domain:web.law.duke.edu
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6m ago
Does this have anything to do with Trump?
The article does mention some connections with Trump specifically and with the US government in general.
Prince, a former U.S. Navy Seal, founded the Blackwater military security firm in 1997. He sold the company in 2010 after Blackwater employees were convicted of unlawfully killing 14 unarmed civilians while escorting a U.S. embassy convoy in Baghdad's Nisour Square. The men were pardoned by Trump during his first term in the White House.
Since Trump's return to the White House, Prince has advised Ecuador on how to fight criminal gangs and struck a deal with the Democratic Republic of Congo to help secure and tax its mineral wealth.
“It’s hard to imagine them operating without the consent of the Trump administration,” said Romain Le Cour Grandmaison, head of the Haiti program at Geneva-based Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime.
When asked for comment about Le Cour Grandmaison's assertion, a State Department spokesperson said it has not hired Prince or his company for any work in Haiti.
A senior White House official said: "The U.S. government has no involvement with the private military contractor hired by the Haitian government. We are not funding this contract or exercising any oversight.”
hooser
10m ago
On the one hand, police clamping down on catcalling with anything other than a talking-to seems to me like a government clampdown on an unsavory lower-class norm. On the other hand, I sure am glad that bottom-pinching is no longer considered merely an unsavory lower-class norm.
JarJarJedi
11m ago
Wait, I am confused - does this have anything to do with Trump or journos are so addicted that they are just unable to report any news, no matter what they are, without mentioning Trump somehow?
Setting that aside, I think that's pretty much what Russians, including the infamous Wagner, had been doing in Africa for a while? And in general some state hiring mercenaries to keep the order - this seems to be a common picture for millenia (Carthage did something like that, and probably more ancient examples exist) though I guess it has been out of fashion for a while, but never really went away.
2rafa
11m ago
What happened in India is just a late stage version of what is already happening in Brazil and what will happen in America, it happens whenever these kind of ethnic merger events happen. Over a long enough time, two ethnically different populations who share the same land will intermarry. Ethnic enclaves - in the Ottoman lands, in 30s Shanghai, elsewhere - can last a while, perhaps even a few centuries - but in the end shared ethnogenesis is inevitable. Even Ashkenazi Jews are the product of Levantines and Italians, after all, and today over 60% of American Jews intermarry. If two people inhabit the same soil long enough, they will breed.
This dates back the full length of human prehistory, it encompasses even Homo Sapiens and Neanderthal interaction, or those other early hominid interactions in Southeast Asia that led to the situation in Australasia and Melanesia etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
14m ago
from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
Not dying. Maintaining the level of success, arete, and prosperity that has already been obtained. These are not only good insofar as we get more of them - they are good in and of themselves, and forgetting and taking for granted the successes of the past is one of the chief flaws of modernist thinking.
The example I provided was a picture of women in full niqab. My experience with men from countries where niqab is common is that they are often extremely distressed by the comparatively immodest dress of Western women. Traces of that remain in most Western regimes, too, though usually limited to the exposure of genitals (and sometimes breasts) being treated as legitimately "distressing" to display.
I'm pretty sure there was a post here by a frustrated man who didn't appreciate seeing tight gymwear constantly in public. I can't find it now unfortunately but I believe it was well-received or even AAQC.
So apparently not just a Muslim thing.
The problem is that the Brahmins could not control their own poor. This is what I have come to believe is the foundational problem of modern India. Land reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Behavioral reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Even political reform is impossible, because the peasants will revolt. Why did your tribe, your caste, grant them endless reservation, government employment, political power? Because you could not stand against it! I have met many extremely intelligent higher caste Indians, far more intelligent than me. This is clear by their extraordinary success in the West, especially by niche subgroups like the Tamil Brahmins, the Iyers and Iyengars and so on.
But in the homeland, they were too weak to conquer their own common people. This is the ultimate failing for any ruling class. You must save India before you can do anything else. I respect that your religion neither destroyed you nor saved you, but it is not important now.
hydroacetylene
18m ago
Yes, looking at women(other than your wife) in bikinis is sinful… but Jesus also says that those who lead others to sin are more sinful- he specifically says it would be better for them if they were killed.
JarJarJedi
18m ago
Obviously I am considering Jews to be a single race in this context, just like Israel does.
Israel does nothing of the sort, Israel does not have racial policies. You completely invented this, out of nothing, and you pretend this is "obvious". It's not obvious, it's you saying things that are not true. Stop doing that.
just like South Africa was a very racially diverse country under Apartheid
No, much more diverse actually. Which you would have known if you knew anything about Israel beyond a bunch of fourth-party packaged woke slogans, but you don't, do you?
Still, the laws of Apartheid made it a country designed first and foremost around the well-being of white people
And Israel doesn't have laws like that. Which again is very easy to learn, if only you tried.
they do not have civil marriage
They do. Ask me how I know? That's how I got married. The marriage in Israel is a bit complex topic, but it's not too hard to learn about it. Again, you didn't even try.
And of course it is completely unreasonable to expect Israel not to take Syrian land that is just there for the taking,
Syria is at war with Israel, and repeatedly refused to sign a peace treaty. When you start a war and lose it, that's what happens. When you are dumb enough to continue the war after losing it, that's going to happen to you again. And yes, it's completely unreasonable to expect from Israel to not act as they deem necessary to protect their borders. If Syria didn't like it, they should have signed the treaty long ago, when Israel offered it. They wanted to keep the state of war instead, because they were unable to admit being defeated by filthy Jews. They are now living with the consequences of it.
This tired talking point about double standards being applied to Israel is the most worn out argument that is just based on playing the victim.
"Tired" is not as strong an argument as you may think it is. If you're tired of hearing the truth, keep being tired, the truth doesn't change from it. Israel has been and continues to be attacked by Arabs - from Hamas to Iran to Husites to Hezbollah to others. All those people eventually find out the dear and grave costs of such actions. Israel does not need to "play" anything - Israel can defend itself very well, it's you and other Hamas defenders who are whining and crying and claiming they are victims - fresh after murdering thousands of Jews and still keeping hostages in Gaza. What they are suffering is the direct consequence of their behavior.
Israeli Arabs are excluded from conscription, so they are not equal.
Yes, they have the privilege of benefitting from all services Israeli society has to offer, without having to risk their lives to defend it. Still, many Druzes and Bedouins serve, and I am sure if a particular Arab citizen wants to contribute voluntarily, he will be afforded this opportunity. If the inequality consists of having less chance to be murdered by other Arabs, then I don't see it as a huge problem, and neither see the Israeli Arabs.
Driving people together is a typical precursor to cleansing.
Nobody "drew them together" to Gaza - they went there voluntarily and they resist all efforts to relocate them anywhere - except, of course, capturing the territory of Israel and cleansing it of the Jews. And their population grows by 2% every year, which is faster than Israeli population (1.5% a year). That's some shitty cleansing.
I have a hard time believing that you are arguing in good faith if you equate a free nation state to a ghetto.
I do not, you do. You said there are "ghettos" - I say they do not exist, what existed in Gaza was completely autonomous self-rule by Gazans, with complete and full withdrawal of any Jewish presence and Israeli control. And the only thing that was asked from them is to please stop trying to murder us. Gaza answered to it by trying to murder Israelis even harder - and succeeding to murder thousands and kidnap hundreds on October 7. That was completely voluntary action from their side, and now they are suffering the consequences of it.
I have seen no poll that shows that all Palestinians are in favor of killing all Jews
Not "all", but 80 to 90 percent. Look up any poll on support of Hamas. You are trying to construct a ridiculous sentence by claiming every Arab in Gaza, including just born infants, is in favor of killing every single Jew. Of course in this ridiculous form it is not true. But it is true that overwhelming majority - about 80 to 90 percent, usually, though it varies with time, but is never not overwhelming majority - of Gazans support Hamas, and their goal of destroying Israel as a state, capturing its territory and murdering as many Jews as they can while doing it. It's their official and well known goal, they have never hidden it, they have gleefully filmed themselves doing it, they have bragged about it repeatedly, and they promised to do it again as much as they can. Israel knows that, and the result of it is what you see now in Gaza. In fact, Israel repeatedly, multiple times, for months, asked Gazans to do one single thing - let the people they kidnapped go, let those Jews live and be free - and they always refused. They will find out there is a price for such actions, and will keep finding out until one day they decide to do what other, more smart, Arab populations decided - that the dream of murdering the Jews and kicking them out of Israel is not worth the pain they will suffer trying to fullfill this dream. That this is no longer the goal they want to spend their lives achieving. Then we will have peace.
Supah_Schmendrick
19m ago
Here's the thing though. I'm fine with human civilization ending. I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization continuing. And I don't see anything inherently good about human civilization ending. I'm neutral about it.
There's a saying about this..."so open-minded his brain fell out."
I enjoy being alive, but I see no fundamental deep importance in keeping the human species existing. I'm not a nihilist in the least bit. I love being alive in a very visceral way.
Okay, so you're a solipsist, not a nihilist [edit: fixing a brain-fart]. This is not an improvement.
Rov_Scam
20m ago
The New York Post ran an article about this a couple days ago, and the comments were variations on the following themes:
- You can't compliment women anymore!
- This intrudes on free speech
- This law probably doesn't apply to immigrants
- They were wearing enticing clothes; this is entrapment
- The women were too unattractive to deserve catcalls
- The police need to focus on actual crimes, like grooming gangs, not this penny ante bullshit
- This is Sharia law
- This is a dumb idea that Democrats probably like
I'll admit to admit that it's a bit unfair to judge conservatives as a whole based on the New York Post comment section, or any online comment section for that matter, but I don't think I'm going out on too much of a limb to suggest that conservatives in general think that busting people for catcalling, or even viewing it as a police issue, is stupid. The culture war angle here is that if you replace "catcalling" with "panhandling" the polarity reverses instantly. I have no doubt, based on prior stories the Post has run on panhandling, that if they ran a story about how some American city did a similar crackdown on begging we'd be hearing about how it was about time that a mayor grew some balls and cracked down, and that all those people should be locked up in mental institutions or forced to get real jobs.
In essence, though, whether we're talking about catcalling, or panhandling, or various other things associated with homelessness, what we're really talking about is obnoxious behavior that occurs in public, and the right to be obnoxious in public.
The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.
Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.
If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.
I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.
People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.
hydroacetylene
21m ago
This seems super culturally mediated, though--I'm not sure I'm in a good position to just tell a pious Muslim or devout Amish that his feelings about bikinis simply don't count the way that a modern woman's feelings about wolf whistles does.
Women shouldn’t be allowed to wear bikinis in public, but neither that nor speedos nor the Borat swimsuit justify potential violence the way a particularly forwards/lewd catcall would.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
22m ago
Whenever I read wholesale dehumanization of groups of people who live in squalor I think to myself: maybe it's the empathetic part of the human brain becoming overloaded and the response from the rest of the brain is to rationalize it as "Well, they're not humans like me.". Yes, words like "dysgenic" and "caste" and "elite" qualify as dehumanization for me, even if they don't for everybody.
I mean, maybe. But my entire life has been living in a boomer project of trying to uplift these communities... to no impact what so ever. Build them critical infrastructure and they destroy it. Give them free resources and they just have as many kids as it takes to reduce them to their prior squalor. At the end of the day, they live like that because they choose to live like that. At least in so far as any of us choose to live any particular way while struggling with the human condition. It just seems that the human condition they struggle against seems to be on the extreme tail and at a horrifying scale.
A society that is 1-2% horrifying unreformable anti-civilization monsters might be able to get away with putting them up in nice abodes, letting them have a terrifying number of children, and generally dealing with the disproportionate drain on society this minority creates. When that rises to the level of a voting block of a country, it gets into "I don't fucking know man, it's literally impossible to accommodate them all, they're gonna drag us all down with them!"
hydroacetylene
24m ago
I do think there is highly significant asymmetry of discomfort between a woman being catcalled and a pious man seeing some legging-clad ass
There 100% is. Women walking around in their underwear is an unfortunate commentary on the state of society; it’s not directly threatening.
07mk
24m ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable.
I don't think anyone knows this with any meaningful level of confidence. The heat death of the universe through entropy is the only thing that I can think of that could guarantee this, but I don't believe we have a complete-enough understanding of physics and cosmology to state with 100% confidence that that's inescapable.
Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
This is perfectly cromulent, but also, I think most people would prefer to live a beautiful long life over a beautiful but pointlessly short one. And the thing about prolonging versus ending life is that it's asymmetrical; if you prolong life when human civilization is barely lumbering along in a state of senility, there's always the chance in the future that that civilization becomes beautiful and prolonged. If it ends in a blaze of beauty, then no one ever gets to discover if there was a way to have a prolonged beautiful civilization. Believing that the end of civilization/humanity is worth it as long as my own principles and values got met by the last generation requires a God-like level of confidence in the correctness of one's own values. Which points to faith.
Which is also perfectly cromulent! I just wish people would talk about this honestly and openly.
hydroacetylene
28m ago
I understand you cannot be brought around to prosocial motivations.
Who do you expect to pay your social security and wipe your ass when you’re old? Is it a work until MAID plan?
2rafa
30m ago
I've also heard theories this is a desperate hail mary to game the stats and have more white people committing "sex offenses" since the current stats are so stubbornly brown.
Very unlikely if you speak to anyone who has been catcalled in England.
07mk
46m ago
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the frouts of progress.
It's certainly perfectly cromulent to judge that as good and even better than the alternative of a civilization that keeps chugging along in a way that improves people's lives compared to not having civilization - and even improving the amount by which this is an improvement - without enjoying the fruits of progress, where progress here refers to the types of societal changes pushed for by people identifying as "progressives," rather than something more generic like "improving over time" or "moving forward." I don't think this is a common sentiment, though; what I see by and large is motivated reasoning that circumvents the issue altogether, by adopting a genuine, good faith belief that progress - again, referring to the specific meaning alluded above, not the general term - not only won't result in civilization ending within a generation, but that progress will help make civilization more robust against ending.
As a progressive, I would say that the odds that I'm mistaken about the goodness of my ideology - and more generally that people who agree with me are mistaken about the goodness of our ideology - is sufficiently high that I have a general preference to hedge my bets by having humanity keep moving forward long after my death. It's possible that we'll create literal heaven on Earth that you and I can enjoy until we die as the last humans to have ever lived, but it's also possible that, when good, intelligent, well-meaning people do their best, in good faith, to implement ideas that I consider to be good, this actually creates a hell on Earth that we all have to suffer through before we die as the last humans to have ever lived. I would prefer to avoid that.
If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
The way I see it, the point of civilization is to organize humans in a way that helps make both surviving and thriving easier or more likely for them. Not uniformly or monotonically, but in some vague general sense. Which some/many people see as a good thing worth sacrificing for, even if no one ever enjoys the fruits of progress, again, by that specific meaning referenced above.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
59m ago
The third is more general throughout the interminable arguments about US immigration, where a common conservative argument against open borders is that allowing anyone in who wants to come in would cause US society to worsen, including, at the limits, just destroying the country altogether. And one common sentiment, though rarely stated explicitly, among progressives who reject this argument, has been something along the lines of, "If open borders would destroy the USA, then so be it; at least we didn't discriminate against foreigners along the way." This happened to explicitly be my own position for a while, before I decided I was selfish enough to want to keep some of the benefits of USA society for myself in the future.
This is just as often reversed on immigration, though.
Lib: We need immigrants for economic growth, to bring in young productive people to support social security programs, to do jobs that are otherwise difficult to fill. Immigration makes America stronger!
Con: What does American economic growth matter if it doesn't benefit Americans? I'd rather see the American economy grow or collapse on the strength of Americans, than sell out my country to foreigners to get stronger.
Purity is typically a conservative basis for morality in Moral Foundations Theory. Refusal to compromise on one's beliefs is the essence of having beliefs, of having principles. Life for the sake of life is the philosophy of bacteria, the life has to mean something, be something.
TwiceHuman
1hr ago
These questions are all meaningful to me. I'm weird, though. I'm not even particularly good at math.
I hate dynamic programming, but it seems that you can't "jump ahead" when calculating prime numbers. This feels like computational irreducibility. The world in which this property exists, and the one in which it doesn't, are meaningfully different.
The Collatz conjecture, and BB, relate to the ability to generate large things from small ones. It seems relevant for this question: Can you design a society which is both novel and stable over infinite time? Would it have to loop, repeating the same chain of events forever, or is there an infinite sequence of events which never terminates, but still stays within a certain set of bounds? If we became all-powerful and created an utopia, we might necessarily trap ourselves in it forever (because you cannot break out of a loop. If you loop once, you loop forever). It may also be that any utopia must necessarily be finite because it reaches a state which is not utopian in finite time.
Some other questions are about the limitations of math. It's relevant whether a system of everything is possible or not (if truth is relative or absolute). If trade-offs are inherent to everything, then "optimization" is simply dangerous, it means were destroying something every time we "improve" a system. It would imply that you cannot really improve anything, that you can only prioritize different things at the cost of others. For instance, a universal paperclip AI might necessarily have to destroy the world, not because it's not aligned, but because "increase one value at the cost of every other value" is optimization.
I also have a theory that self-fulfilling prophecies are real because reality has a certain mathematical property. In short, we're part of the thing we're trying to model, so the model depends on us, and we depend on the model. This imples that magic is real for some definitions of real, but it also means that some ideas are dangerous, and that Egregores and such might be real.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
Human extinction is 100% inevitable. Because of that I am sympathetic to the idea that acting on one's values is ultimately more important than survival. It's the same as preferring to live a beautiful short life over a pointlessly prolonged one in a state of senility.
Btw I think extinction rebellion is named that because of mass wildlife extinctions rather than human extinction.
Lazuli
1hr ago
There's no centralized repository.
If the program's mission is to whip people into writing publishable work every day, there should be a place where anyone can read the pieces. I hope the organizers offer some insight into that.
Which, to me, is interesting to think about with respect to the concept of a "progressive," which indicates someone who wants to "progress" - but what's the point of progress if there's no one around to enjoy its fruits?
If progress results in civilization ending within a generation, then at least one generation has enjoyed the fruits of progress. If civilization continues forever without progress, then, from the point of view of at least N=1 progressive, what's the point of civilization?
This forum also has seen some Aella-inspired discussion of this phenomenon.
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