roystgnr
11mo ago
Where is your evidence that they are anti-Catholic? You linked to their website
I'm guessing you didn't notice the non-underlined space in-between "and" and "mock"? The "mock catholics" link is to video of a man pole-dancing on a crucifix.
roystgnr
7mo ago
I’m saying that constantly referring to them as “the invaders” instead of The Russians is performative.
No; it's precise. Most Russians, even considered by nationality, have not invaded Ukraine, and something like a third will admit to pollers that they don't even support the invasion. There's little reason, when concerned with the armies who have invaded Ukraine, to use a less precise term for them. When considering Russians by ethnicity the distinction becomes even more important: many have been among the victims of the invasion. It might be an understandable accident to lump them together with their killers when speaking imprecisely, but why would anyone ever want to do so on purpose?
their “resistance” to Russia’s invasion is going to lose them their nation, not keep it.
That's not how game theory works.
Do you think that, if they'd allowed their capital city to be taken by the columns of invading tanks, that would have allowed them to keep their nation? Don't you think that's quite gullible? Putin made no such promises, and it's not even safe to trust agreements he does make.
Zelensky’s adventure
This word choice is performative nonsense. Nobody thinks that shooting back at the people sending bombs and missiles and tanks and soldiers to try and conquer you is an "adventure".
It's weird that you assign so much agency to the Ukrainians here, and yet I haven't seen you assign any to the invaders. Since your concern for the Ukranian men isn't feigned, surely you agree that the choice to invade was an atrocity, right? Even the most ardent honest pacifists will agree that starting a war is more evil than fighting back instead of surrendering.
generation of lost men
Ukraine has had those before. If we assume for your sake that the low death estimates there are correct and the high death estimates of the current war are correct, the war has to get about 30 times more deadly before the death toll of opposing Russia exceeds the death toll of being controlled by Russia.
roystgnr
10mo ago
Getting punched by anyone large enough to knock you down (outside a controlled environment) is legitimately, non-sarcastically, a totally super scary thing, and if you don't feel threatened when it happens to you then the outside view says that's probably just because head trauma can negatively impact your ability to assess threats. Homicides with "personal weapons (hands, fists, feet, etc)" typically outnumber homicides with rifles 2-to-1 in the USA. A handful of those each year are deaths from a single punch. Gunshots are much more lethal, but "much more" is still only a 22% fatality rate from handgun gunshots.
the rational response there, given that he was not restrained from retreating in any way, was to walk away and call the cops.
This is legally correct (though I'd walk backwards and not take my eyes off the assailant...), if the premise is true. "He's currently punching me" can be justification for lethal force (ref: George Zimmerman); "he hit me 26 seconds ago and now I'm pissed" not so much.
Is it morally correct, too? Someone commits battery and risks committing murder, but because they haven't (yet?) escalated to a higher probability of death I should be upset that their victim does so first? The outcome was still a tragedy, but I'm not sure "always trust that a violent assailant is going to carefully calibrate their violence level" is a Schelling point that doesn't lead to greater tragedy in the long term.
roystgnr
10mo ago
I guess it is about "honor, fairness", in a sense; you're right. I'd be fine with "old-fashioned" "masculinity", challenging someone to 'take this outside' and holding a fist fight where everybody knows what's going to happen. A sucker punch isn't that. The fact that the risk of fatality is avoidable and isn't consensual seems to be as big a deal as its magnitude. A highly-lethal response to an innocent less-lethal threat is almost tautologically a utilitarian mistake, but for discouraging murder via a more effective means of self-defense I'm fine with at least a couple orders of magnitude of "more effective", because "don't risk committing murder" is a great way to unilaterally avoid the risk of getting killed by your potential murder victim and so I don't see a pressing moral need to provide a "well I guess you should be able to safely risk maybe becoming a murderer" alternative.
We are both just quibbling about numbers at this point, right? If an attacker fires a handgun, and the defender only has a rifle or shotgun available, are they just out of luck because the former are less lethal (I'm seeing as low as 11% from other sources) than the latter (above 30%)? How about if the attacker just has a bat, or a rock? What if you're having trouble figuring out what the attacker has because you just got concussed by a sucker punch? At what point does "if you don't want to face potentially-lethal force, don't start potentially-lethal force" become a more sensible rule than "just shake off the concussion and calculate probabilities", to you? I'm not entirely on board with 0.1% ("not sure" in my original comment wasn't just rhetorical), and I get even less sure with 0.01% and less still with 0.001%, but at some point in the other direction "whoa, this kind of assault regularly murders someone" is a very bad thing that is good to point out and good to discourage, don't you think?
roystgnr
10mo ago
fist fights
I just pointed out how important the distinction is between fist fights and unprovoked assaults. A world with fewer fist fights sounds nice to me, but to each their own. A world with fewer unprovoked assaults, though, is one I'd really like to live in, even if that means I never get to blindside someone myself. Wouldn't you agree? Wouldn't "I can never safely give someone a black eye out of the blue" be a price so small that it's worth paying for even a slightly reduced risk of being punched and possibly even killed out of the blue? Maybe not when we're thinking about 22 year olds, I guess? It's a real shame that men often become old enough to murder people with fists before they become old enough to realize they should avoid any risk of murdering people with fists.
Everything I'm reading about this case makes it sound like it moved from "unprovoked assault" to (albeit unfair) "fist fight", from which point Cranston did escalate to manslaughter if not murder ... but I wouldn't dare swear to any of that before seeing the video, nor generalize it to other cases. Would you? I've seen enough cases where the initial descriptions and the eventually published videos turned out to be tangentially related at best.
reduces overall murder
large increase in dead bodies
You're also ignoring the distinction between different dead bodies. Why? If someone invents the "murder a little child" button, a magic device which can only be used once and has a fifty-fifty chance of working, would you kill them if that was the only way to stop them from pressing it? 1 expected death for 1/2 would be an increase in dead bodies, which in this arithmetic we're treating as interchangeable, so that seems like a no, but maybe that ratio is fairly described as quibbling. What if it only had a 0.1% chance of working? We're now talking about multiple orders of magnitude, right? So at this point it's too steep a price to pay, and little Suzie might need to risk biting it so the guy who gets a kick out of her risk doesn't have to? Except ... couldn't he just not press the button, if he's aware of our position and his life has value to him? If the answer is "yes", then we've solved the problem! 0.001 deaths would have been worse than than 0 deaths. If the answer is "no", then his life is so grossly different from his likely victims that even comparing 0.001 deaths to 1 death seems to be comparing apples and oranges ... and so perhaps we've still solved the problem.
So, must we still treat attackers equally to victims? If so, do we need to worry about the QALYs of jail, too? Just glancing at my local laws, giving someone a black eye out of nowhere looks like it can earn up to a year in jail. I vastly prefer published sentencing guidelines and fair trials over even heat-of-the-moment vigilante "justice", but if we're only comparing punishment magnitudes, at a QA ratio of .5 for jail time that year is already 1.5 OOM worse than an expected risk of "~a week". Is that still too harsh, except in the unlikely case every jailing manages to deter dozens of potential assaults? Or is 0.5:0.02 now a reasonable punishment ratio, nothing like that crazy 11:0.02?
Do you honestly think the deterrence effect is anything other than a rounding error next to a decade of human life lost in expectation?
I would happily accept even a certainty of being killed if I ever punched someone hard enough to knock them off their feet or concuss them, for even a slight deterrence of the possibility of being a sudden battery victim at that level myself. If it was made a clear societal expectation, I would expect this to generalize to others too, at least anyone who's a moral agent capable of being deterred. The probability you're not multiplying in here is "what are the odds that I might innocently do this awful thing by accident", which is itself orders of magnitude below 1 or should be. Knowing that you might die for doing something that might murder someone is a worthwhile deterrence effect, because a decade of the life of a human who can't be dissuaded from risking others' lives so easily is not necessarily even a positive! Violence tends to escalate, especially from someone who doesn't consider its consequences. Escalating an argument to battery that might murder an innocent person is quite bad, and most of the badness is an externality, so unless much of that badness is internalized, the distribution of consequences does not generally give the perpetrator the right incentives. You might still value the life of a battery perpetrator and their victim on exactly the same scale ... but clearly the perpetrator does not.
(The "clear societal expectation" here is as important as the "guidelines and fair trials" bit above; the less/more clear a consequence is, the less/more you can conclude about the future danger of a person who risks it. That 22yo is currently likely to have grown up watching action movies where the hero gets their head bashed in every ten minutes and walks it off. That shooter should have known he'd be jailed unless he could show it was self-defense and not retribution, and in the latter case I'll be happy he's not on the street still either.)
I'm still waiting on some outstanding questions from earlier. Can we escalate from handguns to long arms? From bludgeoning weapons to guns? What is your risk level at which the "on switch" goes on, if it's so clearly off at 0.1% and so clearly on by 11%? How does the victim know his attacker is unarmed, rather than merely stunning him before losing the element of surprise by drawing a weapon? How can it be reasonable to expect the victim of a sudden attack to the head to rapidly yet carefully predict all the possible outcomes of fighting back or not? Why is the attacker, who hasn't been similarly impaired and has had all the time he wanted to think ahead, not to be held equally if not more responsible for predicting the risk of the outcome that he initiated and was entirely capable of avoiding?
roystgnr
10mo ago
a repurposed game controller
This was an excellent decision. Using the two millionth product of some mass-manufactured part, under shirtsleeve conditions like those where the part has already been heavily used, is almost always going to be more reliable than using the first or second product of some custom design.
it doesn't give me a good impression of the entire operation.
The stories from David Lochridge and David Pogue, on the other hand, suggest many other much, much less excellent decisions. Normalization-of-deviance is a slippery slope.
roystgnr
11mo ago
No objections to most of your examples, but:
an increase in violence
(Counter) citation needed? The US reported violent crime rate fell in half over a quarter century, before leveling out. The very recent trend is worrying, but even "let's just ease up on this whole 'police' thing" doesn't seem to have been nearly as disastrous as whatever combination of "let's empty out the asylums" / "let's set a trillion gallons of leaded gas on fire near our kids" / "let's try All The Drugs" / something-else doubled homicide rates in the 60s through 90s.
the only people who seem to exhibit some sort of 'will-to-power' are the radical left, who have insane aims (equity) and insane policies (like depolicing, end of meritocracy, etc)
This is a problem, but is it a major increase? The biggest powers contending for the last century were:
-
FDR's USA: where we shredded the Tenth Amendment to the point where we no longer even realize "United States" is plural, we imprisoned an entire ethnicity, we tried to micromanage the economy with theories as mad as "let's destroy food during the Great Depression", and even our best anti-Depression scheme was the one where we robbed people of gold like cartoon villains. Oh, and we also were lax about nuclear secrets and discharged 85% of our military in the couple years between WWII and the Berlin Blockade, because we trusted "Uncle Joe".
-
Stalin's USSR: the aftermath of radical left gaining power, not just proposing insane policies but killing millions of their own people with them via a sick combination of incompetence and its ensuing scapegoating malice, then doubling down on incompetence by trusting their entire nation to the sanctity of a secret agreement with Adolf freaking Hitler after mutually wiping out the buffer state between them.
-
Hitler's Germany: the very idea of "will-to-power" appropriated from Nietzsche and taken to the extreme, rampaging across subcontinents in an insane attempt to dominate the entire world, but distracted by the obsession with slandering and murdering millions of their own people, and finally defeated in part because ideas like "don't trust that Einstein guy's physics, he's a Jew!" and "let's open up the war on two fronts at once!" are the sort of things you come up with when ruled by your own madness.
I'm not sure how to find political insanity on a graph, and I'll admit it feels like there's been an uptick over the last decade, but we're still nowhere near the heights we scaled during the last century.
roystgnr
7mo ago
Has modern Windows really gotten worse? These days I basically use Windows as a boot loader for the ~20% of my video games that won't run on Linux or a console, but during the era when I was giving up on Windows it seemed to me like it was mostly improving, albeit not fast enough for my liking. Vista was a step back from XP but it was still way better than ME or original NT; ME was a step back from 98 but it was still way better than 3.1.
roystgnr
5mo ago
roystgnr
6mo ago
it is “victim blaming” but the concept makes zero sense
I was whining last week about how lousy our language is about distinguishing "action X makes Y more likely" from "action X is to blame for Y" ... but it's not really a language problem, is it? We're just not good at thinking that way. Victim blaming makes sense as a concept, but it's so close to non-victim-blaming that even when you're trying to distinguish them you risk just falling down on the other side of the line. Compare "you should know better than to pay money to that sketchy-looking fraud; it's too late now" (fraud is a crime, a fraudster is to blame, and shifting the blame off the criminal is victim-blaming) to "you should know better than to pay money for that cheap-looking product; it's too late now" (caveat emptor, "no returns" policies aren't a crime, and aside from other "implied warranty of merchantability" sorts of considerations the most a customer is owed here is a chance to leave a bad review).
roystgnr
9mo ago
The nice thing about "just base it on the SAT" is that the SAT is proctored. Even if you made everyone come write their 950 word essay in person, that would squelch the original-research component and yet it would still be gamed by students memorizing prepared essays in advance.
Actually ... maybe the proctored essay could work, if you gave assigned essay topics? Come up with ten thousand of them and choose 5 at random for each student to choose between when they arrive (so it doesn't matter if the list of topics leaks; they can still prep in general but not for specifics), even give students a web browser (ideally with library/Elsevier/LexisNexis/whatever subscriptions) they can research from (or copy from, but with a monitored browser that's just a filter to get rid of dumb cheaters).
As a shape rotator I still hate it, of course, but soon or later we'll be replacing the wordcels with matvecs (as well as ourselves, but grudges die hard); if we don't all die in the process it'll be nice for them to have an experience like this to look back on fondly.
roystgnr
24d ago
Can't we just get along...by going to Mars or something?
That's a much better idea, I have to admit.
And we do have a massive humans-to-Mars project getting underway, so a quick examination of the public discussion of it will surely reveal just the culture-war-free cameraderie we're looking for. Let me do a web search now, right after taking a big sip of water...
roystgnr
6mo ago
The deadliest mass shooting in the US was the Battle of Gettysburg, a Civil War battle with 7000 deaths.
The deadliest mass shooting of non-soldiers in the US was the Wounded Knee Massacre, a gun confiscation gone wrong with 200 civilian deaths.
The Vegas shooting was horrifyingly awful, but it's still a factor of three below the lesser of those.
(This does suggest that Israel think carefully before letting the genie out of that bottle too; the plurality anti-mass-shooting position in the USA is probably "do a million gun confiscations, and hope they don't go wrong or start a civil war", and it's not because nobody's looking for good ideas instead)
Think this is a very hard problem to solve if the shooters are motivated enough.
If mass murderers are motivated and competent enough it's an impossible problem to solve. A guy with dozens of powerful rifles and a hotel room full of ammo killed 61 people; a guy with a rental truck full of fertilizer and fuel killed 168. Your average one-man-army is a lesser potential terrorism threat than your average farmer, if the latter doesn't worry about getting caught.
In the US we track fertilizer sales more closely now (and farmers aren't generally the mass-murdering type), and many would-be bombers range from incompetent (the Columbine killers planted nearly a hundred bombs, which failed to work; guns were their backup plan) to anti-competent (one suspect in any bombing is the victim, because it's hilariously common for murderers and would-be murderers to blow themselves up by accident) ... but even with Gaza blockaded, Hamas manages to manufacture and employ working explosives and even mostly-working rockets readily enough. Not driving truck bombs through the breach this month was a tactical choice, not a tactical necessity.
On the other hand, even reducing a problem with a non-100%-solution is better than nothing. These hypothetical truck bombs might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by an airstrike, and likewise the non-hypothetical gunmen might not have all made it to their targets before getting stopped by a more-armed citizenry. A more-armed Israeli citizenry might lead to other unintended deaths, but so do Israeli airstrikes.
roystgnr
6mo ago
What a ridiculous conspiracy theory. I should ask for a source just to expose how utterly ... wait, what the hell, that was actually a thing that happened?
roystgnr
10mo ago
not even a tin can, they were using carbon fibre or something?
Titanium end-caps, carbon-fibre cylinder. Carbon fibre can be much stronger than steel, much less tin, and they'd successfully made several dives that deep already ... but composites are harder to engineer with than metals, and the short history of composites for these ultra-deep dives is worrying. Compare:
"The design of the Cyclops 2 hull, says Spencer, is based in large part on the strategy applied to Fossett’s DeepFlight Challenger" (Spencer Composites was OceanGate's original choice for the hull manufacture, though they say it wasn't their hull in this dive, I can't seem to find what later manufacturer was chosen)
to:
"Based on testing at high pressure, the DeepFlight Challenger was determined to be suitable only for a single dive, not the repeated uses that had been planned ..."
And in 2020 the Titan "had to be completely rebuilt after tests showed signs of ‘cyclic fatigue’" ... just from testing? They've had successful trips since, but not nearly enough that I'd be confident they've figured out fatigue.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Yes, homicides fell.
This isn't the data I linked to. The violent crime rate is about 75x the homicide rate, and both fell in half.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/108876790200600203?journalCode=hsxa
This talks about a lethality decrease from the 1960s to 90s. I'm talking about reductions in 98% non-lethal crime from the 90s through 2010s.
it's hard to claim the increase in violence as a good thing.
It's especially hard if violence decreased 50%.
roystgnr
1mo ago
But no one in academia officially uses the term Critical Race Theory.
Google Scholar reports 4,000 citations from the 20th century, which hopefully is an old enough cutoff date to clearly precede the current backlash, and another 200,000 citations since, which probably aren't all part of the backlash to the backlash.
It sounds a bit cringe when Republicans say they want to ban CRT, because officially it doesn't exist.
Wow, that takes me back down memory lane. I never understood how this sort of historical revisionism was expected to work, when we don't actually have a Memory Hole to drop actual history into, we have an Internet. But if the first history you see on the internet is still the revisionist one, it's hard to fault the revisionists for their choice of tactics. Perhaps someday even still-problematically-factual summaries will also learn to love Big Brother.
It's tempting to wonder whether the enraging pattern of gaslighting isn't to persuade, so much as deliberately to enrage. But that's unfair; to the people who actually complain that we aren't all jogging along the euphemism treadmills as fast as they demand, the complaint appears to be a mix of standard attempts to rebrand themselves to avoid "scorn and sarcasm", just combined with very non-standard attempts to condemn anyone who doesn't immediately keep up with the rebranding.
roystgnr
11mo ago
I enjoy challenging friends on whether they've actually thought about just how weird the official story is and how many weird things have happened since.
Damn, that's good bait. Okay: I guess I haven't thought about it? The thing that most people seemed to think was weirdest was "we sent people all the way to the moon but then we couldn't get back for half a century", but we made it all the way to the moon as fast as possible by spending as much money as possible, hundreds of billions of dollars inflation-adjusted, with NASA funding then cut by 2/3rds once "we won the Space Race" had been demonstrated. We tried to switch to a cheaper launch vehicle design (but not a cheaper procurement strategy...) afterward, we failed, sunk cost fallacy kept that failure on our backs for decades, and now here we are.
My favorite space conspiracy is the Lost Cosmonauts theory, Heinlein version. "Ha ha we already put a man in space oh wait the retrorockets screwed up did we mention it was just a test dummy" sounds so much like an inept coverup of a death. If there actually had been a coverup I'd have expected some documents/details/myths to have been leaked in post-Soviet Russia, though, along with the N-1 failures and the more salacious retellings of Komarov's death.
roystgnr
1mo ago
White Protestants
The two top SF authors of all time are arguably Jules Verne, Catholic-raised deist, and Isaac Asimov, Jewish-raised atheist.
two White men
Juan Rico and his girlfriend Carmen Ibanez?
roystgnr
3mo ago
Apologies if you've seen all these already.
https://curiosityandcode.tumblr.com/post/145100433806/swanjolras-gosh-but-like-we-spent-hundreds-of
Do you count comics as memes? The best do spread virally. These three didn't really start hitting like hammers until I became a parent:
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=3106
https://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2996
And this one (in the original blog post form) took on more meaning after I read it to my daughter one night, as the only thing I could think of to assuage our despair at the discovery that my mother's minor health issue was actually incurable cancer.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Non lethal crime is much more easily decreased by changes in reporting, incentives to report and so on.
This is true. So what happens when we track violence independently of reporting, via victimization surveys? "From 1993 to 2021, the rate of violent victimization declined from 79.8 to 16.5 victimizations per 1,000 persons age 12 or older." The decline is even more astonishing.
roystgnr
3mo ago
some pro-sanctuary arguments
"sanctuary" is a basket of many different policies. Perhaps the easiest to support is that police who are interacting with illegal immigrants who witness and report crimes should be prohibited from assisting with those immigrants' deportation, because otherwise the incentive is for the witnesses to just not report the crimes, and thereby still not get deported, making it harder to catch criminals before they reoffend (including against citizens and legal residents).
some pro-illegal immigration arguments in general
I've long been amused by Milton Friedman's argument:
"...that Mexican immigration, over the border, is a good thing. It’s a good thing for the illegal immigrants. It’s a good thing for the United States. It’s a good thing for the citizens of the country. But, it’s only good so long as its illegal.
That's an interesting paradox to think about. Make it legal and it’s no good. Why? Because as long as it’s illegal the people who come in do not qualify for welfare, they don’t qualify for social security, they don’t qualify for the other myriad of benefits that we pour out from our left pocket to our right pocket. So long as they don’t qualify they migrate to jobs. They take jobs that most residents of this country are unwilling to take. They provide employers with the kind of workers that they cannot get. They’re hard workers, they’re good workers, and they are clearly better off." - Milton Friedman, "What is America" lecture
Though bear in mind, this was the late 70s. Perhaps "do not qualify for ... benefits" was a reasonable blanket claim then, and crime wasn't even worth mentioning because who's going to risk deportation for stepping even slightly out of line? In the 2020s, when illegal immigrants can get free schooling (and then in-state university tuition rates, in dozens of states) for their kids, and sanctuary policies may explicitly prevent deporting many arrestees, the cost-benefit calculations may have more net losers.
Are you suggesting they're not invaders? "One who invades", and all that? Surely if an accurate description of actions makes them sound like Marvel villainy, the way to correct that is "don't take villainous actions", not "hope they won't be described accurately".
"Resist invasions by foreign armies" is almost definitional to being a nation. Don't do that and you're just prey.
Do you really not understand that it's not inherently ridiculous for a former television actor to stand up to Russia? This is even more obviously reaching than your sartorial complaints.
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