domain:betonit.substack.com
gattsuru
29d ago
In this case, the perp had brought a weedsprayer retrofitted to act as a flamethrower. There's a pretty wide variety of situations in which "shirtless guy with flamethrower" can be distinguished from "burning people and people running from flamethrower-dude", where the perpetrator would easily fit within all three corners of ability, opportunity, and jeopardy for self-defense or defense-of-others purposes. Even for other molotov attacks, these people haven't typically done anywhere near as good of a job 'fading back into the crowd' as they think.
Target discernment and backstop are things that matter, but they're vastly overstated as unsolved and unsolvable problems among antigunners.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
29d ago
The premise that rogue AI is a coherent concept distinguishable from an industrial accident. I don't believe machines have wills and there has been absolutely no reason to change my mind on that point.
Though both of these also have very large problems if you concede that point. People underestimate how extremely difficult "kill all humans" is as a task. And we have basically no idea what we're building and why it works at this stage so speculation on the terminal direction of the technology is bound to be nonsense.
gattsuru
29d ago
Yep. There's a !!fun!! worse-case scenario where Red Tribe groups specifically create and push the sort of worst-legal and -pragmatic case arguments possible with friendly prosecutors and 'defendants' collaborating to make the state's position crumble, a la the cy pres abuse from the Obama era. But as funny as it would be to see Guiliani dropped into new court cases just to fuck them up, the courts are no more willing to play with that than they are with honest engagement.
IGI-111
God was a dream of good government.
29d ago
Anything that has to do with law enforcement, healthcare, and any of the nuts and bolts of your life that don't happen on the internet?
I'd much rather have both a place that does and doesn't allow the pile of algebra to decide if you get the loan or not. I'm not certain which gives the best outcome.
sockpuppet2
29d ago
I think it's a more plausible argument for public defenders than it is for people on the SCOTUS bar. Unikowsky was not assigned to work with Montana out of some computerized selection criteria or preset longstanding contract. At minimum, he joined Jenner and Block knowing it was arguing these sort of cases with this sort of valiance, he's done so in a variety of contexts (eg whether public employees can be fired for inadvertent misgendering), and some of those he's argued separately from his clients or employer. More likely, while he wasn't the sole decision-maker, he had a pretty sizable degree of control and advocacy, and personally chose to be involved in the case.
At what levels do litigators argue in the interests of their own interpretations of the Constitution, rather than the interests of their client or a preferred alternative to the status quo, with respect to the specific controversy of the case? Are the arguments at SCOTUS the personal interpretations of the litigators, or the arguments they think are most likely to succeed with respect to the specific controversy of the case?
AvocadoPanic
29d ago
I suspect were you to ask someone, "What is an American?", you'd get worse answers than the people who don't know what a woman is.
I'd be happier with language nearer the original, a pledge based on attributes more immutable than nationality. I don't have the language to express this sentiment while also keeping with the current year America context.
I'm not clear how 'All Americans' would imply Albertans are included. I'd be happy to include many people, unfortunately more and more nationality is useless as a descriptor. Some sort of Ahnenpass would be necessary to only include Albertans with 7/8 Albertan great-grandparents.
Tree
29d ago
Charity drive for @AlexanderTurok ! Upvote all his comments!
Through a cruel twist of fate (or the r.drama code copypaste fairy), this innocent member of our community is constantly being censored! Only you can solve this terrible software issue forever.
Do you feel that posting a flag isn’t enough philanthropic effort anymore?
Spare an upvote or two for a poor silenced soul, every bit helps!
Tired of celebrities always helping you, but YOU never being allowed to help THEM?
That’s right, he’s a VIP, world famous in the fourth degree, karlin just name-dropped him. Go to his user page now, and give an arrow to a star!
gattsuru
29d ago
As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.
Okay. If that's the new rule, what day of this week do you think Dexter Taylor gets his day before SCOTUS? The courts don't have a time machine; the half-decade he's going to be stuck in jail isn't going to get undone. Will Malinowski get the other half of his skull back, or his next of kin get due compensation for watching her husband die? Or will both of these cases never get close to SCOTUS?
Ah, but those have different likelihood of success, or we think they're different types of permanent, post-hoc. Which is... at best an entirely different question from prioritization and permanence. And even many of those claims are not particularly believable. AARP didn't get punted because eh, those asylum claims are probably bunk anyway.
I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations.
This has not, bluntly, stopped any Blue Tribe-favored defenses or constitutional protections, many of which have not only as much or more range in interpretation, but in many cases has been completely dependent on the most expansive interpretation to even exist in a meaningful form.
they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president.
I'd quibble with that description, but beyond that "we didn't get to try your Presidential candidate in federal court too much" is not especially compelling, and he's not 'my' guy.
I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.
That's nice, and all, but even assuming it's true, the ability of people to hack their own brains to be super-duper-ultra-disappointed doesn't actually give me any reason to care that they 'only' got fifty years of a made-up right blowing out not just laws across every state in the country, but even the interfaces of actual rights.
Hieronymus
29d ago
This is my third draft of this comment. I am trying to figure out how to articulate this clearly and with a minimum of snark.
Your first paragraph is a 100% correct critique of 2rafa’s read of Barrett. But I think your second paragraph betrays a tendency common among Roman Catholics to read current practice back into history as always having been the practice of the church, and this is mistaken. Aquinas would not have accepted Catholic social teaching – the body which has evolved since the late 19th century – as it is now. Very few Roman Catholics, and perhaps no popes, before the twentieth century would have accepted the position on the death penalty now given in the Roman catechism.
I think that a great deal of Catholic social teaching as it now exists is the product of Western modernism. At its best it can include some genuinely countercultural Christian teaching. (As a Protestant, I particularly appreciated Rome’s stand against torture when everyone else seemed to be losing his mind.) But it is not above the fray or immune to secular influences, often to its detriment.
gattsuru
29d ago
I'd argue that if you're writing a substack that pushes entirely based on your career as a SCOTUS-barred lawyer, and you talk about success in one situation, and personal interpretations in the other situation, even if you're being absolutely honest, if you make absolutely zero distinction in writing, there's absolutely zero reason to care what you say, or take it seriously as anything but a way to talk other people into believing something you'd never do.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
29d ago
Unless you're coding a way to whitelist him, I don't feel like this is an appropriate thread for this post.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
29d ago
· Edited 29d ago
Claude 4 and o3 will take action to avoid being shut down. If you leave aside the literally-unknowable "do machines have qualia" point, they sure seem to be best modelled as capable of agency.
People underestimate how extremely difficult "kill all humans" is as a task.
I'm one of the people saying this. Preppers and other forms of resilience nullify a great many X-risks; another Chicxulub would kill most humans but not humanity (not sure about another Siberian Traps). But there is one specific category of X-risks where that kind of resilience is useless, and that's the "non-human enemy wins a war against us" set (the three risks in this category are the three sorts of possible non-human hostiles - "AI", "aliens" and "God"). Bunkers are no help against those, because if they defeat us they aren't ever going away, and can deliberately break open the bunkers; it might take them a few years to mop up all the preppers (though I imagine God would get everybody in the first pass, and aliens plausibly could), but that doesn't save humanity.
Tree
29d ago
I tried to sprinkle some tinker flavour out of respect for the dignity of this thread. But really I feel all the non-culture war megathreads should be merged.
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
29d ago
you (and others!) can manually give him upvotes, and hopefully he'll eventually get out of the filter. This would in fact be greatly appreciated.
Lizzardspawn
29d ago
Trump Senior will be backseat driving
Trump senior is not fully in the driver seat right now. Let's not pretend that there will be much of his mind left in 4 or 8 years. And his mind is terrible at driving anyway. Good at winning elections. But at best mediocre at governing.
PokerPirate
29d ago
It's pretty obvious that using a pile of linear algebra gives the best outcome for loans, and literally every bank in the word has been doing this for >30 years. The more old fashioned banks have just been using a person to enter the data into the linear algebra.
Corvos
29d ago
I would second The Colour Out of Space. Lovecraft himself considered it the finest of his works, and I think it's a purer example of purely Lovecraftian horror compared to some of his other works.
Tree
29d ago
Okay. You can't upvote from the home user page, you have to click the link to the individual comments, and then do it. So I tried to rope in some helpers.
AnonymousActuary
29d ago
Roe v Wade is repealed and it is left up to the states, Obergefell passes, and federal dictate is declared.
This is an easy distinction to notice, not sure why it is being missed.
hydroacetylene
29d ago
Sodomy should be a crime.
pigeonburger
29d ago
Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."
Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.
Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
29d ago
Tell me honestly: Am I boned?
No. If you get fired, you'll find another job, and there's at least a decent chance that your next job will be much better for you, as this one seems to be a poor fit.
So the worst case scenario isn't that bad.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
29d ago
It will briefly be glorious as the velociraptor-mounted troops square off against each other but yeah it ends with the winner declaring that America first was always open borders.
It's not totally senseless, it's the equivalent of rich people and celebrities having private security and bodyguards today. "You're the guys likely to be robbed, have some defences on your ships or hire some private contractors". Something like ex-military or ex-cops setting up as private security nowadays? "Hello, you're a former privateer with a ship, a crew, and no war going on for you to plunder foreign navies. What do you do in peace time? Write to MERCHANTS-R-US for exciting new job opportunities in the field of civilian fleet protection!"
As you point out, though, in times of war this affair falls to pieces. That is when you need a professional navy with proper warships. Though maybe Paine wasn't anticipating that America would need to be going to war with anyone else after kicking out the Brits?
Lol God damn yeah I imagine I'd feel pretty perplexed in that situation too. Plus it's harder to laugh at yourself when you are one hour in than when you are one second in.
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