domain:gurwinder.substack.com
OliveTapenade
16m ago
For what it's worth, I'm not a Catholic, trad or otherwise.
OliveTapenade
17m ago
I'd request firstly that you not make assumptions about what I know or believe, and secondly that you don't misrepresent me. I haven't ceded anything - I've merely declined to argue for a position that I don't hold.
That said, since moderation has gotten involved, and we're pretty far from anything about the top-level comment, would you like to call the conversation here?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
30m ago
I want to believe that Court is better modeled as a club of weirdo turbo-lawyers.
Among whom Gorsuch prides himself on being the most idiosyncratic weirdo.
theCircusWeakman
33m ago
Interesting article! This finding in particular caught my attention:
The three liberal justices voted together in fewer than a quarter of the non-unanimous cases, and the six conservatives voted together only 17 percent of the time.
This suggests the pattern I noticed is real, although the size of the disparity is not huge. However, I would still like to see a similar voting breakdown focused only on cases with strong culture war salience. The court decides a large number of cases each term that don't have any obvious partisan ramifications. It may be the case that the justices don't particularly care about ideological conformity in such cases, but are more likely to vote as a block on cases involving controversial partisan issues. And the conservatives and liberals may do so at different rates.
I also dispute the 3-3-3 breakdown presented in the article. The authors put Gorsuch and Thomas (who agree 77% of the time) in the same group, but their chart shows that Thomas is more likely to agree with Barrett (82%) than with Gorsuch, and Gorsuch is more likely to agree with Barrett (82%) and Kavanaugh (80%) than with Thomas, and equally likely to agree (77%) with Roberts!
I confess, I am a hopeless wordcel, so it's highly likely that I've misunderstood the statistical wizardry at play in this chart. However, the numbers they give suggest to me that the Justices' breakdown more like 3-3-1.5-1.5: three liberals who vote together, three conservatives who vote together (Roberts, Kavanaugh, Barrett), Alito, and two Justices who often vote with Alito but don't reliably vote with each other (Thomas and Gorsuch).
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
40m ago
I think this forum is about 60-70% INTJ or INTP. But in broader society the ratio is much lower.
Lewis2
1hr ago
It's very common to see conservatives on both sides of an issue, while the liberals overwhelmingly tend to vote as a block…. Many right-leaning court watchers see that as a bad thing, as if the Court's conservatives are wishy-washy and ideologically unreliable.
As far as I can tell, most (thoughtful) conservatives would agree with you that the conservative justices are more principled and unbiased. They just see that as a bad thing since they perceive the liberal justices as defect-bots in an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, and it pains them to see the conservatives cooperating with them. These conservative commenters complain about ideological unreliability because, not being familiar with the field of game theory, they lack the vocabulary to couch their objections in other terms.
Incanto
1hr ago
I've seen a lot of hype over this being the Doom of America over the years but the present reaction has indeed been subdued. Is this not the thing the doomers were dooming about, or is it not doomy after all? Or is the doom yet to come?
EverythingIsFine
1hr ago
Well, Watchmen kinda exists. And so does The Boys. The TV show Watchmen does too, though it goes in a crazy different direction which I can't help but wonder how this forum would feel about it. It takes place in some alternate reality where they pass massive reparations for Black Americans and the show is set in Tulsa (deliberate echoes of the Tulsa race massacre) and there's a neighboring white slum/trailer park trash place locals call Nixonville. A white supremacist group starts targeting police officers and so cops start to wear masks to protect their identities -- in a country where masks and vigilante superheroes are explicitly illegal, and hunted down. The main character is a cop but also a closet superhero, and also tortures people, and it turns out at least one other cop is a closet KKK member. And then there's other wild Watchmen stuff that happens. Not exactly what you're describing, but it was interesting.
EverythingIsFine
2hr ago
Ah yes, I was referring more to LLMs. Image generation is a whole different ballgame, it seems.
DradisPing
2hr ago
Making heroes fight each other for questionable reasons with no lasting consequences is a proud comics tradition. Seeing them fight each other is fun, and that's what Marvel wanted on screen.
Terracotta
2hr ago
I've never watched Bridgerton, dislike the premise and the genre overall, and now, after Googling the actress, have a serious beef with her for breaking out that dumb old canard, "people in The Past had no hygiene," in a public interview.
But if I'm reading your comment right, you're saying that you watched an episode of a comedy TV show that:
- featured a female protagonist played by an actress whom you found facially and physically unattractive
- implied that in its fantasy historical setting, with many other social factors at play, several high-status men were interested in marrying this character
- showed this person having sex
- also had many very short scenes, in an episode specifically stylized and labelled as a riff on TikTok videos
and that on those grounds, you were filled with rage and "hated it more than anything [you'd] watched in your life"?
DradisPing
2hr ago
If a suicide bomber's explosion is magically diverted and accidentally destroys a floor of a building, thus killing dozens of people but also saves the lives of dozens on the ground, no one is going to think the magician is the criminal. Well, the lizardman constant may apply, but certainly you won't have a plurality to call for her head.
They had to keep it simple, but you don't need to change things too much to make it realistic. There would need to be a strong existing political movement demanding superhuman registration that's popular with DC types. The terrorists would need to be from a State Department backed group. Slightly muddle what happens.
In that situation the press would aggressively spin the things to get their preferred policy and protect their friends in DC.
Hyperion
2hr ago
It's precisely because they benefited they can be enough of a fixture in the culture to make a fuss. The kids who got adopted can use the education and stability they got from it to make a fuss about how it robbed them of their culture. While those who got to experience the culture first hand probably just died of alcohol poisoning or are trying to forget they ever grew up on the rez.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
Would you like to put in some reasoning for why this magic is actually reality? Or just boo anything you disagree with? (I stand by that it's positing magic to make ridiculous claims that violate the basic laws of supply and demand in economics.)
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3hr ago
Mainly access to image generation with DALLE, more conversations every 3 hours without being thrown back to GPT-3.5, and access to custom GPTs, which aren't really that useful to be honest.
You're not missing out on much, and it's a sign that OAI is sweating a little that they're handing out free access to their best public models at all, even before the Apple integration.
ace
3hr ago
Thanks for clarifying. My eyes just glaze over on the prompts to upgrade, so I really have no idea what the differences between the free and paid tiers are.
hanikrummihundursvin
3hr ago
There's a lot of interesting ethnic variation in England. The meme explanation is that small round heads and beady eyes are the 'indigenous' britons whilst other physical characteristics, like a longer face and more prominent jaw are primarily due to the Norman conquest. How the Germanic admixture fits in I don't know, but there's certainly a noticeable trend in phenotype.
I wouldn't be surprised if the round headed beady eyed hobbits of England who managed to weather every storm history has thrown at them would be less inclined to move to a far away land, whilst the long faced Normans who had already sailed and conquered would be more predisposed to doing so again.
hanikrummihundursvin
3hr ago
He is still marketed as a counter-culture guy after getting canned by SNL. You might not agree that he is actually counter-culture or whatever but he is undeniably the face of counter-culture comedy.
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I don't think there was ever anything in the comics at the time, i.e. the 1940s, indicating how Captain America voted? He's always been a character deliberately open to interpretation - he stands for the best vision of what America can be, but he shifts over time and is often strategically vague so that readers can project their idea of what that means on to him.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3hr ago
Firstly, their influence is grossly overblown, as outlined by multiple commenters here. A few thousand neo-Nazis aren't a particularly big threat, Ukrainian civic governance seems strong enough that in the event of a peace (of whatever kind, barring Russian occupation), the state machinery is at minimal risk of being overthrown and the country thrown into internecine fighting where such paltry numbers would make a difference. There are plenty of hardened combat units in Ukraine who have only fervent nationalism in common with Azov.
Secondly, there's always the pragmatic option once employed by Hamad to deal with the Al-Qassam brigades. What do you do with a group of fanatical (and exceedingly so, even by Hamas standards) Jihadists who went into every mission accepting death with equanimity if it spread their ethos?
You marry them off, going to refugee camps and selling impoverished women on the honorable prospect of marrying a glorious almost-martyr. Give them a pension and sinecure too, and they won't need to resort to violence as the only way they know to make a living, or as their first choice of livelihood.
Circa 2008:
Hamas, the militant Islamist group that controls Gaza, has been observing a truce with Israel since June, allowing its underground fighters to resurface but leaving them without much to do. At the same time, hundreds of the group’s women have been recently widowed, their husbands having been killed either in confrontations with Israel or in the fighting last year between Hamas and its secular rival, Fatah.
Taking advantage of the pause in violence, the Hamas leaders have turned to matchmaking, bringing together single fighters and widows, and providing dowries and wedding parties for the many here who cannot afford such trappings of matrimony.
“Marriage is the same as jihad,” or holy war, said Muhammad Yousef, one recently married member of the Qassam Brigades, the Hamas underground. “With marriage, you are producing another generation that believes in resistance.”
About 300 Qassam members, mostly in their 20s, signed up with their new wives for the most recent celebration, held at a sports stadium in the Tuffah district, east of Gaza City. Local mosques spread the word about the event and offered to help find spouses for single men whose families had not yet managed to arrange them a match.
As an added inducement, couples were promised a cash grant in lieu of a dowry, which few families could afford.
Turns out that a lot of angry young men with extremist tendencies rapidly cool down when confronted with a wife and kids they love and are responsible for. You're not going to dissuade them from their ideological tendencies quite so easily, but that's effectively de-fanging them.
In other words, deal with people with nothing to lose by giving them something to lose.
If/when this war cools down, well, there's plenty of Ukrainian women abroad, and at home, and it won't take all that much to either 'encourage' them to marry a dashing young fighter, while also giving them cash/jobs, and effective indemnity from political retribution when they cease to be allies of convenience. Provide the latter two and there's almost certainly going to be women wanting in regardless.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
4hr ago
I wrote a fucking book because I'm tired of plot holes and shoddy world building, it grates like diamond dust beneath my eyelids.
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
4hr ago
whereas in Russia the defining feature of Nazis is their hatred of and desire to displace and kill Slavs
Which makes the Azov's "Ukrainians are the real Slavs, Russians are Finno-Turkic mongrels" ideology even harder to square with neo-Nazism.
The defining feature of neo-Nazis in Russian discourse is being a Russophobic nationalist while being white. Since there are no countries that draw a meaningful distinction between Russians as an ethnic group and Russia as a state, Russian propaganda doesn't have to distinguish between instances of both either. With one exception: if you're a Russian ethnic nationalist living in Russia that hates the multiculturalist message of the Russian state, you're definitely a neo-Nazi.
ToZanarkand
4hr ago
Not surprising, given they're a Germanic people.
sliders1234
4hr ago
I mean I don’t claim it’s a good thing that the only way to control immigration is having the POTUS.
The bill does nothing. I hope Trump actually does coup so we can protect the border long term.
That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even blocks may die.
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