domain:mattlakeman.org
aichanuwu
1hr ago
Squatters don't move out willingly, they need the long dick of the law to fuck the resistance out of them. For that to work the 'law' must recognize the contract and OH NO IVE IVE INVENTED A STATE AGAIN
Pasha
Defend Kebab
1hr ago
We have a family acquaintance (doctor earning lots of money, tall, handsome etc) who stayed single until late 40s despite the entire very large social and family network around him mobilising to find him a wife. I am not super sure what was the issue but he would just reject any candidates for decades. I guess he was either somewhat gay or was having too much fun being single.
Anyway eventually he married some 21 year old gorgeous redhead nurse and immediately proceeded to have 3 sons. So perhaps it wasn’t a bad life strategy after all.
You are considerably older than me so I can’t give any real advice. Just an anecdote.
aichanuwu
1hr ago
When bullets become easy to manufacture you expand the definition of bad apples from 'active threats stating their antipathy towards the state' to 'comrade lins daughter refused my hand in marriage and thus shows his capitalist thoughts'
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other.
I sense some ambiguity here as to what entails a "moral actor". Likely, it's not just "an actor that always chooses morally right acts", for that would be a bit weird. Most theories I've encountered have some lower bar for an actor to qualify as a "moral actor", one that allows them to choose morally wrong acts, yet be considered blameworthy for such a choice and possibly subject to morally acceptable punishment. Perhaps this punishment would involve large amounts of armed men and possibly helicopters, but the actors, themselves, are usually still considered to be "moral actors".
Of course, this is all very much complicated if you take what is either a strong minority opinion or possibly a majority opinion in this place, exemplified by @self_made_human and @SSCReader, that this whole morality thing is totally relative, anyway. Who's to say whether the wolves are moral actors? Maybe they're just actors with their own morality, which is I guess just as good as anyone else's. I don't know what else to say here, other than I think that this entire subthread kind of fails to get off the ground back a few steps if this type of thing is adopted.
VinoVeritas
2hr ago
'nazi' is a nickname for ignatius, which used to be a very common bavarian peasant name. It was what the communists called NSDAP (stupid name anyway) members, not unlike modern leftists calling republicans cletus or billy bob or whatever. So pretty much nobody calls themselves a nazi, as it's meant to be insulting
That said, pretty much nobody is a member of a german political party from a hundred years ago, either. That's not to say some people don't identify with some of their goals or policy platforms, but 'let's make Gdansk Danzig again' doesn't really have a lot of cultural currency nowadays. Millions of American men who boomed millions of American babies (one of which was my dad, miss you pop) went to North Africa, Italy, France, and Germany and had a delightful little war that lives large in the public imagination because, unlike the first war, mostly everybody had a really good time. So in answer to your second question, although I'm not /u/SecureSignals, no. Personally I lean toward Falangism because the older I get the more I find protestantism cringe
To your first question, just watch CNN for 10 minutes and listen to Wolf Blitzer ask David Chalian about Chuck Schumer's reaction to a recent statement from Tony Blinken. It is so pants-on-head obvious that it's not unlike trying to tell people the vaccine wasn't safe
Testing123
2hr ago
My understanding as an outsider aligns with yours. The vast majority of murders are either really easy to solve ("he was probably shot by that guy who stole his girl who he's been beefing with for the last three months") or almost impossible to solve ("he could have been shot be any one of 100 gang bangers in the neighborhood"). The genuine who-dun-its are more fun and interesting, but far rarer, and there's probably no systematic way to solve them. At best, you can throw some smart people at these cases and maybe they'll be lucky enough to identify and pursue the right thread. But ultimately, these cases have a terrible cost-to-success ratio for police forces and probably shouldn't be prioritized as a high-level objective. Maybe there's room for private investigators here?
EDIT - Thinking more about it, it makes sense for the FBI to have a system in place for dealing with complex, especially dangerous criminals, like serial killers or Ted Kaczynski types. From a law-and-order perspective, it's probably worth it to spend a lot of money and resources to take these guys out because they set bad precedents and spread social contagions.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
The problem with classifying Ra'am as far-left is that this is that it flies very much in the face of common usage.
I guess German opposition parties vote against bills proposed by the governing coalition. Perhaps more so if the bill would contain a lot of messy details to nitpick over, and less so if the bill reflects a wide consensus in the population.
In times of stable majorities, the votes of the opposition do not matter for the outcome. It is mostly public perception "How could you vote for this?!" vs "How could you vote against this?!". One way to square the circle is for opposition parties to introduce their own bill -- which generally won't pass, of course. This signals "we care about this topic" without any risk of getting blamed for negative outcomes of the coalition bill.
aardvark2
2hr ago
Things are an absolute fuckton better than they used to be for Black people in the US. On top of the whole notion of "blackness" which doesn't make genetic sense, it doesn't make historical sense, it doesn't generalize to the world, and can only be understood in a US context.
It's possible to cherry pick a some definition of "blackness" which does not make sense. Slaves from various Western African polities were brought to various American polities and were indiscriminately mixed, losing their pre-slave distinctiveness. So most other American polities got about same mix as USA did, the difference is that south to USA, there were more race mixing.
Is MLK's dream of kids being judged by the content of their character a bad dream?
And somehow we got non-sequitur "intelligence and personality are same on average for all populations"
Testing123
2hr ago
Related - I think someone posted on the SSC subreddit that the the vast majority of the most popular celebrities (as measured by social media followers) were musicians, as opposed to actors, athletes, or any other entertainers. People generally seem to like music more than any other entertainment.
SSCReader
2hr ago
My experience is with Westminster in the UK but having now moved to the US my interactions with politicians here seems to indicate they aren't any different.
I think you are vastly underestimating personal ambition and desire for power. My experience directly with hundreds of those national level policians is that those are the top motivations for most of them. Some ideological purists but they tend to get ground down over time. Doing the right thing and helping people are what politicians say, but when you are in a room with them hashing out election strategies their revealed preferences show a different side. Maybe they started out that way but by the time you get to national level, yout ambitious, power hungry types have outcompeted the rest.
I've worked with hundreds of MPs and there were at best a handful I would call good people who were motivated by helping people or doing the right thing.
If my years in politics have raught me anything it is whatever level of cyniscism you have towards politicians it is probably nowhere near enough. Desire for money may be there, but its less than ambition and power because polticians don't get paid huge amounts in general. Though you can leverage it afterwards if you are successful.
No its ambition and power. Top 2, by a lot. If you assume any given national level politician is a borderline narcissist with nuclear levels of ambition, who has to filter that through pretending to be commited to an ideology and to want to do good, then it explains all the various undercurrents in the halls of power.
Politicians are sharks with good PR. Thats why they both have big smiles to show off.
aichanuwu
2hr ago
What is it about music that creates emotional resonances?
I don't mean the individual aspect whereby our own past experiences create additional meaning and influence to the music we may hear, I mean specifically the impact of playing in certain keys, registers and styles.
Basically I was listening to Children Of The Omnissiah while my kids played around me, and I noticed they had stopped to just stop and stare for a second. They're toddlers, and its not like they haven't heard non-kiddy music, since I used acoustic covers of dire straits to put them to bed, but this type of liturgical music is the first time they've stopped and just stared. It made me look stuff up and I read some stuff about some keys being 'sad' keys, and then discovered Spinal Tap wasn't bullshit.
So, smartfucks of the motte, please enlighten me if you know anything about this. Am really curious and wonder if this is cross cultural.
Felagund
2hr ago
I think some of the downturn was gamestop taking advantage of the high prices to sell some stock themselves and make a few billion.
NelsonRushton
2hr ago
And according to Pew, even the most strident progressives in the Democratic coalition still less than 50% say they want police funding in their area to be decreased. Other Democrats are way, way less supportive. So I don't think this whole anti-police leftist thing is as prevalent as it's pitched here. In other words, it's a caricature of progressives, and so the whole thing feels strongly of straw-manning.
I don't claim that most progressives want to defund the police. I do claim that if progressives, as a group, really cared about the safety of black people, then they would be talking about the dramatic increase in murder rates since 2014 (at least as much, for example, as they talk about alleged racism in policing) -- and they would be the ones asking the question of whether the Ferguson effect had a role in it.
RobertLiguori
2hr ago
The wolf is factually correct that private property requires force, because Communists (and other thieves and despoilers exist). You cannot trust in the bricks of contract law to willing parties to save you, absent men willing and able to do violence on your behalf.
When dealing with wolves (or when wolves deal with you), there is no 'right' in the moral sense; that only applies when you are dealing with moral actors interacting with each other. If we were talking about pigs, or other people who had signed contracts, then we can discuss if they were right or wrong for how they followed their contracts, and even if contract law is the highest form of morality and if there are some contracts that shouldn't be enforced, but (if I may delve into the spicy takes) the correct response to wolves is not negotiation, not diplomacy, but large amounts of armed men, and probably helicopters.
quiet_NaN
2hr ago
The FDP is kinda libertarian. On economic issues, I would place them to the right of the CDU/CSU.
But on purely social issues, they are clearly left of the CDU/CSU. For example, the Ampel recently legalized cannabis (with some caveats). This is not a position currently compatible with the CDU/CSU.
SSCReader
2hr ago
They don't do calculus, but they clearly do judge differently intuitively in my experience. People are much more likely to forgive someone with motivations they judge to be good. Accidental harm and deliberate harm are treated differently through most of our legal systems as a reflection of that.
ace
2hr ago
AI can 'remove' the clothing from photos.
That's a colloquial way that people talk about it, but it's of course not how the technology works. You can mask out a region of an image, and let the AI fill it in with it's best guess, optionally guided by a text description. Or if you have enough photos, you can train a model to output pictures of a particular person's face. Either way, on an abstract level, it's filling in the gaps with its best idea of what should go there based on the patterns present in its training data. On a moral level, its painting somebody else's naked body. That's why I think the best analogy is cutting-and-pasting photos of people's faces onto pornography, and how we should be viewing it from a legal perspective.
Crowstep
3hr ago
I would say it mainly depends on how young a woman you can attract, which only you can answer. It is literally possible for men in their 80s to father children, but it rarely happens outside of Hollywood because for a guy in his 60s or 70s to attract a woman of reproductive age usually requires him to be very rich, very famous or (ideally) both.
A man's biological fertility really only starts to decline in his forties, and doesn't have the hard cut-off that female fertility does, although the risk of sub- and infertility increases with time. Even then, IVF allows you to increase the odds in your favour.
Get yourself a marriage-minded woman in her twenties and get busy!
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
Replace YouTube here with any of the major tech platforms; Netflix, Amazon Prime (only their digital catalog. Put aside physical goods from Amazon for a moment), the rest of the Google services (Gmail, Google meet), Zoom etc.
It all comes back to the infrastructure underpinning it and cost. The memory/compute/storage cost alone for these runs into 100s of millions to 10s of billions annually. Add on the management complexity on top and it's not possible for a competitor to emerge. A better investment would literally be a nuclear power station.
This is the problem at the root of decentralized web product ideas. The only way to compete is to actually play a different game; decentralization. We can never "trust" that an infra provider or a platform built on top of it will ever actually play nice indefinitely. Maybe you get an Elon Musk type willing to pony up $10 bn of his or her own money to build the alternative but then - "die a hero or live long enough to become the villain." How long before the management executives of that company decide to start charging or running ads or walling off users own data?
The chicken and egg problem, however, is user adoption and friction. Any actually decentralized web applications (take IPFS for instance) requires technical ability that - while actually pretty simple - only exists in, maybe, 5% of users? Now, add on the fact that for 99.9% of users it isn't actually solving a functional problem, but a half philosophical one. Nobody is complaining that there's "no easy and low cost place to host videos on the internet!" Sure, general homepage YT is dogshit, but people shrug it off because being fed pop culture content (and being happy with it) is as old as the radio.
The internet isn't dead, it's better than it has ever been. But the low-friction, easy to use internet is mindless garbage much like the low-friction, easy to use television was before it. I'll admit that the ubiquity of internet slop is at a whole new level of maddening - the experience of using a cell phone for any sort of activity beyond comms (text, calls) is now a net negative to overall life satisfaction. The browser setup to enjoy surfin' the net! (as the kids say) is non-trivial. Social media is literally brain cancer, and most political news is never ending rage-jaculation. Ours is a culture of hyper-abundance where the key is self-moderation, not maximal self-indulgence.
I guess what I'm saying is the true competitor to YouTube is touching grass and leafing through the pages of a physical book. I'm being like ... fucking deep here, Bro.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
I hate to do this, but I have to half-hijack the thread:
When is it actually "too late", for a male, to have children? Please don't give me the sunshine and rainbows "it's never too late!" nonsense. I'd like the informed and unvarnished truth that the Motte is (in)famous for.
I ask this as a mid 30s male in great shape with FAANGy levels of income in a non-FAANG job who's just a little too surly about marriage, but has accepted the moral imperative for reproducing and being a good parent.
aardvark2
3hr ago
What do you if one accidentally opened a topic on themotte, but does not want to read it? If page just closed, all post would be marked as read?
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
3hr ago
I've been on a True Crime spree habit over the past few weeks. This happens every year or so. This year, among other material, I listened to the audiobook Hunt For The Green River Killer about the initial investigation into Gary Ridgway (I do recommend this book). Additionally, earlier this week, I watched American Nightmare on Netflix about the so-called "Gone Girl" case in Vallejo, California. Netflix streteches out what should be a 90 min doc into 3 almost hour long episodes. The directors also shoehorn in a MeToo theme towards the end and, with some selective editing, make a single female police look like the only pure police hero. They are swimming as hard as they can against the riptide of a poor business model.
In Hunt For the Green River Killer, you see just how complex a "Task Force" investigation at scale is. The various intertwined jurisdictions in and around Seattle threw everything they had at trying to catch (then unknown) Ridgway in the 1980s. The result was so many possible leads and suspects that they drowned in their own noise. At one point, the lab work backlog was over 50 years. At other points, they had at lest two suspects that, at the time, looked almost like sure things. The authors do a good job of then demonstrating how obvious it was that those suspects were in no way sure things. This shows the level of confirmation bias and motivated reasoning that can crop up in these kind of investigations even in otherwise experienced and talented cops.
The Ridgway people even brought in the legendary FBI behavior psych unit (of "Mindhunter" fame). Their composite profile of the killer was along the lines of "white male between 30-50, does a manual labor type job, drinks beer, smokes, may have prior military service or outdoors interests." Again, the authors point out that that profile narrows it down to .... 40% of all men living in Seattle! Interesting and also infuriating to see how far people can build a career off of what amounts to a Forer statement.
As a fun side note: Even back in the 1980s, you had pro-sexworker women's groups who demanded the police "do more!" with the investigation, complete with statements like "if this had happened to a bunch of high school cheerleaders and not prostitutes, we would already have an arrest!" It's turtles all the way down, and Witches v. Patriarchy all the way back up, I guess.
With American Nightmare, due to its recenecy, I won't give out any spoilers. Suffice it to say that the police actually try to employ Occam's Razor and go with a basic explanation first but reality intervenes and a fairly wild story unfolds instead. The initial investigating cops don't come out looking good - although I feel like the Netflix editing team was responsible for thumbing the scales hard in this case.
The question I find myself asking in regards to both is; just how well equipped is American law enforcement (outside of the FBI) for complex investigations without a pretty obvious narrative with a lot of obvious circumstantial pointers? An example of what I mean here is; when a drug murder happens, any decent police in the area will know "this was a drug murder. the victim was a known dealer." A slightly above average police probably has some awareness of the recent conflicts between the locals gangs and can therefore say, at least, "It was probably this crew that knocked this guy off, now I just have to try to figure out who exactly did it."
With the "whodunnits" of serial killer victims and frankly just bizarre circumstances of cases like that of American Nightmare, do cops have a playbook / infrastructure / support to actually perform a full investigation effectively? The simple narrative (which Netflix eagerly jumps to without second thought) is that "Cops are often stupid / lazy / racist / sexist / corrupt and so they don't solve cases." I don't buy this for a whole host of reasons. You can debtate me on that, but I'd prefer we stay focused on the question of "are police departments setup to handle complex investigations?" The Ridgway investigation is particularly illuminating, I think; a bunch of well intentioned and talented cops eventually buried themselves in a volume of work that was utterly unmanagable. They really did pull out all of the stops and, in so doing, pretty much led themselves back to square one where their only hope was catching Ridgway in the act. (What ended up actually leading to the arrest was a 20 year wait and the advent of DNA technology, which is just as much of a magical solution)
The higher level of analysis, however, is; should police departments be setup for this? I'd actually argue they should not. Complex investigations are rare. American Nightmare gets a netflix special and Ted Bundy, Gary Ridgway, and Jeffrey Dahmer get hundreds of books, documentaries, and podcast about them because they are so rare and bizarre. The "murders that matter" to use a slightly indelicate phrase are those that are part of a larger anti-social pattern; drugs, gang violence, preventable domestic violence, etc. I'd much rather have a PD that is doing the leg work day in and day out to know about the goings on in bad neigborhoods so that once a murder does occur, they can jail the offender swiftly and, hopefully, interrupt a retaliatory cycle.
I have only the deepest sympathy for the victims of the "one in a million" crimes of serial killers etc. But I must admit that, at a societal level, these aren't things we can really systemically remedy (same goes for a lot of the more sensational gun violence incidients. See: Las Vegas). What we can do at a systemic level is police and enforce known areas of persistent anti-social behavior aggressively.
So, again, two primary lines of questioning:
- Can police departments launch effective complex investigations, or are they at a structural / organizational disadvantage here?
- Should they focus resources on the above capability beyond a small, dedicated "Major Crimes" unit (or some such) or, ought they double or triple down on basic patrol, fast response, and community intel work?
Dean
3hr ago
This is a commonly overlooked distinction, and good on you for remembering it. That conceptual space of [Having an Ambition] is often what overlaps with [Ideology], as the nature of having a goal to work towards often depends on not only the interests behind the person, but the entire framework that leads them to the conclusion that the objective is worth focusing on above more 'reasonable' things, which is also what gets them critical enablers / associates who empower this. This [Ideology] could be religious or secular, but it serves as a framework for consolidating the [Having an Ambition], as well as a legitimization and cooperation-enabling framework to enable action.
Yes to everything but the weird aspersion toward women's education. As immortalized by Danny Trejo in Anchorman "times are changing, ladies can do stuff now." Everybody responds to incentives, and if properly aligned, the women who would be happier as careerwomen will go to school and those who would be happier as homemakers will do that.
And, there is also some irreversible amount of seeking your MRS degree from an already-sorted pool of your best peers
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