what_a_maroon
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User ID: 644
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Of course the problem was the communists, but they didn't ever really go away. They changed their outfit and their choice of lies. The country is still run by a dictator with secret police, it still has a huge stockpile of nukes, it's still attempting to secure an empire. Most of the bad aspects are still there. And yes, this is mostly an issue of the sociopaths in charge, not the regular people.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I see relatively little masking. Even in very crowded, indoor events that are heavily left-aligned only a handful of people are wearing a mask. I sometimes see people wearing one who I know usually don't, which in my experience means they really need to not get COVID (e.g. upcoming wedding or international trip) so the same is likely true of some of the few people I see masking elsewhere (or e.g. they live with an elderly relative or immune-compromised partner, something like that).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Deflation can lead to what's called a deflationary spiral, essentially a reverse bubble: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral
Essentially, if you expect your money to be worth more in the future, than you won't spend it now. This is a reduction in demand, which reduces prices--which further leads to faster deflation. You won't invest it, either: You can risklessly make money by putting cash under your mattress. This has a similar effect, and also reduces future real productive capacity. It can even lead to bank runs, as mentioned in the wikipedia article, since there's no reason to have your money in the bank.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Many people are riddled with debt because they absolutely need the latest Iphone or a shiny new car. Why would they consume less and hoard money if products were going to get slightly cheaper next year?
Not everyone behaves the same way, but even your average middle-class would-be homebuyer is probably capable of realizing what deflation means for their mortgage, to say nothing of the huge amounts of capital controlled by profit-maximizing institutions and their legions of finance professionals. The latter are certainly capable of doing basic arithmetic.
They just need to promise any level of profit. A profit in a deflating currency includes the profit plus the deflation.
The problem is it also includes the risk of failure and, most likely, the inability to redirect your investment. Sitting on cash during deflation is close to risk-free and is completely liquid.
It used to be that you didn't need to take on 30 or 40 year loans for the privilege of one day owning a house. It's good when products people need like energy, food and housing are cheap. Turning them into a debt-ridden investment product is harmful for most, beneficial to few.
I agree, but discouraging anyone from ever taking on debt using deflation isn't the way to solve this--improving housing supply is.
The bubble-bailout economy privatizes gains and socialize losses. And why should the government know what a good interest rate should be anyway? They routinely get it wrong, fuelling bubbles and then popping them.
This is a valid argument IMO, but it's an argument for not having government run the currency at all, not for deflation.
(effectively raising the price of houses still further by increasing repayments), reducing the value of houses (since we made them into investment products that are bought and sold with borrowed money), lowering demand and costing governments more in interest on the absurd amounts of money they've borrowed.
How can the price of houses go up while their value goes down? The housing and mortgage market is fairly broken, but as above this is a housing supply issue more than a monetary policy one. You mentioned above that things like food should be cheap--the same is true of housing, but we've been pretending it's an "investment" rather than a consumable good. No monetary policy will fix these issues.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
justified by statistical reality
On the other hand, assuming you're a man, you are still much more likely to be violent than much of the population. It seems to me that in order to justify your position, you have to rather arbitrarily draw a line right where it benefits you the most (you get the benefit of the doubt if you are doing something suspicious or disconcerting, but you don't have to extend the same benefit of the doubt to the group most likely to be able to harm you).
People really should be less scared of me than they were of Jordan Neely; if they assumed he had a long rap sheet and was capable of violence, they were right to assume that - not only because we know that it’s true, but because people who look and act like him are, statistically, far more likely to have that be true of them than people who looks and act like me are.
The base right of violent criminal activity is low, so even a substantially increased probability may still be low. And no, making a bad assumption and having it turn out to be correct is not right. It's lucky. Our legal system strongly discourages this form of argument--you cannot use information you did not have access to at the time in a self-defense argument, because it is very bad to encourage vigilantism with low standards. The legal system is surely far from perfect at determining guilt but it's a hell of a lot better than letting every random person off the street just decide that they think someone else did something wrong. I don't know the details of your encounters, but there are violent attacks that happen where the aggressor thinks they're completely in the right because they didn't understand the situation, or felt insulted, or think they have a right to other people's stuff, or whatever. Encouraging such behavior is likely to result in more public violence and should be a last resort at best.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Schizophrenia can't be cured (yet) but it certainly can be managed in many (perhaps a majority) of cases.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions and leaps of logic here.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I don't think you've really thought about it if you consider such a question to be obvious.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Every society had such people and was confronted with such problems. Some of them were ruled by such people and it lead to their collapse. Great Britain exiled a bunch of them to Australia and Appalachia, or just executed them. Notably its crime rate remained pretty high by modern standards, because crime is more complicated than "just kill the bad people."
But we have to ask ourselves: how likely is such a nightmare scenario to become reality?
I can't put a number on that with any confidence, just like you can't put a number on your nightmare scenario. I can at least say for sure that multiple powerful countries have turned into that society in the past 100 years, they've committed (and continue to commit) terrible atrocities. I can also say that worries about overbearing government aren't totally one-sided: There's plenty of right-coded worry about tyrannical and controlling governments (just look at of the discourse around covid, masks, and vaccines, or more recently 15 minute cities).
“how many arrests does it take before we declare somebody scum and he loses his basically civil rights” has some answer that you would consider reasonable?
No number of arrests means that someone should lose all their civil rights. For one, as soon as you establish such a number, I think you immediately try to argue it down to be "1" or to "well they did something that isn't actually violent but is vaguely antisocial" because that's what is actually required for you to be satisfied. But also, why is one person being arrested 4,000 times? If it's because there's not actually any evidence they've committed a crime, then that sounds like the police are either incompetent or harassing the guy. If it's because he is convicted and then gets released, then that shouldn't be the case, but putting a convicted criminal in prison for longer does not require revoking civil rights.
Obviously it sucks to be victimized on the street with nothing you can do about it. It also sucks to be tackled and arrested by a power-mad cop with nothing you can do about it, or attacked on the street by a vigilante who got you confused for someone else. I's not like your (honestly, insane) idea of "execute them all" is a solution anyway, because if you could implement it you could more easily implement actually reasonable reforms.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
A "reign of terror"? Are you deliberately taking the piss? He's not Jack the Ripper (the marine, however, did kill someone).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Ok, but it's partly not heritable. A majority non-heritable, if my google-fu isn't too bad. But also, heritability is kind of a tricky metric to interpret. If you reduce the effect of environment on criminality (e.g. raising the standard of living so that most people don't need crime to survive) then heritability of crime goes up, even if the relationship between genes and criminality hasn't really changed.
In any event, this seems like an extremely weak reason to start executing lots of people. High punishment and high crime are almost certainly positively correlated across time and space, because e.g. severe punishment is a natural-seeming response to high crime rates and low clearance rates, and because both reflect the level of violence in the society.
Do you have any numbers that would indicate how long it would take to see a substantial reduction in crime due to the effect of such a mass execution?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
“William Roper: “So, now you give the Devil the benefit of law!”
Thomas More: “Yes! What would you do? Cut a great road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Roper: “Yes, I'd cut down every law in England to do that!”
Sir Thomas More: “Oh? And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned 'round on you, where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted thick with laws, from coast to coast, Man's laws, not God's! And if you cut them down, and you're just the man to do it, do you really think you could stand upright in the winds that would blow then? Yes, I'd give the Devil benefit of law, for my own safety's sake!”
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
You can have decentralized legal systems, but there still has to be some sort of widespread buy-in (or what we might call meta buy-in, where different groups have their own legal system, but still with some other authority to resolve inter-group disputes, and each group still experiences buy-in from its own members). If you could get that level of buy-in, you could probably just make the city government of New York actually enforce laws, and it would be much easier, and with many fewer nasty side effects.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Based on the descriptions I've seen, Jordan Neely was not actually behaving in any sort of violent way. That's why Hoffmeister has to resort to "statistical reality" about black people, to claim that agitated, annoying behavior can be construed as violent. This is not allowed as part of a legal argument for self-defense, with good reason, just like a woman walking alone can't turn around and shoot a man for following her on the public sidewalk and then make an argument about "statistical reality." A "good bayesian" can conclude anything they would like, given limited evidence, if their priors are sufficiently bad. This is why the law does not tell everyone to act like bayesians.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Without researching, this description makes it seem ripe for underreporting.
Family- or clan-based legal systems are viable (David Friedman's book describes at least one), but that still does involve a process. The part where the male family members went to the other family first is really really key. If they just went and did it, without giving the other family the ability to say "I don't think you're correct, this person was out of town last night" it just devolves into a cycle of retaliation.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I think this is just a semantic quibble. The way the phrase "civil rights" is generally used is consistent with what I wrote. Obviously putting someone in prison requires restricting their rights at that point, but we can still respect the rights against unwarranted search and seizure, right to jury trial, right not to self-incriminate, etc.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Yeah, "public nuisance crimes" are not what I would call a "reign of terror." No one knew who this guy was until he was killed. An open container of alcohol in public? Turnstile hopping? This forum will get incensed over the fact the FBI uses loopholes and process crimes to punish politicians and rich celebrities who lied to said FBI, and then turn around and seriously claim that these are very legitimate crimes that prove Neely was dangerous and it was a massive failure of law and order for him to still be on the streets. I haven't found any reference to kidnapping; the only serious or violent crimes I've seen reference to are 4 assaults (over 8 years) and without knowing more about those cases, it's wildly irresponsible to jump straight from "arrested" to "definitely guilty." Like, it's entirely possible that he did commit those crimes, and others, and the DA just let him go out of misplaced sympathy. It's also possible he got into altercations with other mentally ill homeless but it's unclear who was at fault. Or that he was misidentified, or was the victim of a false accusation for being weird and noisy in public (it's totally impossible that someone could overreact to him dancing and being loud on the subway, right? that would definitely never happen?).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I think it's highly unlikely he's never committed any legitimate crime, but spouting a number like "42 arrests" is actively misleading and "reign of terror" is a frankly embarrassing level of unsupported, pearl-clutching propaganda.
Anything's possible. The moon could really be green cheese!
And it's even possible the veteran had mind-reading powers to get any of this information!
You're engaged in mockery, but when the veteran put him in that chokehold, he didn't even know any of this. Literally the only information he had was what he observed, Neely walking back and forth and angrily ranting. This was apparently sufficient to put him in a chokehold for, what, 10 minutes? 15? You can see some of the video here; Neely is barely responsive and the restraint continues. Like, sure, be skeptical of claims that he was as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. But also be skeptical of claims that he spent all his time terrorizing the populace and execution was the only solution.
But I could be wrong, and maybe he's the one subway weirdo that never did anything actually wrong, but New Yorkers singled him out anyways with false accusations.
There's a lot of subway weirdos. I suspect the crime rate would be much higher than it actually is if every subway weirdo regularly committed crimes.
What a sad and boring society it would be if we executed all weirdos.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I'm definitely on the "normal people should be able to ride a subway without being harrassed and threatened with immediate violence" side. Unfortunately, there's no foolproof way to achieve that that doesn't carry some risk. Penny should've been a feckless coward putting up with it like every other New Yorker; the subway will continue to be a miserable experience, it's just now one life is over and another likely ruined.
It sounds like we agree, except that I wouldn't call anyone a coward for not acting. I've only been able to find 1 witness statement and no video from prior to Penny acting, but the one statement I found said Neely wasn't being violent. Maybe that's wrong, and the rest of this paragraph will turn out to be irrelevant. But being able to sit there and distinguish something that is aggravating or annoying, but not dangerous, and not respond to the former with violence, is essential to being able to participate in society. If you go to /r/IdiotsInCars, you'll see, among other things, a steady stream of people who go absolutely nuts in response to the slightest behavior they don't like. In my opinion, these are the people who are antisocial and disruptive to the community--the same accusations that many Motteizans have leveled at Neely.
It's tempting to just go something something healthcare system but it's gotta be more than that; the US creates way more wackadoos per capita regardless of their later (lack of) treatment.
I don't really know enough about all of those other countries to have more of an explanation than healthcare or locking up wackadoos (whether in prison or hospitals). Social contagion is in vogue recently, and American culture probably encourages more acting weirdly than other cultures, so maybe that provides part of an explanation. Americans do drive a lot, so maybe it just looks like there's a higher portion of wackadoos because fewer regular people take transit, but even in NYC there's a famously high number of wackadoos. Maybe they are forced to congregate in the few cities you can live without a car. Or perhaps other countries have stronger familial ties, and the family takes on the responsibility of sheltering the wackadoo--one article I saw claimed that Neely's problems largely started after his mother died.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
here is Science insisting that trans women don’t even have an advantage.
This includes the line:
No, Vilain says. The lab studies of athletes’ hemoglobin and muscle mass say nothing about whether trans women can run faster, jump higher, or throw farther. “You have to demonstrate that before excluding” transgender athletes, he says.
I'm probably preaching to the choir, but this is utterly backwards. The default is that men can't compete in women's sports. If you want to assert that some set of procedures the man undergoes makes it fair for them to compete, that is what has to be demonstrated. One study with n = 8 doesn't cut it. I'm sure that a wokeist would screech in rage that obviously transwomen are women, but such claims are just definitional assertions that are not-even-wrong and convey no information.
That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
This is true, and we could have many additional splits when it comes to sports. In fact, we do have other splits. An obvious one is by age (minimum or maximum), but we also have teams composed of only students from one school or university, we have weight classes in combat sports, etc. The goal is to make competitions that are relatively fair and competitive, although of course some people have massive natural advantages over others like being tall in basketball, and AFAIK there isn't really a "average height basketball league." It all seems somewhat arbitrary to me, to be honest, but I think the solution is something like a trans division (probably not enough population to make it competitive though).
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
He or someone else might at least see it if you cross-post to the actual LW forum.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
There’s a reason criminal trials are conducted on behalf of the state and not the victims. It’s because justice is something sought by society against transgressors. Getting money isn’t “Justice,” and I feel like the legal profession has just gaslit the entire world into believing it is. Of course, I think it is very difficult to provide restorative justice to someone who has been physically attacked or raped or obviously murdered. The deed is done, and money won’t magically make it go away.
Justice for a rape victim isn’t their rapist writing them a big check, it’s the rapist rotting in prison and unable to rape more people. That’s why I find statements like the press release for the bill that created this cause of action a figment of lawlogic that’s totally alien to my worldview:
This is a point of view you can to take, but it's not at all obvious, and in fact this is exactly how many societies throughout history handled justice, and it's certainly not new. The entire idea of imprisoning average criminals is a few hundred years old at most, and has only been practical for less than that, and only in rich societies. (Aside from payment, societies also used slavery, exile, execution, torture, and probably other methods I'm forgetting). Similarly for the idea that the state handles everything--polycentric legal systems based on resolving disputes between 2 parties are also very common historically.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Man, that's an awful lot of euphemism, nonsense, and irrelevance crammed into such a short post.
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
I can do that, but when are you going to make the same point to nybbler ?
what_a_maroon
11mo ago
Since I was asked to elaborate: Just about every part of this comment is extremely low quality.
restraining
Excuse me? A 15 minute chokehold resulting in a dead person is "restraining"?
violent
This is not in evidence. Unless you mean his prior assault arrests, which were not known to anyone on the train and thus irrelevant.
drug-addled mentally-ill
Neither of these remotely justifies death.
Coming late due to the quality contributions roundup, but https://web.archive.org/web/20170628142015/https://www.rita.dot.gov/bts/sites/rita.dot.gov.bts/files/publications/highlights_of_the_2001_national_household_travel_survey/html/table_a15.html says about 1.6 people per personal vehicle trip. Since that includes things like whole-family trips, carpooling is probably not very common.
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