If you say no to the fighter jet thing, but yes to a self-replicating molecular machine finding a stable enough environment in which to proliferate for millions of years, then presumably you would need to explain the asymmetry in your expectations.
Well, if we imagine a fighter jet made of 10,000 different parts, and all these parts just happen to have spontaneously come into existence on some planet, and there's actually a trillion copies of each part on this planet, and this planet has whirlwinds strong enough to constantly clatter these pieces together in different ways, and has plenty of lightning to do the spot welding, and it's not just one planet but an uncountable number throughout the universe, then yeah. I expect you would end up with a fighter jet after a few billion years or so.
why have we been able to create fighter jets, but not engineer a self-replicating molecular organism from inorganic matter?
Probably because fighter jets exist in meatspace where I can manipulate things with my hammer and self-replicating molecular organisms exist in nano-world which we have just barely developed the tools to begin to engineer.
shakenvac
11mo ago
the homicide clearnace rates in the USA have been plummetting since the 1970s. That's because easily solvable intra-family murders have been replaced with nigh unsolvable gangland killings. Therefore what you are saying is far less true today than it was 50 years ago. If anything we should say that murders are not a good proxy for violent crime rates because they probably underestimate wider violent crime rates.
shakenvac
11mo ago
if we accept for the sake of argument that what Trump did is no worse than hat Hillary did, how am I supposed to see Trump as anything more than a rank hypocrite? Trump excoriated Hillary for mishandling documents. He tore her to pieces. He wanted her locked up. Given how close 2016 was it's probably not an exaggeration to say that Hillary's emails won Trump the election. and then at the end of his term he stashes a garage full of classified documents in his house? and then lies to investigators about it? Why on earth should I care that he's getting a taste of his own medicine? Crooked Trump.
If Trump wanted to maintain those documents, as president, that suffices.
If it is true that Trump can psychically declassify documents then I'm sure that Trumps very competent, very well paid lawyers will put together an extremely convincing argument to that effect and get the case dismissed. I'm not holding my breath.
shakenvac
11mo ago
And where do "My rules, unfairly" sit on that spectrum? Trump made an absolutely massive deal out of Hillary mishandling documents and the injury to Hillary was huge (probable cause of losing the election). And now it turns out he's also been mishandling documents and people are making a massive deal out of it and suddenly Mr. "lock her up" is all about forbearance and even application of the law? Even if the basic argument about fairness is true, can you explain to me why I should feel one jot of sympathy for this massive hypocrite?
If politician X in state Y gets prosecuted for smoking weed even though in state Y almost no-one ever gets prosecuted on straight possession, then yeah I would be upset at what I would see as a politically motivated prosecution. If, however, politician X also campaigned like mad to keep weed illegal and made tons of political hay by pointing out that his opponent smoked weed in college? Man, fuck that guy with a stick.
shakenvac
11mo ago
Presidents have ultimate classifying authority
You keep mixing legal arguments with moral ones. Even if we accept that what Trump did was legal (not conceded) you have conspicuously avoided the argument that it was deeply irresponsible. there is no law of physics which says that a former president cannot injure the nation by mishandling such documents. Even if a box in a garage is not as bad as an email on a server (not conceded) you still have to admit that a box in a garage is pretty goddamn bad. And after all that shit he gave Hillary, too. Is it really such a terrible thing to hold Trump to his own standards?
the federal government is bigger and has more resources than Donald Trump.
McDonalds had more resources than Stella Liebeck
It doesn't matter how well-paid or competent Trump's lawyers are (and surely they're both, wisecracking aside)
I wasn't being sarcastic. I'm sure they are very competent. Which is why I don't really believe your legal theory. If what you are saying is correct, and it is uncomplicatedly true that Trump axiomatically cannot mishandle documents, then why aren't his lawyers screaming it from the rooftops? Why haven't they made that argument in court? why aren’t there droves of grumbling articles from the New York Times about how 'this is all BS but unfortunately his lawyers do kinda have a point'? Why did his previous lawyers appear to quit over this? Why did Trump try and hide evidence from investigators if what he did wasn't even illegal? It's all very weird.
unless, of course, you're wrong.
shakenvac
11mo ago
I'll agree that if what he did was legal, he shouldn't have been indicted. I'm not at all convinced by your argument that what he did was legal, and even if you're correct, people sometimes get indicted for doing legal things; it's just a thing that happens sometimes.
Maybe if you start by admitting that this whole prosecution is made-up double standards over nonsense no one really cares about
He cared about it. That's what really gets my back up. 'Crooked Hillary's emails' was like his #1 talking point back in 2016. The man is the king of double standards.
As for unfairness, I think if Trump had done what any other politician would have done, and just handed over the documents when they asked instead of being deceitful, then this whole saga ends with Trump getting a sternly worded letter and a half-dozen news articles written about him. The way Trump acted makes this a very different situation. Of course, I'll admit it's possible that in my counterfactual he gets prosecuted anyway. But then your unfairness argument would be far easier to make, wouldn't it?
shakenvac
10mo ago
our continual pressure and influence in Ukraine has destroyed the country, probably forever (given fertility rates),
Very possible this will happen, but history will not see America as the one holding the knife, but rather the country that attacked a democracy unprovoked and during the war literally kidnapped tens of thousands of Ukrainian children.
has cost enormous sums of money,
Literally the best bang-for-buck the US Military has ever had. Less than 10% of the annual US DOD budget to thoroughly emasculate the old enemy, weaken China, zero lives lost, massive increase in US soft power for finally being on the right side of a war. Plus the true cost is probably less than half of the sticker price.
has wasted American influence in Ukraine,
What?
has pressured Russia into developing better drone technology,
Oh no we can never stand up to bullies like Russia they might -checks notes- develop better drone technology!! Who cares. Besides at this point I wouldn't trust the Russians to develop a microwave. And, more to the point, neither would the half of the planet that (used to) use Russia as their weapons dealer.
has finalized the alienation of Russia from the West,
It has been obvious to anyone paying attention for the last 20-ish years that Russia was never on any kind of course to peaceful integration with the West. The Russian kleptocracy was just fundamentally incompatible.
has influenced Arab nations into cozying with Russia,
Okay so 1) Arab nations don't give a hoot about Russia their relationship is purely mercenary, and 2) this sentence implies that we don't want Arab nations cozying with Russia which implies that their influence is a negative for the US. So then surely -from a purely realpolitik POV- it is good for the US to diminish them? you can't simultaneously hold that Russia is an irrelevant backwater and also that it is a malign influence on American interests.
What will we gain in five years from it all?
A hundred things. but if you want to put blinkers on and care about literally nothing else than the American rival du jour then invasion of Taiwan looks substantially less likely now than it did at the start of the war.
shakenvac
10mo ago
Got an economics question:
I was watching 'Margin Call' the other day, and there is a scene where two day traders are lamenting the (then incipient) 2008 financial crisis. The senior of the two gives his justification for existing to the other:
the only reason they [normal people] all get to keep living like this is because We've got our fingers on the scale in their favour. I take it off, then the whole world gets really fucking fair really fucking quickly and nobody actually wants that.
Is there anything to this? if so, how does that work? I always assumed that day traders basically created no value and just shuffled wealth around to nobody's benefit.
shakenvac
10mo ago
Appreciate the post thanks man. So let me see if I've understood this correctly:
Day traders as depicted in Margin Call do/did perform some modest (probably very modest) service to society in that all the jiggery-pokery and complicated financial instruments have the effect of making investments more appealing, which in turn would reduce the downstream cost of credit to borrowers which is good because all other things being equal cheap credit is better than expensive credit.
It's also not completely fair to lay blame for the financial crisis at the feet of traders/investment banks, at least no more than any other bankers, because they weren't fundamentally responsible for the rotten mortgages that were the root cause of the crisis. At worst they simply didnt look too hard at the numbers because they were making money quite handily from the status quo.
But it certainly isn't true that credit traders etc. give 'Joe Everyman' a big advantage over his global competitors.
shakenvac
9mo ago
Overall, I'm drawing a bit of a blank as to why they'd be compromised beyond TDS or groupthink.
Folk who consider themselves my betters want to insulate me from a truth* that they don't think I can handle, and so deceive me 'for my own good.' Many such cases. The authors of that paper must have felt so vindicated when the first Sinophobic hate crimes started occurring. How much worse might that have been, they must have thought, had we not strangled the lab leak hypothesis in the crib.
Many of my normie friends refused to even discuss COVID origins. The lab-leak hypothesis was a thought crime to them; the sort of thing that conspiritards and racist loons spouted, little different to "Jews did 9/11". That's the environment deliberately created by Andersen et al and the rest of team science. They knew exactly what they were doing, and they also knew how to arse cover if and when the charade fell over. The strenuous denials that they 'ackchually never said that the lab leak hypothesis was off the table' are backed up by a lifetime of practice hedging in the small print.
*The truth being, not that COVID was a lab leak, but that there was a good chance that COVID was a lab leak. Far too subtle a point to expect the plebs to understand.
shakenvac
9mo ago
I would say slightly more likely than the Sun rising in the west tomorrow. But only slightly.
shakenvac
9mo ago
Broadly correct, but I would quibble with parts of the framing.
It's certainly true that the 'bodies' found at Kamloops have never been anything more than anomalies found on ground penetrating radar, and that media and activists have never really made any attempt to communicate this to their audiences. The vast majority of people would never realise that these bodies are entirely theoretical and could easily just not be there. Chalk another one up to the media being bullshitters.
However, what I would disagree with in SecureSignals post is the implication that this stuff therefore didn't happen, or that the backlash against the Catholic Church is unjustified. I personally see the 'graves' at Kamloops as a catalyst for action, rather than the substance of the grievance itself. It is undeniable that the Canadian government in association with the Catholic Church basically kidnapped tens of thousands of native children and stuffed them into places like Kamloops, where the conditions were pretty awful (though perhaps not so awful by the standards of the time). Many deaths resulted. Official records from Kamloops say 50 children died there; the true total is likely higher. Though I admit I have little sympathy for the Church to begin with, I don't see the arson of a couple dozen churches to be an outsize reaction to the Church's involvement in residential schools. You reap what you sow.
shakenvac
9mo ago
I think you're being uncharitable by calling this a 'lie'. Evidence for 200 child graves in Kamloops has been found. It's not great evidence, It could easily be incorrect, it is being treated as proof when it absolutely isn't. But it is evidence, it hasn't been invented, and the underlying atrocity to which this evidence refers is (to a greater or lesser extent) certainly true.
And let's make your analogy more representative of what has happened. If someone found a cave full of suspicious looking bone shards and says "hey we just found evidence of 200 babies that were killed in ritualistic sacrifice" and the Catholic Church says "nuh-uh, Thiose shards are probably from a goat or something, we only raped, impregnated, and sacrificed the babies of 50 indigenous women at that site. And besides everyone was doing it back then, it was really trendy." Well in that scenario I'm less bothered about the veracity of the find and more about the underlying atrocity. And if a group of indigenous people want to take mortal offense at what happened I think that's pretty fair. And if they burn down a church or two, well I don't advocate for that (I genuinely, honestly do not think it is a good thing that churches were destroyed over this), but it's hard for me to feel any indignation on behalf of the Church.
By way of example, let's say Andy viciously insults David's wife in an argument and David breaks his nose in response. I don't think that’s a good or right thing to do - you shouldn't be going around breaking people's noses because they upset you. David should probably be arrested. But at the same time it's a completely understandable and predictable response, and I have zero sympathy for Andy. Now replace Andy with the Catholic Church and David with Indigenous people.
shakenvac
9mo ago
Complicit in the abduction of children by the Canadian Government, subjected them to emotional and physical abuse, often looked after them pretty poorly, and as a result many children died of preventable diseases. and of course, the whole point of the exercise was to expunge their culture from them. Which is, uh, bad.
I mean, is it really that difficult to see where the natives are coming from?
I think if I kidnapped your child, took him half a world away to learn Swahili and African culture and have that dumb Christianity beaten out of him, and then sent you a letter saying 'Sorry, young Mswati (that was his new name) died of malaria.' I think you'd probably feel a tad aggrieved.
shakenvac
9mo ago
some are saying that it's not evidence, it's blips on ground-penetrating radar which could be any kind of anomaly
Some are wrong. Evidence is "a sign or indication of something". Grave-sized GPR returns 6ft under the ground is evidence of graves. Is it strong evidence? not really. You want more certainty? I don't blame you. But fundamentally, the truth of those 200 graves makes little difference, because...
Suppose Dave breaks Andy's nose because Tom said "Hey, Andy insulted your wife" but Tom is lying because he wants to get Andy in trouble.
It doesnt really matter if Andy insulted Dave's wife on the 13th October 2022 when we know he has done so every other day for the last 3 years. We know what we need to about Andy's big mouth.
It doesn't really matter if Sir Cliff sexually assaulted man X if it's already proven that he assaulted 24 other men*. We know what we need to about Sir Cliff's perversions.
It doesnt really matter if you accuse me of being a swindler with little basis if I am known and proven to have swindled 50 people. We know what we need to about my swindling tendancies.
And it doesnt really matter whether it was 50 or 200 children died in Kamloops if it is already known that thousands of children were kidnapped, abused, had their identity erased, and ultimately died of neglect by the Church. We know what we need to about the crimes of the Church.
*I know this isn't true, I'm making a point.
shakenvac
9mo ago
The deaths honestly just sound like poor people deaths.
They weren't Poor People deaths though were they? They were Ward of the Church deaths. When you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them.
I have no issue with teaching poor people higher culture.
it was hardly """just""" that. If they had managed to do so without kidnapping, abuse, beatings, and deaths by neglect they'd have far less of a case to answer today, eh?
Whether the conditions were particularly bad I don’t know
Bad compared to conditions back at the tribe? Probably unknowable. They were certainly worse than they could have been. And like I said, when you steal children away from their parents you get to take responsibility for what happens to them. If you find that too burdensome feel free to not do it. Or engage in apologism for those that did.
shakenvac
9mo ago
If you want to argue it's all lies, then do so. You are arguing that the 200 graves are lies. Those 200 graves are not "all". they are ~1% of the enormity of the Residential Schools System, for which the church bears serious responsibility, and you have at no point indicated that you dispute the other 99%.
Either Dispute the evils of the Residential Schools, or admit that the Church fucked up.
shakenvac
9mo ago
Perfection is never an option nor a reasonable standard.
'better' is always an option. 'better than shit' is certainly a reasonable standard.
shakenvac
9mo ago
The truth always matters.
I never said it didn't. I said it makes little difference. If you'll forgive the invoking of Godwin's law, we could have a spirited debate over whether it was 2000 or 4000 jews were shot in some nameless polish town in 1940. While the truth of that question would matter in some sense, the conclusion wouldn't change the nature of the Holocaust, nor the guilt of the Nazis. Same principle.
but claiming that the people who ran the schools were literally mass-murdering children is a crime of much greater enormity.
Not something that I ever claimed.
"The Church conspired to commit genocide out of sheer evilness."
Also not something that I ever claimed.
Even if we accept, for the sake of argument, that the death rates in the Residential Schools were no worse than in tribal communities, and the abuse meted out in these Schools was hugely overstated, and that the Church only had the best interests of these poor ignorant savages in their hearts, and every single death was dutifully recorded with a heavy heart and a good Christian burial... Even if we accept all that, the Church was still instrumental in stealing these children away from their parents and expunging their culture and destroying their identities and burying them hundreds of miles from their homes when they died. That alone makes me have zero sympathy for the Church having a handful of cases of arson on their hands.
I'm not saying the arson justified per se, grievance resolution by arson is no way to run a society. I'm just saying I get it. If Scientologists had spirited away my great uncle when he was 6 and buried him in one of their godforsaken compounds I'd probably want to burn down a few buildings too.
shakenvac
8mo ago
and the counter-counter point is that most other developed democracies on earth don't have hours long queues to vote so if you want the level of security measures they have you should be willing to accept the accessibility standards that they have also.
shakenvac
8mo ago
I mean, surely from the left's point of view the compromise of 'we'll make it easy to vote if you agree to ID checks' is a massive win? Soft voter suppression is a real issue wheras election security is a nothing-burger. "we'll solve this issue that loses you blues a fuckton of votes if we can also solve this issue that loses us reds basically no votes"? Ka-ching!
Of course, the left could always argue that even free and easy-to-get ID is still suppression as it might be too high of a hurdle for some of their voters (and they'd probably be right) but I don't see why they'd be opposed to the deal in principle.
shakenvac
8mo ago
The more hoops you make people jump through, the more advance thinking and organisation that is required to vote (i.e. to get a photo ID months prior to the election), the fewer people will clear those hoops and actually vote. That's hardly a stretch.
Mandatory ID would solve this problem handily and is common in other developed countries but that would of course be a non-starter in America.
The motive part of it gets much easier when you stop thinking in terms of 'Russia' and start thinking in terms of 'Vladimir Putin'. These pipelines were a threat to his power. To a would be successor they represent a huge amount of untapped income and a ready-made olive branch to the west. With the destruction of Nordstream any individual trying to gather support to depose Putin has lost a major advantage.
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