domain:parrhesia.substack.com
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
20hr ago
Instead, the unwashed masses decided that BTC would be a great investment, so you got an endless procession of shitcoins and NFTs instead.
I find this a weird conclusion given that Congress just passed a big series of crypto regulation and specifically of stablecoins which seem like a very clear candidate for an alternative to payment processors.
Now Circle and Tether do still have a sort of similar problem to Visa and MasterCard, but the ground isn't exactly the same as it was then years ago and you ought to acknowledge it.
vorpa-glavo
21hr ago
My take is that there is no such thing as a "free" market, just like there is no such thing as objective absolute individual liberty. "Free" tends to be defined by whoever happens to be winning the market at that point in time.
I certainly accept a weaker version of this claim.
We could talk about "really existing free markets" if you want, in opposition to the made up models of economists. Even so, my assessment is that above a certain threshold of "freeness", really existing free markets tend to do better than centralized or relatively unfree markets.
are we going to ignore things like cartels and monopolies that exist in absence of regulations and laws? I'm willing to cede that there are bad actors who rent seek through regulatory capture, but are you willing to cede that there are bad actors that rent seek through market capture?
I'm not an anarchist - I don't think we should have no laws.
Ideally, I think we should have the minimum number of regulations and laws necessary to prop up a functioning and trustworthy market, along with things like pigouvian taxes and legal nudges to help the market avoid market failures.
I do think a lot of cartels and monopolies are only able to exist because they're propped up by government in various ways (i.e. drug cartels can often only exist because drugs are illegal, American tech monopolies in Europe are given a boost by EU regulations being so onerous it is hard for a small European tech company to comply, etc.) But I'll grant that some forms of these are not directly or indirectly propped up by government, and I'm not against light touch, effective regulation that minimizes the damage to society without radically limiting the speed of growth and innovation.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
21hr ago
There's a lifecycle that a very specific sort of amazing poster here can fall into (if he's young enough).
- Post a lot
- get recognized for quality writing
- take it off-site (subtack or twitter)
- (here's the critical part) link you're real-life identify to your username
- come back to the motte every now and then
- now that your irl identity is revealed, somehow criticism of your writing seems a lot more personal, and you react badly
- flame out
The exact same fucking thing happened to ymeskhout, another former mod. A kinda similar thing happened to Kulak_Revolt.
Trace was a very highly valued member of the forum, and the forum was even prepared to look past the fact that he tried to recruit all the left-of-center users to a new subreddit. Then the rest happened.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
The loser already does pay in the sense that any personal injury action is going to require a lot of up front money for medical experts, depositions, and the like before the defense is in any position to settle. And they're always going to settle because liability isn't usually as much the issue as damages are. Best case scenario for a defendant is that the plaintiff isn't as injured as he'd like you to believe. But even these cases are relatively rare since the costs of litigation and attorney time make anything under $100,000 simply not worth it for most plaintiff's lawyers. Low value cases that are actually filed are usually ones where the plaintiff is paying by the hour or the lawyer is taking the case on the side pro bono.
I'm any event, truly frivolous lawsuits are pretty rare. The ones that do get filed make the news for how unusual they are. When you hear about something like Trump suing the WSJ in a case he can't possibly win, he's paying his attorneys by the hour and isn't concerned about costs, and cases like this aren't going to be deterred by a loser pays rule. Any attorneys fees must be approved by the court, and courts are usually pretty stingy about rates charged and how many hours they'll let you bill. They could ironically make it worse, since a client is going to be disinclined to pay the balance of the bill after the court knocked half of it off.
Rov_Scam
21hr ago
No, not really. A motion to dismiss won't be granted unless the facts in the complaint don't trigger liability. This is a low bar, and even questionable claims will pass muster if the complaint is drafted well. Summary judgment isn't much better. First, it happens after discovery, which is the most expensive and involved part of the process, assuming the case doesn't go to trial. And even then, the motion won't be granted unless there's no evidence; not bad evidence, no evidence. If you have one witness who says they saw something and fifty witnesses who said they didn't plus documents to back it up, the jury could always believe the one witness. The non-moving party gets the benefit of the doubt and the court views the evidence in the light most favorable to them. This is why anti SLAPP statutes and other mechanisms have been put into place in certain jurisdictions for certain kinds of cases—because the rules that apply most of the time can be abused by vexatious litigants.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
21hr ago
The Israelis are not bluffing. They will not give in, no matter what the pressure. They are perfectly willing to watch Gaza starve until some entity comes out of the territory that they can negotiate with.
They're not bluffing, but will the US stay their hand when no such entity appears?
Tiber727
21hr ago
I guess maybe I'm being uncharitable by interpreting this as "Please associate with each other as a cohesive, organized political movement so I can attack the principles of your group rather than deal with the 17-headed hydra that is contemporary social liberalism". Maybe I shouldn't have use the term "single theory".
If we must say that there's 17 heads and name each of them, that's at least in the direction of what Freddie and I are saying. The complaint is that first they deny that there's anything there, then that it's a hydra, then that the hydra is good. And of course once the conversation is over they will return to acting like the people who cried hydra are responding to literally nothing. If people see sky blue and cyan and aquamarine together, they're going to call it blue. Ain't nobody got time to go one-by-one with 100,000 ever-so-slight variations on a theme, and if you demand they must they will simply refuse. Republicans have been successful in painting the progressive left as obnoxious, and young men are swinging right despite having many left-wing views.
You and Freddie both are painting contemporary social liberalism as a monolith, with the implication that it's a coordinated effort with offices and political committees. Maybe there's a reason that it's so hard to wrangle these disparate movements together (and why they seem to cannibalize through debates on intersectionality):
No, the issue is that you think these are requirements. Central coordination is not required; the only thing that's required is reasonably definable goal that a noteworthy amount of people would agree with and are or would cooperate towards. Many movements don't have leaders, or if they do most of their own members probably couldn't identify them. Was GamerGate a movement? Tea Party? 99%ers? BLM? Are all of those words useless and should be dispensed with?
I've actually seen the pendulum swing way harder in the past couple of years, with many more complaints of too many non-white male characters.
Well yes, the artists (generally left leaning) started doing it, and people noticed. Said artists will happily admit in a friendly environment that it was a conscious decision to increase representation - the idea that people empathize more with their in-group and this is a good thing (except for white men).
It seems to be the consultants, focus groups, and corporate America that are guiding these decisions - not some National Wokism political action committee.
In other words, college-educated people.
crushedoranges
Can Marx explain the used panties market?
21hr ago
Let's talk about Israel and Palestine.
Okay, I can hear you sighing already. But before you look away, let's talk about Clausewitz.
War is a continuation of politics by other means. In our ideological age, where everything is political, it may not seem profound: but it establishes a commonality between the military and civilian where analogies can be made. Like, 'what if we have no ability to fight a war, but continue it anyway?' Could we just... filibuster, our enemies, until they give us the political ends we desire?
This concept is similar to the Trotskyite concept of 'no war, no peace'. (That the policy ended in disaster and Brest-Litovsk bodes ill.) In the Clausewitzian model, war is conducted between states. The loser gives concessions to the winner, with the assumption that even a bad peace is better than a bad war, that ending hostilities - even for the moment - is the best way to bring about revanchist policy.
The differential between Palestine and Israel in terms of military capacity is greater than ever: it was never at par, even in 1948. Seventy-five years later and the Arabs might as well be Ewoks against the Empire. Not to say that they lack the capacity to harm the Israelis, but they have no military capacity to enforce political goals on their enemy. Even now, their demands for a ceasefire are entirely one sided: they are simply outmatched in every conceivable military dimension.
There exists a hope in the Palestinian cause, that there will be a tipping point where they can present to the international community of some Israeli atrocity that will bring about a external intervention. It is the only card they have to play. But now that Israel has control of the food aid that goes into Gaza with the ousting of UNWRA, time is no longer on their side. Their enemy will never consent to a return to the former status quo, no matter how urgently the international community chastises them.
Not coming to terms and holding on for maximalist goals may seem like a cheat in insurgency warfare. But inevitably, reality and physical limits intrude onto the nationalist fantasy. It is chutzpah of the highest order to rely on the charity and good will of your enemy to feed your people. This conflict - indefinitely sustained by Soviet leftist dregs of the anti-colonialist cause - will come to an end not through some master stroke of diplomacy, but a famine long in the making.
Hamas sought to use international sympathy as a weapon, relying on the services provided by American and European NGOs so that they could devote all the funds they neglected to invest in their civilians into their military. Now that military is destroyed, they have no leverage at all. The Israelis are not bluffing. They will not give in, no matter what the pressure. They are perfectly willing to watch Gaza starve until some entity comes out of the territory that they can negotiate with.
As Calgacus would say, "They make a desert and call it peace." Modern problems require Roman solutions. The fatal Palestinian mistake was that they always assumed Israel would come to the negotiating table. After fifty years of fruitless negotiation, the Israelis finally have had enough. There will be no more deals, no more bargains. Just the short, terminal drop to destruction.
ThisIsSin
Liberty has an anti-privilege bias
22hr ago
Yet I still see this quite determined hostility to re-evaluating.
I don't believe traditionalists' revealed motives are trustworthy.
It was absolutely a stupid, destructive idea to replace abuse and overreach perpetrated by men (traditionalism) with abuse and overreach perpetrated by women (progressivism), yes. We have noticed the skulls that gynosupremacy has created, including the fractional ones generated by concern trolling.
But the traditionalists are, at least in popular consciousness, insisting that we merely reset it so it's male abuse and overreach again, uncritically and unironically- where for everyone else, the problem isn't who's doing it, it's what they're permitted to do. They're trying to prosecute a culture war they've already lost, in the same way they lost it before, and expecting things to be different somehow.
correlation and causation
The thing traditionalists don't seem to have a satisfying answer for is "why is gayness uniquely bad"? Why does it uniquely fuel identarianism, if it does? When I consider the question of "if it wasn't this, would it have been something else?", I think back on all the times it has been something else, and note that there's nothing unique/special to non-straightness that lends itself to being used as a weapon in this way.
Because the traditionalists (as a natural consequence of being traditionalist) are unwilling, or unable, to come up with an answer for why it is unique (vagina-having and melanin-having being the two used for this before, with dishonorable mentions to religion and nationality) without ultimately falling back on some variation of "sin"- if they had a better argument, they'd be making it- then I judge they're no different than those who also have the same definition of sin but with the who and whom switched.
The axiomatic rejection that gayness (or whatever else) at times can be productive/the right answer to a particular pair-bonding question means that the needle cannot be threaded/competing interests cannot be balanced between "these relationships function mostly like straight ones do outside of certain specifics; we don't need to hunt these guys down" and "doing this thing that just so happens to be more common in this subgroup creates externalities that are not society's bill to foot".
I'm not interested in swapping a failing axiom for an already-failed axiom (while I am broadly OK with feeding progressives to traditionalists I'm under no deception that's productive); either we grow together limiting/harnessing the axioms to guide us into a position that can be rationally justified, or we don't grow.
hydroacetylene
22hr ago
It’s still not worth an authorized person’s time.
DenpaEnthusiast
22hr ago
Consider the following analogy. We're planning to go out to eat. You suggest a restaurant, but I say I don't want to eat there. You suggest a second restaurant, I also didn't want to eat there. You suggest a third, I shoot it down again. At some point, it's reasonable to demand that I either stop declining your suggestions, or provide some of my own.
This is where Freddie is with wokeness. He says "woke", they say that's not good label. He says "identity politics", they reject that too. He says "CRT", that's also not accurate. The article isn't an isolated demand that they label themselves, it comes after his attempts to label them have been rejected.
This is actually worse because the woke are not a monolithic entity. If they had a clear leader, they could be reasoned and negotiated with. But because they're diffuse with no set leadership, woke group A is under no obligation to respect any deals made with woke group B, and there's no incentive to come to any sort of consensus. They won't be punished for defying their boss.
quiet_NaN
23hr ago
I think that there are plenty of people (myself among them) for whom porn is simply the most ethical way to deal with their sex drive.
I mean, sure, porn is to sex as instant noodles are to cooking and eating a nice meal with other people. Just as good sex is far superior to jerking off to porn, enjoying a nice meal with friends is much nicer than shoveling ramen into one's pie-hole. On the other hand, porn and instant meals are also much more limited in how bad they can go. No main dish which is completely burned, eating in icy silence because someone is pissed or suffocating because someone forgot your peanut allergy.
Happily, while living from ramen does not go too well in the long term, humans do not actually require high quality sex to survive. For people who find themselves in a situation where getting laid would require ethically questionable behavior or a lot of work, or who would prefer sex in the context of a romantic relationship but also have trouble finding such a relationship or worry about the potential drama, just masturbating to smut or porn seems like a totally fine solution.
This fuzziness alongside its other peculiar characteristics (irrational draw, propensity to create children, etc) is why it is not treated the same as other things morally by most societies.
I would argue that no society has reached a cultural equilibrium since effective contraceptives became widespread.
Consider: a nomad tribe which moves around, perhaps mostly sticking to certain lands but sometimes being driven a bit in one direction or driving a rival tribe from some good nearby land will have a fundamentally different relationship with the land -- at cultural equilibrium -- from an agrarian tribe which has plowed 'their' land for generations.
As humans who have recently found ourselves in a world where PIV sex no longer automatically results in pregnancies, we recognize that the cultural rules of old are no longer suitable, just as a neolithic tribe who had (magically, suddenly) discovered agriculture would. It is certainly not the case that throwing all rules which now seem vaguely adjacent to the old status quo seems good, "we will no longer eat animals because grain is our food" might seem obvious but will probably not become an equilibrium rule. Likewise, "now that unwanted pregnancies are out of the questions, having sex can become just as banal as shaking hands" might not be an equilibrium take. Of course, insisting that nothing has changed would be like saying "just leave the fields, we have to follow the herds".
DiscourseMagnus
23hr ago
I, for one, am strongly in favor of calling these people actors and actresses, not out of respect towards prostitution but out of disrespect towards acting.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
23hr ago
Not the person you asked, but try this:
Wokeism is an ideology/secular religion dedicated to righting social justice wrongs. The fundamental theorem is people who are doing well must be exploiting the people doing poorly, somehow. Above all else, one must identify the underdog in any dynamic and side with them.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
23hr ago
Re: #3 above, aren't motions to dismiss and motions for summary judgement the short circuit for this already? If the quality of the lawsuit is low it will blow up here.
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23hr ago
What do you mean by the present situation? The information environment more generally or this specific podcast?
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
23hr ago
Yeah. I tried, but it just didn't click with me.
Jiro
23hr ago
it looks like he regrets it too
Really? Where did he say this?
(And "It was bad tactics" or "I really don't like how it made people hate me" don't count.)
Jiro
23hr ago
I will give him that it must be pretty annoying to already be left of center in a space like this and then get multiple people who link 5 year old posts at him aggressively to tell him how wrong and hypocritical he is.
I'd be more bothered about people bringing up five year posts if the posters (or institutions) involved with them were willing to say "I don't believe that any more" or even "that's out of context" (along with an explanation if needed). I would agree that if that's the case, bringing up the five year old posts is crass and usually inappropriate.
But that's not usually what's happening when people bring up old posts here or on LW. (It often is in the outside world, of course.)
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
23hr ago
Thanks for sharing, wow people were really nasty to him. I don’t really know all of what was going on but it’s a shame because I haven’t seen anywhere near that level of personal mud flinging in my time on the site so far!
Supah_Schmendrick
23hr ago
Except that Cal Code of Civil Procedure 116.530 clearly states that attorneys can only appear in small claims court unless (1) they are party to the claim themselves in a personal capacity, (2) they're a member of a partnership whose members are all attorneys, or (3) they are an officer or director of a professional corporation whose officers/directors are all attorneys.
And section 116.540 specifies the form in which a corporation or other business association shall appear, which is "only through a regular employee, or a duly appointed or elected officer or director, who is employed, appointed, or elected for purposes other than solely representing the corporation in small claims court."
Small claims court is different.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
23hr ago
I think honestly 3 has the best chance of actually working long term. If you have to clear a high bar to even have a case, then there’s no way to abuse it. If you have to prove that the claim was false, the writer knew it was false, and that it caused material harm, it’s a high enough bar that you can’t just sue anyone saying something you don’t like.
OliveTapenade
1d ago
I suppose I should also mention positive predictions that failed to come true as well - I remember plenty of pieces along the lines of "gay marriage will rejuvenate and improve straight marriage", with the idea that extending it would contribute to the wide social valuation of marriage. This will improve reverence for marriage and help everyone.
That... did not happen, and in fact, taking the US as the biggest example, marriage rates have continued to decline, while average age at marriage has continued to increase. The benefit never manifested.
None of this necessarily proves that the conservatives are right, and you can be progressive while just holding that all of this is unrelated and that gay marriage needs no more justification than "it would make some gay people happy so why not?", but I do think that, at the least, it's a good reason to re-evaluate some of those old arguments, and maybe conclude that people against it at the time were not wrong about everything.
In order for Big Tech to rejoin the Democrats, the Democrats would need to make some kind of credible commitment to not backstab Big Tech the second they get back into power. I don't think it's very likely. I wouldn't even trust the Democrats to hold off on the backstab until after they regain power. They're a very stabby people.
Say what you will about Trump but he's capable of playing ball, at least in the short term. If you help him get what he wants then he'll hold off on betraying you for at least a few months. That's not great, but it inspires more loyalty than the Democrats, who will betray any ally at any time if enough activist groups demand it.
But…Germany also fought Stalin.
Surely there are some former East Germans somewhere in the country, too.
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