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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   34352 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 4, 2024

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Have we talked about the squirrel? Sigh. Let's talk about the squirrel:

Mark Longo, the owner of the Instagram-famous squirrel, Peanut, is mourning the loss of his beloved pet.

On Nov. 1, Longo took to Instagram to reveal Peanut had been euthanized, along with his pet raccoon named Fred, by the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation.

...

Peanut the squirrel is an internet sensation. He's the beloved pet of digital creator Mark Longo, who would occasionally share Instagram videos of Peanut eating treats, jumping on his clothes and scurrying around his house as he does various tasks throughout the day.

...

In a joint statement, the DEC and the Chemung County Department of Health say they are "coordinating to ensure the protection of public health related to the illegal possession of wild animals that have the potential to carry the rabies virus."

The DEC also notes that it is illegal to keep young wildlife as pets since they are "not well suited for life in captivity. Plus, they may carry diseases that can be given to people."

...

"To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized," they said in a joint statement. "The animals are being tested for rabies and anyone who has been in contact with these animals is strongly encouraged to consult their physician."

This story has been making the rounds on my social media feeds, with commentary, countercommentary, memes, and political implications galore. A few people have wondered why the story resonates, given that it's just a squirrel. For me, it's because of how neatly it ties into other election conversations.

A couple days ago, we were talking about an article on SlateStarCodex and I disputed Scott's framing where he felt the need to say that Democrats can be authoritarian too, even if it's not the normal definition. No, I say, Democrats want arbitrary and petty control over the smallest aspects of your life, things you can't even imagine that someone would care about. In this case, a man had a squirrel living inside his house rather than outside his house. Squirrels, you may be aware, are common animals. Rodents, in general, frequently cohabitate with humans both as pets and pests. For some, it seems only natural that the government has a compelling interest in making sure you have a Squirrel License with proper proof of squirrel maintenance. Failing to license your squirrel is proof positive of outright irresponsibility - what kind of miscreant doesn't even file their squirrel paperwork? For others, this is a great example of how under no circumstances will the government ever leave you alone, even if it's on something as small and irrelevant as whether you're sheltering squirrels under your floorboards. These petty, useless authoritarians are willing to show up without warning, sit you outside your house, and kill your pets because you didn't file for a squirrel license.

When I was young and naturally rebellious, I was a libertarian on strong pro-freedom grounds. As a young professional, I made my peace with the bureaucracy and thought this was an important part of being an adult. As I've aged, my libertarian streak has returned as I've realized just how much I despise our governments.

I'm going to add a second comment that's different and much more spicy.

For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate? Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby? What's with all the, "I'm speaking," moments? Do the ladies have more power and authority than they can handle?

I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land? The puritanical hunt for all that is good and fun in life can't just be a female thing. Can it? Or is it that safety-ism causes men to operate in a different, more narrow theater (ex. geopolitics) leaving women to police the margins (ex. protesting pussy-grabbin' presidents and yelling at babies)? I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Here's a theory for you - blame cultural marxism....

... Okay, I'm intentionally being a bit obnoxious, obviously, but let me try to make a case here.

Here's one view: women have a lot of power, and women have always had a lot of power. In many cases, that power has looked somewhat different than the power that men have wielded. That's fine and normal. And in a healthy, functional society, gender roles and ideals and responsibilities evolve that take the natural human tendencies of both men and women into account and help temper reliably occurring problems in both men and women to keep their worst impulses in check and help them wield their various kinds of power responsibly, stably and pro-socially. All of this is the ideal, anyway.

But then, enter enlightenment ideals about legibility, equality, and combine them with post-enlightenment ideals about oppressor-oppressed dynamics. Now, the fact that lots of ways women wield power is illegible means it is invisible in political discussions. And an insistence on a sort of a priori equality between men and women means that even accepting that men and women might wield power in different ways is seen a suspect, like it's just a justification for women not having more legible power. And finally, an insistence on seeing things through an oppressor-oppressed binary means that even the basic idea that women might routinely and predictably behave in ways that hurt people, and those ways of being might need to be tempered, is no longer basic wisdom, but rather just one more way to keep women down.

That combination of world views arguably has a tendency of infantilizing women and stripping them of any real agency and responsibility, which over in reality ends up being a giant problem if they actually DO have a bunch of agency and power that actually needs to be kept in check sometimes for the good of broader society.

Anyway, that's one theory, anyway... something like that.

So...a traditional perspective like, "Rooster rule the yard and hens rule the roost." would dial this back? I suppose I could see it.

For a while now, I've had this growing knot in my guts whenever these types of things happen and the bad guys end up being women. I hate the knot because my brain says it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame for the increased pressure to root out anyone who's doing something wrong somewhere. But the knot keeps growing. I can't resolve the conundrum.

As just so theories go "women tend to eschew direct physical conflict in favor of other, less risky forms of social combat" isn't one I'd be particularly afraid to lose money on.

I feel no guilt in admitting that violence crime is a burden mostly-males impose on society, one that it can "unleash" through unwise policy. Unless women are a higher evolved being they'll have their means of wreaking havoc that we shouldn't encourage.

it's stupid to think women are somehow to blame

I'm assuming you're a man.

Female hypoagency is baked hard into your evolutionary biology. This is your instinct of "do whatever gets you laid" doing the talking, and in an era where men and women are, in fact, equal on most fields (that were for the past 100,000+ years dominated by men) it's simply maladaptive. And a woman who can't or won't perform the productive parts of that role is no woman, and it's a mistake of men to consider them as worthy of any special social status whatsoever. The biological principle of "women [and children] first" falls apart when those women in aggregate can refuse to bear children (or fail to put the interests of the nation's children above their own self-interests and aesthetic preferences).

In an age of automation (and slavery) driven equality, women and men ought to be equal parts human doing and human being- the fact that women are both and men are neither is a clear indication that our current methods and measures of "equality" need some re-evaluation.

But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

If you assume that the average man and the average women are just as inherently anti-social/destructive as the other (a fundamental assumption for my worldview), you need to tailor-make the way you deal with those things to suit their biological specializations. If a woman's speech is just as destructive as a man's violence, the speech needs to be regulated in the same measure as the violence, or you're just giving too much power to women and their particular version of anti-sociality eventually starts to dominate.

The current folly of liberalism was believing that legal equality would lead to objective equality, where what actually happened is that by removing the societal safeguards from the gender that has had 100,000+ years to specialize in manipulating men to do things on their behalf, they [predictably] unleashed that machinery upon society. People get confused about "well, then why didn't gynosupremacy have massive negative effects earlier?" but fail to recognize that this is a 1920s problem that we got to punt on for 50 years because the post-WW2 economic boom gave so many advantages to male social power that women would actually end up on the losing end for a while, but naturally they wouldn't last.

I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box.

We already recognize strict legal equality in the face of women as a stepping-stone to strict objective equality, and women in aggregate recognize the concept of intersectionality and equity. They're correct in that these are things that should happen; where they're incorrect is that if it was applied fairly it would be almost exclusively at the cost of their current social license to be destructive. And, as these same women are quick to point out, loss of that privilege will feel like oppression (but, of course, isn't).

The problem I have is that, if this is done improperly, you catch the "transgender" women and men in the blast radius (i.e. the women and men who don't need rules restraining a latent gynosupremacist/androsupremacist attitude they didn't have in the first place). They tend to be the most productive/least disruptive people society has and the cost of this change might not be worth what it costs them.

I have some ideas for the way this might work, but the trick is implementing them in a way contradictory to instinct, are not feasible while men are still in socioeconomic oversupply, and are just as easy to conveniently leave pointed at men (just like how we use paper-bag tests to determine which criminals to prosecute now). (Of course, these measures wouldn't be needed if women were all of a sudden in socioeconomic oversupply -> in less of a position to demand men conform to them; this is why, ironically, that gynosupremacists being able to exclusively choose to bear saintly girls and not toxic boys would eventually end up diluting their current power over time.)

I really don't want to become a Trad Chad who wants to put the ladies back into some parochial 17th century box. But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Why not? Maybe the 17th century got it right and the 20th got it wrong. Perhaps female participation in public life really does everything the anti-suffragists (many of whom were women themselves) said it would. I believe that "longhouse" is a real phenomenon, a failure mode of societies lacking enough masculine energy. Perfectly encapsulated: https://x.com/PopBase/status/1852801265425854866

I believe the 19th amendment was a mistake. Most expansions of suffrage have been. Can't be fixed without a societal reformation, and these reformations usually involve coups, wars, and collapse. The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and bloodshed return!

The line actually uses "slaughter", not "bloodshed".

As a great sage wrote:

It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers−out of unorthodoxy.

That character was wrong about the one example we see. I don't think the book portrays any woman meeting that description. Or any man, for that matter -- Parsons is completely orthodox but not bigoted about it, and O'Brien is fully aware of the party's duplicity. Syme (the Newspeak writer) is excited about the party but is aware of what he's doing, and get sent to Miniluv presumably as a result (or just as a result of talking about it)

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right?

No, it's probably not a coincidence. Ignoring petty complaints, that's a Boys' Club thing. The Boys' Club decides it's not worth the time and ignore it. Sometimes the Boys Club decides to ignore the casting couch. Sometimes it decides to ignore women who complain about too many ice cubes. Sometimes The Boys Club isn't a Boys' Club at all and is instead a restaurants wait staff full of Non-Boys.

You guys talk about a decrease in state capacity. How's'a'bout the capacity to investigate and euthanize wild pets in an orderly and timely fashion? Didn't think of that one, did ya? I would have guessed that the NY Department of Environmental Conservation would just ignore complaints from out of state. It's what I would do. Where did you learn it was a lady from Texas sent a complaint? I just see "anonymous" complaints. Why not a neighbor?

If my neighbor in the next apartment kept weird wild life pets I'd probably ignore it. If they posted cute videos online I'd ignore it. If those pets did things like cause minor problems for my dog I'd be less inclined to ignore it. If that happened more than once I'd probably report it after speaking with them*. This seems possible. If you want to collect wild life without consideration of your neighbors, then live somewhere you can do that.

A lot of people seem fine critiquing this event. Not a lot of defenders. Biden hasn't denounced all garbage squirrels. Maybe he should though, because they are crafty assholes that empty bird feeders.

Why did that lady at the Harris rally scream about Palestine at a baby?

Young woman lost sight of herself and actions at a political event. Her political ally recognizes the malfeasance and polices her behavior. That's a learning experience for most.

A lot of people seem fine critiquing this event. Including one in the video. Not a lot of defenders. We can all make mistakes. Ping me if we see her again.

Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?

Probably. People's wills can be overbearing and annoying. I wanted to attribute a defense of 'Karen' as a social policing agent to a Freddie deBoer article, but all I can find at the moment is this regarding Covid.

Meanwhile we live among a Praetorian guard of busybodies who want everyone to know that the rest of us aren’t taking Covid seriously enough. These are people who are existentially similar to the “Karen,” 2020’s favorite archetype, except that they’re used to calling other people Karens. But they are precisely that figure of clueless white deference to authority that self-nominates as the world’s hall monitor. And while they want you to mask up and vaccinate and obey other rules, what’s much more important to them than regulating your behavior is that they let you know that you don’t feel the right way about Covid.

Which reads like a truncated version of Planet of Cops. Which is not a defense of Karen.

There's a some Defense of Karen thinking out there. This one is kinda one. as an important (if elevated) part of society. We have a need for Karen. Some business interests want to stop Karen, but they are powerless. Karen keeps the trains running on time. Except for the times where the train isn't on time and she inconveniences the line of people behind her by not shutting up about it. Then she makes me late.

I don't consider myself a woman-hater. Hell, once upon a time I considered myself a feminist. Is it just my imagination or has something in our national psyche gone and unleashed the worst aspects of womanhood upon the land?

Are you particularly sympathetic to gender critical view? Smarmy, scolding Karen might be annoying, but men do a violence and rape. I don't think making men an outgroup is necessary to denounce or police murder and rape. I'm not saying you can't or should not police Karen's gross excess. The culture even still allows and, sometimes, encourages this. If the conditions are right.

I have sympathy for the view that detests the feminization of society. Not all of it is bad. I'm glad not every dispute is concluded with a rock to the head. I would like to work towards something... healthier and more easily appreciated. I wouldn't make women your outgroup, though. Go find you a nice girl that doesn't like yelling at babies or killing squirrels. And there's always Sam Hyde's sage advice.

Go find you a nice girl that doesn't like yelling at babies or killing squirrels.

My wife and 2nd daughter were aghast that this happened.

I don't think I'm particularly sympathetic to a gender-critical view. I know a lot of women. I don't view women as out-group, that's maybe, sort of the problem? Because it seems the evidence is mounting that there may actually be an out-group, largely composed of some type of woman that can't be identified or encircled; something like Vance's cat-ladies but not quite. I think it's closer to something revealed as an epistemic preference to always automatically believe the worst, caused by the flattening of society vis-a-vis the Internet. Similar to how you can't tell if a terrible opinion is a naive adolescent or stoned octogenarian.

You guys talk about a decrease in state capacity. How's'a'bout the capacity to investigate and euthanize wild pets in an orderly and timely fashion? Didn't think of that one, did ya?

Since we obliterated Posse Comatitus even the forestry guys have flash-bang grenades, heavy machine guns and tanks. The state capacity can be summarized as: We can ignore it or atomize it, which do you want?

Where did you learn it was a lady from Texas sent a complaint?

https://www.msn.com/en-in/news/world/texas-woman-monica-keasler-reported-peanut-the-squirrel-to-dec-claims-surface/ar-AA1tuR8j

Example link. All alleged. Apparently she deleted her Interweb accounts so who knows. It would be very interesting to have the state-run agency that acted on the anonymous tip not leave us in the dark, but privacy for some if not for others, I guess. I would absolutely agree that a state receiving an anonymous tip from outside the state would ignore it, that is my prior. At the same time, who would know? That's kind of the point of anonymous tips. What leads people to think it was the woman in Texas is hearsay that she was bragging about it on Facebook. That doesn't really change the situation tough: a government department acted on an anonymous tip from...wherever...and took someone's unlicensed an unregistered pet (the pet was allegedly in the process of being registered). One can easily see how this is raw meat for Libertarian types, but Leftists would also be historically appalled by this + it's cute animals!!

Here's an interesting update regarding the alleged reporter of the mis-housed animal.

https://www.dexerto.com/tiktok/woman-speaks-out-after-being-wrongly-blamed-for-peanut-the-squirrels-death-2971538/

It would be interesting to know who the people are hounding this unaffiliated innocent, but I'd suspect the boy's club you mention are mostly happy to let their wives do the chiding.

And maybe that's all it is. Men know they can leave the small stuff to the ladies to clean up and the Internet simply opened the door to every level-one nudnik to run rampant.

My wife and 2nd daughter were aghast that this happened.

Cheers, then not all is lost. I wasn't trying to cast you into inceldom. Vaguely recognizing like shapes. Maybe that's uncharitable.

Jumbles, rumbles, and rambling:

Because it seems the evidence is mounting that there may actually be an out-group, largely composed of some type of woman that can't be identified or encircled; something like Vance's cat-ladies but not quite.

People make such identifications, but I agree it's difficult to land on any particular one. AWFL exists. I'm not sure it's accurate, because I don't know if white or liberal is necessary to yell-at-baby or badger an authority to Do The Right Thing. White women are the acceptable target of the day. There's a brand of white trash that's not really afraid to pull any lever, other than cops, to settle a grievance or perceived slight. Narcissists. The internet loves that one. Black women have a stereotype around around the kind of self-interested, righteous grievance balloon.

The lower class offender looks more like narcissism to me, whereas the higher class offender has more sophisticated (cultural, political) justifications for (what I consider) bad behavior. Perhaps that's the tie in to race. So, uh, are we just talking about intelligence? How are the Asian women doing out there compared to white women?

There's been an absolute increase in the number of jerks and a lot of jerk behavior gets covered in America by culture warring. Women more likely to utilize authority for little reason other than it's something to do-- or easily convinced it's The Right Thing to Do? Probably, yeah. Women more likely to yell at baby? Probably that too, but maybe because a man has more experience thinking of consequences when it comes to other people's kids. At least compared to pretty girls.

The prototypical Karen is the bored busybody. Karen adopts and uses the HOA as an extension of herself. Because. Type A Karen. If that is related to yelling at babies at a political event I'm not sure how. Maybe it boils down to 100 years ago the yell-at-baby girl would have had a husband drag her off before she could embarrass herself in front of the entire nation?

Don't get hysterical, darling. Protesting is uncouth.

And maybe that's all it is. Men know they can leave the small stuff to the ladies to clean up and the Internet simply opened the door to every level-one nudnik to run rampant.

A lower trust society, they say. If we want a more polite society we will need women to enforce it. Tying all this together feels like it is doing too much. But that could be my lack of imagination.

There's been an absolute increase in the number of jerks and a lot of jerk behavior gets covered in America by culture warring.

Hear! Hear!

With Peanut, a lady in Texas presumably sent the complaint to a lady in New York who sent the city services to take the squirrel out back and shoot it. Clearly that's just a coincidence...right? Or is there something darker in here. Like....is the Karen meme deserved and legitimate?

My day job involves handling a lot of regulatory compliance matters and fighting administrative accusations not entirely dissimilar to the P'Nut saga. In my experience while women appear to be slightly overrepresented among the public complainants that I ultimately find out about (which is a small minority of all complaints - my state regards the identities of complainants to public agencies as privileged), there's no particular trend when it comes to which bureaucrats are particularly censorious and which are more lenient. The culture of the particular district office or subunit appears to matter a lot more.

This makes sense. Most of these types of offices have a culture, often driven by one or two people, and that makes the overall consistency seem...inconsistent. Thanks for talking me off the gender-critical ledge.

I mean, it may well be that women over all are more likely to be nosy busybodies, or to go drunk with petty power. The old stereotypes of the gossiping shrew and harridan didn't come from nowhere, just like the male stereotypes of the sex-obsessed brute and violent thug didn't come from nowhere. But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.

But I don't know if the effect translates to the modern day, or if so how big it is.

Polls not only show this effect exists, but translates to a roughly 30 percentage point lead among young women.

The biggest mistake of modernity is that we don't treat the gossiping shrew/harridan with the same seriousness as the sex-obsessed brutes and violent thugs. In an age of equality they're both as destructive, but it's only the latter we deal with.

I would appreciate any links you have to hand on this; I'm trying to keep a better library of supporting evidence for my beliefs.

And if it is an effect that is somehow historically out of proportion, what's the solution. Back in the day we built pyres, but that was barbaric, I'm sure all will agree. I guess forcing people to wipe their socials is our best analog.

I’m not surprised in the least. I’m not sure if it’s evolutionary psychology, but I tend to find that women have perfected the game of weaponizing the system against other people. In this case, it’s animal laws, but it could be technical violations of any rules to force other people to give them what they want. I’ve always somewhat assumed that it goes down to avenues of actual power. Men have access to physical strength, technical knowledge, and the actual levers of power. Women have limited access perhaps to the levers o& power. Not as much as people think, because they are rarely the main decision makers on projects, in business, or in government. So the best way for the median woman to get her way is to basically get a man to wield actual power for her.

Puritanical rule enforcement is a part of that. It’s a way to create new offenses women can use to shame people into giving them what they want.

But if one of the issues is giving too much power to people who can't properly wield it--and it has a gender bias--what on earth do we do?

Punish people who scream at babies, regardless of their sex.

It's one of the biggest libertarian "viral moments" I can remember. Not only is it terribly authoritarian, it's a ridiculous inversion of priorities and waste of resources. We can start talking about euthanizing squirrels over "rabies" concerns after the government has successfully euthanized every rat in NYC. And treating a squirrel as some kind of dangerous exotic pet makes zero sense. There's a long American tradition of owning pet squirrels; Warren Harding had one named Pete living with him in the Whitehouse. This whole thing is just quintessentially un-American.

There were so many other ways to address the issue available, and they availed themselves of none but the most direct and violent one.

If there's a violation of the law, send the guy a notice to appear or otherwise drag him into court unless he gets paperwork in order. I understand the government can't 'ignore' a well-documented violation of the law but we'd expect them to use the lightest hand possible when enforcing said law unless there was some massive public interest at stake.

To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.

To make an absurd comparison, its like burning down the Branch Davidian compound rather than arresting David Koresh while he's out on a jog.

I think the true absurditity is that this is not a particularly absurd comparison, this is just Democrats and the deep-state playing to type.

Speaking of playing to type, the director of enforcement for the Department of Environmental Conservation who ordered the hit is apparently named Karen Przyklek.

Karen Przyklek

It's a squirrel. If it was beaver there may have been some mercy in her soul.

The government regularly ignores well-documented violations of the law, particularly where those violations are non-violent (e.g. speeding, immigration, drugs). Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.

Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore inconsequential violations and focus on consequential ones.

No, this isn't how it works. Given that the government doesn't have the ability to enforce all the laws all the time, it makes sense to deliberately ignore violations which will take a lot of time and resources to remedy and focus instead on easy ones. This is why we get anarcho-tyranny - people trying to get away with laziness and justifying it with moneyball-esque "efficiency" metrics.

It "makes sense" from the government's perspective to do what you're describing. It "makes sense" from society's perspective to do what I'm describing.

At the risk of being tedious, what would make even more sense is to just not make laws about things that you're actually willing to ignore the vast majority of the time. Perhaps Squirrel Law isn't actually something that needs to be on the books at all.

I completely agree. Laws ultimately rest on the threat of violence and there should be as few of them as possible.

Unfortunately "society" has little oversight over how government actually functions on a day to day basis, as things are currently constituted. I wish it were different, but I feel that it's important to recognize where incentives and structures pull actual day-to-day functions away from their idealized/theorized function.

I think it says a lot about the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the PMC in general and the Democratic party in particular that armed insurrection, and the burning of minority nieghborhoods can be dismissed as "inconsequential" or "the cost of doing buisiness" while possession of an unlicensed rodent is somehow a bridge to far.

I'll clarify that in this case "well-documented" means "the guy was literally an influencer and published his videos to millions upon millions of views."

So in a sense, this is like if some person kept posting videos of themselves speeding at 10 mph over the limit and posting them for all to see. If the state ignores that they're almost condoning the behavior.

Driving safely while going 10mph over the speed limit is a behavior the state should condone.

If you can drive safely at 10mph over the speed limit, then the bastards posted too low a limit. (Uncontested freeways are arguably an exception - although the Germans have demonstrated that German drivers driving German cars don’t need speed limits)

Fine, 15, 20, I'm just saying, if somebody is consistently flouting the law to thousands of viewers, it isn't surprising the state is going to get involved.

The judgment call is making sure the intervention is proportional, I guess.

And yet the ATF is not breaking into the houses of children with glock switches.

He deserved to have his feral disease ridden animals taken because he is a degenerate pornstar and vain social media publicity seeker. This non story is total brain melting slop.

I'm sure every animal department has stupid policies where they needlessly kill tame housebroken foxes and let feral pitbulls continue to eat toddlers: https://slatestarcodex.com/2015/09/16/cardiologists-and-chinese-robbers/

  • -23

This comment is bad. It contains no insight, analysis, information, or content except the fact that you evidently don't like the guy and don't care about dead squirrels and wanted to express it in a belligerent fashion. You could have just not commented on a story you don't care about, or you could have put some minimal effort into explaining why you don't think it's a story worthy of discussion (though generally we take a dim view of telling other posters what they should or shouldn't be talking about, since obviously plenty of people did think it was worth discussing), or you could have added some content (like details, with links, about this individual and why you think he's unworthy of sympathy and therefore no one should care about his squirrel). Instead you just decided to uncork and spew. We do not like it when people do this. You have a history of doing this. Stop it.

I think he is making an argument. It's a bad argument in my view, but it's an argument accompanied by some sort of reasoning. Not going to win a quality contribution award, but not in violation of the rules either IMO. He is inviting a discussion and responding.

A plain reading of my comment is clearly that this policy is eminently reasonable, these things happen frequently and are mundane, and this story's notoriety is unrelated to its merit, but the man involved is flooding social media for personal gain. That's not enough analysis for a reply to a thread?

Even if the owner murders babies I don't see how that justifies killing the squirrel. Seems like an unrelated issue.

Animals are property.

So should we burn down murderers' houses? What's the point of destroying property as punishment for a "crime" (which in this case is not actually a crime and which no one has been convicted of yet)?

The squirrel bit a guy I think. If a murderer built a house that tries to punch your balls every time you walked by I'd probably want to demolish it.

The squirrel bit a guy who was trying to take the squirrel away. If there was a car that could punch your balls when you tried to steal it, a lot of people would probably want one.

it apparently bit an officer when they were in the process of seizing it. The same as incarcerating someone for resisting arrest without any other charge raised.

If the cops show up to my house for some stupid reason and want me to go sit in the squad car while they do whatever, and I thrash and kick and headbutt one of them like a BLM protester then yes, I do think it is fine to punish me for that, even if the original reason they were there didn't pan out. If you're more libertarian and completely disagree that the state and its agents should have some good faith wiggle room for mistakes or best practices that fine, but there's no sense in us spending 8 comments to reach that impasse.

More comments

The squirrel only bit the guy after they entered the house and tried to take the squirrel, which should have never happened to begin with.

This guy says law enforcement spent five hours ransacking his property. And destroyed some of it such as his pet squirrel. That's the problem here. The anarchotyranny of a government with no time or resources to deal with shoplifting and car break ins, but apparently lots of law enforcement resources to crack down on unregistered squirrel owners.

So what is the reasoning behind infringing on this guy's property, then?

Probably that the animals spread disease and rabies and are more likely to bite their owners and have to be put down sooner or later anyway. Not sure though, the justification might begin with the negation that he was the right to own this specific property.

the animals spread disease and rabies

Source? Evidently the state does not know that, they killed it to test it for rabies in the first place.

Your link suggests sarcasm, though this showed up in my filter feed.

The whole thing ws wild to me because I used to run a Twitter blog for an anthropomorphic squirrel character for a board game IP I was developing. Crazy squirrel memes were my bread and butter, but not enough bread or butter to see the game to market.

Anyway all these memes popped up on my substack feed and I felt like I had truly missed my moment.

A conservative Substacker (John Carter Warlord of Mars) who I take with much salt, pointed out that aside from the real tragedy of euthanizing peoples' pets (this has happened before) is that this type of government action reveals the depths to which safety-ism will take us while simultaneously whistling past the graveyard of Big Problems. The border is a mess, but there's always time to activate half of a town's civil resources, kick down their door, harass their wife and kill their pets because...something, something rabies. (Squirrels don't get rabies and if they do they don't pass them to humans--research from the game dev, 'natch).

It's unfortunate this happened and even more unfortunate it happened now because it's a case egregious enough that most should note it as over-reach. Instead it's, "just those crazy conservative screwballs taking things too far again." RIP Peanut. #NeverForget

While raiding the house might have been dumb, and tbh probably was, I’m pretty sure that the euthanasia was due to some kind of standard policy for animals that bite an officer, and this is a facially reasonable policy that probably shouldn’t apply to squirrels but nobody drafting it considered that the animal biting an officer would one day be a squirrel.

While raiding the house might have been dumb Kind glossing over the important part. Why rip apart hus house for hours? Why grill his wife over her immigration status (especially in ny)?

This seems personal and very heavy handed, and should be investigated.

Why try to hand wave it away?

Then why the raccoon? There was also a case where something similar happened to lady with alpacas (https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/geronimo-post-mortem-results-alpaca-b1916386.html granted in the UK...but basically the same mindset). I also think that there are many cases where officers are bitten by dogs and cats where the animals are not euthanized. The problem is that the policy of euthanasia is running cover for the deliberate mishandling of the animals. It looks and smells like Molochian malice to this homo.

Edit: I suppose you may choose not to euthanize a registered pet who's up-to-date on their shots. So maybe the law is enforced judiciously.

There’s probably a specific carve-out for licensed and registered pets with documented vaccines, if there’s any exclusions at all. I would actually expect that a huge majority of dogs which bite police officers in the process of serving a warrant are shot on-site, and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals. People who license and register their pets and keep documentation of rabies vaccines, as a rule, don’t have police in their business.

I think this case is more of an exception due to the victim being oddly sympathetic than to the state being abnormally vicious.

and nobody cares very much because they’re dangerous ill trained dogs owned by criminals.

Dogs who bite people who attack their owners are well-trained dogs.

And people do care, at least to the extent that they make fun of the police, when the police shoot a chihuahua because they were "in fear for their life".

I wouldn't take that bet, because these rules are written with coons, rats, bats, sacks of ferrets, angry geese, and other troublemakers in mind. The weird cases are heavily overrepresented in scenarios where you end up saying "today didn't go at all well, we'd better make a department policy about purse-carried mongooses"

I suspect that a large majority of officer-biting animals are dogs, and so squirrels are a weird edge case of something common enough to have a policy over.

Yeah. You don't get weird new policies added for dog-bites-man stories, even when it might be a good idea. But you get a horngry weasel down your pants one time and suddenly you're in an OSHA brief.

I think part of the furor is because it’s an abstracted cartoon version of other more serious government outrages. It’s George Floyd and the Waco siege in miniature.

It’s interesting to consider the motivations and incentives of the state employees here. I doubt the people who wrote the laws and procedures would act similarly, so what went wrong? Some possibilities —

  • The state hires people to euthanize animals. This may inadvertently select for people who enjoy euthanizing animals. The state should take steps to ensure that those they hire to commit necessary evils aren’t searching for evil thrills.

  • The state hires people to euthanize animals. Normal people do not like euthanizing animals. The state should ensure that they aren’t hiring morally-stunted people for the “do we kill the animal” job.

  • The owners make money on OnlyFans and also by recording their pets. They make decent money. The employee in charge of euthanizing animals makes less money and in a decidedly less fun way. Killing the owner’s pet is a way to piss off the owner, and the employee may be pissed at the owner because he makes more money more easily. The State should ensure that petty employees can’t take out their grievances on the subject of complaints. I actually think this is a huge part of all sorts of police and bureaucratic misconduct. Rapper has a nice car from rapping about drugs -> I’m going to piss him off because I hate him. State employees are humans and humans act on grievances all the time.

An addition:

The government hires people to do various jobs. Government jobs do not tend to pay as well as similar jobs in the private sector, but are known to have better work/life balance, better job security, and great retirement benefits. Thus, government jobs tend to select for a more ... relaxed ... type of person than the private sector.

One of the functions of government workers, especially in animal control functions, is to respond to public complaints. This involves a lot of work and disruptions to normal in-office routines, and thus is disfavored by the type of people who tend to take government jobs. However, because public anger is one of the few things that can get government workers in real trouble, such complaints must be visibly and aggressively addressed. On the other hand, the person being complained about has nothing to offer the government workers.

Therefore, when the state agency got multiple anonymous complaints about P'Nut, they were incentivized to take serious action to (1) demonstrate that they took the public complaint seriously, (2) generate as little additional work on their end as possible, and (3) avoid receiving any further complaints on this subject. They had no incentive whatsoever to give a damn about P'Nut or his owner, and likely negatively predisposed towards them because they're the reason there was a complaint in the first place.

Easiest way to solve the problem is to find some pretext to seize and dispose of the subject of the complaint - P'Nut.

In case you didn't mistype that, please please please don't tell me how an animal sanctuary makes money on onlyfans.

Fun fact: Onlyfans wasn't originally intended to be a porn site, but rather something like Patreon where any sort of content creator can set up shop and get fans to send them money for content. They just didn't ban porn, so much like the fabled no-witch-hunts-ever utopia, it's got seven zillion pornstars and three principled civil libertarians (and an animal shelter, apparently).

I actually didn't know that, thanks. Always thought the name was just cutesy to make banking easier.

I'm very familiar with my three principled libertarian friends on the site though: Mr. Hands, Mr. Feet, and Mr. 14-really-is-prime

As far as I can tell without subscribing, his OnlyFans is pretty vanilla gay4pay-themed male focus shots, and more credible in that sense than a lot of stuff directly marketed as bisexual. The pet focus is mostly made on Instagram/TikTok/YouTube, although he does have (a lot) of pretty distinctive animal-themed tattoos and there's some really thirsty shots in Instagram/TikTok stuff.

First link about this I clicked on reddit was commenting on the size the owners appendage...which he displays prominently on his TikTok (along with the squirrel)

"To test for rabies, both animals were euthanized,"

That's bullshit, and the government should be held to a higher standard of honesty.

There's no indication that those animals were suffering (never mind suffering to such an extent that death is the only release), so they were killed to test for rabies.

It's not like killing animals is even that bad. The government is just in the habit of lying to deflect responsibility and make itself look good.

Stranger yet, best as we can tell, there is no such thing as squirrel to human rabies transmission. That's just not a thing.

I read most of this thread and still having trouble understanding what's going on. In what sense did the democrats do this?

Only in the extremely broad vibes sense, in which overly intrusive bureaucracy micromanaging your life "for your own good" is generally associated with the left, and is routinely denounced by the right. Also it happened in the state of New York, which has a Democrat-dominated government at present (governor plus supermajorities in both houses of the legislature).

Kamala wanted to run the country. In the end, she couldn't even run her own campaign.

Apparently, the Harris campaign is $20 million in debt despite spending at least $1 billion over the last 3 months. On the other hand, the Trump campaign was frugal - spending only about 1/3 or 1/2 as much as Kamala (quibble about the exact numbers all you want). Staffing in particular seems to have been a major difference with Harris spending perhaps an order of magnitude more than Trump. Harris hired high paid consultants while Trump relied on free labor from passionate supporters.

It gets worse.

The Harris campaign has been accused of paying celebrities for exposure. Surely, already rich celebrities like Beyoncé and Oprah would be happy to support their favored candidate for free. Right? Apparently not. Fox News has reported that the Harris campaign paid Oprah a million dollars to interview her. Lizzo and Cardi B have also been singled out as receiving payments.

Is it any wonder that these celebrity endorsements don't work when they are so fake?

Contra Scott's too much money in dark almonds piece, I think the reason that political campaign donations are relatively low is that it's really hard to buy an election. Bloomberg tried to back in 2020 and his campaign went nowhere. Money does matter, but the candidate matters a lot more. $1 to Trump makes a bigger difference than $3 to Harris. And Trump appearing on Rogan might have been worth $100 million, but he didn't have to pay a cent.

Harris staffers seem to have been running a campaign that appeals to themselves, personally, with the celebrity concerts and so forth. A fun big party for the Dem staffer class. Of course what appeals to the Dem staffer class is not what appeals to the voting public, in many ways opposite to it.

While the sort of corruption where politicians misuse taxpayer money obviously gets more attention, the sort of lower-level corruption where political parties and organizations misuse donations, membership fees, money from ownings etc. for this sort of stuff is probably rather more common.

A fun big party for the Dem staffer class.

A good description for the Democratic Party as a whole.

Harris staffers seem to have been running a campaign that appeals to them, personally, with the celebrity concerts and so forth. A fun big party for the Dem staffer class. Of course what appeals to the Dem staffer class is not what appeals to the voting public, in many ways opposite to it.

The parallels between She Hulk Attorney at law and kamala's campaign are writing themselves. Up to Megan Thee Stallion's ass twerking convincing the public that showrunners have no idea what they are doing. And the end results.

It's winning by losing. among the biggest recipients of those trump tax cuts will be wealthy liberal elites and woke businesses anyway.

Like Springtime for Hitler?

The purpose of a system is what it does. This is related to the iron law of bureaucracy. The reason campaigns want money isn’t so that they can win elections. The reason campaigns want money is so that they can run the campaign. More money = more stuff for the people running the campaign.

As for why it seems to affect Democrats more than Republicans, guess which party has non-profit employees as a constituency.

Celeb endorsements also are about building a coalition of supporters. Winning is secondary. Even if young people are unreliable voters or cannot vote, they still will grow up and enter society and affect it in many ways.

It's funny because the day after the election I was overhearing my colleagues talking, and somehow, the impression they had was that Trump winning is the proof that rich people can just buy elections in the US. I don't expect that canadians would know much about american campaign finances, but still.

I listened to Pod Save America after the election and they were saying this election shows us that we need to get money out of politics. I immediately thought they were talking nonsense since they are the side that spends the most by far. These are smart, informed, experienced Democratic operatives mindlessly parroting "money in politics" talking points when the exact opposite is clearly true.

Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?

I have no idea how much was spent by whom on each side (and quite possibly no one does), but the war chests of the official campaigns seems like at best a weak proxy for estimating that. (I'm sure there was also quite a bit of money spent on trying to get Harris elected that's not being accounted for in the $1 billion her official campaign touched.)

Just a few days ago I was reading multiple posts on this forum about how the $44 billion Elon spent on Twitter was worth every penny to the Trump campaign and now the Harris campaign spending $1 billion is a sign the big money is on the side of the Democratic Party?

Going by the numbers on Forbes, Harris spent 1.6 billion, to Trump's 1.1 billion to contest the 2024 election. Musk spent $44 Billion to contest the entire culture; the relevant frame here would be the amounts spent on, say, every other major media and tech company in the nation. So yes, the big money is on the side of the democratic party. Blackrock alone has somewhere north of ten trillion dollars under management, to give one example of a company aligned to Blue Tribe.

The debt isn't a bad thing: it's common for campaigns to end up with debt. 20M/1000M is 2%. When you're spending those kind of sums over a very short time period in a high stakes situation, with uncertain, variable income streams, it's almost inevitable. It will end up being paid off, and IIRC donation limits are reset after the election (though, if someone was a Kamala donor, I do not envy how much begging they're going to endure for the next couple weeks). Maybe Trump will magnanimously bail her out.

And, although she lost, I'm not sure you can say it was badly spent. As stupid as it is that paying Beyonce to fart in your direction can make voters want to vote for you, if you're flush with cash and you think it'll help, why not? What else would the campaign spend it on? Yet more clueless college grads to run social media accounts and spam Reddit with Kamala memes?

Final point: Kamala did much better in the swing states where the money was being spent than the country at large. A ~2% shift across every state would have resulted in Kamala holding the blue "wall" and winning the electoral college, while still losing the popular vote. Going into the campaign, the expectation was that Kamala would need to be running 2-3 points ahead of Trump nationally to have a shot at those states, but the campaign managed to eliminate this gap. This wasn't done through offering thoughtful policy proposals that addressed their specific regional concerns, or through her personal charismatic connection with white rust belt voters.

Money is good, and it's an edge Democrats will have for the foreseeable future, even if there are diminishing marginal returns to it. They just need a better product to market.

If the rumors are true, it was very badly spent indeed. People are saying that she paid Beyonce $10 million, Lizzo $2.5 million, Cardi B $3 million, and Lady Gaga $5 million.

The value of these endorsements is close to zero. In fact, Lizzo and Cardi B may have negative endorsement value given what they represent. Lizzo: "Just imagine, if Kamala wins, the whole country could be like Detroit".

The payments seem so high as to be scarcely believable so I'd hold off on judgment for now. But if true, it seems like she ran her campaign like the Biden administration has run the country, with no regard for frugality and wasting money on useless vanity projects.

lol lizzo . even the marketplace agrees she is overrated

And, although she lost, I'm not sure you can say it was badly spent. As stupid as it is that paying Beyonce to fart in your direction can make voters want to vote for you, if you're flush with cash and you think it'll help, why not? What else would the campaign spend it on? Yet more clueless college grads to run social media accounts and spam Reddit with Kamala memes?

This is glossing over the miserable optics of paying (out of touch) celebrities to be your friends. Of course this wasn't known prior to the election results but it's another count amongst many in which the democratic are currently a laughingstock.

That indicates that Democrats are weak when it comes to earned media. That's a massive issue, but it's a separate one from "I have a giant bag of money and need to spend it." The latter is a good problem to have, even if you're chasing after increasingly marginal edges with each additional dollar.

The latter is a good problem to have, even if you're chasing after increasingly marginal edges with each additional dollar.

Only if it's not also in direct conflict with your "get billionaire funding out of politics!" messaging.

She will do fine. i can see a remunerative career in the cards in the private sector. these people always fail forward

"The debt isn't a bad thing." Okay, what would you call being personally 20 million dollars in debt if not a bad thing? Because apparently you're unaware they changed the rules so that candidate personally assumes the debt of the campaign

The debt won't exist 6 months from now. The campaign will continue collecting contributions, pay off the debts, and Kamala will walk away with none, rested and ready for her sinecure.

sinecure

Where do you think she'll land? Unlike Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama she doesn't have her own political machine. So there's not really much to be gained for anyone to ingratiate themselves to her.

And speaking engagements will be thin. No one wants to hear from a loser, especially a midwit who is by all accounts a deeply unpleasant individual.

Clearly, she'll land somewhere. But the fall is going to be steep.

Howard University.

They may not like it, but she's probably now like a Top 5 or 3 alumni. Also, Black Women voted for Harris something like 90-10%. Howard University is 70% female. So this lines up well for her to bring in donations.

Probably also some sort of leadership role with The Links. She's literally listed in the opening paragraph of the Wiki page.

TollBooth's Top 5 All Time Howard Univ Alum (in no particular order)

  • Thomas Sowell
  • Thurgood Marshall
  • Zora Neale Hurston
  • Toni Morrison
  • Nick Cannon (I don't even know If I'm joking)

Somehow in my career, I ended up being in a position to be in the room for many private conferences. One of the things that was particularly obvious to me is how human (in the worst sense) the elite "speaker" circuit is.

People imagine those kind of conferences as a meeting of powerful people exchanging important insights, but few of them were more interesting than what you'd hear on a very average TV fluff interview. Maybe one of them was at a level of discussion that would be comparable to what we have going here. In a couple of cases I even realized that I, the IT guy babysitting the tech setup, knew more about the topic than the speaker did, nevermind the attendees. Pretty much always the attendees' questions were shallow. It seemed obvious that the attendees, rich but unknown business leaders, were starstuck and enjoyed being in the same room as someone "famous". It certainly sound glamorous to drop into a conversation an aside about that time you were at a private conference of former prime ministers, VP, etc... I know I enjoy it.

In that context, Harris definitely can do that circuit if she wants. If she was just a failed presidential candidate, maybe the interest would fade fairly quickly. But I guarantee you there are lots of rich people who want to be able to say they were at a private conference of a former US Vice President, even if the presentation is just word salad about unburdening what has been. Having been Vice President, she can probably milk forever if wants.

Chesa Boudin didn't have a machine of his own and they gave him an entire department at UC Berkeley after his disastrous recall loss. A department specifically made for creating propaganda for his policies that the voters rejected.

There's a larger machine at work, much greater than the petty personal ones individual politicians can build. There's a chance she gets nothing, but I expect they'll at least give her a nonprofit doing $10000/plate "rich women's issues" dinners. That was her key demo, and they need to send the signal that they take care of their own.

Howard is a solid guess. Throw in a book deal, lucrative speaking engagements with audiences who don't really care what she has to say, maybe some corporate board. She'll be well taken care of. Not for any particular affection anyone has toward her, but to signify to others that they'll be well taken care of.

If the audience is composed of midwits does it matter, and also, many people really do unironically like her--just not enough to win an election. No one is expecting her to lecture about physics.

Maybe I'm delusional regarding the cost of things but it feels like you could do so much more with all this money. Just hire Mr. Beast and give him 100 million. Hell, go to a swing state and spend 20 million on some small scale infrastructure project. Or just hire a different candidate.

Just hire Mr. Beast

A man who became famous primarily by creating content appealing to a demographic who are too young to vote?

Considering the mental maturity of those doing the voting, he's the perfect guy.

This is better than lizzo, beyonce,

I don't think mr. beast is a democrat through and would refuse

but who? it becomes evident, when you look at it, the dems have such poor choices. They put all their eggs in the Hillary/Biden baskets . The GOP can always find populist Trump wannabes of the same sort of mold.

Contra Scott's too much money in dark almonds piece, I think the reason that political campaign donations are relatively low is that it's really hard to buy an election. Bloomberg tried to back in 2020 and his campaign went nowhere. Money does matter, but the candidate matters a lot more. $1 to Trump makes a bigger difference than $3 to Harris. And Trump appearing on Rogan might have been worth $100 million, but he didn't have to pay a cent.

yeah. Hype is overrated, as is money in politics. Look at all the hype over bitcoin over the past 3-4 years yet the price has hardly done anything; meanwhile unsexy SPY/voo crushed it. VC/crypto bros showered $ on Trump for his support; if i had to wager, they will see big fat zero for their efforts. It's hard enough to pull the levers of power by the very people who are are in power...good luck doing it indirectly. Politics in the US is influenced by seniority and connections, which is how such underwhelming choice as Harris got so far anyway. She had paid her dues.

Hype can certainly help. Without some positive attention even the best product will sit on the shelf. On the other hand most people will be smart enough to notice when the sales pitch is overselling the actual product.

Kamala had a lot of negatives that were pretty obvious. She’s annoying and has a nervous laugh that’s obnoxious. She can’t give interviews, and when she does, her obvious non-answers are barely comprehensible. She cannot generate enthusiasm for her own ideas. Her rallies needed concerts just to get people to show up. At the end of the day, all the marketing in the world can’t make New Coke taste good.

She is a caricature of everything the right attributes to the left. But we're talking an extremely shallow pool of choices.

It continues to strike me as odd that a party that dominates the Ivy Leagues and Wall Street has had to field back to back candidates that went to Delaware and Howard grads.

And the party that loves the uneducated went with the Ivy League; both Bushes went to Yale and Trump to the University of Pennsylvania.

And Vances is OSU>Yale IIRC. A path generally only for the hyper gifted.

Undoubtedly he’s smart, but hillbilly kid who enlisted and became a military journalist in Iraq is one of those stories Yale admissions would love, not that I’m sure he didn’t also do very well on the LSAT.

You would think so, but actually admissions stats indicate a strong discrimination effect at Ivies against rural kids.

Really? A straight married middle aged woman who dresses professionally, supports Israel, is seen as moderate by the progressives in her base, is the caricature of everything attributed to the left? I'd have to disagree pretty heavily.

I would have thought that a young LGBTQ Palestine defender who is single or promiscuous, has had multiple abortions, supports UBI, and has blue hair would be the choice of caricature for the right leaning among us. Do I misunderstand what the right attributes to the left? Is being 'annoying' and not generating enthusiasm all it takes to be a leftist caricature?

Bitcoin is at $81,000 right now...

Over 3 years (from the last ATH in November '21) it's roughly even with SPY, maybe a little behind. Over 2 years it crushes SPY. Over 4 years (and any further) it crushes SPY.

Comparing it to spy actually handicaps it in favor of bitcoin. A more appropriate comparison controlling for volatility would be something like 2-3x SPY, like UPRO, which beats Bitcoin by a bigger margin. Controlling for volatility, Bitcoin has , as of Today, slightly greater returns and vastly more volatility which makes it worse .

But so far, yes, you're right that Bitcoin as of now is the better performing asset nominally speaking.

UPRO doesn't seem to have performed that well.

https://www.marketwatch.com/investing/fund/upro

On 1/1/2020, it was at $36, now it's at $95. Tesla went from $36 to $335. Bitcoin did even better, going from about $7,000 to $88,000 today. Even Apple went from $74 to $224, it did better than UPRO (and pays dividends). Microsoft did similarly well.

It's not like Microsoft or Apple were unheard of back in early 2020, they're basically blue-chips.

ETFs are generally mediocre investments and have management fees, better to just pick out stocks or crypto specifically. If we look at just the 1 year, Bitcoin is up 140%, UPRO is up a measly 100%. UPRO might be a decent investment but it's not a great one.

A decent amount of volatility is good. You want to get in before the institutional investors, not after they've pumped the market up to high heaven. They're already all over ETFs.

It has done well but it hasn't exactly been 'belly button lint in exchange for untold riches' if you've jumped on board any time since like 2016.

If you jumped onboard 14 hours ago, you'd already have made 7-8% profit, which is what SPY might make in a year. It's at 87K now, rising to 88 as I write this post.

Untold riches for nothing is a very high standard that we've only ever seen with bitcoin and ETH (which was originally distributed to BTC addresses). There used to be BTC faucets where people gave them away, evangelizing to new users.

Hey, another "You can't post that, it's boo outgroup". Employees of the current party in power did that thing they do again, where they openly express their hatred and willingness to hurt people like me.

EXCLUSIVE: FEMA Official Ordered Relief Workers To Skip Houses With Trump Signs

A FEMA supervisor told workers in a message to “avoid homes advertising Trump” as they canvassed Lake Placid, Florida to identify residents who could qualify for federal aid, internal messages viewed by The Daily Wire reveal. The supervisor, Marn’i Washington, relayed this message both verbally and in a group chat used by the relief team, multiple government employees told The Daily Wire.

I know, it's not the smoking gun that the whole FEMA effort in Appalachia was slow walked because those people vote wrong. But it's yet another data point that, no, seriously, these people hate you and will do anything in their petty bureaucratic power to make your life worse because you vote wrong.

who wrote in the government system messages such as: “Trump sign no entry per leadership.”

What a brilliant way to make a paper trail that's less deniable than whistleblowing that would be dismissed as "claims without evidence." If your boss doesn't overrule you, he's nailed himself she/her has nailed herself.

To be fair though I wouldn't want to be knocking at Trump houses in a Florida swamp going "Hi, this is FEMA. Before you ask, yes these are level 4 plates, but I'm out of spares so please don't aim for the cracked bits"

Except that there were no such shootings. It literally never happened, and to my knowledge no one actually pointed a gun at anyone working for FEMA. The idea that they were worried about getting shot is a just-so story.

Second, it is part of the job. The job of a FEMA agent is to get people aid, and “I’m scared” is no more valid for FEMA than it is for the local cops. You don’t get to join a first responders agency and then be too scared to respond. Especially if you’re doing checks on the safety of Americans in a hurricane situation.

I know, but I've spent the last decade joining in on the "hey ATF, my dog shoots first" thing, and I really hate the "lol you're crazy for hallucinating all those things I said" gaslighting tactic.
Even if they're immoral for doing it, I'm not going to mock someone for taking things I said in jest (steely unironic intent) seriously.

Except that there were no such shootings. It literally never happened, and to my knowledge no one actually pointed a gun at anyone working for FEMA. The idea that they were worried about getting shot is a just-so story.

They may not have known that at the time. Something not existing in the territory does not mean it isn't marked on the map.

Second, it is part of the job. The job of a FEMA agent is to get people aid, and “I’m scared” is no more valid for FEMA than it is for the local cops. You don’t get to join a first responders agency and then be too scared to respond. Especially if you’re doing checks on the safety of Americans in a hurricane situation.

A valid point. If the safety concerns were the issue, they should have directed "If a house has a Trump sign, bring backup just in case."

I mean sure, it’s plausible that in some odd universe that it’s possible that someone might pull a gun on a FEMA agent. But again, even with millions of Trump supporters there’s no incident like this. There’s perhaps a need for caution, but there’s a difference between “there have been threats made, so be careful and buddy up” and “avoid houses with [out group] signage because those guys are more likely to be the shooters.

Lots of leftists basically think Deliverance was a documentary and have a statistically unjustified fear of rural white Republicans. I don't doubt that some FEMA workers really were afraid to knock on the door of homes with Trump signs.

Yes, I honestly can't blame them given how hard we've leaned into menacing banjo music intensifies to goad this exact sort of ovaryaction, see "your face, my mace" etc.

To steelman Marn'i Washington's likely mindset, Marn'i was probably hopped up on Oct 14-ish news articles portraying "Trumpers" as "planning to shoot at FEMA workers." This is not Marn'i's fault: the journalists covering this were sensationalizing what looks like just a few claims of threats against aid workers. Marn'i was merely brainwashed by the information made available.

That's less of a steelman and more of an indictment of competence that would be entirely Marn'i's fault.

Setting aside that the 'FEMA is at risk' reporting was for an entirely different state over a fear that didn't happen and in which FEMA activities were re-implemented, and thus not a credible fear in Florida, the broader issue is that the mitigation measure doesn't pass muster. If there is a safety fear in a neighborhood/area, then the safety mitigation is to prevent any personnel from going into the area until you have security, not avoiding specific houses. You are still in gunshot range of a danger house if you knock at the house next door.

Marni's is a person with agency, not a brainwashed thrall, and unfortunately their competence was quite low.

I thought the steelman would be something like the message was in related to FEMA media shots and they wanted to avoid political signage in the media they produced and for some reason they mistakenly said 'Trump signs' instead of 'political signage'.

Several would-be very funny people reported you with "He can't post that, it's boo outgroup."

Of course it's not "boo outgroup" to post an actual argument, without being inflammatory and rage-stroking over it, which is why this post is not being modded.

But you knew that. You always know what you're doing. You just pretend to be confused when you get modded for ranting about "Biblical plagues of retards" and the like.

Carry on.

The last post I made citing numerous government policies, and claiming the government hated me and wantes to deatroy me, you just told me "Stop it" with no further explanation. Theories in the thread were just that i was breaking "boo outgroup" or "consensus building". So no, I dont know.

Some follow-ups on past stories

Southport stabbing suspect accused of murder of three girls charged with owning Al Qaeda training manual

The teenager accused of the fatal stabbing of three girls at a dance class in Southport has been charged with production of a deadly poison and a terror offence, the chief constable of Merseyside Police has said.

Axel Rudakubana, 18, will appear at Westminster Magistrates’ Court by videolink on Wednesday charged with production of a biological toxin, Ricin, and possession of information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing to commit an act of terrorism.

The charges come after searches of his home in Banks, Lancashire, Merseyside Police Chief Constable Serena Kennedy said at a press conference on Tuesday.

The terror offence relates to a PDF file entitled Military Studies In The Jihad Against The Tyrants, The Al Qaeda Training Manual, Ms Kennedy said.

Previous discussion here, and here.

Part of the controversy was about how the right wing assumed the attacker was a boat-refugee and/or a recent immigrant, and while that part remains false, another part of it was about his religion, (see Al-Jazeera, Wikipedia, BBC, or even our own discussion) and how it was wrong / islamophobic to jump to conclusions this way. It now turns out that he was indeed radicalized by Islamists.

Algerian Boxer Imane Khelif Has XY Chromosomes And “Testicles” : French-Algerian Medical Report Admits

A shocking new development has emerged in the case of Algerian boxer Imane Khelif after a French journalist reportedly gained access to a damning medical report revealing Khelif has “testicles.” The news comes months after Khelif seized a gold medal in women’s boxing at the Paris Olympics.

The report was drafted in June of 2023 via a collaboration between the Kremlin-Bicêtre hospital in Paris, France, and the Mohamed Lamine Debaghine hospital in Algiers, Algeria. Drafted by expert endocrinologists Soumaya Fedala and Jacques Young, the report reveals that Khelif is impacted by 5-alpha reductase deficiency, a disorder of sexual development that is only found in biological males.

(...) The report concludes by recommending Khelif be referred for “surgical correction and hormone therapy,” to help him physically align with his self-perceived gender identity, and adds that psychological support would be required because the results had caused a “very significant neuropsychiatric impact.”

Previous discussion here and here, and here.

More than the object level of either of those stories, what I want to know is: what do?

I've had this discussion with @Hoffmeister25 about assuming the worst about your outgroup without any evidence. While I maintain that it's plenty of fun when your unproven stereotype-based claims are vindicated, I'm going to agree with him that this way lies madness, and that's no way to have a conversation on controversial political issues. On the other hand, I can't help but notice that this sort of recommendation for caution is asymmetrical. When mainstream institutions make a claim, that claim is itself treated as evidence, any caution goes out the window, and requests for evidence are met with ridicule. So how should we be approaching these controversies, given that bombshells like these hardly raise an eyebrow anymore?

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media. Vibe Analysis has been the subject of some ridicule, but I think there should be some space to say "I don't have evidence for this, but my gut says there is something off here" and Reddit-tier "source?!" responses to that should not be accepted. At the end of the day we're only people, and our guts will influence us, no matter how much pretense of objectivity and evidence-baseness we'll put on top of that.

It's curious how eager some people are to deny that the Southport killer as an off-the-boat refugee. Surely, that he was a second generation immigrant makes the whole situation worse! What it means is that even when you're not importing terrorists, you're importing people with with a high propensity to become terrorists. There could hardly be anything more damning of British immigration policy, and yet somehow that he was not "off-the-boat" is seen as pro-immigrant.

The pro-immigrationists know that claiming different ethnic groups have different propensities to violence is still mostly beyond the pale, even for anti-immigrationists. Therefore, they can dissimulate by claiming that anyone born in the UK is 'British' and therefore any crimes ethnic minorities commit cannot be blamed on immigration. They can be safe in the knowledge that the obvious counter-argument to this won't be made publicly, even if it is true.

There's a good chance that many of the pro-immigrationists have secretly noticed who commits most of the crime though. From there, I can see two approaches. Either blame racism for minority crime rates, or secretly read Steve Sailer while keeping quiet for the greater good. I'm sure the latter is pretty rare though.

If stopping people arriving on boats is at the edge of the Overton window then removing people whose parents came on boats is well outside it. If you can rule out the first solution by saying it wouldn’t have solved the problem anyway then you don’t even need to refute the second, most people won’t dare discuss the implications you’ve drawn out in public so the public battle is already won for the pro-immigration side.

As time goes on, I'm leaning more and more towards simply rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence" beloved by the mainstream media.

Reject Rationalism, embrace rationalism.

That is to say, movements will be corrupted by status games and politics, but ideas remain true or false regardless. It is rational to observe the degree to which the mainstream media is attempting to manipulate public opinion with both carefully-crafted deceptions, repetition of lies, and aggression towards alternate sources of info, and write them off. It is rational to note how science with the wrong conclusion is buried or never even attempted and to see how the universities have purged themselves of wrongthinkers, and write them off as well.

It is rational to recognize that the words of a liar are very poor evidence. And it is not rational to deny that a liar is a liar and call it charity.

How do we want to call the social manipulation technique at work here? I'm voting for "the social scientists gambit", since it's especially widespread there. It goes like this:

Adam: I'm 6.2.

Bob: No way, you look more like 5.6.

Adam: You have no evidence for this statement, so you should default to trust me.

Bob: Actually, I have measuring tape, let's just see.

Adam: I'm calling HR, this is beyond rude!

Or in more general terms you a) control the null hypothesis and then b) either claim that even testing the null hypothesis is offensive, or you allow it to be "tested" as long as the procedure is designed to get the correct results. Just see the frontpage of /r/science and try reading up on the actual definitions of terms like "racial resentment" or "hostile sexism" for practical examples of the latter.

Imo one big problem is the frequentist / null-hypothesis framework to begin with. You can't have a reasonable opinion about anything if you by-default assume 95% hypothesis A (which just-so happens to be the one you favor) 5% everything else. The appropriate attitude is bayesian priors, which are difficult to do perfectly but in rough terms are actually quite simple: You assume relevant stats of the general category (say, murder rates per ethnicity or religion) and then slightly or strongly adjust based on how much you know of the case (say, a witness explicitly states an assailant screamed "allahu akbar!"). Of course, this makes the next problem obvious, which is abusing incorrect stats, such as claiming that we're not allowed to use the murder rates per [category], but only population percentages.

The other obvious problem is harder to manage: Manipulated/plainly wrong stats. Tbh, I've yet to find a good approach that scales for this one. Sometimes they cook the numbers in obvious ways that are even openly stated in the manual which is easy to adjust for, but more common seems to be the situation as with the recent californian retail thefts, where technically speaking everything is done correctly, but one step in the pipeline completely fails in an undocumented manner.

At least attempting something like this seems better than just going by your guts. And if this is too involved to always do for everything - which I consider understandable - hard scepticism is also always an option as well.

Okay, but that example is actually rude, no? Demanding someone’s measurements is not normal. Neither is insisting someone recant. Calling someone a liar is almost always picking a fight.

An observer would come away from this conversation thinking both participants are assholes and possibly stupid.

Sure, that's how it works. If an observer does not consider it rude, the the tactic falls flat. The trick is to make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question without looking like a douchebag. So I chose an example that would be plausibly considered rude by an average reader here.

But keep in mind that many liberal readers have the same instinctual reaction you have, but to the insinuation that different ethnicities might have different murder rates. Likewise, a honor-virtue ethics society might simply consider Adam pathetic, and Bob virtuous and brave.

Edit: Also, feel free to adjust the example if you think you understand roughly what I'm getting at! I try to find a middle ground between brevity and fidelity in these kind of examples, so it's hardly perfect.

I’m inclined to call it “normal social maneuvering” instead of anything about social science!

make a claim that makes you look good in such a way that there is no way to call it into question

That’s definitely the crux of it. Some claims can’t be made to some audiences. Some questions can’t be asked to others. I don’t know if I can come up with a better example.

Regarding the edit—yeah, I feel that. I have a hard time going for brevity.

I can see the argument that it's part of the repertoire of normal social maneuvering, but it's still a particular manipulative technique that imo deserves some snappy name. "just a joke bro" is also part of normal (male) social maneuvering, but obviously a very different kind.

Forgive me if this question has already been asked. What would this medical report imply for Khelif's lawsuit against JK Rowling and Elon Musk, if anything? If Khelif has testicles (and is hence a man/male by any reasonable definition of either term), how can Khelif claim JK Rowling defamed Khelif by describing Khelif as such?

That is not the definition of woman the courts will use. In the UK especially, truth is not a defense against libel.

I thought Khelif filed the suit in France.

I've only seen other people ask this question, but haven't seen an answer. I'd imagine you're right, but I'm not a lawyer.

rejecting Rationalism, as it leads to cudgels like "falsely claimed without evidence"

Does it? I don't think I've ever seen the phrase "without evidence" used sloppily by anyone whose definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".

It's not being sloppy with the phrase "without evidence", as @RenOS pointed it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.

The whole Bayesian reasoning thing always felt like a gimmick to me anyway. You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.

People can claim to be good anything regardless of facts on the ground. Talk and unfounded claims are cheap and may even be free (ignoring opportunity costs).

I'd expect anyone who outright calls themselves a Bayesian to do better on that front.*

*Going off Bayesian priors about what the kind of people nerdy enough to have even heard of the idea are like, let alone self professed ones

I mean that the whole framework is designed so that you never end up having to eat crow. "My priors for this are very low. Oh, it happened anyway? Oh well, I promise to bump up my priors somewhat for the next time this non-repeatable event happens!".

Uh.. That's the worst way of reasoning from evidence that's ever been tried, barring all the others.

Absent logical omniscience, you are occasionally going to be wrong, and then you try to be less wrong. Taken deeply enough, no macroscopic events in the history of the universe are likely to ever be truly alike or repeatable, so sorting out reference classes is unavoidably important.

"I was wrong about World War 3 not happening. Well, we can't have a World War 3 2.0 happen for me to be right about, but at least I can adjust my priors for massive wars happening in the future".

Besides. You can very much eat crow when you are confidently wrong. It just takes intellectual honesty, and Bayesians at least pay lip service to the notion we learn from our mistakes. Keep being bad at updating, and people will stop considering what you say to be informative (and that's not unique to self-professed Bayesians, because in practise most humans apply the concepts implicitly, some are more disciplined and explicit than others).

it's more about elevating your position to the null hypothesis.

One of the key differences between Bayesian and frequentist statistics is that the latter has a "null hypothesis" and the former does not. Priors aren't the same thing; in Bayesian-speak an experiment leads to an update that's a real number, not a binary acceptance/rejection.

You can claim to be a good Bayesian no matter the outcome of any particular case.

Yeah, but you can also claim to be a good non-Bayesian pundit regardless. The biggest difference from my point of view is that I've seen the best rationalists publish graphs of how well their past predictions, as declared in advance, turned out to be calibrated. I've never seen anybody more mainstream than Nate Silver do the same, even though "my punditry is my profession and public service and livelihood" would seem to entail a much stronger case for doing so than "I like blogging", so I'm going to doubt that rationalism has led to much of anything in the mainstream media.

... which is a shame, because an admission of "that's evidence but not enough to budge my priors" really is a big step up from a declaration of "without evidence". When not moving far from your priors is a good idea (which it often is - I've seen legitimate evidence for Flat Earth Theory!) you at least gain a little humility from having to openly admit what you're doing. And when your conclusions resembling your priors is a bad idea, you're more likely to notice that eventually if you have to acknowledge every time when you're dismissing Not Enough Evidence rather than Not Real Evidence.

definition of evidence is "B s.t. P(B|A)/P(B) > 0".

Wouldn’t the definition of “A is Bayesian evidence of B” be “P(B|A) > P(B)”

I typed >0 when I meant to type >1, yes. That's very embarrassing.

Just because one owns an Al Qaeda training manual does not mean that one has been radicalized by Islamists. Al Qaeda knows a lot about terrorism, so if you want to do terrorism it might be a good idea to read their manual even if one's political ideology has nothing to do with Islamism.

The problem with this is that there is a very clear record of condemning people for their thought crimes on this exact basis.

You can't kick a non-white person and call them a slur without making the attack racially motivated.

You can't create a right wing political movement whilst owning ethno-based political material without being labeled a neo nazi terrorist organization.

By the very same token, you can't stab children in the face whilst owning an Al Qaeda training manual without being labeled a muslim terrorist.

So would you say it is unlikely that the dude got radicalized by Islamists, or are you just pointing out this is not a smoking gun? The latter claim is not interesting, as it's only a matter of time until it gets resolved now that there's a full-blown terrorism investigation. But I don't think this should be an argument that allows people to throw a wet blanket on the conversation around immigration and Islam.

Agreed, but the BBC was reporting there were 'no known links to Islam', presumably after police had searched the guy's house and found the ricin and Al Qaeda manual. At the same time, police had said they weren't currently treating it as a terrorist incident.

There was a huge loss in trust of the government to accurately report what they knew about the attack when they knew it. The latest excuse seems to be that reporting information about motives early 'might impact the legal case against the attacker', with no same standard being held to the Prime Minister quickly painting rioters as 'Far Right Extremists' with a sweeping broad brush prior to their trials.

In an attempt to mitigate ethnic tension in the short term via narrative control, the UK government has lost long term credibility in their reporting of future incidents.

Anyone that wants more information on this topic should check out the /r/unitedkingdom subreddit and search for 'southport stabbings'. Huge culture-war flareup over the last few days with some accounts seemingly doing damage control for the govt's early narrative.

There’s always been debate about whether Donald Trump is anti-establishment or a member of the establishment. Since he is a billionaire, does he relate more to the billionaire class? Because he’s a Republican, will he always conform to Republican pressure? Because there’s photos of him with Epstein and Hillary, is his anti-establishment ethos just a larp?

His prospective appointments suggests that he is anti-establishment now. The appointees include:

  • Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. His statements include: “the principal objective of the FDA today is to serve the mercantile interests of pharmaceutical” and “get President Trump back in the White House and me to DC so we can ban pharmaceutical advertising”. He has called for the regulation of unhealthy food, the banning of fluoride in tap water and the legalization of psychedelics. In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. Many say his uncle was killed by the deep state.

  • Tulsi Gabbard, who has disputed the American account of Assad’s chemical weapon use, argued against the American funding of Ukraine, and argued against sanctions on Russia. She was placed on a heightened TSA terrorist watch list.

  • Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. He has the most controversial foreign policy view of any Republican politician. He wants the legalization of raw milk and more freedom involving small farms selling their produce. His stance is anti-corporate.

  • A possible link up with Ron Paul, the foremost anti establishment candidate of the late 00s.

If he goes through with these appointments — and to be fair, that’s a weighty if — I think it would make him the most anti-establishment president since Andrew Jackson.

What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?

I'm more interested in Musk's promised cost-cutting measures. His whole mode of operation is "guardrails and red tape are for stupid people", while federal bureaucracy is 90% guardrails and red tape. How much carte blanche is he going to get to overhaul the departments before the Congress realizes what's going on?

I once posted a hypothetical here about Trump trying to hollow out one of the noncompliant departments. I can now actually imagine this happening: Trump might be all about vibes, but Musk can easily post a department-wide email that goes, "Just to let everyone know, I've just made myself the sole AD domain administrator, everyone's access has been terminated. Attached is the list of people the new Secretary and I will interview today. If they pass, they will start interviewing more people and so on, so your access will be gradually restored in the next few days. However, I'm going to remain the only one who can approve anything in SAP until the new spending policy is in place. Oh, and let the guys who have come to fix the hinges on the server room door in"

What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?

Yes please, I want to find out if they put her on a watchlist (which almost certainly should be eliminated anyway) for partisan reasons. If the answer is yes, DHS should be dissolved. It's a newer agency anyway and I think the actually useful parts can just go back to being standalone or parts of other agencies. Nonsense like that should be punished severely and publicly.

It's a newer agency anyway and I think the actually useful parts can just go back to being standalone or parts of other agencies.

DHS is a department, not an agency. Apart from the TSA, none of its agencies (list) are new, or obviously surplus to requirements.

Abolishing TSA would obviously be a good idea - move the bits of aviation security that can't be privatised into the FAA, move the bits of port security that can't be privatised into the Coast Guard, and let ordinary law enforcement handle land transport security. But having the various border-policing agencies (CIS, CBP, ICE, Coast Guard) sitting in the same department is probably a good thing given how closely you want them working together.

[This may change if Trump is serious about using broad-based tariffs for revenue - in that case you probably have to unmerge immigration and customs and put customs into the Treasury so it focusses on its revenue collection mission.]

I continue to think the Secret Service should sit in the Treasury for coup-proofing reasons.

To troll the Deep State without handing too much power over to someone politically unreliable, Trump should make Tulsi Gabbard DHS inspector general.

I would generally put anything law enforcement on a national level into Coast Guard (maybe rename it to state security or something) just for the ability to unify such things under a single legible chain of command. As it sits, CIS, CBP, CG, ICE, TSA, and CG are all doing similar things and even at times crossing purposes without any cross communication possible. A bunch of Migrants picked up by the CG would be handed over to BP or ICE, but why? What’s the purpose of doing so when you can simply dump them off at a port in Mexico and shorten the process by days or weeks?

What's Tulsi going to head, DHS?

somali_pirate_meme.jpg

Make it so!

The prospect of Elon Musk crippling the entire SAP infrastructure because they don’t want to answer his questions just made me physically cringe.

To quote Jim Hacker, Prime Minister on an overbearing Foreign Office:

"Are they here to follow our instructions, or are we here to follow theirs?"

The FO makes some good points: politicians tend to be geographically ignorant, prone to black-and-white thinking, and have short time horizons. Nevertheless, the bureaucrats are also blinkered, prejudiced, incompetent and leverage their expertise to block off any feedback or reform that might make them otherwise. Ultimately that can't be tolerated.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=fVVX0lHZ8JE

I doubt any of these, with the possible exception of Massie, plays any significant role in a Trump administration, to wit:

  • RFK isn't going to be the next FDA Commissioner. His opinions might be popular among a certain portion of Trump's base, but they aren't popular among the GOP senators who have to confirm him. His complete lack of qualifications for the position give cover to any Republican looking to vote against his confirmation, and it's hard for me to see a vaccine hawk like Jim Justice voting for him in any event. If he gets anything, it's likely to be some made-up position that doesn't require Senate confirmation where he's given a title but no power, no budget, and no staff. He'll do this for 6 months or a year until he realizes it's pointless and resigns. Then he does the usual song and dance about how Trump doesn't really believe in his cause and cast him aside after making grand promises.

  • The chances of Tulsi getting a cabinet position like Secretary of State or Defense or National Security Advisor are even lower than those of RFK being FDA Commissioner. The Republican PArty, Trump's base included, is still dominated by people who supported Bush's foreign policy. Trump's stated pacifism is attractive to a growing number of people, but the average Republican is still more Bellicose than the average Democrat. A lot of older Republicans I talk to still criticize Obama's Iraq pullout. I've had countless arguments about why invading Iran isn't a good idea. Tulsi's a known Assad apologist, yet just prior to Trump's ascension Republicans were criticizing Obama for not taking action in Syria. Combine that with Trump's fixation on "looking tough", and someone like Tulsi is a nonstarter. I'd be surprised if she gets any position at all.

  • Like I said, this one has a decent chance of happening. That being said it only has a chance of happening because Massie is at least a sitting Republican congressman, and it's a position where he can't do much damage. Raw milk availability is largely a state-level issue, it doesn't break along partisan lines, and removing Federal regulations would only have a small effect on a market that's already tiny (most of the raw milk consumers I know buy it specifically because it's local).

  • I'm going to lump Ron Paul together with Elon Musk, whom you didn't mention, because it's pretty clear that the only role either of these guys would have would be in reducing government waste. It's also clear that neither of them would have a full-time position. Paul is 89 an retired, and Musk has to run something like 50 companies. My guess is they'll co-chair a bipartisan blue-ribbond panel on government waste and inefficiency which produces a pretty report showing that we could reduce the deficit by 0.3% if we cut these 9,000 programs, which report is presented to congress and promptly filed circularly after each legislator finds something in there that benefits his district.

The problem with a lot of this speculation is that it involves fringe figures who are hoping that profile will substitute for actual influence. People like John Barrasso and Thom Tillis don't want to see people who are further to the left than most Democrats placed in positions of power because they flattered Trump's sense of appealing to a broad coalition. In 2016 there was a lot of talk about Trump appointing Giuliani Secretary of State, and giving people like Steve Bannon and Sarah Palin prominent roles. Giuliani, loyal past the point of any logical sense, had to settle for Trump's personal attorney, and that was before he tanked his reputation. Bannon's career in the White House lasted approximately 20 minute, and Palin was never under serious consideration. Trump has a pattern of bringing people into his fold and making promises (or at least suggestions) that he conveniently forgets when it's time to actually pick someone.

There's some speculation that he might act differently this time because in 2016 he was too reliant on establishment advisors whose choices ended up burning him, and that he may choose to chart his own course this time. I don't think this is possible for two reasons. First, everyone listed above has locked horns with Trump in the past, and three of them are former Democrats whose stated views are still more liberal than the median Republican. There's no reason to believe that either Kennedy, Gabbard, or Musk would be any more of a Trump sycophant than Rex Tillerson or Mark Esper. Second, any position that comes with real power needs Senate confirmation, which makes most of these people total nonstarters.

I think you misunderstood the issue. The anti-vaxx portion of the base is very vocal and they won’t hesitate to primary a senator blocking RFK from the FDA. O I’m not sure about Gabbord, simply because I don’t know much about her or the base’s opinion of her. But the thing here is that the people putting Trump in office want to put those types of people in to secure an actual victory, and they’re not shy about insisting on the changes they fought for.

The anti-vaxx portion of the base is very vocal and they won’t hesitate to primary a senator blocking RFK from the FDA.

Honestly, I think Trump's election is actually going to pacify that part of the base to the point where they become much less decisive in primaries. The tea party people activated out of dissatisfaction with the ruling party-- at the time, obama. But Trump is going to claim the economy is good, the immigrants are out, and the woke agenda has been destroyed... and they're going to believe him, regardless of any of the facts on the ground. The traditional midterm apathy is going to favor opponents of trump, disgruntled with the status quo.

They’ll be pacified (and this is true of much of trumps base) if the state allows them to actually win. What you saw on Tuesday was a Revolution, and the people who won are going to insist on actually winning and not symbolic victories. They want Trump to clean house, they want the deep state brought to heel, they want their agenda to happen. And unlike the last time, the6 won’t take no for an answer.

people who won

The person who won is an elderly, lazy reality TV star with somewhat idiosyncratic political views with a long history across multiple careers of not honouring obligations to people who helped him out. He isn't seeking re-election and doesn't have a plausible dynastic successor (the Kushners don't want it, Don Jr and Eric aren't up to it, and Barron is a long way from 35) so he doesn't need you for anything.

The people who think they won will have exactly as much say as Trump (or whoever controls access to him if he becomes too senile to make decisions) wants them to. They can say they won't take no for an answer, but they say what they want and Trump does what he wants.

FWIW, my best guess is that both the upside and downside potential of the Trump administration will be limited by Trump's laziness and lack of attention to detail. This is what we saw in his first term, and also what we saw with Boris Johnson in the UK, who is a somewhat similar character.

He’s head of a movement though. And the movement is not a bunch of limp wristed hand wringing party loyalists. They support Trump as the guy who’s there to basically clean house of the establishment and in their view restore the republic to its glory days. They aren’t going to sit home and do nothing if that establishment doesn’t allow the changes to happen. They’re at minimum going to attempt (probably successfully) to primary any republicans who don’t give them what they want. And that’s if they’re nice. We also have a fairly good sized militia contingent who might not be so nice about it.

Trump is perhaps irrelevant except as figurehead. JD Vance is probably more aligned with the movement as I see it, and he’s definitely going to work to implement MAGA and Project 2025

If we're talking the COVID vaccine, that ship has sailed. Bringing up 2021 policy concerns in 2026 isn't going to cost anyone their office. If you're talking vaccines in general, I doubt the antivax Republicans are large enough to primary anyone for any reason, let alone lack of a confirmation vote. And keep in mind that they only need a few Republican votes, and 13 GOP Senators won't be facing reelection until 2030. Ultimately, though, it won't matter, because Trump isn't even going to nominate the guy.

I honestly have no clue. Trump looks to have a dream team IMHO, and a better understanding of who to trust and who not to trust.

And then there is Mike Pompeo. God help us if he ingratiates himself back into the administration again.

It's also... I mean when I think back to his prior administration, all the promising advisors like Steve Bannon got squeezed out of the administration by more establishment GOP apparatchiks who had Trump's ear when the media threw a shit fit over some made up controversy. I'd hope he's smart enough not to repeat that mistake again, and allow RFK Jr, Tulsi or Elon to be pushed out by the Court Eunuch's again. But I'm also fully prepared to hear Trump start a speech about RFK Jr the way he starts a speech about everyone he's about to fire. "He's a great guy, but I don't know him that well, and he didn't really do much...." And I guess at that point all we can expect is 4 years of mean tweets and deep state sabotage.

Still better than the alternative of a Harris admin using Title IX to force schools to sterilize and mutilate children, or some executive order granting amnesty to 30m illegals that might get challenged in court but is the fig leaf D governors need to start letting noncitizens vote in federal elections, or god help us a tax on unrealized gains. But I was hoping to claw back some my nation away from these people.

I don’t think you can draw a conclusion that Trump is intentionally doing this. Last presidency he was burned by a lot of his establishment picks when they weren’t loyal enough to him. Now he’s selecting for more loyalists, and that tends to include those who want power but have been kicked out or left behind by the establishment.

Maybe you like the end result of this, but I think it’s largely coincidental. It also means he’s less likely to pick competent people, since competent people are smart enough to stay close to existing power.

I don’t see why Trump would believe that these politicians are likely to be loyal. All of them have previously demonstrated an unusual amount of defiance to the party that employed them. You don’t pick dispositionally defiant, independent thinkers as loyalists, especially not when they have their own micro-base to return to. If RFK doesn’t implement the changes Trump wants, RFK will “burn him”, so RFK’s continued support is contingent on policy alignment. And that’s just politics in sum, no loyalty required. If Trump merely wanted a collection of loyalists then he would pick totally unknown conservatives, because they would only have him to thank for their position and their reputation would be contingent on Trump.

I don’t see why Trump would believe that these politicians are likely to be loyal.

Trump sees himself as a magnanimous sort of big man who gives everyone, even erstwhile enemies, the chance to be loyal. If Hillary swore fealty tomorrow he’d be distrustful, but he’d give her a chance to prove herself. He has no perpetual enemies.

What are you basing this on? My inclinations run the other way. There is no chance in hell Hillary would ever be appointed to anything

His VP pick literally compared him to Hitler less than ten years ago.

He didn't base his whole campaign for months on locking up JD Vance though.

But it’s exactly because Tulsi, RFK, and in a way Elon rebelled against the establishment that they need Trump. They have nowhere else to go!

I think Trump picks people for a lot of reasons, not just pure loyalty, I just think loyalty is much higher on his list of requirements than it used to be.

He has very old interviews where he talks about loyalty and punishing disloyalty. It seems very important to him, and it always has been.

He can say whatever he wants, but then he did a bad job last presidency, because they were fighting against him constantly. I’m imaging many more yes men this time around.

Arguably true for Tulsi (though I'd like to think she feels sufficiently strongly about her broader progressive economic outlook that she would never be compatible in the long run with a Republican administration), but the other two can just go back to whatever they were doing before a/two/three year(s) ago. Neither of them really needs party politics.

Tulsi and RFK, like Trump, are completely behind Israel. Ukraine is a sideshow in comparison in establishment interest.

Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. He has the most controversial foreign policy view of any Republican politician.

Coincidentally, agricultural secretory has very little to do with foreign policy.

But he’d be ninth in line for the presidency.

The ratsphere is among the most vocal critics of the FDA. However, I perceive that the consensus is that it is too restrictive, not pushing towards minimizing health_costs - health_benefits, but instead minimizing health_costs - 0.01*health_benefits or something, because their incentives are bad: they will not be celebrated as heroes for certifying a drug which saves millions of lives, but they will be certainly be cast as villains if a drug they certified ends up killing a few 10k. "The FDA serves the commercial interests of the pharmaceuticals" is either orthogonal to that or even in contradiction.

French fries, various prescription medications, raw milk and psychedelics all have some risks. I am all for arguments that current legislation is not consistent with regard to the relative risks posed by them, and some should be regulated more harshly and some less harshly, but I would be surprised to see Trump basing his policies on a sciency risk analysis.

(The other thing to discuss is the debate what should be regulated by the federal government and what should be left to the states. However, I do not expect any consistency from either party here.)

If we are making a distinction between dissident members of the establishment and actual anti-establishment candidates, any Kennedy clearly falls even more on the "establishment dissident" side than Trump does.

  • Robert F Kennedy, one the most vocal critics against the pharmaceutical and processed food industries. [...] In Trump’s victory speech, Trump proudly stated that RFK will “go wild” with his blessing provided he doesn’t touch fracking or the oil industry. [...]

  • Rumors of Thomas Massie being tapped for agricultural secretary. [...] He wants the legalization of raw milk[...]

I assume Trump voters want a return to the economy prosperity they recall from 2017-2019, not to the whole having a pandemic thing of 2020. Hopefully we get lucky and H5N1 doesn't jump to humans (and my understanding is it's more likely it won't than it will), but if you wanted to maximize the chance of another pandemic, these are the policies you'd enact. Not that Biden has exactly been pro-active in doing anything about H5N1.

Although if we get a sufficiently anti-vax federal government we can just have some old-fashioned polio and measles epidemics.

People drank raw milk for thousands of years. Louis Pasteur only invented pastuerization in the 1860s. It wasn't until the early industrial era of contaminated factory dirt that raw milk began causing problems. Which is to say, pasteurization doesn't make milk safe to drink, it makes dirty contaminated milk safe to drink. Which isn't even a problem anymore because our cleanliness is better. Not to mention that the average cow used for raw milk lives in very healthy natural conditions compared to the feedlot pens used for factory farming mass milk cows.

I've been drinking raw milk on and off again for years. It's never made me sick. Raw milk is banned in certain states, but a dozen or so allow it, and more allow some workarounds. It would probably make the Founding Fathers sick to know that milk as they knew it is now illegal to drink in many places. What kind of liberty is that?

Anyways, the last pandemic probably didn't come from viruses in the food supply jumping to humans; it probably came from novel coronavirus funding. Prosecute the people responsible or bankrupt the institutes responsible. I don't know that either of those things will happen, but with Bobby Kennedy in government it's the likeliest chance we'll ever have.

People also died of all sorts of shit for thousands of years. Sometimes literally.

I agree there’s little reason to treat raw milk as the fentanyl of animal products, but it’s not because of the Founding Fathers.

I agree, at the very least direct-to-consumer raw milk should be perfectly legal. I wouldn't trust even something like a co-op creamery not to screw something up.

If we get another pandemic under Trump and another round of global lockdowns, I will update heavily towards thinking that Covid was intentionally planned and the new one is too. Because that would just be a little too perfect.

If he slashes regulation on oil rigs, and we have some sort of horrible spill, would you assume Deepwater Horizon was planned?

Deepwater Horizon happened due to onerous regulations that crowded out terrestrial oil drilling in favor of offshore drilling, which is inherently less profitable and far more dangerous. A foreign E&P company (BP) outsourced its well driller to a firm that bungled the job and had lax safety standards. That sounds a lot like the circumstances behind the COVID-19 lab leak. Regulations caused the job to be offshored/outsourced… foreign entity screws the pooch…

I do not think that you should update very heavily.

In one model, pandemics randomly happen with a certain rate, perhaps once every 50-100 years (though we might debate if the rate should scale linearly with the world population or not).

In another model, the deep state (or whomever) will engineer a pandemic timed to prevent Trump's re-election (not that he would be eligible again).

Both of these models explain the past data reasonably well. The deep state model might predict 50% for another pandemic (after all, they might try something different, nobody would claim that a lack of another Trump pandemic conclusively falsifies 'COVID was a CIA op'), while the natural rate model would give you a 4-10% chance, perhaps.

I have not calculated it, but I think that the update would increase the Bayesian probability of the deep state hypothesis by a factor of five or ten (if your prior was reasonably small).

If this is a 'heavy update' is debatable, the overall effect is largely dependent on your prior. If you have the deep state COVID hypothesis at 20%, then this observation will certainly push you over 50%. Personally, I have the probability that COVID was intentionally released by a state government (or a cabal of similar influence) at perhaps 0.3%. Most of that 0.3% are not linked to US federal politics at all, however. So even if I multiply the probability of the subhypothesis 'it was all done to thwart Trump' by a factor of ten, it will still be very low.

As an analogy, suppose someone claims to be able to predict dice rolls. I throw a 1d20, and it comes up at the predicted value. This will certainly favor the hypothesis 'that guy is a psychic' over the null hypothesis 'he is just guessing' by a factor of twenty. But this will certainly not be enough to convince me, because I started with a very low prior probability.

Bad model I'd argue, ignores agency of public officials.

Consider parallel: "terrorist attacks are random and happen at a certain rate. If a huge terrorist attack happens and the state seizes enormous powers, then starts warning about another looming terrorist attack right as they attempt to justify invading another country/win re-election, the dice roll probably just came up 20 again by coincidence."

Pandemics are now "in the tool kit" the same way the "terrorism alert level" warnings at every bus station were in 2003. And deliberate release/false-flags aside, "are we in a pandemic/at risk of terrorist attack" is itself a political decision: see the difference between choosing "we must fight monkeypox stigma and not let it change our behavior" vs "we must close the bathhouses for two weeks (forever) to slow the spread"

Wouldn’t they also have to consider public compliance? After 2020, I don’t think a lockdown is going to be allowed to happen. You won’t get anyone to abide the lockdowns even if it’s Cordysepts of zombie apocalypse fame and mobilized the entire US military to enforce it. It would be resisted and probably violently so. The government would have to be insane to try it.

Depends if it's a situation as unfamiliar as the first one, where medical establishments and governments were truly panicking. That fear is transmissible and I don't think there'd be that much resistance. If it's what looks like a repeat of Covid though, and there is less of a sense of the unknown, I do think people would likely resist.

Even at an unknown, the known negatives of lockdown are known — and the end dates given by the authorities are known to be suspect. If some government officials told you to lockdown for “two weeks” given what happened in 2020, very few people are going to believe that the lockdown is actually going to end within 6 months. They also know that they won’t get much in the way of support when the lockdown forces people into unemployment and to close businesses, or schools or forbidding social gatherings. And given that, and given the knock on effects of inflation and shortages, it’s going to be very very difficult to convince people to go along. Covid wasn’t exactly a nothing burger but it also wasn’t something that justified the extreme measures taken to slow the spread.

I think that when the situation becomes scary, everything changes. Another covid-style pandemic wouldn't do it, until and unless hospitals became overrun on a whole new level. If it was something much more horrific, I reckon you'd be surprised how quickly people's current bravado would disappear.

You don't have to convince people to go along. Just send cops to close down the businesses.

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No, people would fall right in line just like during COVID, and any that didn't would be forced in line by government force, just like during COVID. There might be some violent resistance in Red areas until some high-profile loudly-praised shootings of the resisters.

I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns. Although H5N1 could be bad enough that a lot more people would be isolating voluntarily.

But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy, not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?

I can't imagine there being another round of top-down enforced lockdowns.

I can!

But, really, your assumption would be conspiracy

Sure!

not the much simpler explanation that public health is bad when you cut funding for public health?

This phrasing makes it sound like the response to Covid arose naturally from "the facts on the ground". But the response to Covid was a political and ideological choice. We could have chosen differently. There was no direct unmediated causal link between the actual effects of Covid and the measures we took in response.

We could have chosen differently

And in fact, some countries, or even states, did. I feel like this conflation of COVID with COVID-response is a huge issue.

As @SlowBoy said, raw milk is perfectly safe to drink. If you feel squeamish about it then by all means don't drink it (I'm all for requiring proper labeling), but don't deny the rest of us the choice.


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