stuckinbathroom
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User ID: 903
(I am not the one to whom you are responding but)
The point being made here is, what exactly does Thiel mean by “small-o orthodox”? Presumably he doesn’t mean Eastern Orthodox, else he wouldn’t have qualified with “small-o”. But then he must have in mind some other notion of “correct belief” (literally, ortho + doxia), and given his, shall we say, (in)famously libertine lifestyle, it’s not at all obvious what that “correct belief” is, nor how it accords with any conventional benchmarks of correct Christian belief, such as the aforementioned Nicene Creed.
Or maybe Thiel was just making a nerdy joke about how his Christianity is growing much faster than Orthodox Christianity.
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Not true; Singapore is a Star Alliance state
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
triple digit salary
Uh, what currency are we talking about?
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
I would even settle for a tradition of requiring the CEO to invest a material percentage of his liquid net worth in the company’s stock on his first day on the job, precisely to put the fear of God downside risk in him. Or, more or less equivalently, a tradition of letting shareholders pierce the corporate veil and personally sue the CEO in civil court for securities fraud or breach of fiduciary duty in the event that the share price declines too much (perhaps relative to a broad market index, or a basket of competitors’ stocks or something)
stuckinbathroom
1mo ago
Morality cannot exist between entities that are so different in power and nature.
… which of course is why there can be no possible moral objection to wantonly torturing puppies and kittens just for laughs (/s)
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
The over-performance of resident Asians means that UCs have large gaps between the median Asian/White and affirmative action candidates.
Hasn’t California banned AA in university admissions for nearly 3 decades now? I don’t doubt that university administrators/admissions committees will try every trick in the book to put a thumb on the scale in favor of “diverse” applicants, but there are hard limits on how far they can move that needle, particularly given Asian academic performance as you mentioned. The top 2 UC campuses (Berkeley and LA), for instance, are near-majority Asian and have vanishingly low numbers of Black students.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
What might be other ideas for actionable things to combat the misery and cultural malaise?
Unironically ~all of this is downstream of broken dating/relationship-formation norms and scripts among young people. The sexual revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race, and I am extremely blackpilled and pessimistic about our odds of putting that particular genie back in the bottle whence it came.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
she thinks she was deliberately undermined by the Biden White House both while in office as VP
To be maximally fair, it really does seem like JD Vance is getting much more press coverage and airtime, and tackling higher-profile issues both at home and abroad, than Kamala ever did as VP. Maybe that’s because the Republicans are more serious about grooming (heh) JD to be Trump’s successor than the Dems were about Kamala, or maybe it just boils down to Kamala’s relative lack of gumption/competence.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
siblings with different amounts of African ancestry have the same family background and their appearances (in terms of looking more or less African) are unrelated to how much they differ in African ancestry.
Surely this proves too much. Either Cremieux thinks percentage of African ancestry is entirely unrelated to how African anyone looks (in which case, uh…), or he needs some sort of convoluted “threshold” model in which percentage of African ancestry determines how African someone looks in general, but between-siblings differences are always too small to result in a visibly-distinct degree of African appearance (though somehow they aren’t too small to produce a noticeable difference in intelligence?)
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Of course, it might also be cover for the recommendation to delay hep b vaccines until 12.
Why would this recommendation need cover at all, let alone in the form of such a red herring?
The case against universal infant Hep B vaccination can be made straightforwardly to the American people: Hep B is quite rare in this country and is generally transmitted vertically or through contact with body fluids, so the vaccine should generally be restricted to infants born to a Hep B-positive mother, or living in close contact with Hep B-positive people. I’m not saying this argument is a slam dunk: although it’s easy to test the mother for Hep B at the time of childbirth, it’s hard to test everyone whose body fluids the neonate might come into contact with, and understandably the mom-to-be may not answer survey questions like “Does anyone in your household shoot up hard drugs, or have lots of promiscuous sex?” honestly. I’m merely saying that this argument is cogent and plausibly defensible on cost-benefit grounds in a way that the “Tylenol causes autism” distraction just … isn’t.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
I don’t think Argument #4 (refusing to engage in some amount of hypocrisy is self-defeating) is as strong as you seem to think. To continue with your example of non-violence, you could just adhere to the non-aggression principle: it’s categorically wrong to initiate violence, but responding to violence with violence is justified. Boom, now you have a principled rationale for self-defense without any hypocrisy!
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
bush-league TV pundits
W or Bush Senior?
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
A brief account by a person named George Zinn regarding their father Overton
Of window fame, no doubt
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
I doubt we would have been where we are, if the left satisfied itself with cancelling racists, and otherwise acted normal.
This is a bit like saying “I doubt the milk would be all over the floor, if the glass had just stopped in midair instead of hitting the ground and shattering to pieces”
Yes, that is technically true, almost by definition—but in practice, “the left only cancels racists and is otherwise milquetoast colorblind meritocratic Third Way Clinton Democrat/Blairite New Labour straight outta the 90s” is, like a glass of milk after being knocked off the table but before hitting the floor, a highly unstable state that can only exist for a moment on the inexorable path to a decidedly higher-entropy equilibrium.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
It’s stricto sensu
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Tyler specifically waited for Kirk to badmouth transpeople before firing his shot. In fact, I'll go so far as to speculate that if Kirk had been gracious in his response, the Tyler may not have even shot at all.
Uh, weren’t Kirk’s last words about gun violence in the US, not trans people?
Also, how exactly do you think Robinson was able to hear what Kirk was saying from ~200m away? Even though Kirk had a mic and amplification, it didn’t look like there were speakers set up within earshot of Robinson’s vantage point. Are you suggesting that he was watching the livestream on his phone, just before picking up his rifle and assassinating Kirk?
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
I agree with you on this. As much as my libertarian-ish heart hates the idea of government meddling in the free market, I do grudgingly admit that the EU is onto something with their regulations prohibiting employers from taking any adverse action in response to an employee’s personal social media activity.
Since it’s a matter of EU law, companies no longer have to worry about policing this shit: they can just throw up their hands and (rightly!) say “wellp, nothing we can do”. And naturally, this implies that the activist class (on either side of the culture war) can’t rack up any wins by threatening to boycott some company unless they fire so-and-so for some unconscionable post on InstaBlueTokBookX.
As the GMU Econ crowd is fond of saying, solve for the equilibrium—IMHO it’s a much more civilized one than what we get in the land of laissez-faire. This is at least as good a case for the role of the state in preventing runaway Molochian escalation spirals as China cracking down on extracurricular tutoring hours.
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
Kirk was very vocal about some very specific topics, and that might attract attention from particularly crazy people.
Can you elaborate? I vaguely gather that he was pro-gun but not more so than the median Red Triber; similarly, pro-Israel to the same extent as a replacement-level right-wing pundit. What specific topics was Kirk known for, beyond mainstream conservative media talking points?
stuckinbathroom
2mo ago
How could any amount of missing paperwork justify bringing lethal force to bear against a human being? That's the impulse, and it is a fundamentally moral, compassionate one.
…
the "imported for no clear reason" framing obscures this, which is at once uncharitable to the decision-makers
First of all, thank you for stating clearly the view from within the pro-immigration left’s mindset; it’s one that is based on moral precepts very different from the ones we usually hear about ‘round these here parts, and it’s always good to get a periodic reminder of how the other half lives (and thinks).
Nevertheless, I want to answer the above-quoted passages in good faith, as a not-especially-pro-immigration non-leftist (though I am myself a child of immigrants).
How, indeed, could missing paperwork justify the use of lethal force? In the first place, I would argue that lethal force is seldom necessary to enforce sane immigration policy: simply patrolling the border properly—much easier nowadays with autonomous drones—and enforcing citizenship requirements for any government benefits plus employer compliance with E-Verify or similar, together with harsh penalties for violation and immediate deportation of illegal aliens, would suffice in almost all cases. Still, it is true that deportation is ultimately backed by the threat of force, up to and including lethal force should the prospective deportee resist hard enough. How is this OK? Because the alternative—that is, that we should never enforce immigration law—implicitly grants to every would-be illegal immigrant the unilateral right to nullify American law! Once we let that camel’s nose into the tent, everyone will start asking, quite reasonably, why they should be bound to abide by laws they find immoral, or even merely inconvenient, and what can we say to them? “Actually, the law is subordinate to my particular moral code”? Well, why are your morals better than mine, and by whose authority do your morals supersede the law of the land? And, more darkly, how do you propose to stop people with very different morals from using the same argument, should they ever get their hands on the reins of power? I am reminded of the famous scene from A Man For All Seasons: “Yes, I’d give the devil the benefit of law, for my own safety’s sake!”
In short, respect for the rule of law—even when your morality disagrees with the law—is the ultimately the only way to prevent a Hobbesian war of all against all. In game theory terms, we most punish defectors, lest everyone think it’s a good idea to defect.
I would also argue that “imported for no clear reason” is the wrong framing—there is a reason, namely that Biden (or his handlers, or the Democrat activist class, or whoever else you want to blame for this decision) wanted to do so, and in particular wanted to do so out of the deeply-held moral sentiments that you have just articulated (in addition to base political considerations, of course). But even granting, charitably, that this policy was the result of well-intended moral judgments rather than mere political gamesmanship, I would say that the decision-makers here are very clearly in the wrong, and it is not at all uncharitable to say so.
The President is the chief executive of the federal government. That means his job is to carry out the law as Congress has created it (and as the judiciary has interpreted it): nothing more and nothing less. In particular, the President’s own moral scruples should play no part in how he faithfully carries out the duties of his office. I have no problem with the President using the “bully pulpit” to argue for or against this or that moral view; nor do I see any issue with an ex-President, in his personal capacity, acting according to whatever moral beliefs he may hold (see, e.g., President Carter and Habitat for Humanity); nor is there anything preventing the President from encouraging Congress to pass laws that accord with his morals. But when he is on the job, the President must hold his personal beliefs aside and execute the role that has been entrusted to him.
An analogy: would it be acceptable for the CEO of a public company to unilaterally decide to sell off all the company’s assets to raise money to give to charity? I would say no: the CEO is answerable to the shareholders, who endowed him with stewardship over their capital in the expectation that he would carefully husband the business to maximize their return on investment. The moral worth of the charity is irrelevant: if the shareholders want to, they can decide to donate to that charity with their own money—and if the CEO decides to give his bonus to the charity, or to briefly bring up the benefits of that charity at the next shareholders’ general meeting, then good for him! But in his capacity as CEO, he has but one mandate entrusted to him by the shareholders, which he is bound to carry out faithfully, personal morals notwithstanding.
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
the U.S. has weathered a good number of major crises over the years without drastically changing its system of government, or at least, not permanently doing so.
(emphasis in the original)
Hard disagree; the Progressive era and, especially, FDR’s presidency ratcheted up the scope of federal government intervention in everyday life, with tortured readings of the Constitution (courtesy of the Supreme Court) providing only the tiniest fig leaf over what was really going on: a radical break with the Constitution as it had previously been understood, and its replacement by a qualitatively different system of government—one in which the unelected federal bureaucracy had theretofore unimaginable powers to regulate all manner of activity.
I’m not saying that this was good or bad, necessary or unnecessary, historically inevitable or historically contingent. All I’m saying is that it happened, and the Republic has never been the same since.
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
Specific link chosen for the soap because the writer has a crazy prosthetic eye.
Not surprised; she seems quite Moody!
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
no more than Mexicans born in the US makes them Americans
Aye, that one’s a consequence of the Magic Document
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
stuckinbathroom
3mo ago
but I think it’s the first serious attempt to construct an arcology
Is the Kowloon Walled City not "serious"?
That’s not really a downside risk (i.e., a risk of negative payoff), that’s just a risk of getting zero payoff.
Yes, sure, fine, if you account for opportunity costs, then losing a CEO job might be net negative (depending on base salary, length of and compensation during a post-termination non-compete period, if any, etc.—and, of course, on the value of the next-best alternative to being CEO)
But there is still a principal-agent problem here. The shareholders want (or should want, under homo economicus assumptions*) the CEO to be an agent who only takes +EV actions, where the “V” in “EV” is “market cap”. The more diversified the CEO personally is, the less he will personally care about declines in the value of the company’s equity—sure, if he makes some decisions which go south, then his equity compensation from this job might only be good for toilet paper, but if he’s already amassed a generational fortune and socked it away in a well-diversified portfolio, then a bet which is zero or negative expected value for the shareholders might very well be positive expected utility for the CEO. It’s just like how you’re much more inclined to go for a YOLO all-in with a questionable hand in poker when playing with Monopoly money than when playing with real money.
*There are some interesting ways in which homo economicus incentives break down when the shareholders themselves are all massively diversified; in the extreme case (which may no longer be all that extreme, now that everyone and his mum has piled into market cap-weighted index funds), everyone has the exact same equity portfolio, so all shareholders of company A are also shareholders of all of its competitors (B, C, D …). In such a world, it no longer makes sense for company A’s CEO to prioritize increasing market cap by any means; if he increases A’s market cap at the expense of B’s, the shareholders are no better off! But that’s a story for another time.
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