domain:rifters.com
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
13hr ago
the political choice of states and localities not to assist
I thought we settled this question in 1865.
ThisIsSin
PC is for progressive-conservative
13hr ago
14yo perpetrators
Adult perpetrators get adult punishments. That society is abdicating its duty to train its young men and women and delaying -> denying them a significant chunk of the prime of their life does not change this basic biological fact.
The reason why society does that is related to the reason society generally fails to punish criminals- redistributing resources (intangibles like virtue and intelligence are just as real a resource as physical goods are, though I understand this is a fringe view) from the useful and decent to the useless and evil under a belief that being useless or evil could be solved if the community simply loved them more (that it imposes real costs on everyone else is not material to that analysis).
Thanks to the relatively unbalanced rise in political power of those whose evolutionary biological specialization leads them to solve problems that way, that's the approach we most often see in modern times. And in fairness, there is something to that approach; keeping humanity's natural biological tendencies in check can be greatly beneficial to mankind. That being said, though...
At what point should society decide that a kid is beyond redemption?
At the point where means, motive/desire, and opportunity become relevant factors (we treat those who are sufficiently mental defective in the same way- they just go to an institution until they are fixed or die). It's very rare- like, once-in-a-generation rare- for actual children to pull off capital crimes in the first place, but I really don't have a problem with the sentence for the once-in-a-lifetime case of tweenagers luring and murdering a toddler for kicks being death. Probably unwise to parade them through the streets before the gallows, though.
TK-421
13hr ago
I am American and understand how it works...
Then I notice that I'm confused. In your original post you said: "How do you know they’re not US citizens if, as ICE has been doing, the people being detained are not given a chance to prove their citizenship?". But that means you know that ICE can't deprive you of a chance to prove your citizenship because a claim of citizenship (or legal status generally) can only be legally adjudicated by a court. They cannot deprive you of a chance to prove your citizenship. If you know of any cases where it seems they have been doing that I would be extremely interested to learn more - that would be, to me, an actual scandal.
Citizens shouldn’t have to worry about being detained for even a few hours by federal agents just because those agents randomly decide your license is fake...
Yes, but also no. Yes because I agree that citizens shouldn't have to worry about that in the same way I think citizens shouldn't have to worry about being the victim of a crime or (if running for office) citizens shouldn't have to worry about how they're going to put food on the table. Ideals we should strive towards but which are not achievable in our current - maybe any - civilization.
I have no idea about the situation you're describing so I'm not making any judgment about the details. I will admit that there have been enough "ICE Agents Did A Bad" stories that turn out to mean "ICE Agents Enforced Immigration Law" or "Complete Fabrication, ICE Agents Not Involved" that my skepticism level of an ICE related story is at the level of Jussie Smollett reporting a new hate crime. But that's my bias talking and it's absolutely possible that it happened exactly as presented, so let's stipulate that this was a Bad Encounter.
Bad Encounters are bad and we should work to minimize them. Bad Encounters are also inevitable and there are feedback mechanisms to do their best to correct the damage - I truly do hope that if this guy has some sort of case against ICE he gets anything he's entitled to - afterwards.
Maybe, though, this type of Bad Encounter is more widespread than I believe and citizens are being routinely detained in large numbers. I have not seen any evidence from reporting that this is true, I haven't personally seen it or known anyone who has despite having friends who have illegal immigrant family members, and given the number of Hispanic citizens and the intensity of press coverage on the issue I'd expect it to be clearer. If in my bias I have missed it or if this happens in the future (because I think it very improbable) I give you permission to say about me "man, what a maroon". This would also be a large scandal to me.
...especially in a country like this where limiting government overreach was a core value of our constitution...
Skepticism towards authority is pro-American and healthy, but like all virtues it can be taken too far. Don't forget that the same George Washington who freedom fought against British tyranny turned around and personally led troops as President during the Whiskey Rebellion - which was partially a dispute over Federal authority.
anon_
14hr ago
If local governments aren’t actually compelled to provide aid, then they don’t have to run the investigation. They don’t have to provide riot police, or give access to every city building. I have a hard time squaring that with the absolute vitriol getting thrown their way.
They don't legally have to. That is clear. But as a matter of norms, they did something they didn't have to.
You can play the game of "who broke the norm first" if you want.
You can play the game of "what is the next escalation of this norm breaking" as well
Those games are fine, but they do not answer the core question of whether than norm was worth preserving.
OliveTapenade
14hr ago
I wonder, looking at some of the comments up-thread, if it's somthing peculiar to Americans? Do the rest of us treat it like fun make-believe to share with the kids, and for some reason it's just Americans in particular who take it extremely literally and obsess about genuinely convincing children with the most convincing illusion possible?
Or is it, for lack of a better way of putting it, about certain personality types, perhaps very detail-oriented or autistic ones? Maybe if you can't read social cues very well, are very literal-minded, and very trusting by nature, you take what's supposed to be make-believe, genuinely believe it, and then feel surprised and betrayed when you realise your mistake? It's possible that people like that are just overrepresented here and on rationalist-adjacent blogs.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
14hr ago
Dogs though, I'm not convinced at all are capable of evil. They either act according to their natural instincts, or they act how they've been trained.
I am intrigued - what do you think is the difference between humans and dogs, that you believe the “He’s a good boy he was just raised wrong” argument above doesn’t also apply to humans?
anon_
14hr ago
If ICE agents actually come to major and life threatening harm as a direct result of city-mandated inaction
I think "direct result" ends up doing a lot of work. ICE could also go out in fewer/larger groups closer to where backup is. The Feds could hold more forces in reserve to respond to threats.
In fact, that's probably where this is going to actually end up -- no one is gonna get hurt, but the political choice of states and localities not to assist will end up being an operational constraint on ICE.
ulyssessword
14hr ago
The board could say whatever it wanted, but it can only regulate the things that the State delegates to them. For example this Act (pdf) does not give them any power to regulate radio broadcasts. Heck, they can't even set their own fees: It's fixed at $100 in section 36, and would require legislation to change.
Botond173
14hr ago
Before porn was widespread, a successful 30yo married guy was (at least to the West of the Hajnal Line) typically someone who has been married for a few years already, to a woman 3-6 years his junior, plus he was probably someone with more or less ample experience in sex before marriage. Unless he had a specific penchant for 19-year-olds and nobody else, which doesn't seem likely, it's not like he experienced his situation as greatly frustrating.
On another note, I find it curious that you're not addressing all the negative externalities of the porn industry at all.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
14hr ago
Yes. I would rather be whipped a few times than deprived a $10 million dollar bonus. Hedons ARE fungible. Maybe not perfectly fungible, but if you tell me there is no amount of money that would convince you to take one stroke of the lash then… I just won’t believe you.
anon_
14hr ago
The necessity is in developing better pathways for young men to enter adulthood and develop a sense of self paired with durable external meaning. Some sort of religious or, at least, high-minded civic metaphysics is a necessary part of this
Historically, a decent number of those pathways ended up with the young man dead at the bottom of the ocean or under the hangman's axe or in a monastery somewhere.
Young men can't be given a pathway to manhood with no uncertainty in it. Some of them have to fail, otherwise success doesn't mean fuck all.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
14hr ago
borders in general are basically unethical, but outright saying that is still a bit outside the Overton window of mainstream political discourse
I don't think this is a particularly common view among leftists, but I've definitely heard statements to that effect in far-left media spaces (i.e., from people publishing, not just random comments).
Markass
14hr ago
I think it's too early to tell. It's more acceptable now to criticise porn and masturbation, sure. But there are still many communities on the Internet where porn consumption is not shamed. Maybe you wouldn't talk about porn in polite society, but that's not a problem if you only socialize in these bubbles, and nobody can force you to talk to other people. Will the broader culture shift to be anti-porn enough for a porn ban to be successful? Hard to say.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
14hr ago
“Not being a great dog trainer” is hardly grounds for vituperative opprobrium though, is it? Many people are not great dog trainers.
Botond173
14hr ago
It's interesting to see how porn has become somewhat of an obsession not only at opposite sides of the political/cultural spectrum, but all across it.
To the extent that this is true, and I think it largely is, it mainly is so in my view because it's interpreted as another male problem in general. Take note that the female consumption of pornographic literature is reaching unprecedented levels at the same time but without inviting any negative reactions from the mainstream media.
TK-421
14hr ago
Fact of the matter is, policing in Democrat controlled areas is fucked. When they aren't being ambushed and murdered, politicians are throwing them under the bus, or to the wolves, and recruitment has completely collapsed.
TLDR: recruitment in one local Democrat city police department does seem to be suffering from poor candidates but the department itself makes recruitment difficult and is likely to make it harder.
Personal story time. I live in a very blue city in a very blue state. You have seen my city in the news many a time regarding its police.
I am also in about month six of the hiring process for my city's police department. The below is only applicable to my experiences with a single department but from what I've heard it's broadly similar to other comparable departments*.
It's not fair to say that the process is broken necessarily because I think it's heavily constrained by the stakeholders as explained below, but it is awful. As I said, I'm in month six. Month six of how many? Haha haha, there is absolutely no way to know but I'd guess at least three more months before I would start the academy (if selected). This means that with the academy and field training it's around 18-24 months from application to a usable police officer.
This department is also about 10% below its previously approved staffing targets. One would assume that with the current numbers and the known recruitment issues, the department would at least keep standards the same if not be forced to lower them. Haha, haha. The physical standards - already way, way beyond the state's requirements - are changing to remove age/gender norming and adding another upper body event. They fully expect that the change will cause large numbers of candidates - I'd guess around 50% - who are currently well above passing to fail in the new system.
My interaction with the other candidates comes via boot camp style workouts that are technically optional but anyone not attending regularly (1-3 times a week for all those months you're in the process) will not have their application moved forward when it hits a certain point. They're better about communicating this now, previously they just silently let you wait. And wait. In a part where it's normal to wait two+ months before you're contacted to start the processing. There are probably people still expecting a call that is never going to come**.
Some of these are relatively relaxed. Others are extremely militaristic and difficult, much worse than anything I remember from actual boot camp from my prior service. 4-6 mile runs with other exercises sprinkled in are not uncommon.
But they do allow a good opportunity to meet and evaluate the other candidates. Now, I'm not a great one myself so I do not brag when I say that I'm probably in the top 25%. I don't know the quality of the people who applied in the past. I would not rate the average highly now.
So the obvious question: why? Why is it like this? Again, some of this is may be specific to my city but my impression is that it's because it benefits no one to fix it. The ACAB / Defund the Police chatter has quieted down nationally but is still very strong at the local level and they fight to reduce the budget for officers - and even previously budgeted spots that aren't filled represent money that can eventually be clawed back. The existing officers aren't really impacted yet outside of opportunities for additional overtime. Why not push for the highest standards possible? Don't we want the best of the best? The city has limited upside but massive downside possibilities when hiring. The benefits of a supercop are real but diffuse and difficult to measure. The price of a bad cop can be calculated in lawsuits - and this is a very litigant friendly state. Plus the more combustible risks. A couple of cops who set their mind to it could probably bankrupt the city and get part of it burned down in riots. Be as methodical and restrictive as you possibly can because the pain felt by residents through underpolicing is also more diffuse and the public will at least partially blame the cops anyway. Win/win.
My prediction is that things will not change unless there's a sufficiently horrifying event that gets recorded and can be directly blamed on understaffing (unlikely) or enough of a crime wave to elect a city government focused on the issue (possible but ACAB).
- This will likely be remedial for Americans but for the benefit of any non-US barbarians reading: Things vary so much because in the US there is no such entity as The Police. There's a marvelous constellation of departments at all kinds of levels of jurisdiction who are granted police powers by various authorities. We do not have something like the Garda in Ireland or Sweden's Police Authority. There are advantages and disadvantages to that model - data collection would be dramatically easier - but there's no chance that the US will be moving towards it any time soon so they don't really matter.
** Each step is like dealing with the DMV if the DMV was able to tell you to go away and they'll get back to you whenever. One regular at the workouts was rejected near the very end of his process and filed an appeal. In January. The appeal contains all the necessary information because all the relevant investigations have been completed, it's just waiting on yes/no.
Botond173
14hr ago
If you argue that porn was banned in the USSR or is banned in Iran for example, than my cursory knowledge of the matter will compel me to agree with you, because in these cases state control of the media and the country’s borders was sufficiently thorough that whatever level of cultural presence illegal pornography had was bound to be marginal. If your argument is that it’s banned in South Korea, a late-stage capitalist cyberpunk hellscape where I imagine a large segment of the population is addicted to the internet, a society that is usually said to be overall conservative but where the cultural heritage of ancient Korea has zero significance, I’ll not assume that whatever law it is that is technically on the books regarding this matter will limit porn use to any significant degree.
KMC
lurk moar
14hr ago
I should have been more temperate, and I cranked up my, well, crank at the hagiography of the CP5. It's worth being temperate about these things, and I am willing to take the not-at-all extreme position that relatively routine death penalty is justice, but I'm too many posts deep for not enough forethought.
Hanging for thieves is not unknown, but I would consider harsh. If you want to advocate for the death penalty for copying files I'm willing to hear it. I don't think running Napster deserves death, but you might be able to convince me of Silk Road.
Hanging for beating people senseless is closer, especially given the disposition of the victim. If she had died then it would have been murder, even if she was breathing when they left her, and none of them raped her. I think he severity of her injuries given her complete innocence deserves death.
Muggers, yes again, especially if someone ends up dead or in a coma. Not if they are confronted and flee, but more likely if they prey on the women, (actual, prepubescent) children. Carjackers, too, while we're at it. The correct number of these criminals put to death is way higher than zero. It doesn't have to be every single one, but the more violent you are, and the more helpless, innocent, and vulnerable your victims, the more you deserve to die for the same crimes.
Does acting as a prowling gang make each member less culpable, or more? I don't think you can necessarily treat all thirty the same, but it speaks to coordinated action and opportunistic behavior, and neither are cause for leniency.
Does youth remove culpability? You clearly think so, and I'm inclined to agree, but the amount of grace I'm willing to extend does not get to 14, and just like before, the worse your crime the less leniency you deserve on all counts, including age.
For the 8 year old: not hanged but still punished severely. The 5 year old: no legal punishment makes sense but that doesn't mean faultless, blameless, or free from scrutiny. Who is shot matters a lot, as is what happens. That's also part of justice, as there are victims who matter, and everyone has an interest in deterrence of new criminals and prevention of new crime from known criminals.
Redemption should not dominate the discussion of justice to the extent that it has. It is less important than Consequences.
I started with a weak mea culpa but I'm ending with a stronger one. I was wrong on the details and ran my mouth off, then had to go back and justify myself. Had I any sense, I would have cancelled the first reply. I muddled through it, eventually, and I got to a decent thesis of my original reply, but I regret doing it and would take it back if I could.
I've edited, above, too.
anon_
14hr ago
Lying to your children isn't definitionally bad! We lie to children all the time.
Today I lied to my kids by telling them I was a pajama robot programmed with the mission of chasing down and pajamaing all the children. When I was a kid we played werewolf/mafia a lot in school.
There are all manner of imagination, pretenses, games, and kayfabes. If you don't teach your children that, you are not giving a key cognitive skill.
I use ChatGPT pretty much all day every day but as a replacement for Googling mostly. It's great at pinging a dozen news sources on a issue and giving me more information than I'd get from reading a single article (and it's usually not wrong).
If I have trivial code to write in an unfamiliar framework it's good for that too.
It's also good for teaching me entry level stuff in a new topic faster than anything else.
It's generally better at telling me what's wrong if I paste an error message than anything I'd get from Googling.
And that's about it. And this is awesome, don't get me wrong.
But everything else it kind of sucks at. And not just ChatGPT, but Claude (including Claude code as well).
If I ask for help in a mature codebase it will almost certainly waste my time. Ask it for more subtle plot details of a popular sci-fi book that you just read and you will see how hard it hallucinates.
I would be quite worried about doing science or medicine with it if I can't rapidly verify its information.
It's sort of hard to see this improving very quickly? They've run out of gains from training on all of the internet. Inference costs are increasing exponentially but the gains in intelligence are only increasing logarithmically. You will note that the model that they used to win the Math Olympiad is very much not available to the public. Why? Perhaps because it cost millions in inference to do it.
It sure seems like other architectural breakthroughs are needed to keep scaling, and I don't see those as guaranteed.
Or, as Yannic Kilcher put it, "we have entered the Samsung Galaxy era of LLMs"
pusher_robot
PLEASE GO STAND BY THE STAIRS
15hr ago
anon_
15hr ago
Colorado admitted a priest or a life coach could have the very conversations that it was banning therapists from partaking in; why would the difference in title suddenly change the classification of the act itself?
I think you are placing too much on the classification of the conduct rather than the social framing.
To diverge for a bit, there are plenty of personal trainers where the fundamentals of what they do (determine what is an appropriate exercise/stretch and teach it) is substantially the same as what physical therapists do. Same for diet consultants vs dietician. Or even massage artists as compared to chiros as compared to orthopedic surgeons.
What I think is fairly critical is not about what they do in practice but how it's held out to the public and whether that person gets the assurance the practitioner is notionally vetted and supervised in some fashion (I'm not taking a position on whether this training/vetting/supervision is worth anything).
It's also similar to the way society distinguishes between being a financial advisor vs being Jim Kramer giving advice and opinions on the market. Or Caleb for that matter when it's household finances. No one is going to jail for the conduct of recommending index funds (or 0DTE SPY calls) but you can't publicly portray that as professional financial advice.
So in that lens, restrictions on what the licensed folks can do aren't triggered by conduct, but who gets to publicly represent themselves as a specific kind of professional. When the restrictions are paired to that title but not otherwise applied to individuals doings substantially the same thing, it seems clear to me that the conduct itself isn't really what's targeted.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
15hr ago
If people can make radio transmissions without a license from the state medical board and they would face no repercussions for doing that, the state medical board is not regulating radio transmissions.
SimpsonsCurtis Yarvin did it.Note that this is an extension from a previous idea in Patchwork where he proposed it as an "alternative to genocide".
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