domain:putanumonit.com
sockpuppet2
4m ago
Literally?
sockpuppet2
5m ago
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Why?
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What was wrong with the legal reasoning in the decision?
sockpuppet2
5m ago
I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".
And the other SCOTUS Catholics?
sockpuppet2
6m ago
the nuts and bolts of your life that don't happen on the internet
I was asking from a place of pessimism about interstate companies faithfully executing independent processes for customers in different states (if the human-made algorithm is less profitable than the AI black-box, will the company scrupulously avoid benchmarking the former against the latter or pulling out of the market?), but fair point.
sockpuppet2
6m ago
Using "incendiary device" as a hypothetical, after the same words were used to describe a makeshift flame thrower, was poor communication. However, I think the point remains that less-lethal weapons address the problems you wrote about, and that a firearm may have been a good defense weapon against this specific attacker is not a good reason to opt for firearms over less-lethal weapons.
Even for other molotov attacks, these people haven't typically done anywhere near as good of a job 'fading back into the crowd' as they think.
How do you know?
Target discernment and backstop are things that matter, but they're vastly overstated as unsolved and unsolvable problems among antigunners.
I'm not an "antigunner" (I'd eliminate practically all restrictions on personal ownership of small arms, if I had my way), but it's difficult to overstate a problem that is literally deathly serious.
sockpuppet2
6m ago
In 1979, Playboy published a 15 page feature/interview with musician Wendy Carlos. Carlos had been a minor celebrity for a few years around 1970, known for being a pioneer of musical sound synthesis (she and collaborator Rachel Elkind recorded the "Switched-On Bach" series of albums and much of the soundtrack for Kubrick's film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" and Carlos had performed with the St. Louis Symphony, as well as doing a handful of televised demonstrations of sound synthesis), before becoming a recluse. The motivation for Carlos to sacrifice her privacy and Playboy to devote 15 pages to a relatively obscure musician was sharing Carlos's experience of gender dysphoria sexual transition, something few had previously done. (A transwoman named Christine Jorgensen had shared her experience with a magazine in 1953 and published an autobiography in 1967, but she did so after being involuntarily outed by the New York Daily News and having difficulty supporting herself. Playboy assumed their readers to be so unfamiliar with the topic that two of the introductory questions are "Let's start with a basic question: What is a transsexual?" and its followup question, "So transsexuals aren't necessarily former homosexuals?") I recommend reading it as a now-historical primary source.
Carlos is an interesting case, because she has traits that would trigger incredulity among critics of transgender medicine, if she were transitioning today (exemplifying many elements of the male nerd archetype), but she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child (page 4, though I strongly recommend reading the full interview). Historical cases aren't dispositive of present-day sociogenic gender dysphoria, but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?
(Here's a pdf of the book Carlos mentions on page 5, in case anyone is curious about it.)
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
8m ago
Makes perfect sense to me, AI is a national-level issue. Really it's global, a server farm in Ohio can take jobs off Uzbeks and Bolivians, not to mention Floridians. Makes sense to regulate nationally.
Plus, would you really want California regulating a critical sector of the economy?
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
10m ago
Reminds me of one of my favorite movie dialogues:
Warden: Did you enjoy God’s latest gift?
Teddy Daniels: What?
Warden: God’s gift. [points to the sky] The violence. When I came downstairs in my home and I saw a tree in my living room, it reached out for me like a divine hand. God loves violence.
Teddy Daniels: I…I hadn’t noticed.
Warden: Sure you have. Why else would there me so much of it? It’s in us. It’s what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.
Teddy Daniels: I thought God gave us moral order. Warden: There’s no moral order as pure as this storm. There’s no moral order at all. There’s just this; can my violence conquer yours?
Teddy Daniels: I’m not violent.
Warden: Yes, you are. You’re as violent as they come. I know this because I’m as violent as they come. With the constraints of society we’re lifted. And I was all that stood between you and me? You would crack my skull and eat my meaty parts. Wouldn’t you? But Cawley thinks that you’re harmless, that you can be controlled. But I know different.
Teddy Daniels: You don’t know me.
Warden: Oh, but I do.
Teddy Daniels: No, you don’t. You don’t know me at all. Warden: Oh, I know you. We’ve known each other for centuries. If I was to sink my teeth into your eye right now, would you be able to stop me before I blinded you?
Teddy Daniels: Give it a try.
Warden: That’s the spirit.
Always wondered if he wasn't based a little on Judge Holden.
gattsuru
43m ago
Cutberto Viramontes and Christopher Khaya, together with the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, appeal the dismissal of their constitutional challenge to Cook County’s assault weapons ban. Relying on District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), they argue that the ordinance is facially invalid under the Second Amendment.
We addressed a similar challenge to the ordinance in a case that was before us on appeal from the denial of a preliminary injunction. Bevis v. City of Naperville, We rejected the challenge based on the record the plaintiffs had compiled at that early stage of the litigation. Id. at 1197. The challengers here have failed to develop a record sufficient to justify a different result. We therefore affirm.
It's a three-page read, but to summarize: Viramontes has not demonstrated sufficiently that an AR15 is different than an M16. What could prove such a thing? What is required to prove such a thing? The court does not feel it necessary to even hint. Why did it take three grown adults several months to write three pages? Also a mystery.
Yes, Bruen explicitly said that the burden was on the government, that "The burden then falls on respondents to show that New York’s proper-cause requirement is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation." Yes, it's so obvious it should be in judicial notice. Yes, the plaintiffs explicitly argued "The banned semiautomatic rifles, like all other semiautomatic firearms, fire only one round for each pull of the trigger. They are not machine guns." among a variety of other significant distinctions.
Doesn't matter.
That was one of the possible ones, except nope. Hope Kavanaugh finds it really illuminating.
WandererintheWilderness
45m ago
How dare they! Don't they understand that we have norms? Well, no, "We" don't, because those norms died here,
This is what I dispute. If we're talking about gun control - sure, the 2nd Am has been bent pretty badly to allow Blue states to effectively ban at least some arms that should clearly be protected. But no Blue government actually passed a federal ban on firearms. I guarantee you that in a world where everybody ignored the Constitution without a second thought, they would have tried at some point. The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict, while our chances of surviving are excellent;
I don't actually believe that. The Blue Tribe has better liars, better loophole-finders, and above all else a much better social shaming apparatus. It has a nonzero ability to affect Red-aligned normies' worldview, while Red think-tanks are pretty useless at shifting Blue-aligned normies' Overton window. If everyone fights maximally dirty, then, all my personal opinions aside, I'm betting Blue.
(Of course, perhaps we're operating at different levels of metaphor, and you meant the Blues would lose a literal bullets-flying civil war? That's a very different conversation, and frankly one I'm not sure has very much to do with the issue at hand.)
roystgnr
49m ago
Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.
2.25% (15y refinance), and I won't shut up about it!
(You've got to let me have this one; in hindsight the biggest financial decision of my life was "I guess gwern makes some good points about this 'bitcoin' thing, but I just can't bring myself to buy any fake money tokens for nearly a dollar a piece!")
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1hr ago
I know millennials who bought in (youngish, but out of college) at that interest rate. Post-2008 was an interesting time for most of a decade. Also very quietly, I suppose: their equity is also up 200% or more.
What if the other side bends the niceties, but is still constrained by them to a point? You're better off with a devil who's compelled to keep up a facade of lawfulness than a devil who's acting completely unconstrained.
Of course. Then the discussion advances to where we draw the line between "we can live with this" and "we cannot live with this", and it becomes very important to have a clear understanding of exactly what you're being asked to tolerate. Hence why @gattsuru and I have spent considerable effort over a long period of time tracking the facts on the ground, and why, more and more over time, the conversations here are predictable in advance. At some point in the relatively near future, the Supreme Court is going to hand another win to Blue Tribe, and then our elites will turn to Red Tribe and expect them to accept this win as decisive, and then will be shocked and horrified when Red Tribe fails to comply. How dare they! Don't they understand that we have norms? Well, no, "We" don't, because those norms died here, even if realization of their death doesn't actually dawn until Blue Tribe attempts to draw on them and so renders their absence legible via New York Times headlines.
To put it another way, taking the blows is usually a better strategy than declaring all-out war. The fact that the other guy is feeling free to pummel you is a pretty good sign that they're confident in their ability to win (or at least ensure MAD) if you did, foolishly, fight back with lethal force.
The other guy is deluded, and their delusion has been sustained by ironclad control of the knowledge-production apparatus that, it turns out, has just about rusted through. If we play by the rules Blue Tribe plays by, Blue Tribe has essentially no chance of surviving the ensuing conflict, while our chances of surviving are excellent; thrive vs survive, no?
Blue Tribe's inability to understand this fact and thus leaning heavily on their supposed strength is one of the great risk factors dominating the present crisis.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1hr ago
Here's an extension of this theory that I've also been kicking around.
I remember, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump was still being treated as a joke, him racking up surprisingly big wins (in a Republican primary context) in places like Massachusetts. And I was reading something at the time that noted, essentially, that there was a surprisingly big, untapped demographic of voters all throughout New England and places like Illinois (or other Midwest places with dominant progressive cities ) that wasn't particularly religious or pious or prissy, and wasn't large enough to win local elections, but that sounded a LOT like Trump and was really receptive to Trump. But neither major political coalition had had anything to say such people for a very long time.
And ever since then, I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners. The Democratic party had turned into the party of coastal winners, and the Republican party had evolved into the party of sunbelt winners. And that meant Democrats were more attached to old money prestige cultural institutions like universities, and the Republican party was especially connected to new money success like booming California and Texas and Florida population growth and business (although over time, the political culture in California shifted from the ur-Sunbelt model to a much more coastal, entrenched model). And this bifurcation was comfortable and made a lot of sense to all involved - of course the two parties are going to be heavily utilized by various winning elements of society and work as their megaphones and enact their interests. And the winners of the Democratic coalition were morally prissy about PC stuff, and the winners of the Republican coalition was morally prissy about evangelical and personal sex stuff, and so that go reflected in how they became annoying in public discourse, and how they got attacked rhetorically.
But the George W Bush years, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis, were very bad for the Sunbelt winners coalition. It was badly weakened. And a lot that coalition, particularly the parts that had gotten wealthier and were more drawn to the cultural attraction of the Obama story, really didn't want to be associated with the culturally low class (but still economically booming) Sunbelt model any more.
And that coalitional weakness opened the door to a new faction, one that wasn't really getting any representation or being courted... the Northern (and Midwest / rust belt) losers faction. And the Northern losers faction is a nightmare for the Northern winners faction, because 1) they aren't prissy like the Sunbelt evangelicals, 2) they've embraced counterculture energy to a more serious degree than even the Northern winners had (which had always been a cultural Achillies heel for southern evangelicals), 3) they're actually way more racists and tribal than sunbelt winners have been for the last several decades, and much more unapologetically so, which morally horrifies Northern winner sensibilities, and 4) on a deep and profound level, their condition is in many ways the FAULT of northern winners, their own local expert class who has been much more interested in growth through globalization than the economic fortunes of their downscale neighbors.
I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney. That's a very self-flattering world for them, where everything makes sense and they get to fulfill their role of being cool. But quite frankly, the 2016 campaign was the first time in my entire life where I was seeing campaign material for Republicans, at least online (much of filtered through 4chan anarchy), where I recognized the Republican side of political rhetoric being, unambiguously, much cooler in a countercultural sense than what Democrats were doing. I found it fascinating, to be honest.
What if the other side bends the niceties, but is still constrained by them to a point? You're better off with a devil who's compelled to keep up a facade of lawfulness than a devil who's acting completely unconstrained. Sure, it sucks to be stuck in this kind of asymmetrical equilibrium where you have to completely refrain from rule-breaking just because it compels your opponent to do less rule-breaking than he otherwise would. But you might still want to keep that equilibrium in place, if you have reason to believe the opponent has a sufficient advantage that a completely unconstrained version of them could squash you.
To put it another way, taking the blows is usually a better strategy than declaring all-out war. The fact that the other guy is feeling free to pummel you is a pretty good sign that they're confident in their ability to win (or at least ensure MAD) if you did, foolishly, fight back with lethal force.
ABigGuy4U
1hr ago
My first thought was the “Putin-Medvedev strategy” but I didn’t want to sidetrack the thread into a 500 reply tangent about the war.
I have never felt any strong enough need to post that I thought it necessary to make an account
Read: “I made an alt so I can drop a pissy comment without repercussions”
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
This is a good test, but it only tells us that the Founders were fine with the destructive power of grapeshot in civilian hands when it came with the costs and portability, etc of a cannon. A fragmentation grenade will have a similar destructiveness as grapeshot, but it will also have much-increased portability, will be easily concealed and vastly cheaper, and can easily operated by a single person. So the trade-offs for society are very different.
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
To be fair, Paine lived in a very different age. In his day, to compete in the Atlantic against the great colonial powers was not on the table for the US. If the Brits decided to invade again, a fleet to block them would not have been cost-effective. Instead, they would have been able to make uncontested landfall somewhere in North America. Of course, with a supply line spanning the Atlantic on sail ships, they would then have been at a disadvantage compared to the US in a land war.
Even today, I would argue that most of the naval forces of the US are not to keep the continental US safe from maritime invasion. Land based missile bases and a few spotter ships or planes would suffice for that.
The US navy is all about force projection. A airbase is superior to an aircraft carrier in every regard, except that you can not simply move your airbase to the South Pacific. Defending democracy on the other side of the world was probably not what Paine had in mind for the US.
To use civilian ships for warfare seems not entirely outlandish either, while purpose-designed warships will certainly offer superior performance, filling a merchant ship cannons is still a reasonable thing to do. What I am much more doubtful about is the use of turning over just some of the space on the ship to cannons. Traditionally, warships have dedicated most of their space to propulsion and armament, which is why they make very shitty merchant vessels. Smoothbore cannons do not exactly operate themselves, and the sailors will be quite busy navigating, so you need dedicated personnel to operate the guns (and the bilge pumps, for that matter). Unless you are also paying that merchant vessel to keep an extra crew of a few hundred to operate the guns, that 50 guns will be worthless.
Paying them to only carry a small fraction of the guns their ship could carry is even worse for warfare, because that means showing up to a rifle fight with a handgun. (It might still work out to scare of the occasional pirate, though.)
I think a better approach would have been to pay merchant vessels to have gunports so they can quickly be retrofitted with cannons (and the crews to man them) if the need arises.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
1hr ago
The responsibility for corruption doesn't come from other guys being perfect, and a presence of other corrupt guys, true or imagined, can not excuse your own corruption.
I fully agree with this.
Joe was totally and undoubtedly pocketing bribes
Strongly disagree with this. I've yet to see anyone present any compelling evidence despite the massive Republican fishing expedition on the topic. Incredulity and demands to "stop living in denial" are not arguments.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
1hr ago
I’m another finding this from AAQC. I’ve always been intrigued by orthodoxy, at least the theological content. But im not entirely convinced for several reasons that aren’t necessarily “the ICK”.
First is that the converts seem to get this weird smug vibe where they decide that ONLY this one specific way of being a Christian is real, and ONLY these particular types of chants are valid. And of course if you don’t fast like a monk and keep a strict prayer rule and build an icon corner (the bigger the better of course). I find them specifically enamored with the trappings of this style of Christianity. What I don’t necessarily find is the faith behind it, concern for Christ Himself. It’s like someone who’s in love with a lifestyle, maybe not completely a LARP, but it’s also not a focus on faith itself.
Second, I do get the ick from some of the “if you don’t do it exactly like I do, you’re a heretic” thing. Like, I do prefer high church liturgy, but I find myself feeling put off when the Orthobros come along and absolutely mock contemporary worship music, “strip mall churches”, and — horror of horrors — having coffee and donuts outside the sanctuary. I’ve never understood the need to try to fit my style of doing church onto everyone else. I like tge British Common Book of Prayers. I’m also generally okay with you liking modern Christian worship if that’s your choice. We come from different cultures, and me trying to stuff you into my box is not good, as I’d rather you find Christ in the most rockabilly smoke machined evangelical church out there than go to a high church liturgy and mentally sleep through it. There’s just a Pharisaical vibe about the whole thing like they’re sort of above the rest of us because they’re the only ones who got it right and the rest aren’t really good Christians and might not even be Christian at all.
Finally, I think there’s a rather odd thing where a lot of the Orthobros seem to suddenly take on really reactionary political views that have nothing to do with what I understand Orthodox Christianity to be about. They suddenly are unironically believing that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion represents a real conspiracy. They suddenly believe that women need to become trad wives and so on. Like, you converted to orthodox Christianity and suddenly you’re a Byzantine Mencius Moldbug who talks like a groyper? I don’t think that’s the traditional Christian faith. It seems rather the culture of online Orthobros who either come from or are lead into far right politics and somehow see these ideas as the reason to choose orthodoxy.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1hr ago
Wow, this really rings true to me. In particular, I think that it meshes extremely well with my own sense of how the political right has evolved since Buckley:
[T]he Republican coalition circa William F. Buckley, Jr. was capitalists, anti-communists, and the religious right. Today it's more like "lib-right" capitalists, anti-Wokists, and the working class.
"Political Dad" was the religious right, or at least the way that capitalists and anti-communists spoke when still coddling the religious right. Strength, but also manners; he can crack open a cold one and tell off-color jokes, but only when Mom is out shopping. If Dad is stuffy and uncool it's because Dad has nothing to prove; you already know Dad fucks, that's how he became Dad. But Mom went from being a bitter church lady to being a blue haired political lesbian so she kicked Dad out and now we only see Dad on weekends when he's not on a Disney cruise with his hot girlfriend, Crypto. In short, it's like I said:
Obama's defeat of Romney (not incidentally, a religious capitalist whose prophecies Obama mocked in his infamous "the 1980s are now calling" comment) was the end of Buckley Republicanism as a going concern.
Not to overmix the metaphor but this last semester I had five students in one of my classes show up with ashes on their forehead for Ash Wednesday. The Children do not seem impressed with... whatever the hell this is, this political upheaval that is happening between the Boomers and the Millennials. (Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.)
The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is within living memory. The last Blue Presidential nominee laughed at the idea that the Second Amendment would protect against outright confiscation of firearms from their current owners. There are several federal bans on firearms, and not a single one has been successfully challenged at SCOTUS. The only federal gun control law that has ever been successfully challenged was the Gun Free School Zones Act, under the Commerce Clause, and which immediately was reenacted with the court pretending it was all okay. Nor is that because the statute-writers carefully wrote around the borders of the Second Amendment, or even believed it could cover anything.
If you mean to say that the Blue government have not passed a federal ban on all firearms, granted. But this does not reflect the Constitution coming out of its glass case.
They did, in fact, try. They have, in fact, tried repeatedly, both at local and federal levels. The 1938 Gun Control Act started out specifically as a complete registry of every semiautomatic, under a theory that this could make a future nation-wide Sullivan Act possible! Lujan Grisham was not stopped by a preliminary injunction (it got stayed), or a citizen grand jury (New Mexico has them in theory but defanged them against politicians) or civil suit (New Mexico's overturned qualified immunity with a but, and that butt is Grisham's face) or impeachment (nope) or federal or state censure (double nope, didn't even get a single Dem vote); she was stopped by actors holding politically-responsive offices knowing that knew they would face a serious cost at the next poll.
The only thing that has stopped several very broad gun control laws has been serious, prolonged, and coordinated political and structural force from the Red Tribe against its own politicians, well away from the courthouse.
Some of those came at massive political cost! The NRA tanked several Red Tribe politicians to protect Harry Reid, in exchange for Reid blocking gun control efforts, right before Reid infamously burned the next Red Tribe presidential nominee with malicious slander from the House floor. Even smaller stuff, like increasing efforts to curate Blue Dog Democrats and trim anti-gun Republicans, cost no small amount of political capital and literal money, and was one of many factors that lead to the ACA passing.
There is no application of the 2nd Amendment, today. There are only fancy papers talking about it.
Heller can not register (lol) his gun from Heller I, he's brought a handful of other cases that SCOTUS punted on every single one, in Heller II a goofball wrote a dissent from the appeals court case specifically calling for SCOTUS to decide on the question of 'assault' weapons bans, and yesterday the guy who wrote that dissent in Heller II put out a statement in Snope deciding nope not gonna. From the last available numbers, the NYPD have issued fewer CCW permits per-annum post-Bruen than before it, those lucky few can carry fewer places at greater legal threat, and they may not be able to carry at all anyway. Other courts have simply read Bruen's rule against banning carry across an entire island and deciding that five sounded better, and SCOTUS punted. Lower courts have simply defied SCOTUS opinions that covered other rights too, and SCOTUS punted; others outright deny that the 2nd Amendment exists in their courtroom.
I can keep doing this.
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