domain:noahpinion.blog
kky
1d ago
Presumably because of demand. As I figure, the HOA is basically a way of forcibly excluding people who can’t “fit in” with the community or follow the rules. Reading in between the lines, that was what was going on in this case, as in, classic bullying. Probably the people trying to force defendant to fit in were a real mess of busybodies, obviously, as they brought a dumb case to court, but this is the function here.
In a more sympathetic case, imagine a family moved in who left rusting cars on the lawn and other obnoxious but not quite illegal things that nobody of your class or background would do. How do you make them stop? I know a lot of the people here are libertarians, principled or otherwise, but the average Joe ain’t and would rather keep those families out, or else coloring within the lines. Personally I don’t empathize and enjoy my freedom more, but I get that’s a rarity overall.
And apparently HOAs are overall popular. People like em. Or at least, they aren’t the kind of radioactive that would stop people buying these properties, even with the very obvious downsides, and encourage developers to not enforce them. I know revealed preferences is a meme, but it seems to apply here.
Relating this out. I’ve seen a lot of people on this forum arguing pretty directly for a shared US culture. Well, the HOA feels exactly like what’s being asked for here - an association that punishes deviance with process, and upholds normalcy. Japan is a pretty culturally centralized place, and from what I hear from my friends there, pretty much every little village and neighborhood has its own little HOA (micro-local government). They organize things like who goes to sweep out the graveyard, sure, but also make certain nobody gets too far out of line, in that distinctive passive-aggressive but unmistakably Japanese way. And I think of that, and of the fuck-you American spirit, and it makes me laugh a little. Conformists are allowed their little liberties here, but why think they’re remotely popular? An American will only subject himself to banding together once he’s exhausted the alternatives for keeping the undesirables out.
(This is ignoring the little associations that are just about funding shared resources, like an HOA that pays for the community pool. Those have a straightforward reason to be.)
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Lots of people dream of working an oil rig/alaskan crab boat/mining camp/whatever. It’s very well remunerated(sometimes more in fantasy than reality), it’s away from civilization, it’s physically difficult, etc.
Having a very high income while very young is a common young male fantasy for the same reason young women fantasize about becoming incredibly beautiful after some minor change.
No ceasefire until Ukraine withdraws from the four mainland regions
What is the purchasing maxim? Never offer to pay what someone is willing to do for free? This is the inverse of that- demanding for free what others know you are willing to pay for.
Even if all parts of the Russian position eventually end up being accepted as written, this demand alone would be reason enough to keep fighting on. The 'rapid' advances of Russia in the eastern front last year were still slow enough in absolute amount of territory gained that it would have taken years of fighting at the same rates to finish conquering the claimed territories at the same rate, if they could sustain the same intensity over that period of time. Indications so far this year don't really support that, with the territorial advances in Ukraine in the earlier part of this year falling behind the rate of the last months of last year.
The upcoming Russian summer offensive does not change that. In fact, the bloodier it is expected to be, the less reason to accept the Russian ceasefire terms to give up land it has not conquered, especially if you expect this advance to make major gains against the Ukrainian defensive lines.
After all, if the land and defensive lines would be lost regardless, the relevant variable isn't the land being lost, but the resources both sides lose to do so. Russian forces and equipment and time spent taking the easternmost regions by force are resources that can't be used in a later offensive should the conditional ceasefire break down. In turn, the defensive positions in the east, even if they are insufficient, are better than the defensive lines further west, while the investments in the east provide no benefit if turned over without a fight. But defenses in the west will have more time to be developed if it takes months, or even 'just' weeks, to be developed.
Even if the entirety of the four regions is conquered in the coming offensive- and that requires a level of belief that the Ukrainians are about to have a systemic collapse cascade that ignores the last few years of the war to date- it would still be better to accept the Russian demands then, rather than now.
And if the Russians wouldn't be interested in accepting them then, that is a pretty strong indicator they aren't likely to be satisfied even if the terms were accepted now. Which increases the value of making the Russians pay more manpower / material / time in the present, rather than leaving it open in the future.
2rafa
1d ago
It’s because Murray is British and thinks British culture and history are the best in the world, and Churchill is by far the most beloved British political / cultural figure in history, topping almost every single poll of the greatest British people of all time. Ideology is entirely secondary, although in general Murray, as a fan of the British Empire - of which he considered neoconservatism / liberal imperialism a successor - likes Churchill’s imperialism. Churchill’s actual opinions are irrelevant on both sides (see, for example, Cooper’s insistence that Churchill’s primary motivation in prosecuting WW2 was some debts he allegedly owed to Jewish moneylenders).
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1d ago
Dude that's not even "Hitler was a vegetarian!"
This is like saying "Hitler had legs."
Hitler certainly fucked.
People who don't have the full range of human emotions and experiences are cripples. That doesn't make them morally bad people, sure, but it's wrong to pretend they aren't cripples. Being deaf is substantively worse than not being deaf, and deaf "activists" who want to lobby against cochlear implants are insane.
omw_68
1d ago
This isn't a real schedule. This is an artifact of legal and bureaucratic processes.
I tend to agree with you on this. I would guess that at some point the town residents wanted buried power lines. Maybe someone was injured by a downed electric line, maybe there was a power failure with especially bad consequences, maybe it was the pet issue of a few leading residents, who knows. At the same time, there wasn't the political will to spend the necessary money to do it. (Presumably it's very expensive to bury power lines as it is very unusual). In that kind of situation, nobody wants to tell some widow that the town doesn't want to spend the money to prevent more possible electrocutions. So one way to square that circle is to set up a situation where you can pretend that there is an actual project to bury the power lines when in reality there is not.
I think that these sorts of situations -- let's all pretend that we are addressing problem X -- are actually pretty common in politics. Anyone with a lick of sense knew perfectly well that the crime bill of 1992 would not reduce crime; that the No Child Left Behind Act would accomplish little or nothing; and so on. More recently, a lot of the policies put in place to fight against Coronavirus were obviously never going to help. So I would guess that the Pasadena power line project is a similar kind of situation.
zeke5123a
1d ago
How about bring overturned on a national injunction is evidence of bad behavior and therefore removal is merited? That is, a judge should only do it in the most extreme clear situations?
zeke5123a
1d ago
I think it’s 5-4 with ACB being on the liberal side. Government got the harder of the question but BK made the most impactful point re asymmetry of the outcome and Roberts understands institutionally forum shopping nationwide injunctions increases the frictions between the branches in a way that will cause a constitutional crisis. ACB reads too much of the NYT.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
See my other comment but I'm puzzled that you'd feel Chinese is a bigger cultural transformation when there are more Spanish speakers, as a percentage of the population, than there are Black people in the US. I might be biased from living in the West, though.
zeke5123a
1d ago
A few points:
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If the argument is “it doesn’t matter SCOTUS will decide anyhow,” then (1) maybe not due to cert denial, (2) maybe yes but if SCOTUS sided with the 499/500, then an injustice occurred potentially for years, and (3) if trying to solve time then legal issues don’t get to evolve within multiple rulings to tease out the thorny issues.
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DOJ discussed long standing precedent that the general rule is they respect the opinion and judgement but they reserve the right to respect only the judgement. Notably, this is a historic precedent something that the DOJ actually pursued while Kagan was solicitor genera. However, the DOJ stated they would respect both the opinion and judgement of SCOTUS.
What? Who believes that? It's my understanding that a strong majority people across all political sides think [European] WWII was preventable, it's just that the reasons vary. I think there are, broadly speaking, about three camps that conveniently tend to align with modern political positions:
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The people of Germany should have been better at fighting back and denouncing Nazism when it was rising and/or after Hitler took control (Left)
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The other nations around Germany should have been better at drawing firm lines in the sand for what was allowed and what was not, it was appeasement that let Hitler get out of control (Right)
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The winners of WWI shouldn't have imposed such an overly strict and emasculating treaty of Versailles which led to German resentment and decline creating an environment of radicalism and lawlessness (Center)
I mean these were all reasons, but I think historians (to the extent that they agree) roughly rank those reasons above in ascending order of importance. I guess you could add underestimating Hitler (first bin), failure of the League of nations (first bin), economic factors (second bin), criticism of the Weimar democracy (third bin) too.
The argument for non-preventability rests on what? Actions from Versailles and foreign leaders are pretty agentic and led to many of the other reasons, I guess you could call the Great Depression non-agentic, or simply say that the world hadn't yet learned these lessons because similar situations hadn't existed yet?
(edit: formatting)
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
"Scapegoating" itself as a word comes from Jewish tradition where the sins of the entire nation would be laid on a single literal goat who was then released into the wilderness (practically, pushed off a cliff outside town), while another 'innocent' goat would be sacrificed on Yom Kippur, the holiest day of the year. Jesus literally and symbolically took the role of both being innocent and being sacrificed, and it's quite literal in Christianity that he took on him the sins of the world there, which sins would otherwise prevent us individually from reaching heaven. Reasons for why exactly he was capable of doing this differ across sects but usually are some variant of him being innocent or of godly nature.
In modern discourse being scapegoated is seen as a bad thing (i.e. avoiding responsibility) but Christians would agree that you need some action yourself to obtain this absolution, though it's "free" in a more general sense. Here is the key point where the various sects differ greatly, what action? Some believe that you need to follow some kind of true regret/restitution/prayer process, others that you need to confess to a priest, others that you actually don't have to do anything other than once in your whole life ask for forgiveness and that's it.
aldomilyar
1d ago
I just felt like it should have been brought into the vampire climax somehow and felt like it just kinda weirdly floated above the rest of the movie just to tick the 'racial oppression themes' mentioned box moreso than really contributing to the plot perse. Also like the only two real white person interactions of the movie are 'The Local Klan is ready to go on 24 hours notice for the grave crime of selling an old barn' and 'Old drunkard's friend is mass lynched for the crime of having $20' which is a pretty insane setup.
If it had tied into the vampire plot with say the Vampiric mulatto woman going to the local town and making up a rape or something to galvanize the Klan into action to get the vampires into the barn I'd buy that, or if it somehow tied into the source of the Chicago money with organized crime contacts using the Klan to try and get revenge. Otherwise it's just a child's understanding of the South where mass lynchings were a daily occurence in every locality.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
It depends on what parts of the Bible. Some, absolutely. My very-atheist hometown of Portland, OR (suburbs but still) had a "Bible as Literature" English elective class in high school! No, I didn't take it, sadly.
Not all chapters are equal, and it also depends on the translation. KJV has a pretty famous poetic style, though the NRSV keeps a good bit of the charm while updating the language somewhat. Read some famous passages in the ESV though and you might feel like a toddler, it's pretty bad. There's some of the Psalms, of course, parts of Isaiah with nice imagery, the start of Genesis is a bit of a classic. In the New Testament, it's a little more parceled out into particular chapters, though John and Luke are definitely more literary than the other Gospels.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
1d ago
It's definitely true that most Spanish-only-speakers have developed coping strategies already, or are bilingual to an acceptable extent, so the returns aren't as starkly defined as with other languages. However, it does expand your ability to vacation in most all of the hemisphere, allows you to be a better "neighbor", and furthermore allows you to communicate somewhat acceptably with those who speak Italian or Portuguese (French to a more limited extent), so there's that extra marginal effect too. I just yesterday had a whole conversation with someone from Brazil, cross-language with him in Portuguese and me in Spanish, and it was pretty effective. So you kind of get 1 + 2 * (1/2) languages for the price of one. On top of that, since the linguistic roots are so similar, learning Spanish also has the effect of boosting English vocabulary (and vice-versa)! It's extremely common for regular-use Spanish words to have less-used English equivalents. As a trivial example, the word for "to chew" in Spanish is "masticar", which you might recognize as related to the more archaic English word "masticate" with an identical meaning. By contrast, Chinese offers practically zero cross-over knowledge in vocabulary, the script itself, and some intonation.
Again Chinese is definitely #2 on that list of most-useful languages, though. It's just hard to argue with the numbers. Most people rarely leave the country, and even if your Spanish is functionally decorative with 80% of all Spanish-speakers, there's still twice as many Spanish-speakers where it would be useful as there are Chinese speakers domestically (for which similar arguments could be made anyways). Sure, there are still 2-3 times as many global speakers of Chinese, but IMO you really need to weight that heavily by exposure chance. An unused language is still vaguely helpful developmentally as I mentioned above, or as a hobby, and might get you some attention from women, but overall it would still be a poor investment to learn a language never used.
Status-wise, there's no doubt Spanish has a lower socioeconomic association, so if you're trying to raise your kid to me a major climber, Chinese might be better if that's your primary goal. However, Spanish is the kinder and more practical option. So it might come down to values/priorities in some sense.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Because he made it into a brand that elevated it from "seedy porn" to something daring, sexy, naughty but in keeping with the spirit of the times, when Sexual Liberation was all the rage. Now women too could explore their sexuality openly! Being a Playboy bunny may seem ridiculous today, and it wasn't without criticism back then, but a lot of jobs for young women advertised an image of glamour and sexiness, e.g. airline attendants or trolly dollies, because air travel still had the air of being something luxurious and not commonplace.
These kinds of careers were presented as something more than the conventional "be a secretary or teacher and then get married and settle down to being a housewife" path for attractive young women. They did rely on sex appeal but there was a crucial distinction established between that and being the pole dancer or stripper or prostitute or porn actress: no expectation of having to have sex with the customers. The fantasy on both sides was: you are a hot young woman who, through working this job, may meet a desirable well-off man/you are a young man in a white collar job who can meet a glamourous girl not like the girls-next-door for mutual fun.
HereAndGone
1d ago
t's a moral, emotional, and physical cripple incapable of basic human functioning.
See, here is where our opinions sharply diverge. I don't want to fucky-fucky like a rabbit in spring? Well gosh, then I'm not a real human! Asexuality does not mean incapacity to have emotional and relational bonds with others, it just means 'no sex'. It doesn't even mean 'no romantic love', that's aromanticism!
Taking a look at the news pages about the people who do experience sexual arousal and so are not 'moral, emotional and physical cripples incapable of basic human functioning', what do I see about these paragons who have the fullness of erotic desire?
Serial killer couple from decades past. They were in love and sexually functional, you know!
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c39x1ggj3e3o
Man murders his daughter by deliberately running over her. If he had a wife and family, he had normal sexual and romantic human relationships, unlike those soulless asexuals!
Female prison officer attempted to get pregnant by convict. They're so in love, your honour! Okay, the guy is a convicted rapist, but that just means he is so overflowing with normal human attraction to potential sexual partners that he shares the love vigorously!
I can find a lot of stories of that type, if we want to argue about moral cripples.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yeah, the money-making empire was the brand but the magazine was what brought it to mainstream attention. Maybe you'd never be that guy going to a Playboy club or casino, but the magazine allowed you to participate in the dream. That's what porn is about - selling fantasy in a way that tries to persuade the consumer 'this is attainable for you'.
HereAndGone
1d ago
it sounds bonkers that they planned a project like this, and when it came to "how do we pay for it?", their answer was the equivalent of "uh, look down the back of the sofa for some spare change".
HereAndGone
1d ago
Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. That's only about a hundred and forty years or so, but they're still working on it.
HereAndGone
1d ago
Yes, blue on black.
I suppose if you factor in everything possible (disruption to supply, closing off streets, getting all the legal stuff around planning permission etc.) that it does make sense they could only do under a mile of power lines per year, but the proposed timeline does seem.... excessive.
Since I don't have anything useful to contribute, here's a classic song that is applicable. At least the linemen of Pasadena will have job security!
hanikrummihundursvin
2d ago
I'm not seeing the mischaracterization. He can call himself a classical liberal neoconservative and suck as many dicks as he wants, he is still haggling against progressive morality.
Why else would a gay cosmopolitan man care so much about the legacy of Winston Churchill? It's because it's a part of his foundation for why the west deserves to survive. A moral narrative of redemption. He doesn't leverage how many amazing gay bars there used to be in London.
ControlsFreak
2d ago
You're just bringing this exponential out of nowhere
It is not out of nowhere. It's the analogy you selected. It's literally a law of the universe. It's fundamentally just conservation of momentum. It's not some "utterly deranged" statement like your current examples, which are untethered from any mathematical reality of scaling. It's the actual fundamental law of how scaling works for the analogy you selected. In your analogy, they might not have realized where they were on the exponential at the time that they were making great gains; they might not have quite realized how far along they would be able to go before running into this fundamentally exponential scaling curve. But that was the underlying reality of the world.
I mean, how do you think this is supposed to go? "Let's use the analogy of flight, but it's absolutely forbidden to notice that there is a scaling law there, because that would be 'out of nowhere'"?
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
2d ago
Bloomberg has posted the list of Russian demands from the Istanbul talks:
- Permanent neutral status for Ukraine (like Austria)
- No reparations
- No calls for the return of Crimea and the four mainland regions
- No ceasefire until Ukraine withdraws from the four mainland regions
- International recognition of the new border
An anonymous X user clashreport has posted a similar list, but with "adoption of EU standards for minority rights and ending nationalist propaganda" inserted as item 3.
The ordering of the items shows what Russia is willing to negotiate on:
- military neutrality of Ukraine is important
- where the new border will be isn't, as long as Russia doesn't have to cede any land and Ukraine drops all claims beyond symbolic ones
- the other part of the original war goal, "denazification", is an interesting case.
I think Bloomberg's source consciously omitted it from the list to make Russia look like a straightforward warmonger in pursuit of moar clay. It's also the most dangerous to Ukraine in the long run, a poison pill.
Armed neutrality is easy: Ukraine can still buy whatever military hardware and training it needs from anyone, it just needs to do it in Przemyśl.
But "no persecution of the Russian language" is hard, because either Ukraine will have to crack down on its own most politically active citizens in a complete reversal of its current policy, or Russia will have a pretext for a resumption of hostilities at any moment.
It’s entirely possible that the women are unhappy because gen Z guys(I won’t get into the discussion of what qualifies as a man) are inadequate and that their standards are either very reasonable or only slightly high. Porn and gambling addictions, for example, are much more widespread in this generation than in the previous ones, and male employment is often less stable.
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