domain:acoup.blog
desolation
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
This belief is a grave sin, and we refuse to be complicit in it.
Then why don't they say that? Instead, they say that in the interests of "racial justice," they refuse to help white Afrikaners. An old story about logs and cinders comes to mind.
The problem with steelmanning is that it so often involves replacing the real but stupid or evil with a fictional synthetic. Imagining a good argument for one's opponent is useful practice! Unfortunately, it does not mean that "the opponent" is actually the noble soul one imagines them to be.
aqouta
1hr ago
Or he could just walk next to the person in the basket for as long as needed.
Possible murderer was getting onto a boat.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
1hr ago
I never feel like I learn something from your comments anymore. Its always just AI/China is the best, unbeatable, even better than you thought, and not even committing to anything concrete there. Like for example:
That the EU has sovereignty, that Canada has sovereignty, that… basically, that the US is not a big scary hegemonic superpower it imagines itself to be and sometimes laments the wages of being. It's just a very powerful country, with large but decidedly finite leverage, and that runs well short of getting everyone to play along with American King's unreasonable imagination.
In what sense wasnt this already demonstrated by Germany buying russian gas? That seems like a case where wed expect more US influence than any of this tariff debacle.
Jazzhands
1hr ago
There's been a weird narrative push here lately to blame Christianity for the worst parts of leftism (see the similar "akshally Communism comes from Christianity" upthread).
You know the expression "Fascism is always descending upon America, but landing in Europe"? Same deal here. SJWs and Communists have been consistently and outspokenly opposed to Christianity. When you see a Christian organization turning to such left-wing activism, you can usually safely bet they are also on the off-ramp from being Christian.
Atheism is a critical ingredient.
hooser
1hr ago
I do that too, but I am not on call. I imagine a DA has to be open to calls from unknown numbers, since those could be a police officer's personal phone.
hooser
1hr ago
I get about 10 spam calls a day. I am not on call, and I have set my phone to only ring for my known contacts. My friend deals with kids and parents, so she must answer numbers she doesn't recognize (what if it's the kid's grandma coming to pick him up?), and she gets a bout a dozen spam calls per day as well. But at least she puts the phone on silent for the night. I'd imagine that getting woken up by spam is much more inconvenient than taking two seconds to recognize a spam call and hand up during the day.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
There's a reason I called it a fantasy.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
1hr ago
Have you read The Sun Eater series?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1hr ago
That said, the other regulatory standard that libertarians hate the most is KYC/AML, and those do seem to me like they fall squarely in the crosshairs of this EO. Those are the primary reason I'm tentatively excited/optimistic about this order.
The EO says that
Sec. 8. Effect on Immigration Enforcement and National Security Functions. Nothing in this order shall apply to the enforcement of the immigration laws or regulations promulgated to implement such laws, nor shall it apply to the enforcement of laws or regulations related to national security or defense.
If I were a bank regulator, I would assume absent explicit instructions to the contrary that the entire money laundering/terrorist financing apparatus (at a regulatory level there is no distinction between the two) is out of scope of the EO because related to national security. In any case, the EO doesn't really help as applied to money laundering regulations, because the authorising statute includes a catch-all section (31 USC 5322) making all willful violations of money laundering regulations criminal.
roystgnr
1hr ago
Annoying favor request: would you find the location (Book+Chapter number) of what you feel was the first really exciting rug-pull, add a random number of chapters between 0% and 20% of the count up to that point to avoid this being a total spoiler, and tell me?
I started reading A Practical Guide to Evil at one point a couple years ago, but didn't make it very far before getting a little bored of it and moving to something else. I'm no stranger to fiction that takes a little while (Mother of Learning) or a long while (Babylon 5) to introduce itself before it gets really good, but I feel like I need some place at which to say "either I like it by here, or it's just not my cup of tea".
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
DOGE would do this by having an AI parse the CFR, and it would work...
...about as well as Full Self Driving - good enough for you to put your guard down, and then drive you right into a truck it misidentified as a bridge.
2rafa
1hr ago
I mean 3.5 years to go…. I would say that things are probably going to be fine, but the real question mark is over the response to any black swan events (very major terror attack, major financial crisis, something weird/new happening with AGI) that could happen.
stolen_brawnze
I am the way Sia says "batteries" in that one song.
1hr ago
Oh they’re defined by doctrinal concerns, just not Christian doctrine.
Tucker Carlson claims to belong to this denomination lol.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
If the intent of the EO is to focus on strict liability regulatory crimes, then it will be a move away from straightforward application of the letter of the law and towards first a prosecutor's and then a jury's impression of your internal mental state at the time you did the actus reus.
For lesser regulatory offences (like speeding), strict liability and modest fines works very well in practice, as long as the rules are sufficiently simple relative to the complexity of the regulated activity that all drivers can know what the speed limit is with ordinary effort.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
2hr ago
I mean if you want arbitrary power and think that's necessary to maintain your society, at least have it say in black and white that's how it goes, don't go about pretending you have limited government. That's the worst of both worlds, you don't even get the benefit of unquestionable authority.
Tollund_Man4
2hr ago
@Tollund_Man4 are Irish and live in Ireland
I left for France two years ago. But to add to your point I don't work in tech and have never even been to the United States.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
2hr ago
The socialist principle, "He who does not work shall not eat", is already realized; the other socialist principle, "An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor", is also already realized. But this is not yet communism, and it does not yet abolish "bourgeois law", which gives unequal individuals, in return for unequal (really unequal) amounts of labor, equal amounts of products.
-- Lenin
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
2hr ago
** Many, many thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I forgot we don't actually know-- which is why step one makes agencies plainly list them. Yuge!
Federal regulations are codified, although you are probably right that nobody has explicitly tagged the criminal provisions. DOGE would do this by having an AI parse the CFR, and it would work.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
2hr ago
This is so viscerally disgusting to me, it's almost amazing the way the Trump administration has managed to expose the hypocrisy at the heart of the refugee resettlement NGOs and cause them to undermine their entire raison d'etre, it's beyond brilliant:
-- It's blatantly obvious to any liberal paying attention that politically rejecting refugee groups on ethnic grounds will go in bad directions. If you're rejecting Afrikaners, why are you accepting Palestinians? Who can you accept from Rwanda and the Congo? Almost every ethnic group has done bad things en route to refugee status, the myth of the innocent victim is an absurdity. This undermines all future refugee resettlement projects, and exposes them to future lobbying against other refugee groups.
-- It's going into the nativist frame by admitting that some refugees and immigrants are bad for the country and don't deserve to be here. The pro immigration argument must be universal if it is to exist at all, once you admit of some exceptions you enter the restrictionist frame of argument, and you start losing.
-- It's not clear how accepting white south africans who want to leave South Africa into the United States can possibly be a bad thing for South Africa. It's creating a frame of imprisonment, of anti-emigration: the country of South Africa has a right to say that white people can't leave in the name of "racial justice." Which is clearly insane and disqualifies their whole argument: absent an actual crime a country being unwilling to let their people leave is obvious tyranny. If South Africa wants to keep its white population in the country, it should treat them better. Full stop. Freedom to leave is the most basic freedom imaginable.
Not only is all this disgusting to me, it blows my mind that they are saying all this out loud. That no one at the organization seems to see what they are saying, is bright enough to pick up on subtext.
This is the best way yet to permanently torpedo the refugee program.
Hieronymus
2hr ago
The classical liberal chamber of my heart grew three sizes today. A move that simultaneously targets overregulation, the illegibility of the administrative state, and strict liability? I hope that the president can find a way to parlay this into lasting change.
Am I wrong in reading there seems to be reasonable wiggle room built into the EO?
Sec. 6. Default Mens Rea for Criminal Regulatory Offenses. (a) The head of each agency, in consultation with the Attorney General, shall examine the agency’s statutory authorities and determine whether there is authority to adopt a background mens rea standard for criminal regulatory offenses that applies unless a specific regulation states an alternative mens rea.
There's built in discretion to maaaybe adopt a different mens rea standard for criminal regulatory offenses. One hopes that the AG only accepts reasonable defenses of different standards of criminal enforcement, but there are probably many reasonable, wiggly exceptions.
"Excuse me, AG Bondi, in 98% of cases the US Forest Service targets Big Criminal Forestry-- these jerks are always finding ways to wiggle out of their illegal logging. If we lose strict liability standards for this enforcement they will claim ignorance every time, in every forest, and likely get away with their illegal logging. By the way, Mrs. Bondi, I have it on record we protested this. We aren't going to eat this story when the time comes."
Apply that to less reasonable, but similarly wiggly enforcement. Requiring a defense of different standards is good, but there's got to be thousands(?*) of these, and a safe political decision would be to defer to the agency if they request a different standard. This EO wasn't blasted out with political vigor. It was dumped on a Friday with barely a peep, so there may not be a big Trump backing to hide behind any unpopular decisions.
I may just be negative. This seems good, generally. If done intelligently, better. There are likely real trade offs in losing flexibility with higher burdens for enforcement, but still seems amenable.
** Many, many thousands. Hundreds of thousands. I forgot we don't actually know-- which is why step one makes agencies plainly list them. Yuge!
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
3hr ago
My fantasy of a lowkey-good Trump administration that is ultimately restrained from doing anything really stupid is back in play. Tariff's are minor, if silly. There's a deal with Iran on the table that simply allows Iran a nuclear program. Ukraine and Russia are apparently on their way to a real meeting in Turkey. The shambolic disassembly of the government and NGO infrastructure has been accomplished in such a chaotic way that it will be difficult to put back together and impossible to restore faith in.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
The abrahamic god is not internationally communist in any sense of the word. Some of the later Christian/Islamist pan-nationalist religious modifications are there for pure realpolitik goals, but the the raw original religion is not. It's explicitly ethnic/nationalist and totalizing.
FistfullOfCrows
3hr ago
but their vagueness is largely organic and downstream from the fact that any stricter standards would make the enforcement of the rules pointless because any intelligent lawyer or other actor could rules-lawyer their way out of it.
Ah yes, the classic we can't tell them the rules because then we wouldn't be able to jail/ban/disappear the people we don't like. It's bullshit when forum mods/jannies do it and it's bullshit when the law does it (a lot more so) too.
is the Tinker Tuesday bot down? where's the May 13th thread? are these done by hand?! :screaming_face:
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