solowingpixy
the resident car guy
4m ago
FWIW, as a 2/3 Trump voter (albeit in a red state, so I knew my vote didn't matter and just thought it would be funny if he won the popular vote) I'm generally bored with the Epstein stuff and wouldn't be surprised if he was in it or if he was covering for others in his circle.
I mean, he's more Ross Perot and Bill Clinton than he is Pat Buchanan (so the immigration restrictionists should be expect to be betrayed), even if he was clever enough to ape the latter for politics' sake.
JarJarJedi
5m ago
First of all, people are punished for imaginary crimes all the frickin time. Starting with the sitting president, who has been punished (or there was an attempt to punish him) for imaginary crimes at least half-dozen times, maybe more. And downstream from that, down to declaring parents who want to know not even what happens in the upper regions of the system, but in their own local school - domestic terrorists, and making a task force to find some imaginary crimes they can be prosecuted for. This is part of the deal too - while the patricians virtually never get prosecuted for anything - unless they cross another, more important, patrician - the plebeians are getting prosecuted left and right for utter bullshit.
But second of all, the crimes of Epstein are not "imaginary". He was known as a convicted criminal since 2008, and the exact nature of his conviction was also known since then. Moreover, the materials of his and Maxwell criminal cases strongly suggest that his operation was not uniquely tailored to satisfy one single person, but was wider. And also common sense suggests that at least some people who associated with known criminal who did not exactly hide his proclivities used his criminal services. One can not claim, obviously, just having any business with Epstein means they were part of the criminal business too, but at least it is plausible that there is more than one person that consumed those services. And there are witnesses that claim they know for a fact such persons exist.
And if it is plausible, the inferior people would like the people who claim they are there to protect them (or at least The Law), and given enormous powers to do so, will actually do at least a proper investigation on the matter. We know they can do that - this happens in drug cases, this happens in terrorist cases, this happened on Jan 6 where the FBI deployed immense resources to find every last grandma in Alabama who were in the vicinity of the Capitol on that day, and put her into jail. They have the powers. They are not using them. The inferior people are wondering - why? What is happening here? You answer is "you are just a bunch of dumb idiots and nobody is going to explain you anything because you are dumb". This answer is not very satisfactory.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
5m ago
A few things.
First, nobody likes a flouncer. You would not be the first to decide this hive of scum and villainy is too much for you and crash out. And that's entirely fair. This place is not for everyone. But if you think loudly declaring you will take your marbles and go home will effect a change in the status quo... no, it probably won't. We allow people with unpleasant views to say their piece if they can stay just this side of attacking individuals or groups. That's by design, it's because we want to have a place where you can actually be exposed to someone able to make an argument for a point of view you might find reprehensible. I do not like racists, blackpillers, incels, white nationalists, accelerationists, Holocaust deniers, and our various other deplorables, but where else can I go (except a forum specifically dedicated to those views, which would be nothing but unfiltered bile and rageposting) to hear what they actually believe and engage with them?
"But I don't want to engage with racists!" you say. And again: fair enough. Maybe this place is not for you. But what is it you want, exactly? For us to be less racist, collectively? Then be one of those who pushes back. For us to not allow people to be racist? Might as well just demand we ban all the deplorables, right?
Second: @WhiningCoil earned a number of reports on that post. He gets reported a lot as he descends further into his bitter nihilistic hole. He's been temp-banned many times under his various alts since he first started blackpilling hard on reddit, so it's not like his seething rants about how much he hates (an ever-expanding range of people) have gone without consequences. That post (and several others of his) are in fact still sitting in the mod queue because I decided I was not going to be the one to make a decision about them.
Borderline posts about how much you hate your enemies are, well, borderline, and whether we decide they cross the line depends a lot on how a particular mod reads the particular wording. Outright saying "Black people are a violent invasive species" would be unambiguously cause for a ban. Saying plainly "I hate black people" would get a lot of reports but would actually be allowed. You are allowed to hate people here! Making a nasty innuendo is, well, borderline. Same goes for a lot of the various posts we get about Jews Jews Jews.
As for the upvotes, would it surprise you to know that many of our most heated, reported, and ban-baiting posts also get heavily upvoted? The more spicy your screed about how much you hate Those People, the more likely that a lot of other people who also hate Those People will upvote you. Yes, that means we have a lot of haters here. You'll notice quite a few people also downvote those posts, though, so it's not one-sided.
So yes, this site is "tainted by racism." We have racists here, and they aren't banned just for being racist. That is intentional. The intent is not to be a haven for racists (though we've certainly been accused of being just that), but to be a place where people can say the things they can't say elsewhere, and then have to defend it. I only wish more people like you would muster the wherewithal to argue back instead of just getting indignant and leaving.
sodiummuffin
9m ago
That seems like a bad way to judge a metaphor? If you say "wolf in sheep's clothing" or "fox guarding the henhouse" that has very little to do with the typical way farmers respond to animals threatening their own animals (shooting them).
For reference, the quote in question:
It's all well and good to want to plant seeds, and failing to plant your own, nurture what you can find. Just make sure you aren't nurturing some virulent invasive species that will leave the land barren.
Whether accurate or not, I think the crux of the metaphor would be the idea of carelessly planting something that is destructive to the other plants/environment (particularly because they aren't well-adapted to dealing with it), not any particular response.
hydroacetylene
10m ago
Or the Epstein files have been destroyed and they don't want to admit it.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
11m ago
My Trump-voting mother has been saying "of course Trump's in the Epstein files too" for like, years now? Quite a while at any rate. At least some segment of his base just took it to be common knowledge and wouldn't view it as a big revelation even if it was "confirmed".
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
12m ago
Yes, this is mostly Harris' fault, although her advisors were always quick to blame Biden. Most notably, she asked to be put in front of something significant, and Biden gave her immigration. Then, she turned around and complained about being put in charge of a "no-win" type of issue, and sulked about it. Biden's advisors then got mad and thought she was being ungrateful. However, you could perhaps imagine a world where Harris actually took that lead on immigration and pushed for more border enforcement - might that have deflected later attacks by Trump against her? Actually, quite plausibly. Instead she did some tours of Central American countries to try and pressure them to stop the flow and tried her best to dodge media attention about it. (Ironically this was at least mildly effective, as far as I'm aware, but selection bias means that it's hard to take credit for this kind of thing).
At any rate, the bad feelings about the immigration assignment meant that Biden's camp dragged their feet about giving her something else. She was also eventually put in charge of "voting rights" (federal level) as a portfolio, but IIRC they never managed to pass anything. Instead she just spent the whole time accusing Republicans of various things, which I think most people easily tune out. If she had managed a win there, maybe she could have talked about it more.
Gaashk
12m ago
I'm going to go ahead and support the metaphor.
Consider ailanthus. Imported to New York when air pollution was so bad and green spaces so rare that almost nothing else would grow (c.f. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn). Now it's endemic throughout the country, integrated into a ton of rather harsh towns, cities, and as roadside hedges, and it's not going to be eradicated. Even if it could be, people would be upset about it, because it's providing privacy and shade.
Consider the Siberian elm. Planted during the Great Depression to provide shade when, outside the river valleys with high water tables, it was pretty much the only tree that would grow. And it's edible! Now there are canopies in the high desert with nicely kept, mature elm trees, but also weedy wild elms. They aren't going anywhere. People would be upset if all those old, shady elm trees disappeared, though the roadside volunteers aren't always welcome.
Now consider malaria and heatstroke in the old South...
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
16m ago
But groupings mix and blend like crazy
So do colors, clouds, emotions, religions, languages, etc... but there's been no mass political movement to try and convince the public that these things "don't really exist".
Quantumfreakonomics
18m ago
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Of course Trump is in the Epstein files. It was deniable 2 weeks ago ("two more weeks" guys finally get a win), but there is really only one reason everyone in the administration would suddenly get cold feet and display the same suspicious nothing-to-see-here attitude at exactly the same time. They didn't just want this quietly ignored, they wanted this GONE.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
21m ago
If you don't want to be fixated on vote tallies, the site shouldn't have vote tallies thrown in your face on any post over 1d old.
deluxev2
23m ago
I only bring up Condorcet as if we are going to be doing ranked choice ballots we have all these other better options. Options where counts can be aggregated from different polling centers and that provide better mathematical guarantees. I don't think later-no-harm is a good outcome. If a candidate B becomes more popular with a subgroup, but doesn't reach the threshold of being their first choice, candidate B should be more likely to win the election. I'd much rather have monotonicity, so that rating a candidate higher makes them more likely to win.
I'll grant that your threshold choice is inherently tactical, but I think it is a much better brand of tactical than other things that fall under the label. In IRV, tactical votes are misrepresenting your preferences to the voting system. You have to lie about who you actually like and dislike. In approval voting, you are compressing down the vote to provide as much information as possible to the voting system. It is a "true preference" that you like everyone you voted for more than everyone you didn't. It doesn't reward liars, it rewards those in touch enough to know roughly the bounds of possibility for this election.
But yeah, I guess there are some real selling points of IRV:
-a lot of the other ranked choice methods aren't clone independent which is definitely a problem that needs a solution
-you can just walk in and list your candidates in order and be voting "optimally for your desired outcomes" a good chunk of the time.
I still think ranked methods aren't worth the cost (really try it, with a group of even 5 people trying to decide what to do, ranked methods are demolished by approval voting in terms of implement-ability, then extend to the entire country). IRV among them is particularly bad for counting but is among the better set of election properties and especially explain-ability.
(Also, you've been a great conversation partner, kudos and gratitude)
Do me a favor and explain why it's literally false?
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
Or, you know, at least stop subsidizing them.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
24m ago
I would have thought that by September they would have had a clear policy platform that was different enough from Biden's that Kamal could call it her own
I was saying this loudly and from the beginning. She basically had a classic "fork in the road": do I stay the course and hope that Trump is too unpopular to win, letting me win by default, or do I try to do something notable to make me stand out, and run a more traditional campaign? She took the first road, and I was screaming the whole time that it was the wrong one.
In fact, the sloooooow roll-out of a nearly non-existent policy platform was excruciating to watch. Did you know I asked my (liberal, news-reading) family about if they could name 3 policy proposals Harris had? They could name ONE. ONE policy! In a major election! That's insane! They should be the demographic most knowledgeable about this kind of stuff, my mom phone banked for Obama twice and they are both white college-educated liberals (since ~2005). I'm a self-admitted news junkie, and I could only name three!
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
27m ago
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing.
Some are evidently hardwired to care more than others.
There's a reason why TheMotte leans heavily rightist, while leftist spaces don't even let us post there.
crushedoranges
29m ago
I am frustrated with him. I go to all the effort of taking him seriously, and he gives me, what, a two-liner?
Not to say that there should be a minimum reply word count, but I've found AT to be infuriatingly evasive. He never, ever, addresses the main thrust of my argument, only sniping around the edges with snarky remarks.
He refuses to speak plainly. Honestly, at this point, I wonder why he even bothers. I would argue with him if he presented an argument, instead of constantly updating us on his twitter beefs. But he doesn't.
Unless he's willing to defend himself, he should stop making top-level posts. He has a substack, if he wants to sneer at right-wing dudebros without responding to them. Or whatever ideology he professes. So as far as I know, he hasn't even made that position clear.
Mihow
Lipstick on a guitar
31m ago
No but I got the David Bowie tarot set for my partner for Christmas. I assume she’ll use it one day and I’ll post on here about it.
She’s into that sort of stuff in the most lukewarm way, which is the best way.
It’s a really nice, and apparently authentic, tarot set.
Goodguy
32m ago
For the record, I do not upvote or downvote people on here, and I would support getting rid of the upvote/downvote system here entirely. It gives me a nice pleasant dopamine hit to see a comment of mine upvoted, and I enjoy that very much, but overall, I feel that upvote/downvote systems make political discussion forums worse, not better. For one thing, they feed into a sense that the people who are writing the comments are like athletes in the middle of an arena, fighting it out to the cheers of the audience. Not exactly something that inspires intelligent thought.
That said, I disagree with your notion that any left-leaning or even just contra-MAGA opinion gets heavily downvoted. I write contra-MAGA opinions on here all the time, and they get upvoted more often than they get downvoted. Sure, sometimes I write something that does not fit the average Motte writer's political opinions and I get downvoted a lot, and I can clearly infer that it is because the downvoters disagree with me. But given that I often write things that go against the local average and still get upvoted a lot, clearly it is more complicated than that.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
32m ago
“I never wrote a picture in my life. I don’t draw pictures of women,” he said. “It’s not my language. It’s not my words.”
That's deep. Feels like we're getting a rare look at the man behind the mask.
Never wrote a picture in his life. Does he regret that? Is there an artist in there, struggling to get out?
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?
Better writing than most of what's on AO3.
hydroacetylene
32m ago
She's not that religious and there was always the baptism loophole.
EverythingIsFine
Well, is eventually fine
33m ago
And how did we end up with a talentless nonentity of a VP? Because it had to be a Black Woman. The Original Sin was choosing a VP based on identity characteristics, and not based on talent
Sorry, I have to push back about the VP chosen because Black Woman narrative. This is wrong, and absolutely NOT the "Original Sin". It's true that Biden committed to a woman as VP. But the reason Harris specifically was chosen was loyalty. So we shouldn't be surprised that she never stabbed him in the back, because she was chosen on precisely that criteria!! Being Black or possibly the beneficiary of Democratic affirmative candidate action is mostly irrelevant. Extensive evidence here about the process of selection. If you want to play with counterfactuals, the other women in contention were: Elizabeth Warren, Gretchen Whitmer, and Susan Rice. So the more fair question is if Warren, Whitmer, or Rice were VP, would they have spilled the beans, or pushed back against a doomed re-election campaign?
What does that say about the capture of the government by the administrative state, if the elected official in charge of the executive branch seems to be irrelevant?
That the government works fine without the extensive input of the President is a feature, not a bug. The fact that most Americans don't recognize that this has always been the case, even with more attention-hungry presidents, has more to do with how attention-hungry presidents are than the facts of who does the work. The Cabinet and bureaucracy has always done the lion's share of the work. And most Cabinet members, quite honestly, are also at least nominally capable of being president themselves, so it's not as if they are incompetent. And (relative) stability in US governance is partly why the US had such an excellent 20th century (of course far from the entire reason, but it helps a lot).
Ultimately I agree that Tapper doesn't actually want to find the Original Sin too badly. I just don't think there is a smoking gun anywhere. It's a larger Democratic problem, and not even a new one! However, if you insist on identifying, if not a smoking gun, that at least a moment in time that demonstrates the impending problems, you don't need to look any farther than 2016. Hillary Clinton and her campaign is the Democratic Party's original sin. Or, maybe, that Obama decided to make a deal with the devil in the first place? Anyways, nearly every single flaw of the Democratic Party today is visible in nascent form in 2016 already, from the cynical insider takover of the primary process, to the sanctimoniousness of the rhetoric about electing a woman, to the lack of Obama-style vision to help regular people's pocketbooks, to the mistrust of a temperamentally and ethically aloof Clinton herself.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
34m ago
First of all, we should probably state that race doesn't really exist.
You can take medical images in various different modalities, you can even mask off either the high-frequency or low-frequency spatial data, and use a machine learning classifier to reliably determine self-described race. Race is real, and it is pervasive.
the_Culture_is_great
34m ago
The implication that a "ghetto boy" is a member of a "virulent invasive species" is both literally false, and metaphorically wrong.
I shouldn't have to explain why it's literally false.
The metaphor is wrong because in the typical understanding, the actions we should take against "invasive species" should be extreme, up to and including eradicating them from the "invaded" area.
You can make a nature/nurture point just fine without bringing these kind of implications into it.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
36m ago
Humans are basically hardwired to care about that sort of thing. For any average human, arguments between people are mostly just popularity contests, not truth-seeking exercises. Even though the Motte might be composed of people who are several standard deviations away from being "average" in that sense, it's still bothersome. If the downvotes happen on posts you also thought were not your greatest, that would be one thing, but having them happen only on posts with a particular type of political persuasion makes it start to seem like a BOO OUTGROUP button.
I think it would be quite mean to ask a high school student to figure out ab initio a Taylor series for a function.
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