domain:city-journal.org
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
4m ago
I'm obviously not your immediate interlocutor, and I don't think BLM should be dismissed as something like mere "pressure release" - but still, attacks on legislative bodies seem to be in a fundamentally more severe category to me. It seems foundational to representative democracy that legislative bodies are to serve as a sleeker and more efficient representation of voter preferences as expressed by the act of voting, and any attempt to subvert this by subjecting representatives to pressures other than "how will the voters vote in the next election" is threatening that very foundation. Meanwhile, our political system as I understand it does not make any particular promises about police representing anyone at all. Therefore, trying to use violence on legislators to get them to act in a particular way is worse than trying to use violence on policemen to get them to act in a particular way.
This is not a Russell conjugation; I am very happy to consider the leftish-perpetrator examples of this post to be worse than J6 (which was honestly a relative nothingburger as far as threatening legislators goes).
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
19m ago
I don't think it's particularly useful to argue about which of the two protests-turned-riots(?) has more merit - my point is just that they are sufficiently different that blanket accusations of hypocrisy towards anyone who judges them differently make no sense.
It's perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are sacrosanct but largely autonomous devolved subunits of the executive like police are fair game (they represent nobody and have a lot of leeway in how they act), and it's also perfectly consistent to think that legislatures are fair game (they are supposed to be the people's bitch) but police are inappropriate targets (they are wageslaves doing a hard job and owe allegiance to some command superior, not the people).
BahRamYou
24m ago
I remember back in the boom years of online poker before it got banned in the US, a number of people did things like that. People who weren't good enough to make money playing in a normal way would play just enough to clear the bonuses that sites gave to new players. They called it "bonus grinding" or "bonus whoring." The main caveat, I think, is that it's an incredibly soulless, boring way to make money. It still requires a certain amount of mental effort, and without even the fig leaf of pretending like you're doing something beneficial to society. So most people got bored of doing it, and started to play for real, sometimes losing back the money they earned from the bonus.
4bpp
After January 20th, all orange flairs are considered political
28m ago
I'm genuinely confused as to why you would say that, since in my eyes the factual claims I made shouldn't even be particularly controversial. Could you restate what you think my claim is in your words?
sun_the_second
37m ago
If the only thing you do with whales is hunt, then understanding hunting them is understanding them in general.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
42m ago
No wonder Moldbug always claims to be the most right wing person in the room.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
49m ago
I thought Old Man's War wasn't half bad. It's far up from the disgustingly mediocre level of stuff that populates the Hugos these days.
But I don't think Scalzi is ever going to write anything that transcends being formulaic genre fiction. And him not being that great of a character writer probably is a big part of that, never mind the antics.
That said, I don't recommend holding his stuff in the same level of contempt as Martha Wells or something.
Even if the only thing you do with whales is hunt, their place in biology is relevant to evaluating theories there much more generally, which will inform you about other things.
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