domain:lesswrong.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
9m ago
It's an Interstate highway. There aren't "blind corners" of the type you might find on a surface street. There are a few places Interstates do violate Interstate standards (e.g. I-70 and I-76 in Pennsylvania), but I-64 through New Kent County appears to be quite straight if a bit hilly.
07mk
16m ago
I don't think he's done any soul searching, he's done whatever is intended to get people like yourself to think he's done a soul searching.
This seems likely to be correct - I'd certainly bet on it if it were possible to rule on it fairly. But it also raises the question, what would Klein need to do to convince people like you or me that he's done a soul searching?
I don't follow Klein enough to say definitively, but I'd say that something that explicitly disavows identity politics as having negative value both for humanity and for the Democrats, while explicitly praising enemies on the right such as Trump for helping to fight against it, in a way that shows that he believes that right-wing electoral gain is a worthy cost to pay for excising this cancer from the left-wing - even when some (or a lot) of the healthy cells around the cancer are excised - would probably meet the bar for me. I don't expect him to meet this bar.
However, I consider his cynical ploy to convince some people in the middle/right that he has done some soul searching on this to be a step in the right direction, instead of the deflection/rationalization game he and people like him have played wrt their more extreme ideological allies.
roystgnr
22m 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.
07mk
25m ago
I'm reminded of a joke from 30 Rock like 15 years ago - so at the beginning of the recent "awokening," or possibly before it - where one of the writers is forced to go to sensitivity training. The instructor asks about offensive terms you can use to call minorities, and he responds by saying, "PERSON of COLOR," putting emphasis on the all-capped words, and the instructor says, "Well, if you say it like that, sure," or something like that. This was around the time when "POC" was becoming more and more mainstream as a generic term to refer to "people of races we've deemed as oppressed," and one could probably describe the way he said it as "Saying 'person of color' with a Hard R."
07mk
35m ago
I'm yet another commenter who remembers the 107 days very differently wrt to the enthusiasm around Harris by many Dem-leaning posters on this forum. I distinctly remember multiple regular such commenters explicitly talking positively about how different and positive this "vibe shift" was on the ground towards Harris, especially about the "weird" attack that Walz & she were pushing heavily about JD Vance (and conservatives in general).
Of course, this was mocked just as heavily here and in other places. One rather common response I recall was a meme format on /r/stupidpol (subreddit focused on Marxism/socialism/leftism with an explicit disdain and rejection of identity politics) where people would make up fake anecdotes about going to the local "McSchlucks" to hang out with "the boys" where tough blue collar workers were all gushing over how they were a little skeptical about this fancy-schmancy lawyer Harris lady, but after looking a bit deep into her policies and considering the kinds of things Trump has done, they feel like she's really the one that speaks to them, their values, for what's good for their daughters and wives and sisters, etc. Basically the "Man Enough for Harris" advertisement in text form, as parody, before the ad was ever created.
Now, I did fully expect most mainstream Subreddits and news outlets to buy in hook-line-sinker to Harris's message and to push it as pure true believers, and that was indeed what happened, but I admit to being surprised by seeing the sheer volume of that here at the Motte. I consider The Motte good not only for providing a space for people with non-mainstream opinions to present, argue, and discuss their cases, but also for being a space where people with mainstream opinions tend to hold themselves up to higher standards, and seeing this was a disappointment to me that challenged this belief.
birb_cromble
38m ago
How does that work in situations where you believe the road would be empty, but a broken down car is right around the corner? Is there a test of reasonableness there, or is it a situation where the default assumption for a driver is that a broken down car is around every blind turn?
DiscourseMagnus
48m ago
I think you're blundering straight into the greatest problem with anti-porn sentiment (though this is probably more of a problem with anti-porn sentiment from the left than anti-porn sentiment from the right): its bleedover into censorship of non-porn. Non-porn has a much harder time adapting to the conditions of porn censorship than porn does.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
52m ago
I genuinely wonder if that’s more common on modern social media. A lot of the userbase is too young to ascribe special significance to 9/11?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
53m ago
It's less that I think "White Dudes" or variations there-of are in any way equivalent to dropping a hard-R gamer word. It's more, I sometimes can't believe the amount of hate and vitriol leftist are able to pour into their enunciation of that word. On paper you'd never imagine it's possible.
Normally, recklessness involves danger to other people, not just to oneself. Quote from a court opinion that I posted recently:
Recklessness is distinguishable from negligence on the basis that recklessness requires conscious action or inaction which creates a substantial risk of harm to others, whereas negligence suggest unconscious inadvertence.
If nobody else was on the road at that time (on an Interstate highway, unlikely but not impossible), driving at extremely high speeds would be negligent but not reckless (under normal laws, not under this particular unusual law).
I think the phrase he was looking for was "wether vein", the metaphor about how you can tell a sheep is getting ready to follow the flock when its heart starts pumping harder.
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