are not perfect, but they are clearly distinct from their respective baselines.
While some of the conflicts you have mentioned were clearly waged by powerful states for ulterior reasons, and I have been opposed to GWBs adventures in Afghanistan and Iraq from the start, I also notice that most of the wars waged by the left were not for outright conquest and annexation. A few of the wars might even have been net positive, like interfering in the genocidal mess that was the Yugoslavia civil war. In retrospect, I can not say I am especially proud of NATO for sitting out the Rwanda situation, for example.
Russia's war in Ukraine is one of straightforward annexation. This is markedly different to what GWB did. Thus, it is in the interest of the proponents of the IRBO to make Russia pay as high a price as possible, to deter both them and other states from trying the same in the future.
If this also means that Putin fails to conquer Ukraine, that is a bonus, but for the international supporters of Ukraine that is not the essential outcome. The goal is to make the war net negative for Russia by making them pay a high price in blood and economy.
As long as the Ukrainians are fine with dying for that, it seems like a no-brainer for the West to give them the materiel to continue their war.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
That is why I wrote my 2nd paragraph. Again, if the woke mob decided that every American who is a member of an anti-abortion organization deserves to be bombed, and that if others die in the bombing attacks that is acceptable, and turned most of the US into rubble in their quest to eliminate all the abortion opponents, then you could claim that the woke mob is hypocritical when opposing the IDF. But if it is just the odd assassination, that is very different in scale.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Why? Tens of thousands of people have been crowing for weeks that Charlie Kirk deserved to be murdered because of his "transphobic rhetoric" and/or his opposition to abortion. It's probably a safe bet that Kirk was less misogynistic and anti-LGBT than the modal Palestinian.
While I am not one of these people (and think that Kirk's murder was wrong for both fundamental ethical and dumb for strategic reasons), you are equating political assassination with what is perceived to be genocide.
If the IDF only used snipers to take out public figures who expressed pro-Hamas sentiments, or if Kirk had been killed by a rocket along with his family and neighbors as collateral damage (whose intendedness could be disputed), your comparison would be more on point.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
My opposition to violence against women is precisely why I am opposed to housing convicted male rapists with intact genitalia in women's prisons,
This seems like a motte, with the bailey being "all prisoners should be segregated according to their birth gender".
I am opposed to violence against women as it is violence against humans. My estimate is that prison rape is mostly XY-on-XY, with the likelihood of being a victim increasing an order of magnitude for XYs who are MtF.
Obviously all prison rape is bad. It is not part of the punishment, and it is certainly not a privilege for the stronger prisoners -- we do not even allow free men to rape, after all!
Gender segregation plays an important part in prison rape prevention, even though it is clearly not sufficient. As such, I would propose simply extending the intend -- minimize rape -- towards trans people.
So rather than a "one size fits all" solution where the serial rapist only has to yell "I identify as a woman now" to get into the women's shower, or where we place a big-chested bottom surgery MtF with a conviction for bank fraud with a bunch of gang members, I would assign prison genders case by case based on minimizing the overall rape risk.
Take into account physical strength, testosterone level, convictions for violence and especially sexual violence, feminine presentation, etc and determine if the MtF prisoner is more likely to be raped in men's prison than they are to rape in women's prison.
This solution also has the advantage that it will likely piss off both sides of the culture war.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
The steelman is that 1st and 2nd generation immigrants sometimes have great success for selection effects.
After all, most people do not migrate. The ones who are happy doing the same job their grandfathers did are unlikely to migrate. If you select for people who look at the lives of their forebears and decide that they want their kids to have a better life, it is not surprising that some of them will be very smart and many of them will be willing to put in a lot of work into securing their place in their new society.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Reading the interview, the interviewer was on a warpath. KJP seems to have stepped outside the party line with her book and now she needs to be brought to heel or pushed aside.
I think that some claims are more difficult to defend than others. If you write a book without controversial claims, perhaps a work of fiction or a textbook on a well established field, then an interviewer would likely not feel the need to cross-examine you.
But if you published a book about how Trump is secretly a lizardman, I would hate to see an interviewer who just goes "interesting opinion, man".
Claiming that Biden was forced out of the race for some nefarious reasons while he was mentally fine to be president is trying to claim an 'alternative truth'. I hate it when Trump does these things (starting from the size of his inauguration crowd), because I feel that people should strive to agree on facts. I do not like it any better when some lefty makes claims which seem factually wrong, and I applaud efforts to probe if she has extraordinary evidence for her extraordinary claims.
I do not think that "Biden had dementia which made him an unappealing candidate" was a particularly Democratic party line. It was basically the consensus reality. Anyone who pushes back against people trying to make our collective map of reality worse is doing god's work.
To steelman KJP: Running with Biden through the election and then benching him and getting Kamala in as VP was probably the best choice given they did not have a better candidate than Kamala.
I think that by the time of the TV debate, the Democrats had already maneuvered themselves in an unwinnable position. Running with Harris as a candidate was not great, but running with someone who had been seen on TV as suffering from dementia would not have gone better.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that ACX mentioned that some pro-Palestinian Muslims were announcing that they were going to vote for Trump because Harris was too Israel-friendly. I am unsure how they are feeling about Trump's ME policies now.
The obvious choice to fixing situations where some voters can not credibly defect from their party because the other party caters to their interests even less would be to get rid of FPTP and get a multi-party system.
But without that, "always vote for the party which is most closely aligned to you" seems like a bad meta-strategy which will see you voting for the marginally less evil ones. Sometimes it is good not to engage in trades which are only slightly net-positive to incentivize the other player to offer you better trades instead.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I think that the proportion requirement is also disputable.
Basically, I think that an innocent should not be expected to offer a fair fight to an aggressor. If there is an advantage to be gained by moving a step up on the escalation ladder, then stepping up on the escalation ladder should be fine. Probably not that many steps, though.
Here in Germany, there is no balancing of the legal interests of the attacker and the attacked, with only an exemption for a massive disproportion of the act of self defense. If you need to kill a criminal to stop the theft of valuable property (like a car), German law is generally a-ok with it. Of course, you are still taking your chances with DAs and judges which generally do not like that.
Personally, I have an intense dislike for non-consensual violence. In my opinion, when an adult makes the decision to assault another person, they are taking their life into their own hands. If it ends with the aggressor bleeding to death on the sidewalk, that is sad, but not upsetting. It is not that the attacker deserved to die, but we do live in a world where people can make bad decisions which will cost them their lives. If someone drives 300km/h on the highway while drunk and ends their life in a crash, that is similar -- sad, but not upsetting. Upsetting would be if they killed someone else with their stunt.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
That was not the question which @Rov_Scam asked, which was if you would rather be tackled or shot.
One outcome of tackling is a fractured skull, but it is not particularly likely. One outcome of getting shot is to get a bullet through a vital organ or major artery. My gut feeling would place p(fractured skull|tackled)=0.1, and p(life threatening gunshot wound|shot)>0.1.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
There was certainly the possibility of sever injury or death, to be sure, but that's the slippery slope that people warn about and which point you're proving; to pro-gun people, any physical contact is a potential justification for use of deadly force in response.
I think a lot depends on the context here. If you get attacked in empty alley at night by two unarmed guys, then it seems entirely plausible that they will kick you until you stop moving once you go down. If there are plenty of co-demonstrators around, it seems very likely that they would save you from being kicked to death.
Of course, attacking someone who is openly carrying is also a Darwin awards move, even more if you go to clinch fighting which could be seen as a precursor move for grabbing the gun yourself.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
From a continental perspective, the fact that you even need stand your ground laws is basically a bug in the common law system, which often imposed a duty to retreat. For example, German law started from the opposite direction, where using violence to stop unlawful attacks was generally considered okay, then carved out exceptions that no, you can not shoot kids stealing apples from your tree, you have to pick the less deadly option if both are equally likely to stop the attack, and if the aggressor is obviously not of sound mind you do have a duty to retreat.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I admit that I was thinking of USB-A to USB-B cables, which are supposed to be completely passive.
Also, I think that that level of paranoia is going to be prohibitively expensive if you want to protect the US public at large from supply chain attacks.
The compromise would be to have a process to manufacture USB cables in the US using vetted companies which employ vetted citizens for 100$ apiece to supply the needs of the NSA and the Pentagon (where BYOD is presumably forbidden), and let the rest of the US buy 5$ cables from China and risk supply chain attacks which spy on their printer communication.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
The phrasing originally used by @sodiummuffin was:
cryptocurrency companies were at serious risk of the government banning or heavily restricting key features of their business
I think that a total 'crypto' ban, i.e. making bitcoin as illegal for Americans to own as cocaine is, was always unlikely. But if you are a crypto company, you are vulnerable to far lesser government interference.
As an analogy, suppose your industry is in the business of selling ammonium nitrate to private customers over the counter. Some of you customers may use it as fertilizer in their gardens, others may use it to make stuff go boom. Business is great with both groups. Sure, sometimes a factory goes boom, but other companies will pop up to satisfy the market demand.
To destroy your industry, the government does not have to outright ban NH4NO3. They can simply step in and pass regulations. Suddenly, "able to figure out how to run Haber-Bosch" is no longer sufficient qualification for manufacturing it. Instead, there are safety standard, certifications, audits, et cetera. And the same goes for selling: you are suddenly required to check that your customers are certified and have a legitimate use. While the regulations might technically allow someone to get certified and buy 100g of AN to fertilize his front yard, the process is designed with bigtime farmers in mind, and nobody is going to bother spending thousands of dollars for that. In fact, anyone buying small quantities of the stuff is a big red flag.
So while AN is technically legal but regulated, your business of cheaply manufacturing it and selling it in hardware stores to the public is suddenly no longer viable.
(The analogy is not perfect, AN is much more intrinsically useful than cryptocurrencies are, and personally I am a lot more willing to have my government prevent my neighbor from mixing ANFO than I am with them preventing her from buying drugs on the darknet.)
In its hayday, the crypto currency industry was a total wild west. Straightforward scams, pyramid schemes, whatever FTX was, the NFT craze. The end uses are to hide assets from the government and to conduct transactions which the government does not want you to conduct. (I think that there is a point to be made that the latter use is at times actually rather pro-social, allowing people to work around de-banking and donating to wikileaks. But good luck convincing your government of that!) Then there is the fact that there is a big traditional financial industry, which has a ton of regulations and decades of experience lobbying politicians to ensure regulatory capture, which were likely less than keen to compete with unregulated crypto bros. They would probably have preferred regulations to the effect that US residents can only buy crypto assets from their home bank.
So in short, the threat that most crypto businesses in the US would be regulated out of existence seemed very real to me.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
I would argue that free trade made the US the economic superpower it is today. Of course, there is such a thing as being a victim of your own success. To bring back low-margin manufacturing, one would need to crash the US dollar. If the dollar is low, US products will be cheap on the world market, while Americans will have a hard time paying for international alternatives. However, this would not be in the best interests of the US.
While some people care about the US manufacturing physical goods, very few want to work in manufacturing. The fraction of Americans who are envious of the job and life quality of an Indian working in plastics manufacturing is basically zero.
I think protectionism makes sense for supply chains which are of strategic importance. But that only covers a small fraction of products. Raising tariffs on USB cables until people will start to manufacture them domestically will not help your economy.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Well, from browsing through his WP page, it seems that he is sorta libertarian-conservative. As he is not the at the head of a nation state, it is hard to judge how committed to free trade he is. I think that it is very possible that he really believes that free trade is a good Schelling point to strive for, even if he does not have a picture of Reagan in his bedroom.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Trump did the same with Zelensky in the past where he also misread the situation. Zelensky was in weak position and came literally to beg for money - but he could not help himself and overplayed his hand. So he got fucked and in turn he fucked his nation - he apparently did not realize that he needs to change his behavior under new administration. Last time Zelensky behaved much better, he even brought suit.
I think that the US has sound strategic reasons to supply Ukraine, and that these are orthogonal to how much Zelenskyy is willing to grovel before Trump's throne. I do not think Zelenskyy disrespected Trump in a way that would have harmed him. I can not imagine an opinion piece by the (very pro-Ukraine) liberal media about how Trump was letting Zelenskyy walk all over him by tolerating him wearing his trademark army fatigues.
A typical rational actor does not like to grovel. Making the other party grovel will lower their utility function, so in turn their more tangible demands will be higher. If one buys a house only if the seller is willing to give a blowjob as part of the deal, it seems very likely that one will severely overpay for the house.
Again, there is an optimal amount of aid the US should be willing to give to Ukraine for strategic reasons, and likely other amounts will be less effective.
Now one can still criticize Trump for his style, but it seems to be working. He was able to negotiate peace between India and Pakistan, he managed peace between Israel and Hamas, he managed peace between Armenia–Azerbaijan, he presides over cooling of tensions between Cambodia and Thailand and he even turned Modi and Xi Jinping against Putin with his latest oil embargo. It is not as if he is just a buffoon without results.
I do not think India and Pakistan were that keen on a big nuclear war. The US (which is kinda allied to both) probably helped, but I think this is something which the Biden administration would have done just as well.
Regarding Hamas, his strategy was basically to give Nethanyahu the card blanche. This (questionable) victory is Bibi's, not his.
I remain skeptical if Trump really manages to get China and India to forgo cheap Russian fossil fuels. In general, with Trump, the winning move seems to tell him "yes", and continue as you did. Chances are he will either have another good phone call with Putin or a bad phone call with Zelenskyy and go back to not caring about Russian oil exports.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
This is a negotiation- the corporate arm of the people of Ontario being one of the interested parties. The fact that those people still see fit to go out of its way to shitpost is actually relevant; I wouldn't want to do business with them either.
I would not characterize the ad as 'shitposting'. Also, the relative strength of both parties will likely be reflected in how the gains from a deal are distributed among them. If the US is in a stronger position, it also has more to lose on not making a deal.
Of course, it could be that a trade deal is so insignificant that it is simply not worth the president's time. If it was a negotiation between the US and Madagascar, saying "screw you, try again in a year" at the slightest offense might be acceptable. But with Canada, not having a trade deal is leaving quite a bit of money on the table, I imagine.
quiet_NaN
2mo ago
Larry Ellison said that a vast AIfueled video surveillance system would ensure quote citizens will be on their best behavior because we're constantly recording and reporting everything that's going on. This comment is a perfect encapsulation of the delusional fantasy pushed by so many in Silicon Valley. That the surveillance state will be used for good. The narrative is seductive. If we could just see everything in 4K, disputes over what really happened would collapse, the thinking goes.
This is likely a hostile summary. I think that there is a steelman to be made on how video evidence can help establish a consensus. Think stuff like killings by the police. There will always be scissor cases, but if there is video evidence of a suspect pulling a gun or raising his hands in the air, then both sides of the culture war are somewhat more likely to agree on what really happened compared to when they just have to rely on eyewitness testimony.
Of course, video evidence will not always show the full context of an interaction, but it is generally better than nothing to find out what happened. And with gen-AI, video evidence will probably become less trustworthy. AI-generated videos can already fool members of the public (such as me), in the future they might also fool a forensic expert. At that point, you need to rely on a chain of custody, and in CW contexts, you generally can not trust the other side not to tamper with the evidence. Half the police departments would probably happily edit body cam footage if it lets them avoid a few weeks of BLM riots, and half the SJ people would happily use AI to "improve" their videos to drive home the point of racial injustice.
Or it could be that Ellison was really voicing a pro-panopticon sentiment, where video analysis AI will punish every tiny infraction anyone commits a la Demolition Man. I think such a society will slide into totalitarianism, because dissent begins in private.
And I would guess that trans-women in men's prison also significantly increase the risk of sexual assault in prison. My point is that there are certainly some people where the one effect is larger, and certainly one where the other effect is larger.
Or are you implying that a trans woman getting raped in men's prison is less of a big deal or that they were complicit by being trans in the first place?
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