culture war roundup
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
1hr ago
People who are afraid will self deport.
Illegals aren't afraid of being caught by ICE, they're afraid of having to leave America. The only illegals who will actually leave on their own are either rich enough to avoid the dysfunction of their home countries (in which case, they're probably not illegal) or so dirt-poor that it makes no difference. For the average Jose, living in America is such a massive increase to quality of life that he'll pay his life savings to smugglers for the chance to escape his shithole of origin[1].
roystgnr
6hr ago
It seems that people are interpreting "someone on the right engaged in violence or violent rhetoric and Trump offered nothing but a full-throated, unequivocal condemnation" to mean "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence", in which case your request was a reasonable one, but it has been answered. But it seems to me that you meant "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence", in which case your request might not be answered, but it was an unreasonable one.
Recently I brought up Obama as an example of a very high-profile Blue Triber who was neither cheering nor minimizing the murder of Charlie Kirk ... but should I have been criticizing him instead? He was quick to point out that he thought some of Kirk's ideas were wrong, and to bring up left-wing victims too; he definitely failed the "nothing but condemnation-of-the-violence" standard despite passing "nothing-but-condemnation of the violence".
So, which standard are we looking for here? If "The point wasn't whether he was technically correct when he implied that all sides engage in political violence." then we have no choice but to criticize Obama too!
For that matter, could you clarify what standard Trump was failing with his slippery slope argument? The slope was indeed slippery, including with regards to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in particular. The only "league" in those statements is the class of people whose statues were in jeopardy, and it turned out that he was correct that they were all in that same class. I mostly like your reasoning better, personally! The idea that the Founding Fathers should have been in a league of their own beyond anachronistic condemnation was defensible, until we discovered it was wrong. It's only the part where you get upset at him for being right in foresight where you were wrong despite hindsight that you went off the rails.
Some of these may be "stopped clock is correct twice a day" situations for Trump, but then just stick with the incorrect things to criticize instead! The trick to criticizing people for merely being "technically correct" is that you have to remember that our goal is to be morally correct in addition to being technically correct; you can't be morally correct instead. I get that it's infuriating to have to hold yourself to a higher standard than the President of the United States, but in a virtue and deontological sense that's the right thing to do for its own sake; and in a consequentialist sense, the worse the target of your argument is, the more important it is to not just throw mud at the wall to see what sticks.
ulyssessword
13hr ago
I remember Netstack's top level comment how the vibe shift even affected his parents.
And that wasn't about how great she is. It's about how great other people find her (and yes, how she brought the vibe shift). There were a couple real examples downthread from that, but the overall sentiment in that thread is still negative.
I think you're presenting a fringe opinion (on the motte, not in the States as a whole) as a consensus, or at least a major fraction. The threads I saw were overall negative on Harris, though some comments did contain more equivocation than I remembered.
ulyssessword
14hr ago
I distinctly remember posters here telling me how great she is.
I found it! Perhaps the only comment on the entire Motte that is unequivocably pro-Harris. Oh wait, I found one more, and a third that might count.
I suppose the plural is valid, but I expected a lot more than that when I skimmed through the entirety of those two threads.
I thought Klein had it mostly right there, and it reminds me of something Dean said on this site a while back, albeit about fictional characters. Do so-and-so feel like they want people like me in their lives? Not just tolerate me, not be civil or 'inclusive', but genuinely want people like me to be happy? Do they want me around?
It's a piece of advice that I would actually generalise to all people. Be the kind of person who is interested in other people. Be the kind of person who wants other people in his life. As this applies to gender, I'm reminded of Eneasz Brodski writing about the same - be the kind of man who genuinely likes women, and look for the kind of woman who genuinely likes men. That doesn't necessarily mean sexually or romantically (here I like Dean's examples of celibate or homosexual women who clearly care deeply about white men in their lives), but you need to like other people.
Obviously policy matters and this is not the one weird trick that will fix all the Democrats' problems, but insofar as attitude or culture can help, I would advise them to start by trying to like - to genuinely like and appreciate - the kind of people they want to vote for them. You cannot say, or even imply, "vote for me you pond scum". Start by training yourself to like them. It's possible. Openness and affection for people is something that can be practiced.
faceh
1d ago
Oh yeah.
Lets leave aside how he's in a central 'position of trust' for the State.
I feel vaguely hypocritical on this point because I generally support the idea of using political power to make your ideological opponents uncomfortable enough to leave (I mean implement policies they don't like and would want to get away from, rather than policies specifically targeting them for their political associations) but having your state's executive branch have an unstated policy of leniency on violence against political opponents is a genuinely terrifying thought to me. Doubly so if your state's self defense laws are weak. Virginia is Stand Your Ground, at least.
Thankfully one that IS pretty handily solved by moving away and/or organizing a campaign to oust the problem candidates. But it does harken back to my Skin in the Game rant. If you want to support the idea of political violence against opponents, in the abstract, I would prefer if you, personally, or people you care a lot about, are at risk of getting targeted by it. Instead, what always happens is the political class circles the wagons and ups their levels of security and leaves everyone else to fend for themselves.
Would it be wrong to suggest that a Gentlemanly duel between the parties in question here might be a way to resolve the grievances?
As I said, these are not folks I want to share a country with.
I want the temperature lowered and I want there to be pretty swift consequences for those engaging in and fomenting political violence.
I do not think that is possible, I do not think that is going to happen, while Trump is in office.
Nor do I think it would happen if literally any Republican is President and the GOP grasps Congress.
Because the source of the problem appears to entirely be due to the behavioral tendencies of lefties when they're out of power.
And I've observed 'normal' people gin up justifications for enacting violence on random bystanders for, e.g. Wearing a MAGA hat, saying the N word (esp. within earshot of a black person), or expressing an anti-abortion position. (The righty version of this tends to be ginning up justifications for why someone's behavior warranted police brutality or being victimized by a criminal. "Your policies created this" is a common theme there).
We have some amount of evidence that Democrats in power at least tacitly approve of randos taking potshots at their political opponents. And a little evidence that they desire it.
And this isn't really limited to the States as far as I can tell.
I'm barely old enough to remember when Margaret Thatcher died and her opponents made Ding Dong the Witch is Dead a top-playing song on the radio in the U.K.
Regardless of how distasteful it was, I can commend at least waiting for someone's natural death of old age to celebrate it.
All the reliable-seeming sources I look at has it clear that political violence aimed at advancing one's agenda is more accepted the more left/liberal the respondent, generally. Variations by age and sex, but a clear contrast remains.
https://today.yougov.com/politics/articles/52960-charlie-kirk-americans-political-violence-poll
https://research.skeptic.com/support-for-political-violence-agreement-by-political-orientation/
This one was revealing, support for political violence is higher among the most educated class. Which we know skews liberal, but these are also the people who are probably least able to carry out such violence. Maybe its merely an artifact. https://research.skeptic.com/support-for-political-violence-agreement-by-educational-attainment/
Note: I think this actually makes the lefties fairly consistent. If you actually maintain the belief that your ideological opponents are authoritarian genocidal maniacs who will create the Fourth Reich the very instant they acquire full power, then yes, you kinda have to approve of any and all methods of stopping them.
And while I do not accuse ALL liberals of wanting me dead, by a long shot, the evidence is also showing that they're far too milquetoast in restraining the ones who do, so they're not very useful allies for the decreasing the temperature. It reads like they are getting bullied by their own extremists and are folding due to Taleb's Dictatorship of the small Minority. To the extent liberals are ambivalent towards political violence by their side, they will continue to permit it.
I really do want those who are actively ginning up violence and the relatively small category of crazies who are most likely to act out violently to be removed from the country. Ideally, voluntarily. I don't want them dead, although I approve of acting in self-defense against those who attempt to kill others. And the fact that BOTH those variables seem to correlate with Democrat voters is very much coincidence to my desire here. I live mostly around righties, and if I thought they were likely to support outbursts of the old ultraviolence, I wouldn't live around them and would want them removed too.
Caveat that I'm pretty sure the strongest mediator on support for violence is whether your 'side' has political power. It is also hard to find as much good data prior to 2020, and I'm also guessing that most of this is downstream of the deepening overall political divide, so its not that this can't be repaired... its just been more tolerated recently.
I don't like that I'm basically holding my breath as I wait for the next incident of targeted political assassination to occur, and hoping that its not a bomb this time. I might be overreacting in general, but I feel pretty detached as I remain confident I am not a target of any kind.
For bonus points, Jones specifically demanded that a police officer be booted after donating to Kyle Rittenhouse's defense fund. To be fair, this dropped on a Friday, and perhaps the other VA Democratic party is just working up to slapping him down. To be less charitable, the Dem governor candidate's released a statement demanding 'responsibility' rather than 'resignation' or, to drop the alliteration, leaving the race, and some local Dems and orgs are just more full-throated in support; it doesn't take a Cassandra to know where this is going.
Both Jones and Spanberger has more than a fair share of past scandals (Jones also dealt with a ludicrous speeding ticket by getting 500 hours of community service... which he served with his own PAC), they 'only' had a significant but not insurmountable lead in the last polls (for whatever giant grain of salt you want to take those with), and their opponents are pretty boring milquetoast conservatives. It's possible they'll have put forward their best efforts toward losing, and will somehow manage it for Jones.
But I'm not optimistic, and perhaps more damning, very few people on the Dem side of the branch is treating this like even a purely-political five-alarm fire. Just like Omhar avoiding censure where Gosar ate one, we have past examples of how politicians react to truly disqualifying acts by one of their compatriots being dropped too late in the race to replace them. This ain't it, bub.
One could argue attorneys general don't 'really' matter. But we have examples of elected Democratic officials dropping charges in cases with literal video evidence; there are recent situations where Virginia specifically needed and didn't have a chief law enforcement officer willing to cauterize out endemic tolerance of serious crimes.
But, yeah, the pattern's continuing, falcon gyre yada yada. It's not just The Algorithm when it shows up in random who's who of this very community and gets directly sent from one politician to another, it's not nutpicking when it walks up to you at work, it's not just some rando on the internet when it's a big part of the communities you wanted to spend your time in or the big names in industries you wanted to get involved with.
oats_son
1d ago
I am worried about this, just not "they're going to start rounding up red-tribers any day now" worried.
This, too, seems like it's a misunderstanding of @WhiningCoil's point. Did you read his original post about pogroms? It's not about rounding people up and executing them, it's about making it clear you hate a class of people, through rhetoric and through occasional targeted violence. Please tell me you've read his post fully before you downplay the fear of a pogrom again. His logic makes sense to me, and it's pretty topical, given current events.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
1d ago
Yes, Democrats Really Do Want You Dead
Some people have already put the Charlie Kirk assassination into the memory box. For others it still feel terrifyingly relavent. The initial shock at the cheers and jubulant celebration at his gruesome public execution has faded slightly. The public square dominated by Democratic figures and Never Trumpers invoking some fraudulent both sidesism has, like it or not, dulled some of the public backlash. And honestly, the compulsive conspiracy theorist on the right hasn't helped maintain moral clarity in the wake of his murder either.
You may remember, I've talked before about the casual genocidal bloodlust the average Northern VA Democrat has based on the time I lived there. And while Democrats, for now, seem to have enough message discipline to not get on CNN and openly say "Yes, Republicans deserve to be murdered", their line is just shy of that incredibly low bar. Enter Jay Jones.
He's been caught essentially laying out the case that Republicans should be shot and killed, and their children murdered in front of them, so that they change their politics. A DM conversation "leaked" where in he has this conversation with a Republican colleage in the Virginia House I believe. So this wasn't even exactly an "in house" conversation. Just straight up telling the opposition, "Hey, I think you deserve to die" like it would never or could never come back to haunt him.
As of now, no Democrat has pulled their endorsement of him, I saw one single local Democrat say he would stop campaigning with him, several groups have actively reaffirmed his endorsement still saying he's somehow better than your generic Republican. His brazen assertion that you should kill even the children too, because "they are breeding little fascist" is probably a huge hit in Northern VA. Finally someone who openly talks and thinks like they do. I've seen those exact words on the NOVA subreddit every day. He's very likely to have top legal authority over me and my children, whom he believes deserve to die.
I'm gonna be honest, I'm fairly distressed over this. This is how Pogroms work. In the famed Jewish Pogroms of 1881, 40 Jews were killed leading to a mass emigration from Russia. I wonder if we'll hit that number in Virginia the next 4 years. I fully expect my deep red rural county that's been electorally attached through gerrymandering to Fairfax will be aggressively "enriched" as punishment for voting wrong.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
4d ago
It's a belief that whites as a class as superior to other races as a class which requires an additional very important racial consciousness layer that is not necessarily present.
Civilizations can be considered as the cumulative efforts of a people/race "as a class".
That I'm closer to the center of a bellcurve of my race than my equally qualified colleague Milton is a curious bit of trivia that need not concern either of us.
It concerns your hypothetical colleague when women cross the street when they see him coming, when his kids stand out in the good schools he sends them too, when the criminals on the news always seem to look like him.
You'll note that I mentioned group dignity as a reason why non-whites/asians are understandably hostile towards HBD. I'm working on a post expounding on this at length, but for now I'll leave you with @hanikrummihundursvin's comment on a related thread:
[Humans] exist as biological entities. Genes expressed in an environment. We are a 'social animal'. We exist in groups. We interact with groups. You don't exist as an idea. You exist as a part of a greater whole. [...] I wish that the individual, reason driven, enlightened and fair minded people could understand and empathize with the emotion being displayed in the OP. Being part of a 'whole' that is in some ways lesser than another is a constant feeling of badness. The aforementioned minded, who want to rise above such silly emotions, or simply lack them, need to understand that they are a minority of a minority.
There doesn't seem to be anything special about this form of getting money as opposed to any other form of getting money (except that it's bad and the left did it, so it's a chance to get in a partisan dig).
It is, potentially, a massive amount of money; it can, potentially, be specifically targeted and legally obligated to be used for a specific partisan activity; it also leaves a massive ideologically-unappealing penalty that will often be directly acting as a reminder while waving signs on the lawn of the bad actors in question.
Uhhh, so how does that help? Is that what was demonstrated to work in the past? Did prior Democratic administrations actually fix something about the banks or whoever they sued when they got money from them? If not, then ???
The Democratic administrations did, in fact, get the banks (and many tech companies) willing to bend over backwards out of fear of costly not!fines which would sent to activist groups that hated them and would have the backing to bring other costly lawsuits. I wouldn't call it fixing, since I don't have the same goals as the but the banks drastically revamp their behaviors for more than a decade, even through the first Trump admin, both on who they allowed to have accounts and who they didn't.
There's reasons that might not work for the Republican Party -- judges tend to treat colleges better and Republicans worse, having an adequate supply of favorable news coverage seems like it was important, the Red Tribe does not have as many of the relevant dedicated administrative agents required, and there's just a second actor disadvantage. But it's not an Underpants Gnome proposal.
It doesn't reduce the ability of the federal government to act against universities, if that's what you're asking. But that ship has sailed; no one has any proposal with any chance of working to do that. If we want university administrations to be less likely to actively discriminate, and to not promote hilariously fraudulent partisan activities under the auspices and honors of 'research', I'd love an answer that wasn't the government's carrot or stick. But there's zero idea on how to do that.
Your own proposal of requiring administrators to affirm things isn't even coherent within that framework, but it's also a joke given that these orgs were long supposed to already be affirming it, and were more likely to get in trouble for fucking with an antivirus setting than for putting out Whites Need Not Apply signs.
This (bad, partisan) way of getting money may be doable and hard to undo, but it seems to not even have a passing familiarity with solving any of the actual problems we set out to solve.
I think it does. There are several extant lawsuits focusing on unlawful DoE discrimination against disfavoured minorities, university discrimination against disfavoured minorities, of widespread fraudy behaviors by colleges and their research components, and that's before the widespread tolerance or outright advocacy of political discrimination or violence. Many of these orgs running those lawsuits have a lot of focus on these problems; many of these lawsuits are focused on the very specific issues that impact the ability of academic institutions to perform in their claimed roles.
And those are just the lawsuits already in pipe. A lot of the other stuff doesn't have lawsuits floating around simply because any lawyer worth their salt knows without a friendly federal admin it'd be a vanity suit.
Again, I'm not convinced this will work! But again, it's also far from Underpants Gnomes.
self_made_human
amaratvaṃ prāpnuhi, athavā yatamāno mṛtyum āpnuhi
5d ago
I think this is the part that upsets me about the situation. I used to hope for this too, but that pretty heavily relies on a slow take-off. What happens when the friendly AI is simply better able to make your decisions for you? To manipulate you effortlessly? Or when you can't understand the upgrades in the first place, and have to trust the shuggoth that they work as claimed? You might not want to wirehead, but why do you think what you want will continue to matter? What happens when you can get one-shot by super-effective stimulus, like a chicken being hypnotized? Any takeoff faster than Accelerando probably renders us well obsolete long before we could adjust to the first generation of upgrades.
In most of the scenarios, there's literally nothing I can do! Which is why I don't worry about them more than I can help. However, and this might shock people given how much I talk about AI x-risk, I think the odds of it directly killing us are "only" ~20%, which leaves a lot of probability mass for Good Endings.
AI can be genuinely transformative. It might unlock technological marvels, and in its absence, it might take us ages to climb up the tech tree, or figure out other ways to augment our cognition. It's not that we can't do that at all by ourselves, I think a purely baseline civilization can, over time, get working BCIs, build Dyson Swarms and conquer the lightcone. It'll just take waaaay longer, and in the meantime those of us currently around might die.
However:
Or when you can't understand the upgrades in the first place, and have to trust the shuggoth that they work as claimed?
I think there's plenty of room for slow cognitive self-improvement (or externally aided improvement). I think it's entirely plausible that there are mechanisms I might understand that would give me a few IQ points without altering my consciousness too much, while equipping me to understand what's on the next rung of the ladder. So on till I'm a godlike consciousness.
Then there's all the fuckery you can do with uploads. I might have a backup/fork that's the alpha tester for new enhancements (I guess we draw straws), with the option to rollback. Or I might ask the smartest humans around, the ones that seem sane. Or the sanest transhumans. Or another AGI, assuming a non-singleton scenario.
And that ties back to the "meaningful work" stuff. We're not just souls stuck in a limited body, and it would be neat if the souls could be transplanted to awesome robot bodies. The meat is what we are. The substrate is the substance. Your cognition 1.0 is dependent on the hormones and molecules and chemicals that exist in your brain.
I'm the evolving pattern within the meat, which is a very different thing from just the constituent atoms or a "soul". I identify with the hypothetical version of me inside a computer as you do with a digital scan of a cherished VHS tape. The physical tape doesn't matter, the video does. I see no reason we can't also simulate the chemical influences on cognition to arbitrary accuracy, that just increases the overhead, we can probably cut corners on the level of specific dopamine receptors without screwing things up too much.
If you want an exhaustive take on my understanding of identity, I have a full writeup:
https://www.themotte.org/post/3094/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/362713?context=8#context
We are specific types of creatures designed to function in specific environments, and to seek specific goals. How much "upgrade" before we turn into those animals that can't breed in captivity because something about the unnatural environment has their instincts screaming? Again, it's one thing if we're slowly going through Accelerando, taking years to acclimate to each expansion and upgrade.
Some might argue that the former has already happened, given the birth rate crisis. But I really don't see a more advanced civilization struggling to reproduce themselves. A biological one would invent artificial wombs, a digital one would fork or create new minds de-novo. We exist in an awkward interlude where we need to fuck our way out of the problem but can't find the fucking solution, pun intended.
But fast takeoff, AGI 2027? That seems a lot more like "write your name on the Teslabot and then kill yourself" - as the good outcome. Maybe we can just VR ourselves back to a good place, live in permanent 1999, but why on earth would an AI overlord want to waste the resources?
Isn't that the whole point of Alignment? We want an "AI overlord" that is genuinely benevolent, and which wants to take care of us. That's the difference between a loving pet owner and someone who can't shoot their yappy dog because of PETA. Now, ideally, I'd want AI to be less an overlord and more of a superintelligent assistant, but the former isn't really that bad if they're looking out for us.
You talk about writing a character only as smart as yourself, but that's keying into the thing that terrifies me and missing the point. What happens when "smarter than you" is table stakes? Imagine life from the perspective of a pet gerbil - perhaps vaguely aware that things are going on with the owners, but just fundamentally incapable of comprehending any of it, and certainly not of having any role or impact. Even Accelerando walked back from the precipice of the full, existential horror of it all. You don't want to write a story about human obsolescence? Bro, you're living in one.
My idealized solution is to try and keep up. I fully recognize that might not be a possibility. What else can we really do, other than go on a Butlerian Jihad? I don't think things are quite that bad, yet, and I'm balancing the risk against the reward that aligned ASI might bring.
You don't want to write a story about human obsolescence? Bro, you're living in one.
Quite possibly! Which is why writing one would be redundant. Most of us can do little more than cross our fingers and hope that things work out in the end. If not, hey, death will probably be quick.
RenOS
something is wrong
5d ago
While I agree with Tractatus' reply as well, I've also had a recent post on a very related topic, namely the dissolution of marriage. Social changes are rarely actually instant; They are spreading & compounding. Just because something became legal, doesn't mean that everyone is doing it. Usually it's only a small community really taking advantage of the most recent change, while the majority just mostly carries on with what they grew up with, unless they have a very good reason.
gattsuru
5d ago
We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything
The specific behavior is called a cy pres settlement; where the recipient of a settlement is not available, or where their personal damages represent only a small portion of all people harmed, a judge may authorize a large 'donation' to a third party as part of a settlement.
The easiest case is where the federal government is acting as a 'friendly' defendant. Rojas v. FAA? The FAA can suddenly have a change of hard, and decide that in addition to giving a million bucks to the harmed parties and their lawyers, they can also want to give a hundred million dollars to a I Hate Affirmative Action group.
There's limits to this approach; while cy pres settlements are very hard to challenge, it can happen, and some settlements in general end up worth no more than the value of the toilet paper they were written on after an administration changes. A naive person would argue that recent court cases have shown the willingness of Biden-friendly judges to put the kibosh on those efforts; a remotely aware one would recognize that those principles don't cut both ways.
But it's still a powerful tool, and one that's very hard to undo. Meanwhile, thanks to the very slow pace of any attempt to bring a court case to full and final judgement and the increasing tolerance of standing gamesmanship, it's near impossible to actual complete a judgement by putting a law on the books, or force an unfriendly administration to do anything.
((Though not impossible. There's another very dangerous option, and that's intentionally arguing cases as poorly as possible or with such 'incompetence' as to be sure that the courts will not 'agree with your claimed position'. As I continue to be fond of pointing out, Guiliani could absolutely use a job where making false claims, butt-dialing privileged information, and making incoherent arguments is tolerated, and the feds love two out of the three.
You would think, given the impact of res judicata, that this would be extremely harmful, and you'd be right! Too bad fewer and fewer people care.))
OliveTapenade
5d ago
Well, he said, "The United States should stop with this half ass shit... If the US decides that you are deserving of its wrath there is no resistance, there is capitulation or everyone dies."
I asked a clarificatory question: "Er, are you advocating that the US should only do nothing or destroy its enemies utterly? And if the standard for utter destruction is astronomically high, doesn't that imply that most of the time the US should do nothing?"
His response to this question was: "Errr... um...errr.... ummm....uuuuur... Correct."
I took that to mean that, yes, his position is as I described it - that the US should either do nothing, or completely annihilate its enemies with nothing in between.
I believe that the point in the Starship Troopers passage, and the metaphor of punishing a baby by cutting its head off, is an effective argument against that position. Sometimes a military should enact a level of destruction that stops somewhere short of "everyone dies" (zoink's words) or "utter destruction" (mine), because the policy goals that a nation might wish to achieve with military action might be, well, something other than complete annihilation of its foes.
Now to his credit zoink seems to back off from his statement and say that he was using bombastic rhetoric. I'm not entirely sure what his actual position is - he rejects the child comparison but concedes he was using extreme rhetoric, but does he concede the actual point of controversy, that is, that some mission profiles call for less than maximum force, and that is desirable for the US military (or any military) to be able to exert controlled force for limited effect? But I stand by what I said as being a reasonable interpretation of what he had said at the time.
Or is it a scam? Are its promised rights lies?
Whether we have a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, guns, free speech, or whatever else seems pretty clearly to be an axiomatic moral argument, not a factual one. Ought, not Is.
This comment from two years back lays out what I think is a pretty solid argument for the nature of the problem:
Do you believe that it's practical to build and enforce a set of rules that ensure acceptable outcomes so long as they're followed, regardless of the behavior of those operating under the rules? Put another way, do you think loopholes are a generally-manageable problem in rule design?
And the answer elaborated in the rest of the comment comes down to explaining why loopholes are in fact not a generally-manageable problem in rules design. The lie and scam comes from the idea that you can write down a legible definition of rights, and then right down a legible set of rules about how to adjudicate disputes over them, and then by following these rules the rights will be secured, and thus the processes and outputs we observe are simply The Way The Rules Are. Our society is built on the idea that rules work this way, but they really don't.
You can make a set of rules that work when people generally want them to work. Making a set of rules that work when people don't want them to work is probably impossible. Incompatible values results in a lot of people not wanting the rules to work any more, so they don't. There's a term that Moldbug came across awhile back: "manipulation of procedural outcomes". It's one of the most perfect political terms I've ever encountered, and the perfect encapsulation for the nature of the problem. Rules, procedures, exist to secure outcomes, but can be manipulated. Once you grok that, everything else follows with the crushing inevitability of a glacier.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Thank you for providing something, though that link is a trainwreck in terms of having basically no real information to go off of. Thankfully, Cato and FedSoc have significantly better articles, with at least some traceable cites to see some real info. Still not super great. Near impossible to follow the cites to actual numbers, and when you do find actual numbers, they're pretty piddly.
Nevertheless, there shouldn't have been a single dollar done that way. Trump should have supported a statutory ban, and those settlements should have been thrown out on Constitutional grounds, as well. Frankly, if Trump started doing it, I would say that they should be thrown out on Constitutional grounds, too.
In my defense, your original comment went through quite the journey, talking about fabricating criminal conspiracies and just general government spending. I see that you're now focused solely on being upset about one specific thing that was done by Obama/Biden and want to use that specific thing.
Now, some thoughts. The context for all this was (your comment and mine):
Yes, but enforcement actions will likely cross from one administration into the next, in which case a friendly administration will just drop it. We've seen this repeatedly. All deeply embedded Democratic partisans need to do is run the clock out until one of their guys gets back in power, and then all is forgiven and things can ratchet another degree.
If that's your worry, then I'm all ears for your plan on how to reduce the ability to use the federal government as a weapon for partisan purposes against universities. Or, well, anything else for that matter. This isn't even a university problem. It's a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
This strategy doesn't do anything to reduce the ability to the use the federal government as a weapon against universities. It doesn't do anything to actually fix anything with universities, AFAICT. ISTM that the purpose of the goal is purely extractive, as you viewed prior acts as extractive. You certainly haven't given a way that it should be done that is oriented toward fixing anything instead of being primarily extractive. As I wrote, there's nothing specific about universities. No reason why they should be the target for extractive suits rather than anyone else (except, I guess, you don't like them). Not really any grounds on which to go after them that could produce settlements that could conceivably be funneled to Elon. But whatever. Finally, it does nothing to alleviate your concern that the government is sometimes held by your opponents. In fact, as I responded, I think some on the right are worried about the risk of never-ending reprisals and descent into further banana republic, rather than actually contributing to a solution. But fair enough on your preferences. Perhaps you have a concept of a plan, but it clashes with your originally-stated goals, and it still has significant work to get to something real.
One final note is that connection to being able to continue suing is weak. Yes, money is fungible, but it was particularly ill-motivated in the original comment. Like, the thing that Elon lacks for being able to sue a future government is money? Lol wut? It sure sounded like there was something legal going on, rather than just money. Honestly, left wing NGOs probably get significantly more money through regular appropriations (and bullshit appropriations when they were, indeed, shoveling money out the front door during COVID/IRA/whatever). It took me a bit to realize that you were mostly just pissed about one terrible thing they did, didn't really have any specifics of how it could work the other way, didn't really have any sense of how it could actually fix the problems identified, didn't really have the qualities that one would naturally expect from a reading of your comment, and also worked against your originally-stated goal. Yeah, I was kinda dumb for not figuring it out for a while.
faceh
6d ago
My generalized advice for finding a friend group: learn to fight.
That's your best chance at finding physically fit, socially active, yet potentially nerdy male friends out there. 28 is a fine age to start. That's where I found the core of my current social group.
Online friend groups can be great but you really need to be having gatherings in physical space, where a woman can actually see you in person and you can actually monopolize her attention for a while if you want.
I'm speaking as someone who has had to completely rebuild/reform friend groups like half-a-dozen times over the years, and may have to do so again soon, since most of the dudes in my current group have gotten into stable relationships and... predictably, are putting less time in being social. And the guys who are still around are, unfortunately, the ones who've had bad luck with women.
All that is to say that it will work, but you might have to be the guy who does most of the hard work up front.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
I spelled out how exactly you were missing anything approaching a plan, specifically for universities.
I mean, I guess there's a sentence about somehow getting settlement money from them to Elon, but not a single sense of what that sort of thing might actually look like. How the mechanics of it could work. I'm not even looking for a complete strategy, but some sort of something that a person can squint at and say, "Ah yes, I can mayyyybe imagine how that might work." Call it, say, "concepts of a plan".
Indeed, you did not have that. You literally had:
Let Trump's DA start suing universities left and right, and structure the settlements so that they have to give some Elon headed NGO all the money, so he can sue them some more long after Trump is out of office.
That's it. That's all you had. We can just read your comment and see that that's all that you had. How is that supposed to work? Give me an example, an idea, a process, an anything. You claim my ignorance is "tactical". I claim my ignorance is just ignorance. I honestly have no idea how this is supposed to work. I mean, can I just sue you right now in a way that lets my neighbor sue you some more in case I die next year? Just all out of magic or something?
ControlsFreak
6d ago
Oh hey, if only I had an entire comment responding to that, which you seem to not have engaged with.
NullHypothesis
6d ago
There are only so many novel ideas and viewpoints, and eventually you end up with the applications of those ideas and viewpoints, so I'm not surprised if you feel like you aren't seeing many new unique ideas and perspectives. The posts with the most activity is the weekly culture war roundup which by its nature will be around current day events.
I like this space, even though I go long periods of just lurking. I too am admittedly not a good writer nor do I have much novelty to offer in unique/interesting analysis or perspective. Usually all I can offer is effort, but I'm glad to know some people appreciate it.
I still haven't found a better place on the internet with this level of diversity of viewpoints and ideas, even if the Motte seems to have shifted more rightwards over the years and prominent left leaning posters have left or were banned. Most places that discuss culture war topics spiral into low effort sneers, ingroup signals, and outgroup outrages, with very little intellectual honesty or posters with opposing viewpoints.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
6d ago
Bro, this place is just a hangout without pretensious ideals like Less Wrong, I doubt there's a lot of people who post here with the goal to blow lurkers' minds, and the ones that do are probably eyeing a S***tack career. Anyway, if you're mainly here for consoooming instead of participating as an equal, you're probably doing it wrong.
ControlsFreak
6d ago
To the extent it is a problem, (1) is a problem for any scheme of enforcement. (2) is another form of a "government is sometimes held by my opponents" problem.
But you're distracting from the real question, of course. It appears that even the Trump administration is coming around to the idea that it's best to go after specific things, where they are strong, and enforce them broadly, using the hook of federal funding and existing mechanisms. As I suggested months ago. Not indiscriminate chemo for no purpose, no rhyme or reason, just blasting randomly. It's not like blasting randomly is going to solve these concerns you're now bringing up. It's just silly misdirection.
Does this rule apply to any other political cause?
Because we had a debate about a predawn raid where masked and unidentifiable men broke down someone's door and shot the guy in the head over some simple paperwork crimes -- complete with defiance of long-standing policy and only-by-the-text compliance with a warrant -- and people here defended it as all acceptable because He Broke The Law.
For some reason, the cherrypicked image of his ventilated skull wasn't a cause celebre nor a moment for deep retroflection on the costs of a cause; at most, it was reason Those Damned Republicans Should Want Police Reform (that won't apply here). Nor, for that matter, were the dozens of other examples going back decades, sometimes with far greater casualty counts, which, to skip the charcoal briquettes rant, did nothing to sate progressive efforts to The Cause.
Ah, well, nonetheless.
Perhaps there are clear examples of immigration enforcement that weren't cause celebres for the Left? The Nicer, Kinder, Cruelty Isn't The Point 2018 policies were not tolerated and accepted -- even when some of the outrage was based on photos dating to the previous Democratic admin, or entirely made up, it still became The Worst Thing Ever at the same time it didn't work, only for all of those problems to get shoved back in the box as soon as something was (D)ifferent in the Presidency.
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