domain:streamable.com
I'm pretty sure those are outliers. At least, if you subtract the partisan reasoning, the entire industry is converging on even stevens. If Harris was suddenly doing landslide numbers it'd have been factored in already, no?
Consider getting checked out for hayfever/allergies.
I took way too long to do this after moving to a new house and subsequently turning into a mouth breather, because I never thought of myself as a person with allergies. It turned out that, although I wasn't allergic to the oak pollen that would fall like yellow snow around my previous home, I was very allergic to the relatively invisible wild grass pollens at the new place. A year or so of allergy shots cleared it up.
Are the Nasonex sprays okay for indefinite use? I was prescribed Flonase nasal spray (way back when it was still prescription-only) as a temporary fix while the shots were doing their thing, and I was warned at the time that some of the OTC options let you build up a tolerance if you used them too frequently and would then have withdrawal issues afterwards.
Just to steelman this, unless the people guilty of stealing have reason to fear getting punished, the law against stealing is basically dead. There are large portions of most major cities where these kinds of situations exist. The laws against stealing, drug dealing, and murder are not enforced consistently. The results are not freer people unconcerned about crime, in fact it’s the opposite. In those areas, since the cops can’t (often because of government policies) deter crime or reliably enforce the laws, the people who can’t afford to leave take the job of self protection on themselves. Bars go over windows, people carry weapons, and gangs take over to protect criminals from other criminals. It’s basically a post collapse society on display in the middle of downtown Chicago or St. Louis.
Sure an inquisition isn’t a great system for a modern functioning state. It’s not something that’s compatible with civil rights as we know them. But the other side is that the alternative is also terrible for civil rights. You have a right to private property. Sure, but what good is it when the cops for lack of proper paperwork and prosecutorial authority simply shrug as local thugs help themselves to anything not physically impossible to steal? What good is it to be protected from the cops detaining you when you and your family are prisoners in your own homes behind barred windows because your neighborhood is to unsafe to be outside in? What good is it to say “I am safe from the cops shooting me” when you have to worry about getting caught in a drive by shooting? Freedom isn’t just freedom from the state, but the presence of law, order and justice. If you don’t have the ability to come and go as you please without fear of the Cripps, it’s not far off from not being able to come and go for fear of the cops.
Norway uniquely jails speeders who reoffend far less than a normal which is discussed further down the piece bringing the gap to 25% vs 28%.
The gap is so small that imo default should be incapacitation is not rehabilitory. Maybe not so much in that its so ironclad to be true, but because it would shift the idea that it where innovation in the justice system has potential.
Your points about parole theoretically much better potential seems drastically underexplored compared to prison.
Think you've missed a trick here. The russians did fund the German green movement, and mostly because of the dynamics re imports and exports of energy. If you look at the Petra Kelly/Gert Bastian situation for example, the whole thing glows as bright as the sun. And it doesn't take rocket science to work out why. If you're pro green energy, at least at the time with 90s/00s level tech, then you're going to need (even if you don't acknowledge it) some stable energy source to make up the down periods. And at the time gas was by far the best option other than nuclear. You essentially had a domestic production of nuclear/coal which could be demonised as dirty and possibly even evil. The anti domestic side didn't say "and we'd like russian gas to smooth out the gaps" but this was an inevitability.
Basically yes, Vance is trivially correct that the German greens were funded by the Russians, and for relatively sensible reasons.
He says it's actually the Russians funding the German Green party, not even hedging or speculating.
Greens were pushing for no fossil fuels, of which Russia is the default European supplier. Greens were pushing for continued war in Ukraine. These are policies that benefit the US.
Surely he knows this. I can't think of it as anything other than a blatantly dishonest narrative in the usual vein of 'Europeans are incompetent, not pulling their own weight, Russians doing with them as they please, they need a savior, that's us (again!)'. Genuinely infuriating. Sobering, too.
I think it's Major Kong riding the nuclear missile in Dr Strangelove or nothing.
Thanks, fixed. (Like Hakan Rotmwrt said, "High-quality racism is extraordinarily hard work.")
Alright, out with it: Which one of you motherfuckers is J.D. Vance? It’s pretty strange to know that the future Vice President of the United States of America may have personally read my shitposts.
I'm trying to come up with a joke about Trump choosing to go out in a "hyperbolic" chamber/suicide pod, but I can't quite get there. "We really have the best pods, don't we, folks? This isn't just ending, it's ending with a flair, with class."
60/40 would also easily justify a big bet at 33.3%. I have a long history of uhhhh gambling/speculative investment. I try to only place bets if there is a lot of extra room for me to be wrong and still have positive EV. Harris at 33.3% just seemed like a great buy.
because their opponent is Trump.
It's probably a little early, but maybe someone should start collecting bets on whether the next Republican candidate gets tarred as uniquely evil in the same way. Seems quite likely to me, but I guess a lot depends on next week there.
What happened there? I must have totally missed that news cycle.
Kenyans are the distance runners. It's west africans, the dominant genetic heritage of Caribbean blacks, that are the sprinters.
I've seen the claim a few times on notes on Substack and shared posts from Twitter. Along with things like, "If Trump is elected we will literally be killed!"
but it shouldn't be some impossible feat of man to convict thieves.
It's not, it's just very difficult under the system as shaped and maintained by our ruling elites. (I am once again reminded of a trad-cath friend's argument that pretty much all of the US's problems, this one included, have known and simple solutions — not necessarily easy, but simple — only we're not allowed to enact out any of them, leaving a single political priority.)
He failed to achieve most of his policy goals
This is the best reason to vote for him. I'm being completely serious.
You definitely need to post this call-out in the thread. Lying about what's in cited papers knowing nobody will read them should be disqualifying, or the spirit of SSC is just another hollowed-out skin-suit for leftist propaganda.
Sorry in advance that I'm only responding to part of your points (and thanks a lot for writing them; I thought I should be more explicit about appreciating it since you are otherwise just eating downvotes from the lurker gallery) - I have read and thought about everything, but it was a choice between not responding at all and procrastinating way more than I can justify to myself.
So I think the poetic language is a good thing, up to a point (you can always take anything too far, of course).
I don't think "poetic" is the right term for what I see in these writings. A poet, I imagine, is someone who finds new, surprising and accessible ways of expressing a complex or rare sentiment; an obscurantist finds complex and inaccessible ways of circumscribing a common or simple one.
When you have this sort of interaction repeatedly when discussing philosophy, where people say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's bullshit", it starts to wear on you.
Well, it equally wears on you when you repeatedly have an interaction with people who essentially say "I don't know what that means, but I know it's deep". I'm sure you could see some symmetry between those who are serious about philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of the tribe that is opposed to the philosophers' coalition and those who are serious about anti-philosophy fighting off hordes of foot-soldiers of Team Philosophers, but the symmetry is broken by the philosophers alone being in the position where they could have chosen to express themselves in a way that forestalls the "I don't know what that means" part.
Relatedly, insofar as it addresses why there are such foot-soldiers on the philosophers' side, and why people like you may underappreciate their number and impact -
I think it's helpful to think of continental philosophy as a sort of 20th century version of TheMotte for French academics. They had their own memeplex, their own points of reference, there was a whole context surrounding it that isn't immediately obvious if you're approaching it for the first time in 2024. These guys all knew each other, they went to the same seminars and published in the same journals; sometimes they were writing "serious" arguments, and sometimes they were just shitposting at each other. A lot of times on TheMotte we'll have someone come along and say "y'know, I've just been thinkin' about this thing" - about leftists and rightists, about men and women, about whatever it is. And then they make some sweeping claim, that may or may not be particularly well supported empirically, but often enough it still makes you go "y'know, I think that guy might be onto something". And that's often the sort of value I get out of continental philosophy. Plainly there's some sort of value in this activity that we do on TheMotte, because we all keep coming here.
I think this is an instance of the Motte of a Motte-and-Bailey that is commonly deployed in defense of every academic discipline that operates according to "humanities rules". Motte: "This is just a bunch of guys shooting the shit. Sometimes they even produce interesting things that I personally enjoy. Why do you, an outsider who doesn't even appreciate any of this, barge in and try to impose rules such as your 'epistemic standards'?" Bailey: "These people are the world authorities on philosophy. We pay them to do philosophy and all philosophers agree that they are the most influential and insightful philosophers, so we should defer to them in matters of philosophy." As a result, there are Lacanians and Deleuzians sitting in IRBs and ethics boards and asking to be persuaded, in their terms, before I am allowed to use my funding to perform scientific experiments (this is mildly overstated for the sake of argument; I have only dabbled in stuff with human subjects and most of my work is mercifully untouched beyond the 60% institutional overhead that is used to subsidise the humanities); we defer to them in questions of what arguments are acceptable in politics and school; and ultimately they are what anchors the chains of trust and authority that we use to determine which political movements are legitimate (at risk of pulling clichés from the bingo board, the argument that the druggie who runs off with five pairs of sneakers as he torches the store is misguided but has his heart in the right place ultimately leads back, via many chains of simplification for political expediency, to some humanities tract full of "poetic language") and which ones are to be treated as threats.
(The most prominent not-obviously-political counterpart of the same dynamic result in cities tiled with brutalist wannabe 1984 film sets. I think people feel the commonalities between a two on a visceral level: it's no accident that Orbán's Budapest is one of the few European capitals that is basically devoid of modern architecture.)
As if something is wrong with us, society, and not them, the criminal.
This gets to a key point in my "disparate impact" effortpost, as well as the Emile DeWeaver "Crime, the Myth" piece I linked and quoted here, particularly the bit:
Then there’s a second myth, that crime is an act committed by an individual. Calling an act a crime is instead a choice we make as a society about how we respond to harms committed in our community.
(Emphasis added).
The criminal laws we have did not descend from the heavens. They are a social construct, a societal choice, and we can always choose differently; laws have varied quite a lot across human history.
It's a matter of where we place the problem. I remember an anti-HBD piece from @ymeskhout, giving the example of a game law limiting shellfish harvesting from a beach, and how everyone caught breaking it was a Cambodian immigrant. One can frame this as a problem with the Cambodians, and ask how we get them to stop over-harvesting shellfish… or we can frame it as a problem with a law that disproportionately punishes Cambodians by labeling behaviors more common among them as "criminal." One could easily eliminate said disparate impact by repealing the limit on shellfish gathering, after all.
If, instead of picking our leaders by elections, we did so by a test of sprinting ability ("There's only one Big Giant Office, and whoever outruns the fireball wins!"), the racial makeup of our government would be rather different, wouldn't it? (A lot more Kenyans, Afro-Caribbeans no?) Similarly with all the "13/50" memes; if you replaced the current US criminal code with that of, say, the Kingdom of Dahomey, would the racial disparities stay nearly as stark?
The position in the Kendi, DeWeaver, etc. space is that to frame the problem as being with people is inherently bigotry, and incompatible with values of tolerance and equity. The problem must be seen as with the system, and to address any problems, we must change who and what our society chooses to label as "criminal," and how we treat those so labeled.
I'm reminded of all the "Positive Action" self-esteem building crap we got in grade school back in the late 80s and early 90s (I thought it was stupid and nonsense back then, and my opinion has only gotten lower). It was full of "you're perfect just the way you are" assertions. Take this idea — the flower of liberal tolerance and the individualist view that "[a]t the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life" — and combine the value of "equity," and this seems to follow rather straightforwardly.
There's a core liberal impulse here — a "the laws were made for Man" view, a "that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men… it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it" view — that we must adapt "the system" to fit, and bring equity and fairness to, the people in all their diversity and freedom, rather than force people to adapt to a particular "system" created by one specific culture, reflecting a specific set of values, out of all the many possibilities.
I suspected mold issues in the ramshackle house I grew up in. Not much of a lead, but if it clears up if you ever spend a few months away from home, it might be a start.
CNN just hot-dropped multiple battleground state pollsh showing Harris with a +6 lead.
Since polymarket mostly trails polls, it makes sense.
I might have said this before, but there's no way old age is the death Trump would choose. He'd want a death so dramatic Vance would have to commission a 400' gold statue of him on top of Mt Rushmore, standing above all the other presidents in a heroic pose. He'd want a new Trump House built over the smouldering crater where the White House used to be.
He'd want good television
When I am arguing against the efficacy of individual strategic partisanship, "but then a group following this advice might cause the wrong party to win!" is not a meaningful response. Yes, if one side is collectively strategic and another isn't, then that other will lose the election. But (presumably) you don't have any control of either side, collectively, and your defection or cooperation will basically never make any difference, so you have no compelling reason to behave as if it it would. If everyone could be counted upon to behave as I am suggesting, it would actually be good for our election processes. If they can't be so counted upon, then you lose nothing by behaving better anyway.
Why not?
Why is this a problem?
More options
Context Copy link