domain:betonit.substack.com
Lizzardspawn
6hr ago
Unfortunately, the other end of the spectrum is a permanent generation-on-generation underclass of non-citizens like Turkish and Arab immigrant communities in Germany.
I see no problem here. They can always return to turkey or whatever.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
6hr ago
Is 200 k$ the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover?
No, it's the limit on the amount that Carlos's insurance would cover.
If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200 k$ in the first place.
To clarify: This situation arose solely because Keith was impatient. He asked the two judges to impose the 200-k$ limit because he wanted to get his money ASAP, without waiting for the bankruptcy proceedings to finish.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
6hr ago
Thailand is a good place, you see a lot of female uber drivers, food delivery drivers, something that I had never seen in India as that place is safe. Girls I met from the west who were tourists like me were surprised that they could walk the streets at any hour without worrying about any safety.
In general I suspect women are better at following 'the rules' which has downstream impacts on criminality
They are very agreeable which is also why they get exploited int the workplace more, ignore the diverstiy hires in large tech firms, life away from the ivory towers is pretty harsh if you are a woman. My mother works a lot more than my dad who techncially has to do jack all as he is a senior professor (no tenture in this nation but he is unfireable). My mother begrudginly agrees with a lot of requests whilst my dad made a name for himself for taking the uni to court and winning many times over, to the point where people respect him. Gender differences are quite apparent in workplaces not clouded by obvious globohomo ideas.
On the crime part, even in female prisons, trans women commit more rapes than males would in a male prison. The only crime I usually see from women is getting their husbands killed with their boyfriends which has been happening a whole lot more now.
I've seen quite a few porch pirates use their children to steal
Pathetic, disgusting. Using your child as a shield and making them do bad things. I have heard that some places like SF dont have felony charges unless you dont strike a threshold amount, meaning that you can legally send kids to steal a lot of stuff regularly and not face any consequences legally either.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
7hr ago
Reading updates - fable edition. Do post if you are reading anything this weekend.
I begun reading watership down and its been nice so far. Anytime I read something, it seemds to be mostly old or older than our current times. Besides non fiction like the very enjoyable Masters of Doom, I keep coming back to the question of art and why modern art is not as good. Paul Graham's essay Hackers and Painters give a paraller of painting and hacking wherein paintings peaked at a point and its been worse since, modern times being the age of hacking. What causes such peaks and declines? Is it due to the innate biology of the people, the social environemtns, combination of both or just the story of life.
Rabbits are small cute little creatures that live very short lives. We may look down upon fables, I certaintly did and I am somehwat pleased to say that I have a better understadning now due to this book suggestion. There are two great fables in the Hindu tradition, Pancatantra and Hitopadesa. I read the first as a child and loved it, though I did not remember any stories, you could sense that it affected or at least encapsuated a lot of the vlaues of the time. During a recent discussion I was made aware of how it conceals very harsh truths that would get you isolated from broader society due to them being true.
Which brings me to Richard Adams watership down which is an epic that involves rabbits in a believable world. I bought on the suggestion of my mentor and was surprised to see that the publication logo featured a smaller version the tux like penguin of penguin publications since this book is sold by their childrends division puffin. As an adult, you can appreciate the story quite a bit, the undertones and themse in many similar texts go beyond what kids can understand whilst imaprting them with some appreciation for these values. I watched Lord of the Rings as an adult, by the end of the movie, I could feel the things Tolkien held dear and saw as virtous. Good texts need to be passed down,, even if you cannot grasp them fully, you embody a lot of the underlynig tones.
Despite their being infinitely more entertainment avalible to us, we mostly seem to consume the worst sorts. I hope more kids grow up reading these stories. By time I get done reading something really good, I always gain a better feel for the world, anytime I spend time online, even though it seems helpful to keep up with tech news, I come back feeling worse. The subtext for good texts has an element of heroic valor whilst modern internet subtext is that of envy, lethargy, learned helplessness. Texts for the longest time were not a revenue stream the way modern books are. This is not some novel piece of information, I wanted to write out some things I felt to be true.
Gift your kids books, these fables do a lot of good modern media cannot. The world needs more heroes.
Goodguy
7hr ago
Women are more hostile to COVID vaccination, perhaps reflecting a female urge to make politics revolve around their bodies.
I don't understand the supposed logic here. Wanting politics to revolve around one's body is orthogonal to one's opinion about COVID vaccination. If you want politics to revolve around your body, that could equally easily make you a fervent COVID vaccination supporter or a fervent COVID vaccination skeptic.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
7hr ago
Hmm. I was going to disagree, but some back of envelope bayes-rule calculations actually do seem to agree I understated the case so I guess I stand corrected on that front.
Felagund
7hr ago
You can't use DNA evidence from a place to prove you weren't there, which is what he's trying to do.
mrvanillasky
Indo Aryan Thot Leader
7hr ago
Great observation, human beings also innately have some desires that cannot be verbalised properly by most except for a handful of blessed minds. Epics everywhere despite not being epxlicitly related have shown similar themes time and time again. Goethe referenced Kalidasa who himself referenced ancient texts here that themelsves had a lot of references from the origin of the Indo europeans. Some part of modern day steppe effectively influenced a seminal author who himself influenced the world and these things came from different parts but did have some shared ancestry.
I often ask myself if the reason behind the world not having good art now is due to the fact that like everything in life, things begin, peak and then plateau before thier end or because society truly is so bad socially and biologically that these things cannot be done again. Technology is a good example of this wherein the fastest pace of progress we saw was a cetntuy ago which allows silicon valley to LARP as tech innovators whilst making b2b saas trinkets that do not do very much.
On the same note as what OP mentioned, Moldbug famously avoids reading anything written by other NRx (neoreactionaries) to avoid copying thier ideas but they all reference the same people modlbug references anyway.
This is a very good point given that we have IP laws now yet things are staler than before. One more thing that maybe has an impact on this is that authors today need to sell a lot of copies to make money and get status, something that was not true for a long time thanks to patronage and fixed classes/castes.
I've seen quite a few porch pirates use their children to steal, so none of this surprises me any more. Lots of ragebait videos out there about this sort of thing if you go looking.
You're right though. In general I suspect women are better at following 'the rules' (agreeableness) which has downstream impacts on criminality. I remember once hearing about a SE Asian nation (Thailand?) only hiring women as traffic police because they wouldn't extort bribes like the men would.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
8hr ago
If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?
ace
8hr ago
Yea, the incentive structure of birthright citizenship is insane. Unfortunately, the other end of the spectrum is a permanent generation-on-generation underclass of non-citizens like Turkish and Arab immigrant communities in Germany. Seems a difficult needle to thread.
vorpa-glavo
8hr ago
I do think a lot of that is part of the sub role, but I was also trying to describe the appeal from "both sides."
There are people who want to become the bimbo, and I agree that a large part of the appeal for them is literally "turning your brain off" and giving in to blissful ignorance while letting another person take control. But there are also people who want to make the bimbo, and I think for them it is all about the feeling of seeing someone who was smart being taken down a peg and becoming a parody of themselves.
I think the bimbo sub has a lot of overlap with the sub in ageplay, petplay, hypnoplay, etc. All of those involve embracing a more simple-minded mentality and letting someone else take control for a while.
A much more speculative part for me is why particular kinks end up appealing to particular people. I have a second hypothesis, which I might call the 'horror story hypothesis.' I think that the power dynamic that becomes part of a person's fetish is often a thing that they worry about a lot. Classic examples would be the girl obsessed with staying skinny who ends up with a weight gain fetish, or a smart guy whose greatest fear was brain damage getting a bimbofication fetish - which are both examples I've seen in the wild. I don't think that this explains every instance of someone fixating on a single power hierarchy, but I think it probably explains a good deal of them.
2D3D
8hr ago
Thats more a reflection of only idiots wanting to have sex with 16 year olds (idiot teenagers, perverted men). The most successful girl I know (extreme outlier) got pregnant at 17 to her godly christian boyfriend, popped out 3 more before 25 and is now a happy grandmother at 45 with a home based baking business supplanted by her husband (same dude) being a highly successful investment banker being pressured to take over the family business. This is an extreme outlier and much is contingent on the success network available to the woman, but it goes to show that not being idiots has outsize benefits. That the more common story is the girl getting knocked up and the young man abandoning her early on is reflective of poor mate filtering on the girls part and lack of social censure on the mans part, though being honest the man behind closed doors in high censure environment tend to be abusers so thats the main risk.
2D3D
8hr ago
My daughter is more at risk of NEVER having any sex because she is at her tender age already obsessed with degenerate homosexual kpop boylove fics (RIP the Chatgpt server instance tasked to her). Between that and her godsis already being a degenerate goonette whose collection of bad dragons highly upsets even her somewhat liberal mother, the risk is more in the opposite direction. While the risk of infiltrators in good christian churches or feminist groups are both extant, the greater risk of women having impossible standards for men and defaulting to the internet rabbit hole instead is unexplored.
HighResolutionSleep
8hr ago
A child support order is going to say, throughout, "for the support of the child"
I said that referring to it by name is against the rules.
If we have to black out every mention of "child" then I suppose it might be hard to figure out what the purpose of the order is.
I didn't say that, I just said you can't say "the purpose of the law is support the child because the law says so, it's in the name, stupid". You do this multiple times so I'm only addressing it once.
The fact that the support ends when the child reaches age of majority
This is also compatible with the mother support theory.
the calculation of support is based on the child's needs
Do the needs of children scale with the father's income? They eat more food? Wear more clothes?
how would you prefer to make sure she does not personally benefit from the child support
I'm less concerned about this part than other elements, but to the extent that it matters, it is a solved problem. You make it an EBT card with similar controls. Courts can pull the records on a moment's notice. There's way less deniability because the funds aren't co-mingled. This isn't rocket science. Wouldn't be surprised if some places already do this.
You could argue that without the child support she wouldn't have been able to afford to buy clothes for herself. While true, the point of child support is that children add expenses. If she weren't taking care of the child she could afford to buy clothes for herself.
If this were the modal impact of the policy, that would be a great point in favor of calling it mother support.
almost always rooted in a sense of bitterness and injustice
I will cop to feeling that there's a great amount of injustice across nearly all policy that touches men and women as such, and that I harbor a considerable measure of bitterness about it. No point in denying it. I guess that means my beliefs about the world are wrong because they come from a bad place, huh. Where do your beliefs about child support come from? Only love and honey, I'll bet. That means they're better than mine.
It always boils down to a desire to be punitive and/or bail on financial obligations
How do we know that child support policy as it exists today isn't "punitive"? Sounds like a motivation that could be attached to the fact it scales with income.
I have financial obligations to women all across the country and their children. No bailing on that one, unfortunately. I'd probably feel less bad about child support if it meant I never had to pay strange woman to raise another man's kid. Hell, raise it 10x if that's what it takes. Throw men who can't pay into lithium mines.
not actual concern for the welfare of any children in question.
Who cares? Nobody has any concern for the welfare of children when it collides with the needs/wants/whims of women. If a woman's right to drink smoke and snort as much as she wants while pregnant is inviolable, I don't see how a man's right to stay home and play video games shouldn't also be etched in sapphire. There's a thousand different policies we could pursue that would have manifest benefits to children to the inconvenience of women, and we implement exactly zero of them.
anon_
8hr ago
Indeed. I don't disagree.
But at the very least the core of his appellate claim is on a relevant (to the TX legislature) factual matter about what happened. It might be weak, but at least he's arguing the right actual thing.
That alone puts it far ahead of the majority of far-less-defensible capital appeals that are about everything else.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Problem in this case is that it's possible that any DNA under the victim's fingernails match one of the Gutierrez's compatriots, and Gutierrez still entered the trailer and participated in the murder -- just without being scratched. Indeed, because one of his compatriots lived with the victim and had 'found' the victim's body, some of the samples should be reasonably expected to be not-Gutierrez's even if he was totally guilty as can be.
There's been fact-based determinations before focusing on guilt (even, rarely, ones that raised serious nontrivial questions of guilt: McCollum is pretty embarrassing to Scalia). I'm hard-pressed to see how that'd happen here.
anon_
8hr ago
I think we should all pray that the US suffer many more disastrous times as bad at that awful period from 1988-2001.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
This one's weird.
The law is probably reasonable enough or close to reasonable enough (if not necessarily my idea of well-designed), but the lower court just set it against rational basis review. Previous SCOTUS decisions either put restrictions on adult content either fully in strict scrutiny (Ashcroft I and II, where restrictions were on the basis of the content's adult nature) or rational basis (obscenity to minors, movie theatres). And strict scrutiny, at least in a free speech context, is ruinously hard to achieve, in ways that even Thomas probably doesn't want to water down. The closest obvious parallel in previous law was adult theatres, which was admittedly a pretty jank decision of its own by pretending it was separating the effects of the content from the content to justify rational basis review. But that'd be the same as no review at all.
I guess this case didn't fall close enough to the commercial speech restriction cases for the adult theatre side to be even remotely palatable? But it's Thomas, and his willingness to go to the bat for bizarrely aggressive paternalism (eg, en loco parentis) is one of the bits that's long been a go to, for better or worse. Instead, he reaches (through BSA v. Dale for some reason) to the draft-card burning regulations from US v. O'Brien, saying restrictions on speech here are incidental to restrictions on behavior, so intermediate scrutiny. From that view, it's not unreasonable.
Then Thomas differentiates it from the strict scrutiny CDA cases by saying those "effectively suppresse[d] a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive”. But the analysis is just limited to privacy concerns and stigma (aka, more privacy concerns). Yet these restrictions have potentially massive costs to speakers, not just receivers, on adult-content sites or even mixed-content that don't go up to that mark. Likewise, he tries to distinguish the CDA as regulating noncommercial sites that would not readily take up credit card processing, but HB1181 applies to all commercial entities, not just commercial sites. Burden can't drive level of scrutiny up, but this sort of perfunctory analysis gives little idea of what the actual analysis is, especially since intermediate review is a little ad hoc to start with.
Some of that burden review is probably because the Free Speech Coalition advocate comes across as kinda a nutcase during oral args. He mentions costs to site managers once in oral arguments and it's a stunning 40k USD per 100k users, and then spends much more of his time ranting about the motivations of anti-porn people. But then intermediate scrutiny's biggest bite is specifically in the prong of the O'Brien test that asks if the government interest is tied to the suppression of information, which is where the whole anti-porn thing rises anyway.
It rounds out to normal -- Thomas does everything short of wink-and-nod to say that pretextual restrictions on obscenity-to-minors that try to cover restrictions on adults are invalid -- but it's just such a bizarre way of getting there, and it's going to invite a lot of mess from lower courts.
Gutierrez v. Saenz - ... My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years
Yeah, probably. I'm really skeptical that a DNA test with no return of Gutierrez's DNA from the few samples available would factually demonstrate that he was outside of the trailer (or for a positive result to have his advocates want him in the chair), and while I could kinda see the arguments for allowing it anyway, it's hard to care. There's a chance Texas will just punt on killing him, but it's Texas, so that's a real far outlier. The process and procedural stuff might matter for other cases, perhaps? The court just didn't like the lower courts ignoring past dicta?
anon_
8hr ago
I think testing finding DNA evidence under the victim's fingernails that matches a guy convicted of rape would probably be fairly weighty evidence. Of course, to be weighed against everything else. Of course, that's a just-so manufactured scenario.
In this case, the perp confessed he was there to rob the victim and his co-conspirators went inside and murdered her instead. This appeals doesn't challenge his overall guilt for what happens, only whether he actually killed the victim or not. And that's relevant because the TX legislature (not a federal judge) specifically made that a precondition for the death penalty.
In other words, there is an actual factual question about what exactly this guy did.
JarJarJedi
8hr ago
Democrats failed to offer any organized opposition to Trump when he launched an illegal war
No they didn't - the fact that you falsely call it "illegal war" (it's not a war and it's completely legal) is owed solely to the organized effort of Democrat politicians and Democrat press. And it's working. It can't stop Trump - because, again, what he is doing is completely within his powers as the President and Commander of the military, so short of removing him from that position in some way, it is not possible to stop him from doing it - but it does what it intended to do, creates the false image of Trump violating the law.
anti_dan
8hr ago
Without knowing specifics of a case, what the hell would DNA prove in a murder case? Did some guy shoot his own hand splattering the wall then shoot the victim?
This is why these sorts of appeals and objections are such BS. People just seize upon any possible avenue to delay an execution. Usually in such cases its not like there was a semen sample in the deceased vagina and he was convicted without testing done. Its obviously going to be some other thing.
anti_dan
9hr ago
Well, this has happened to us once before, so using these two (which are similar) incidents, I don't think these food delivery people are just stealing all the food. From what I can tell, in both instances it was the last delivery of the day and they just had reached a breaking point where they wanted food. There was food. And this seemed like a way to get free food at that time. Both times it has happened to me were around 9:00 PM which is about the end of these apps delivery windows. Both times were also on Fridays.
So these people are generally okay employees most of the week (I suspect). And what they do is if at the end of their shift they think they can get away with something, they try it. And they do get away with it mostly because despite the prevalence of ring cameras, most people are too lazy to follow up and the companies can't really fire them for stealing 1/50 orders a week because the pool of replacement labor is even worse. She will probably eventually be fired if this is a pattern. But she will just move to a different delivery app at that point.
urquan
Every one who exalts himself will be humbled, but he who humbles himself will be exalted.
9hr ago
My understanding is that, in addition to the physical component of masochism (some people really do find pain pleasurable -- maybe it's to do with mild endogenous painkillers released?), much of the interest in submission among people who swing that way is about surrendering control and shutting off your brain, just like you say. Humiliation is probably something else entirely. And frankly my politically-incorrect view is that people with humiliation kinks are people who truly believe they're inferior in some way and believe being placed in a situation where it's called out is just revealing and acknowledging a reality they already fear is true.
This period was not because of the amnesty but because of the win of the cold war.
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