roystgnr
1mo ago
That the pivot to Ukraine when the covid thing became too embarrassing was pure coincidence? That the pivot to Israel was also pure coincidence?
Since those "pivots" had their timing fixed by Putin's invasion date and Hamas' massacre date, and since I'm very confident the US Deep State or whoever isn't collaborating with them, I'm going to have to go with OF COURSE. Putin's "de-Nazification" excuses were a cover for "I want conquest", not "I want to do Biden a solid".
Good luck to you. I'm as big a Deus Ex fan as the next guy, but actual paranoid theorizing about how the world is controlled by a giant conspiracy against you is a really hard epistemic failure to break out of. Meds can help, but of course that's what They would want you to do...
roystgnr
11mo ago
Not allying with Stalin doesn't mean the Soviets collectively drop their guns and meekly submit to slaughter.
Some of them wouldn't even have had guns to drop - a hundred billion (current) dollars of war materiel here, a hundred billion dollars there, and pretty soon you're talking about real support.
I admit, based on how tragically well-situated the USSR was in the aftermath of WWII, it's easy to think there must have been some lower amount of assistance that would have been a much better outcome for the world as a whole, by putting the same resources to work on the Western Front instead, but:
-
What Western Front, at that point? We didn't start assisting the USSR until a year after Dunkirk, at which point we had no beachhead and wouldn't be able to establish one for years. The choice wasn't "bleed the Nazis by supporting the Soviets" vs "bleed the Nazis ourselves", it was vs "do nothing".
-
What is the minimal lower amount of assistance that would have left us with "weakened USSR unable to drop the Iron Curtain" but not with "conquered USSR unable to keep the Nazis fighting on two fronts"? Get this one wrong and we still end up with multiple genocides (only like a third of the Soviet victims were post-WWII; by the time they became one of the Allies it was too late to save the other 2/3rds), except one of those becomes a much larger, nearly unstoppable genocide.
I suppose we'd get The Bomb and Hitler was further from catching up to that than Stalin was, so perhaps that makes both questions moot? But that only works with a lot more hindsight than anyone could have been expected to have in 1941. For that matter, even "not allying with genocidal maniacs" only makes sense with hindsight. In the 30s Duranty was getting his Pulitzer for reporting on how totally fake the Holodomor was, and in the 40s FDR was telling everyone how trustworthy he thought Stalin was. Enough people bought it that we demobilized like 85% of our military in the 2 years before the Berlin Blockade.
roystgnr
11mo ago
has issued millions of concealed carry permits
That undermines more than supports the argument for permitless carry, doesn't it? I can see a strong argument for permitless carry in states where the legislature says "shall-issue" but the licensing agency says "ooh, sorry, on your application you did/didn't close the top on the digit '4', please try again, that'll be another $200 filing fee", but if training requirements are actually providing training rather than obstruction then they don't seem like a bad idea in theory.
it doesn't cause excess violence or deaths
I don't think you can extrapolate from "Florida allows trained licensees to carry concealed and the homicide rate kept declining" to "Florida allows anyone to do so and the homicide rate won't jump" ... but "dozens of states allow anyone to do so and the homicide rate kept declining" is decent evidence. New Hampshire isn't exactly a murderous hellscape.
roystgnr
1mo ago
It just says "having previously taken an oath" - shouldn't that apply to former office-holders as well, even if their term(s) ended before the insurrection?
(still doesn't seem like it should have applied to Cox, who was neither a present nor former office-holder before the Civil War)
roystgnr
11mo ago
a big disaster (not extinction, or close to it, but some kind of big spectacle) that prompts serious regulation
Fingers crossed. With typical normalization of deviance this is how it happens, because eventually you push farther than is safe and that causes a spectacular disaster. But does that still hold when a disaster is an agent with obvious incentives to avoid spectacle? It could be that the first thing smart enough to cause a real disaster is also smart enough to hold back until the disaster would be irrecoverable.
roystgnr
7mo ago
constantly referring to Russians as “invaders” like some sort of marvel movie speech
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".
It’s a ridiculous, nationally suicidal vanity project
"Resist invasions by foreign armies" is almost definitional to being a nation. Don't do that and you're just prey.
by a former television actor
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.
roystgnr
11mo ago
Where exactly is a discontinuity of such a magnitude as to make this absurd? It's somewhere between 300 million people and 8 billion people, I gather, but ... I can't even really picture 1 million people in my head, much less calculate how many more would need to be added before we hit Democracy-bad-critical-mass. Can you? Did India cross the line yet, or does it risk doing so? Would China, if the CCP transitioned to democracy? Would a world country have been fine a few centuries ago, but it's too late now?
a single nation
The US is a single nation ... how? Looking for "a combination of shared features such as language, history, ethnicity, culture and/or society" isn't getting me much. 20% of Americans speak a language other than English at home, and about 40% of native English speakers aren't American. We get a million immigrants a year with their own histories; presumably they still count as American regardless. We're certainly not an ethnostate. This is the Culture War roundup, so that's out; skimming through the old tenets of American civil religion and looking for universal and/or religious levels of acceptance is doomed to fail. The US is a single country, but our hypothetical single democratic world country would check that box too.
Part of what made us (barely) hold together as a single country is the paradoxical idea that we don't have to be a single nation, that "United States" is a plural noun and not just an extra 's' for funsies, that the federal government should just be handling the friction between states, who in turn try to devolve their own power onto even smaller localities ... but that's all pretty antiquated at this point, isn't it? Opposing local control because slavery is too awful was a pretty noble rationalization, but it was less than a century from that point to "growing too much food is too awful", and it's been nearly another century since. Even when Texas state government is grousing about DC they'll happily turn around and overrule Austin city government. Who are we to say that China's citizens' votes shouldn't be overruling US mistakes or (in less common cases) vice-versa too, as the obvious next step once we finally give Californians the rest of the control over Montana they want? Is it just special pleading and status quo bias? It really does feel like "more populated places should outvote less populated ones" is a "principle" that's convenient to hold when I'm part of the majority in the more populated place and suddenly abandon when I'm part of the people expecting to be outvoted.
roystgnr
6hr ago
We've already synthesized "real" meat that may not be as good as real meat. Grain-fed beef can have an omega-3:omega-6 ratio several times worse than traditional grass-fed grass-finished beef, but everyone eats grain-fed since it's half the price. Time to fix the problem with a ban?
roystgnr
6mo ago
I'd also want destruction to be off limits so long as there's anyone willing to move the monument to private property, but surely such removal should be an allowable option when it's practical. "Must we commemorate X in the public square just because our great-great-grandparents wanted to?" seems like a reasonable proposition to vote "no" to.
If for some reason we can add monuments but not remove them, though, might I suggest a design for a new line of Anti-Abduction monuments? They'll each be basically a stereotypical barred jail cell, symbolizing the ironic fate that should await those who hold innocent people against their will - and the best part is that, since the design is hollow, it can be erected without using too much space by placing it around other monuments!
roystgnr
17d ago
Yeah, "assuming future research doesn't have any surprises" was a predicate here, not an actually-safe assumption. Sure would have been nice if we hadn't stopped the research a decade ago.
roystgnr
1mo ago
Assuming they can consent, no.
The assumption was "too drunk to say no", just the opposite.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Ah, Benford's Law. Great in other contexts, but here that one didn't pass the smell test for me; the "law" only applies if you're sampling from distributions spread over orders of magnitude, not voting districts drawn to be nearly equally sized multiplied by vote percentages centered around .5. I later learned there's a clever trick where you can look at later digits' distributions instead of the first digit's, but all the skeptics I saw in 2020 were just misapplying the basic version of the law.
I've seen final vote tallies that were obvious fakes from the numbers alone, but for elections like Saddam's or Putin's, not Trump's or Biden's.
I still heartily approve of trying to check, though. An election isn't just about getting the right result, it's also supposed to be about getting the right result in a transparently trustworthy way.
roystgnr
4mo ago
Inherently? Surely not. This is just a vague heuristic, and I'd be shocked if it was actually a universal rule. It just seems that there are some pathways to "make brain quiet down now" that don't do so perfectly gently, which a priori isn't too surprising. General anesthesia and alcohol are the two other examples that come readily to mind. So when I see a new drug that has that effect, and there's no safe explanation (like for melatonin) apparent, I wonder if it's doing so unsafely.
I don't worry too much though. I've had general anesthesia once, and I wouldn't hesitate to take Benadryl after an allergic reaction, because I doubt the costs outweigh the benefits, and I had a glass of wine with dinner tonight, because YOLO.
roystgnr
5mo ago
From a few other sources it looks like the quote was from Isaiah 60:18 and the prophecy was Isaiah 60. Nothing irrevocably genocidal there, but "For the nation or kingdom that will not serve you will perish; it will be utterly ruined" isn't exactly the sort of footnote you'd put on a Coexist bumper sticker.
roystgnr
6mo ago
Mainstream definitions don’t include warfare
The first sentence of that link does: "A mass shooting is a violent crime in which an attacker kills or injures multiple individuals simultaneously using a firearm."
The second sentence says, "There is no widely-accepted definition of "mass shooting"".
We finally get past the part that agrees with me and the part that admits that reasonable people differ and reach, "Definitions of mass shootings exclude warfare", but at this point it seems like an arbitrary rather than a principled exception. If someone wants to make up a term, and they pick "Adjective Noun" but then whine about "but I didn't really mean all instances of Noun that satisfied Adjective!", wouldn't it be better just to make up a new term? Logically it's more coherent. Rhetorically it doesn't allow you to steal all the connotations that Adjective+Noun already have, but that's a feature, not a bug.
(Also, I personally would have called the Wounded Knee Massacre a "war crime" rather than "warfare", wouldn't you? I know we're way before the Geneva conventions at that point, but "don't kill all the women and children too" seems like it's not too much of an anachronism to ask for.)
Personal violence and state-coordinated violence have different implications for culpability, capability, and potential countermeasures.
That's a great argument for responding to different subcategories of mass shootings differently. It's not a good argument for caring about them differently ... and it's especially not an argument for excluding the deadliest of them, in the specific context of "which was deadliest"!
That doesn’t justify diluting the term.
The Wounded Knee Massacre is a dilution? Maybe at the time, when that sort of mass shooting got the murderers medals instead of prison, they'd have made that argument, but we should know better now. Nobody should ever look at the mass murder-via-shooting (am I at least allowed to call it that?) of hundreds of innocent people and say "gosh, these mass shootings aren't as bad as I thought!"
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
8mo ago
My experience is just blip in history
Mathematically his is too, right? Not every only-child is going to have kids, and in that extreme case, a TFR below 1 (hi, South Koreans! Remember that the last one there has to turn off the lights!) is as unstable as a TFR above 4.
it is a rare transition towards inevitable modernity.
I can barely imagine what a future stable modernity is going to look like. You could tell me anything from "After the AGIs cure aging low TFR is a good thing" to "After the environment/economy/whatever collapses and the low TFR subpopulations die out, Malthus has the last laugh for the next million years", and I wouldn't be sure you were wrong...
roystgnr
8mo ago
Many would argue that lifting has better health benefits
Citation? Maybe I'm lifting wrong (too few reps with too much weight?) but I never get my heart rate up for long while doing it. IIRC exercise-elevated heart rate and breathing are what most directly translate to better cardiopulmonary health and stamina, which is what has the strongest effect on healthspan and lifespan.
roystgnr
9mo ago
The (false) idea that Catholic priests are somehow more likely than anybody else to abuse children (in reality they are less likely)
According your link, Catholic priests are less likely than school teachers to abuse children ... and both are orders of magnitude more likely than anybody else. Compare its stated 10K abuse allegations from 100K priests (4,392/4%) to its remaining 310K abuse allegations from 260M non-priest adults in the US and the former is about a factor of 100 higher ... but then consider that, to have the stated 5% abuser rate, the 4M teachers in the US must have 200K abusers among them, and at even 2 incidents per abuser teacher (still less than the stated rate among abuser priests) that wouldn't leave any allegations left for non-priest non-teachers.
Maybe this makes sense, at least after accounting for rounding errors, in a Willie Sutton "Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is." sense? But I have to wonder if these numbers are just inconsistent because some of them are incorrect, or at best inconsistently defined.
roystgnr
10mo ago
“It’s morally wrong for the average voter to vote; we should try to decrease voter turnout.” Pro
these are very unusual positions and I would like to hear why you believe in them.
Not OP, but my most blackpill moment was discovering that the median voter was obviously casting ignorant votes. I'd heard complaints about "I had to stand in line an hour to vote!", and they seemed kind of weird because that's still just a small fraction of the several hours minimum it takes to do a half-decent investigation of candidates, but of course the answer was that nobody does that minimum, they just press the button and get the sticker.
I can't argue with rational-ignorance theory, I totally get it if someone just wants to vote for President because they're deluged with information in that one case alone, but then maybe don't cast votes for the other offices too?
I still don't think "try to decrease voter turnout" is the solution, though. I'm not sure what the solution is. Something more like a deliberate liquid democracy might help, perhaps? Even people who would push the "just vote for everyone with the correct letter after their name" button on their own behalf might feel more weight of responsibility if ten friends have placed trust in their decision-making. That might greatly increase voter turnout in midterm elections, too; you might think to yourself "I don't have time to figure out who the next city councilor should be", but if you know someone more politically interested who you trust then your vote can go through them rather than being abdicated entirely. I might not be sure who I can trust as the next Railroad Commissioner, because that takes research time, but I could name several people I would trust to do that research for me, because personal experience is "free".
roystgnr
11mo ago
the go-to political claim by the respectable institutions is that crime is caused by poverty.
Put scare quotes around "respectable" next time. And yeah, poverty only even correlates with a fraction of the problem.
We have a homicide rate that's increased or kept the same
And you say "since 1930s"? No. The 2020 jump leaves us worse than 1937-1939, but it's still below the start of the 30s and nearly 20% below the peak. The first big jump in homicide was over the 1900s through 1920s (following a long secular decline), and then the mid 30s through mid 50s was a decline again.
But though since the 1930s the US homicide rate fell a little again on net, the "huge jump from 1960 to 1980 then decline again from 1980 to 2000 then sudden more moderate jump in 2020" pattern is more complicated than that. This roller coaster is an interesting phenomenon but you have to pay attention to the details, not oversimplify. "We screwed up something horribly between 1930 and today" would have us looking in the wrong places, if the problem is really that we screwed up something super horribly between 1910 and 1930 and then again between 1960 and 1980 (or between 1890 and 1910 and then again between 1940 and 1960, if the "childhood lead exposure" theories are right) and we've fixed something between 1990 and 2010 but only part way.
If anything, we still could use way more details. E.g. I'd love to see that "murder correlates astonishingly well with single parenthood rates" graph extended in time instead of just space; looking at just national data they did increase together but then when the homicide rate fell the single parenthood rate didn't.
Why, on the basis of this data would we conclude there's less violence ?
As another comment here just paraphrased today: "if someone is biased towards something, then when presented with evidence that reinforces the bias, they think "CAN I believe this," but when presented with evidence that counters the bias, they think "MUST I believe this?"" This is not a straight path to truth.
The other data I've brought directly concerns the violent crime rate rather than trying to extrapolate from a biased subcategory of it. Ceteris paribus, far fewer people admitting to having been victimized is evidence of fewer victims! You've come up with the possibility that the ratio of crime to reported crime (and the ratio of crime to surveyed crime!? the ratios of surveyed to reported crime haven't changed too much) both increased a lot, not because you've brought evidence of that but because that would let you answer "CAN I believe this is wrong" in the affirmative. You're simultaneously neglecting the possibility that the ratio of (attempted) homicide to other violent crime increased slightly, because that is necessary to let you answer "MUST I believe this is right" in the negative. If now 4% of violence ends in death instead of 2%, like the data seems to show, that would have interesting implications ... but if your priors are "violence is simply proportional to homicide" then "true" is no longer a conclusion you can reach, it's in a blind spot that gets filled in from assumptions instead of evidence.
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
17d ago
On #1: try the second button from the top on the right of the gas pump's screen. It's almost never labeled as such, but it's usually set up as Mute. I've heard of one pump brand that uses top right instead, but never encountered it myself.
roystgnr
2mo ago
Frequently what happens is that it gets comically enormous and useless as various stakeholders fill it with random bullshit.
Could you give any examples of "erroneous"? I've certainly seen "enormous"/"useless"/"random bullshit", and burying important truths in so much filler they get ignored might have consequences as bad as falsehoods, but I just don't recall seeing any likely falsehoods. Even the random bullshit is unevidenced rather than obviously untrue, along the lines of "let's put X in the list of possible side effects, as CYA, even though our only evidence for X is that in one study the treatment group reported it almost as often as the control group"...
He lost 48% to 50%, though, right? With Alabama something like 62% Republican, that means perhaps a quarter of Republicans there who would have voted for him didn't, and the rest held their nose and voted for him anyway.
I suspect the vast majority of his voters believed the allegations to be false, so their votes aren't evidence of evil, but willful ignorance isn't a great alternative. The guy's denials were waffling, self-contradictory, and self-incriminating. "I don't remember ever dating any girl without the permission of her mother." is not the sort of thing you say when you're into adult women.
More options
Context Copy link