Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
Disabled Alaskan Monarchist doomer
User ID: 2666
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
2d ago
turned into Phyllis Schafer
Did you mean Phyllis Schlafly here? Because googling "Phyllis Schafer" gives me a landscape painter.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
from brewing to mycoprotein cultivation
AIUI, most of these involve single-celled organisms, with their own abilities to fight off rival microbes that animal muscle cells, adapted to the presence of a broader immune system, lack. And for the rest, look at how much the products cost — and that's usually chemicals produced by the organisms rather than the cultured cells themselves. Or how much a financial hit is taken if a vat or batch "goes bad." You'll be required to maintain a food production plant more sterile than a medical lab, at industrial scale.
Again, I read a lot of stuff without remembering where I read it, so I don't have cites on hand, but a quick google search gave this link: "Lab-grown meat is supposed to be inevitable. The science tells a different story."
It’s a digital-era narrative we’ve come to accept, even expect: Powerful new tools will allow companies to rethink everything, untethering us from systems we’d previously taken for granted. Countless news articles have suggested that a paradigm shift driven by cultured meat is inevitable, even imminent. But Wood wasn’t convinced. For him, the idea of growing animal protein was old news, no matter how science-fictional it sounded. Drug companies have used a similar process for decades, a fact Wood knew because he’d overseen that work himself.
…
Wood couldn’t believe what he was hearing. In his view, GFI’s TEA report did little to justify increased public investment. He found it to be an outlandish document, one that trafficked more in wishful thinking than in science. He was so incensed that he hired a former Pfizer colleague, Huw Hughes, to analyze GFI’s analysis. Today, Hughes is a private consultant who helps biomanufacturers design and project costs for their production facilities; he’s worked on six sites devoted to cell culture at scale. Hughes concluded that GFI’s report projected unrealistic cost decreases, and left key aspects of the production process undefined, while significantly underestimating the expense and complexity of constructing a suitable facility.
…
“After a while, you just think: Am I going crazy? Or do these people have some secret sauce that I’ve never heard of?” Wood said. “And the reality is, no—they’re just doing fermentation. But what they’re saying is, ‘Oh, we’ll do it better than anyone else has ever, ever done.”
…
GFI’s imagined facility would be both unthinkably vast and, well, tiny. According to the TEA, it would produce 10,000 metric tons—22 million pounds—of cultured meat per year, which sounds like a lot. For context, that volume would represent more than 10 percent of the entire domestic market for plant-based meat alternatives (currently about 200 million pounds per year in the U.S., according to industry advocates). And yet 22 million pounds of cultured protein, held up against the output of the conventional meat industry, barely registers. It’s only about .0002, or one-fiftieth of one percent, of the 100 billion pounds of meat produced in the U.S. each year. JBS’s Greeley, Colorado beefpacking plant, which can process more than 5,000 head of cattle a day, can produce that amount of market-ready meat in a single week.
And yet, at a projected cost of $450 million, GFI’s facility might not come any cheaper than a large conventional slaughterhouse. With hundreds of production bioreactors installed, the scope of high-grade equipment would be staggering. According to one estimate, the entire biopharmaceutical industry today boasts roughly 6,300 cubic meters in bioreactor volume. (1 cubic meter is equal to 1,000 liters.) The single, hypothetical facility described by GFI would require nearly a third of that, just to make a sliver of the nation’s meat.
…
It’s a complex, precise, energy-intensive process, but the output of this single bioreactor train would be comparatively tiny. The hypothetical factory would need to have 130 production lines like the one I’ve just described, with more than 600 bioreactors all running simultaneously. Nothing on this scale has ever existed—though if we wanted to switch to cultivated meat by 2030, we’d better start now. If cultured protein is going to be even 10 percent of the world’s meat supply by 2030, we will need 4,000 factories like the one GFI envisions, according to an analysis by the trade publication Food Navigator. To meet that deadline, building at a rate of one mega-facility a day would be too slow.
All of those facilities would also come with a heart-stopping price tag: a minimum of $1.8 trillion, according to Food Navigator. That’s where things get complicated. It’s where critics say—and even GFI’s own numbers suggest—that cell-cultured meat may never be economically viable, even if it’s technically feasible.
…
“A key difference in the CE Delft study is that everything was assumed to be food-grade,” Swartz said. That distinction, of whether facilities will be able to operate at food- or pharma-grade specs, will perhaps more than anything determine the future viability of cultivated meat.
The Open Philanthropy report assumes the opposite: that cultivated meat production will need to take place in aseptic “clean rooms” where virtually no contamination exists. For his cost accounting, Humbird projected the need for a Class 8 clean room—an enclosed space where piped-in, purified oxygen blows away threatening particles as masked, hooded workers come in and out, likely through an airlock or sterile gowning room. To meet international standards for airborne particulate matter, the air inside would be replaced at a rate of 10 to 25 times an hour, compared to 2 to 4 times in a conventional building. The area where the cell lines are maintained and seeded would need a Class 6 clean room, an even more intensive specification that runs with an air replacement rate of 90 to 180 times per hour.
The simple reason: In cell culture, sterility is paramount. Animal cells “grow so slowly that if we get any bacteria in a culture—well, then we’ve just got a bacteria culture,” Humbird said. “Bacteria grow every 20 minutes, and the animal cells are stuck at 24 hours. You’re going to crush the culture in hours with a contamination event.”
Viruses also present a unique problem. Because cultured animal cells are alive, they can get infected just the way living animals can.
“There are documented cases of, basically, operators getting the culture sick,” Humbird said. “Not even because the operator themselves had a cold. But there was a virus particle on a glove. Or not cleaned out of a line. The culture has no immune system. If there’s virus particles in there that can infect the cells, they will. And generally, the cells just die, and then there’s no product anymore. You just dump it.”
If even a single speck of bacteria can spoil batches and halt production, clean rooms may turn out to be a basic, necessary precondition. It may not matter if governments end up allowing cultured meat facilities to produce at food-grade specs, critics say—cells are so intensely vulnerable that they’ll likely need protection to survive.
…
Of course, companies could try. But that might be a risky strategy, said Neil Renninger, a chemical engineer who has spent a lot of time around the kind of equipment required for cell culture. Today, he is on the board of Ripple Foods, a dairy alternatives company that he co-founded. Before that, for years, he ran Amyris, a biotechnology company that uses fermentation to produce rare molecules like squalene—an ingredient used in a range of products from cosmetics to cancer therapeutics, but is traditionally sourced unsustainably from shark liver oil.
“Contamination was an issue” at Amyris, he said. “You’re getting down to the level of making sure that individual welds are perfect. Poor welds create little pits in the piping, and bacteria can hide out in those pits, and absolutely ruin fermentation runs.”
…
The risks are even more dire when it comes to slow-growing animal cells in large reactors, because bacteria will overwhelm the cells more quickly. At the scale envisioned by proponents of cultured meat, there is little room for error. But if aseptic production turns out to be necessary, it isn’t going to come cheap. Humbird found that a Class 8 clean room big enough to produce roughly 15 million pounds of cultured meat a year would cost about $40 to $50 million dollars. That figure doesn’t reflect the cost of equipment, construction, engineering, or installation. It simply reflects the materials needed to run a sterile work environment, a clean room sitting empty.
According to Humbird’s report, those economics will likely one day limit the practical size of cultured meat facilities: They can only be big enough to house a sweet spot of two dozen 20,000-liter bioreactors, or 96 smaller perfusion reactors. Any larger, and the clean room expenses start to offset any benefits from adding more reactors. The construction costs grow faster than the production costs drop.
Also "Is Lab-Grown Meat Commercially Feasible?":
The first of Humbird's grievances is the need for a cheap and plentiful supply of nutrients for the cells. [15] Currently, such cell food is produced for pharmaceutical purposes, so is expensive and not produced in the vast quantities required have cultured meat supplant animal meat on the global market. [15] In fact, nutrients are the currently the most expensive part of cultured meat production. [15] On top of that, the most popular source for key biochemicals needed for proper cell growth is fetal bovine serum (FBS). [16] FBS is harvested (lethally) from unborn cattle after the mother is slaughtered. [16] A replacement for FBS will have to be found to keep the ethics people on cultured meat's side. Additionally, the cells' food would need to be extremely clean. In the case of animal meat, any trace toxins in the animal feed are (mostly) filtered out by the animal's liver, and do not end up in the muscle. However, for cultured meat, the cellular slurry inside the bioreactor has no liver, meaning any toxin left in the feed is put directly on your plate.
An effective scale-up of cultured meat production would also require an incredibly clean work environment. The warm, nutrient-rich bioreactor, ideal for animal cell growth, is also the perfect environment for pathogens (bacteria and viruses). If a single pathogen managed to get a foothold in the bioreactor, it would quickly overwhelm the animal cells, killing the entire batch. This restriction requires labs to be at least Class 6 cleanrooms. [15] Importantly, since that level of sanitation requires all pipes, windows, etc. to be perfectly sealed, as well as ventilation replacing the air 25 times an hour, they get much more expensive with size. Essentially, you can have a large factory or a clean factory. Cultured meat requires both. In animals, pathogens are mostly dealt with by the immune system. Since the cell slurry has no immune system, great care and expense must be invested to ensure the cells' safety.
The final problem I'll discuss is the limits on the size of the bioreactors. Larger bioreactors are more space-efficient, allowing you to have smaller cleanrooms, reducing those sanitation costs. However, larger bioreactors are also more susceptible to disease, since pathogens can ruin the entire batch. Beyond that cost balance lies another problem with larger bioreactors: waste management. When left to their own devices, cells build up waste products which slow down future cell growth. Cycling out this waste effectively is only possible in small bioreactors, requiring more reactors, therefore larger and much more expensive cleanrooms. [15] Another possible solution is to use slow-growing cell cultures, since they are more waste-efficient, however less frequent batches means again more reactors are required, again ratcheting up the price. [15] In animals, waste is extracted via blood vessels. Since cell cultures have no blood vessels, cell waste becomes a problem.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
5d ago
The only thing that matters is who can kill or indefinitely imprison whom without any consequences.
Yes, and we need only look around us, look at history and who's been winning, to see the clear answer to that question.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
Not mine; from a screenshot (of a Mastodon post, I think?) that was passed around Tumblr:
there once was a lamp that could turn anyone into a woman by merely standing in its light. people came from far and wide to see it, but to their dismay the lamp was rarely lit. for this lamp ran on a special fuel, and that fuel was heavily guarded. it had all been gathered up and stored in a fortress, and that fortress had only one way in or out, through a big iron gate. the only way to get the fuel was to get permission from the person in charge of the gate, the girl light gas keep gate boss.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.
Does it, though? Because I, for one, am not sure about that at all. Because, first, does a president have the authority to fire an A.U.S.A like Smith on paper? Second, even if a president does have that power in theory, well, how DC is supposed to work on paper and how it actually works are two distinct things, so is this a power the president has in reality, or merely on some musty old piece of paper nobody who matters cares about? (I here link this marginally relevant Substack piece from our dear @KulakRevolt.)
Third, and perhaps most important, even if a president has such a firing power in general, one could easily argue that in this situation Trump would not, because allowing him to use said otherwise-legitimate authority "to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida" against him would so fatally-undermine basic justice and the rule of law that the very survival of Our Democracy demands the suspension of said authority until the cases are resolved, and that it be incumbent upon all to #Resist any attempt by Trump to remove Smith.
My personal expectation is that none of these things are going to matter — the system is going to find some way to push past all these roadblocks and keep these cases going.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
30d ago
So again we see that whatever the supposed rules and procedures about how these things are “supposed to” work, in reality what matters is what you’re able to get men with guns to enforce. (As I’ve said before, a lesson I learned in 7th grade.)
And this gets to one of my common political arguments and frustrations — the perennial criticism of my support for restoring human authority and decision-making. In (the portion I watched of) Benjamin Boyce’s interview with Aydin Paladin, he makes this standard argument against her monarchism: but if you have a king, then won’t he become a tyrant, and take away people’s freedom by enacting a parade of horribles… all of which, Aydin pointed out in reply, are things which democratically-elected governments have done. People ask ‘what if the local aristocrat makes an unfair/unjust/tyrannical decision?’ as if modern bureaucracies can’t do the same (and throw in all the sorts of mistakes and irrationalities — like the classic ‘you must fill out and submit Form A before we can give you Form B, you must fill out and submit Form B before we can give you Form A’ class of problems — of which only bureaucracies are capable).
What if Baron Such-and-such throws you in the dungeon without trial? Well, what if the Pennsylvania Ag Department does it? The difference seems to be that the bureaucracy adds diffusion of responsibility. If the Baron locks you up, everyone knows who to blame. But when it’s a faceless bureaucracy, full of jobsworth human cogs, who ‘don’t make the rules, just follow them,’ where nobody is to blame; and, like @pigeonburger notes below, nobody in government really suffers serious consequences.
Some people talk about “Brazilification,” viewing us as moving in the direction of that South American nation. I say should be worried less about becoming like Brazil the country, and more about becoming like Brazil the Terry Gilliam film.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
One way in which I see a second Trump term being significantly different from the first one is that he's not going to be shy around things like this.
This assumes there's actually things he can do "around things like this." I've made my case before as to why a second Trump term won't be significantly different from the first, because whatever his powers on musty old parchments nobody cares about, the President is a figurehead who only has as much authority as the Permanent Bureaucracy allows him.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
17d ago
Only tangentially relevant, but I'm deeply skeptical of the commercial viability of "lab-grown meat" because of the need for, and serious expense of providing, the requisite hyper-clean conditions and total lack of microbial contamination. That is to say, the living animal has an immune system, your bioreactor culture equipment does not.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
12d ago
Your argument becomes close to saying that ranking any human attribute is in bad taste, because someone ends up at the bottom, which is bullying.
It's been awhile since I was in elementary school, back in the previous century, but even that far back, the whole "self esteem" program we were subjected to pretty much endorsed something like this — you're great just the way you are, nobody is better or worse than anyone else, everybody's equally special in their own way ("which is another way of saying nobody is," to quote Dash Parr), everybody gets a participation trophy.
It's the "equity" mindset, the moral axiom that fairness demands equal outcomes for everyone; the same thinking that, when applied to identity groups, creates our "disparate impact" regime. And to many of its defenders, whether it's true, or even if it's a "noble lie," it's the only thing holding back horrific oppression. After all, you know who else once thought some people were better than others, back in mid-century Germany?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
What consoles did everyone have growing up?
NES — the package deal with the light gun and the floor pad, to go with the cartridge with SMB, Duck Hunt, and Track & Field. Then SNES. Then, when I was in high school, the N64 — which let all three of us boys plus Dad play (mostly 4 player versus mode on Star Fox 64).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
he can fire everyone involved he can get his hands on
Again, I dispute this. If he says John Q. Bureaucrat is fired, but the rest of DC says Mr. Bureaucrat isn't fired; they still work with Mr. Bureaucrat when he comes into the office; payroll still issues Mr. Bureaucrat his paycheck; and they have the guy Trump appointed to replace John hauled out of the building and arrested for trespassing, because he doesn't work there, since the job he claims to hold is actually still held by Mr. Bureaucrat; and anyone who tries to remove Mr. Bureaucrat on orders from Trump gets arrested themselves by the FBI for attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the exercise of his duties, because Mr. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee… then has John Q. Bureaucrat really been fired?
he can declassify any and all documents involved
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps treating them as classified anyway?
he could order the entire classification system revoked
And if everyone ignores him, and keeps acting as if the system is still in place?
If Congress is on his side, they can open investigations into the investigators
With what people? Who are they going to order to carry out these investigations? What if those people ignore that order? Or side with those they're "investigating" against Trump and Congress?
they can defund the offices involved.
Government "shutdowns," where nothing shuts down and the executive branch continued to spend and disburse funds without the constitutionally-mandated Congressional authorization, say otherwise. What happens when Congress "defunds" the offices, and Treasury just ignores them and keeps issuing the offices their funds as before?
but I find it very unlikely that Trump's enemies will really push (escalate) a Constitutional crisis
Why not? I don't understand why everyone seems to think a "Constitutional crisis" would be any kind of big deal. What would change, really?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
What's the argument that fighting and losing leads to worse outcomes than not fighting and losing?
Should Hirohito have surrendered before Hiroshima and Nagasaki? (Do you think Japan should have continued to fight on further?) The war was already lost well before that point; all continuing to fight did was get even more Japanese killed.
which is useful for coordinating further escalation
This would require a Red Tribe capable of coordinating, rather than being downright allergic to it. (This is a point David Z. Hines has been making for years now.) These are my friends, my family, my neighbors I'm talking about. They're never going to do anything. They'll grumble, and mutter about "2nd amendment solutions," but they'll bow down and comply. Let somebody else take the risk of resisting Federal tyranny. And don't come around expecting them to join up with you — they don't take no orders from nobody, y'hear?
About a year ago, I did some reading about historical counterinsurgency methods, particularly Rome. And, contra to Princess Leia's comment to Tarkin, crackdowns usually didn't generate greater resistance, they generated submission. When they did lead to "further escalation," it was generally only a single cycle — Rome's second crackdown usually got the job done. The only exception, with multiple cycles of escalation, was the Jews — and look how that turned out:
The Bar Kokhba Revolt had catastrophic consequences for the Jewish population in Judaea, with profound loss of life, extensive forced displacements, and widespread enslavement. The scale of suffering surpassed even the aftermath of the First Jewish–Roman War, leaving central Judea in a state of desolation.
…
According to a study by Applebaum, the rebellion led to the destruction of two-thirds of the Jewish population in Judaea. In his account of the revolt, Roman historian Cassius Dio (c. 155–235) wrote that:
"50 of their most important outposts and 985 of their most famous villages were razed to the ground. 580,000 men were slain in the various raids and battles, and the number of those that perished by famine, disease and fire was past finding out, Thus nearly the whole of Judaea was made desolate."
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
From my limited understanding, the president is the head of the executive, and any democratic legitimacy of the federal bureaucracy ultimately comes from the fact that the bureaucrats are enacting the will of a democratically (or however you call the electoral college system) elected president.
Again, this is how it's supposed to be, on paper. But that matters as much as when Bart Simpson was sent back to kindergarten:
Bart: Lady, I'm supposed to be in the fourth grade.
Kindergarten teacher: Sounds to me like someone's got a case of the s'pose'das
The law isn't what's written on paper, the law is whatever is enforced. There's how the "employee handbook" says a workplace is supposed to work, and then there's how the workplace actually operates. (The very existence of "bothering by the book" and malicious compliance illustrates that there's a difference between the two, sometimes rather vast.) The written constitution is like an ignored, out-of-date employee handbook.
For one thing, do you really suppose the Supreme Court would play along with that?
Maybe, maybe not. But it won't matter.
If they do not, should the rest of DC also pretend that the Supreme Court does not exist?
Absolutely yes. Because there's no actual enforcement mechanism for SCOTUS decisions, except the willingness of the executive to heed them. From the federal court system's own webpage:
The judicial branch decides the constitutionality of federal laws and resolves other disputes about federal laws. However, judges depend on our government’s executive branch to enforce court decisions.
And from Cliff Notes:
The Supreme Court has no power to enforce its decisions. It cannot call out the troops or compel Congress or the president to obey. The Court relies on the executive and legislative branches to carry out its rulings. In some cases, the Supreme Court has been unable to enforce its rulings. For example, many public schools held classroom prayers long after the Court had banned government-sponsored religious activities.
(DC still hasn't given Mr. Heller his permit.)
the long term effects of establishing that the federal bureaucracy is independent of the president would likely be violent.
Not really. I mean, sure, maybe a few people might resort to violence, but only a few hundred at most, and they'll all be lone actors independently pursuing disorganized, poorly-targeted acts of domestic terror. Nothing that the FBI and ATF won't be able to handle (particularly given that at least half of our would-be rebels would be receiving "assistance" from someone in the pay of the FBI). Maybe you get a few more "Oklahoma City"s, but, as in that case, the perpetrators will accomplish nothing but creating martyrs for the other side, tainting their own side by association, and getting themselves executed (assuming the state takes them alive at all). And once a sufficiently-strong example is made of these people, most everyone else will be disincentivized to follow in their footsteps.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
18d ago
I challenge anybody reading to name an occasion on which they met a bear they weren't actively going out of their way to meet.
Salmon fishing in Alaska as a kid. A couple of times, we had to quickly pack up and make a quiet retreat thanks to a bear coming down the other side of the river, while Dad had his rifle at the ready should it start charging our way (that's why we always brought a gun or two with us when fishing).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
21d ago
Given the (pretty good, IMHO) case Michael Lind lays out in this Tablet piece about how demographic trends still strongly favor utter dominance by the Democratic Party, what can people on the right do, then? Note, I'm not asking what the Republican party does, which is move left to capture moderate voters so to remain electorally viable (per the median voter theorem and Duverger's law); I'm asking what voters who care about the policies that would thus be abandoned, as opposed to the "politics as sports" folks who are happy just so long as "their team" beats the other guy.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
Abbott and DeSantis are coordinating open defiance to the bureaucracy. Maybe they'll lose, but they haven't yet.
When they do, will you change your tune?
The Bureaucracy is losing the fight on gun control, and they are losing it permanently.
That's not what the demographic trends say. And what good is the right to own guns, anyway? You talk about it as a "coordination mechanism" — i.e. something like "when they come for your guns, that's when you fight"; but they're never going to actually "come for your guns" openly, are they? They'll salami-slice here and there some. But if they push leftward on everything else but guns while never actually hitting that line in the sand?
And they are destroying those corporations, in a way that's pretty impossible to hide.
Are they? "Companies That Get ‘Woke’ Aren’t Going Broke — They’re More Profitable Than Ever."
They have a scam that works when we endlessly cooperate with it, and that falls apart if we simply and consistently defect.
But we're cooperators. Defecting is what Leftists do, and using Leftist tactics would make us no better, no different from them (as Hlynka insisted more than once). "What does it profit a man to gain the whole world," et cetera. What defines the Right — the only thing that distinguishes us from our enemy — is our willingness to put absolute adherence to principle over worldly victory, unto martyrdom and death, knowing their can be no real victory in this world anyway, and the only reward to be sought is in the next life, which is why all atheists are Leftists by definition, right? (Again, this is from Hlynka.)
If that defiance doesn't keep escalating like you predict, but instead does "all fizzle out," and Red Tribe mostly backs down like Nybbler and I predict, what will you say then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
We have not yet begun to fight, metaphorically or literally.
We haven't begun to fight because we're never going to. Because we're not capable of it. Every time, this wasn't the hill to die on. Every time, it wasn't yet time. Every time, we've backed down and said "next time" or "someday." Because we're never dying on any hills, because it will never be time, because "someday" will never come. We've always backed down, and we're always going to back down.
But I will note that every time you initiate this argument, you claim that "2nd Amendment solutions" means hicks with AR15s in twos and threes attempting to fight the US government.
Because anything more than those random hicks requires levels of organization of which we are not capable. (It's how one can tell all the sizable "militia groups" are Fed honeypot operations — they're simply too coordinated to be authentic. It's got to be undercover FBI doing all the organizing.)
Organization requires hierarchy, requires following directions from others; and we're talking about people who declare that "they don't take orders from anyone but Jesus." They boast about how if someone told us to breathe, we'd suffocate ourselves to death just to spite them. Who swear that no matter how dire things get, should anyone dare talk to them about organizing or coordinating or fighting together — even if they've been a friend for decades — that automatically makes that person "the Enemy" and they will shoot them dead on the spot.
How are you going to get that guy to join up? How are you going to get him to follow directions, to coordinate his actions with yours, to not immediately go off and do his own "Lone wolf" thing?
As for your "other vectors," I suspect you're talking about infrastructure vulnerabilities. Those are a bit easier to do with a smaller group, but from what I've seen from investigating the issue, it's still more coordination than anyone I know is capable of.
You appear to argue that the correct option is unilateral surrender, let the Blues do whatever they want, in the hope that they'll abuse us less. Is that correct?
Yes. At the very least, I want people to accept the war was lost long ago, and there's nothing we can do about it now (if not going further, to "accept we're utterly doomed and LDAR," or even "spare ourselves the worst of the horrors to come by taking The Exit early," but I get that most are too religious to consider that).
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
12d ago
It's weird to have more than one person give you "advice" suggesting you try to become a drug dealer, right?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
29d ago
But, is it actually discriminatory?
What would you say to someone who answered “yes” to this question? Because it comes down to how you define “racial discrimination.” To discriminate is to make distinctions, to distinguish, “to separate from another by discerning differences.” The examples you give all discriminate by race at the individual level; they treat individuals differently according to their race. But what about discrimination at the group level? If a system produces statistically distinct outcomes between two racial groups, even if no individual is treated different on account of their race, does it not still distinguish, separate, and discern differences between the two groups as groups? Does it not then discriminate between the racial groups?
If you read academic race theory works, you end up finding working definitions, usually implicit, in line with exactly this — “racial discrimination” being defined as the presence of “disparate impact” — regardless of whatever causes it. If blacks do have lower average m scores, then anything that sorts on m will discern that difference between the racial groups (unless you deliberately compensate for that racial difference), and thus discriminate between the racial groups. Thus, lower m scores are not an excuse for hiring fewer blacks, they’re the reason using m scores at all is racist.
the algebra test might have real predictive power
Are “having predictive power” and “racially discriminatory” mutually exclusive? They certainly aren’t so if you use the above definition. In fact, given your example, the more predictive power your test has with respect to m, the more racist it is.
Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test?
Again, no. Even if “general intelligence” is real, if it statistically differs between races as groups, then an algebra test that measures it — or any other test that does so — will be racist for exactly that reason.
will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.
It doesn’t matter what sort of racism ordinary Americans hate, it only matters what sort of racism American elites hate. And looking at the people who are the credentialed “experts” in these matters, and how the people who interpret and enforce the relevant laws have been drawing upon their views for decades, they’re very much in line with the “disparate impact = racism” view, in which any system that produces statistical differences in outcomes is definitionally racist regardless of the reason why, no matter what real statistical differences it may be detecting. It doesn’t matter if “general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job”; that just means that a “colorblind* selection for job performance is racist.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
11d ago
That was, in fact, the context of one of the two cases, within the broader case that my lack of a job makes my failure to reproduce less excusable, not more, because being a welfare parasite puts me in one of the few income brackets with above replacement TFR.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
8d ago
You left out one of the cases, which was the other context — that is, making use of my Caltech science education, specifically my lab experience from chemistry classes, in the production of methamphetamine.
Exactly. Anyone expecting the Pentagon brass to intervene on behalf of Trump (or Red America, for that matter) is bound to be sorely disappointed.
And this is all contingent on Trump even winning. Odds are, we get a second Biden term, followed by a younger and lefty-er Dem after that (and after that, and after that…)
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
This Calvin and Hobbes comic illustrates the position the bureaucracy would find itself in
And just who's supposed to be revolting, and how? I keep bringing up the German Peasants' War for a reason. As the late Kontextmaschine over at Tumblr said, about JFK's quote that "those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable," that making violent revolution inevitable then crushing it by force can be a viable strategy. It will confirm, in the minds of Blue Tribers, the truth of every comment they've made about "neo-Confederates," or about domestic terrorism being the biggest threat to Our Democracy, and that there really is no living with the Deplorables, they'll truly have to be crushed utterly, and the surviving children forcibly reeducated residential-school-style.
The US military seems kind of big on following a chain of command which ultimately ends with the president.
The same military who lied to "misled" Trump when he was president? The same military where these people are in command:
The top US military officer, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Gen. Mark Milley, was so shaken that then-President Donald Trump and his allies might attempt a coup or take other dangerous or illegal measures after the November election that Milley and other top officials informally planned for different ways to stop Trump, according to excerpts of an upcoming book obtained by CNN.
The book, from Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker, describes how Milley and the other Joint Chiefs discussed a plan to resign, one-by-one, rather than carry out orders from Trump that they considered to be illegal, dangerous or ill-advised.
…
The book recounts how for the first time in modern US history the nation’s top military officer, whose role is to advise the president, was preparing for a showdown with the commander in chief because he feared a coup attempt after Trump lost the November election.
Or see here:
In normal times, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, the principal military adviser to the president, is supposed to focus his attention on America’s national-security challenges, and on the readiness and lethality of its armed forces. But the first 16 months of Milley’s term, a period that ended when Joe Biden succeeded Donald Trump as president, were not normal, because Trump was exceptionally unfit to serve. “For more than 200 years, the assumption in this country was that we would have a stable person as president,” one of Milley’s mentors, the retired three-star general James Dubik, told me. That this assumption did not hold true during the Trump administration presented a “unique challenge” for Milley, Dubik said.
Milley was careful to refrain from commenting publicly on Trump’s cognitive unfitness and moral derangement. In interviews, he would say that it is not the place of the nation’s flag officers to discuss the performance of the nation’s civilian leaders.
…
These views of Trump align with those of many officials who served in his administration. Trump’s first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, considered Trump to be a “fucking moron.” John Kelly, the retired Marine general who served as Trump’s chief of staff in 2017 and 2018, has said that Trump is the “most flawed person” he’s ever met. James Mattis, who is also a retired Marine general and served as Trump’s first secretary of defense, has told friends and colleagues that the 45th president was “more dangerous than anyone could ever imagine.” It is widely known that Trump’s second secretary of defense, Mark Esper, believed that the president didn’t understand his own duties, much less the oath that officers swear to the Constitution, or military ethics, or the history of America.
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For Milley, Lafayette Square was an agonizing episode; he described it later as a “road-to-Damascus moment.” The week afterward, in a commencement address to the National Defense University, he apologized to the armed forces and the country. “I should not have been there,” he said. “My presence in that moment and in that environment created a perception of the military involved in domestic politics.” His apology earned him the permanent enmity of Trump, who told him that apologies are a sign of weakness.
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In the weeks before the election, Milley was a dervish of activity. He spent much of his time talking with American allies and adversaries, all worried about the stability of the United States. In what would become his most discussed move, first reported by Woodward and Costa, he called Chinese General Li Zuocheng, his People’s Liberation Army counterpart, on October 30, after receiving intelligence that China believed Trump was going to order an attack. “General Li, I want to assure you that the American government is stable and everything is going to be okay,” Milley said, according to Peril. “We are not going to attack or conduct any kinetic operations against you. General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise … If there was a war or some kind of kinetic action between the United States and China, there’s going to be a buildup, just like there has been always in history.”
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The October call was endorsed by Secretary of Defense Esper, who was just days away from being fired by Trump. Esper’s successor, Christopher Miller, had been informed of the January call. Listening in on the calls were at least 10 U.S. officials, including representatives of the State Department and the CIA. This did not prevent Trump partisans, and Trump himself, from calling Milley “treasonous” for making the calls. (When news of the calls emerged, Miller condemned Milley for them—even though he later conceded that he’d been aware of the second one.)
More on that latter:
Twice in the final months of the Trump administration, the country’s top military officer was so fearful that the president’s actions might spark a war with China that he moved urgently to avert armed conflict.
In a pair of secret phone calls, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, assured his Chinese counterpart, Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army, that the United States would not strike, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward and national political reporter Robert Costa.
…
In the book’s account, Milley went so far as to pledge he would alert his counterpart in the event of a U.S. attack, stressing the rapport they’d established through a backchannel. “General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years. If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”
(Emphasis added.)
And on the Floyd riots:
This week, Milley made headlines with remarks before a congressional committee about critical race theory, an academic discipline that explores racism in American law and institutions that has been targeted by Republicans, in relation to the US army and its academy at West Point.
“I want to understand white rage,” the general said, “and I’m white, and I want to understand it.”
When Trump was in power, Milley had to deal repeatedly with presidential rage.
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Milley is also reported to have told Stephen Miller, a senior Trump adviser, to “shut the fuck up”, after Miller said “cities are burning” amid protests prompted by the murder of George Floyd by a police officer in Minneapolis last May.
Throughout a tense summer, Trump threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act, a historic piece of legislation regarding domestic unrest, but ultimately did not do so.
Bender reports that at one stage Milley pointed at a portrait of Abraham Lincoln, the 16th president who led the Union to victory in the civil war, and told Trump: “That guy had an insurrection. What we have, Mr President, is a protest.”
The US Military is famously apolitical, and, like you note, they obviously will be reluctant to interfere within the US, particularly on behalf of Trump. The guys at the top, especially, spend a lot of time in DC, and interacting quite a bit with other DC "insiders." They're not going to want to send in troops to shoot fellow Americans — civilians, at that, even if Trump says they're in "insurrection." So all they need to do is declare that any conflict over authority, and what is or isn't in the president's power to do, is a civilian political matter, because the US Military does not get involved in civilian political matters, full stop.
So, let me ask you, if Trump declares the bureaucracy in insurrection, and the top brass say "no they're not," and tell Trump to go f*** himself — or even if they just say "civilian matter, we're staying out of it" — what then?
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
10d ago
Who's going to sign the paychecks? ; Who's going to sign off on maintaining the security clearances? ; Who's going to assign work?
The same people who do so right now. (I mean, it's not like Biden is doing so.)
These are all people who would have to report to the President, or report to somebody who does.
Again, on paper. What if they just don't? The President's orders aren't magic — they contain no inherent power to compel obedience in and of themselves.
Why would the FBI step in and arrest people?
Because they're as anti-Trump as the rest of the > 90% Leftist fed bureaucracy, and thus they'll agree with them that Trump can't fire John Q. Bureaucrat, and that John Q. Bureaucrat is still a federal employee. And attempting to obstruct a federal employee in the course of his duties — which is, in this view, what anyone attempting to remove John Q. Bureaucrat would be doing — is a federal crime. Why wouldn't the FBI arrest someone they believe to be committing a federal offense?
I can think of several factors that contribute to this.
First, what does it mean for a state to be "gun-friendly"? I mean, most people on the pro-gun side support "reasonable" restrictions — where "reasonable" is often heavily influenced by status-quo bias (the conservative side of the leftward ratchet) — and the "2nd Amendment right to personal nukes" position is mostly just a few fringe (if vocal) libertarian types. And states are not politically homogenous; even your most "gun-friendly" state is going to have plenty of people — particularly in the cities — who support increasing gun restrictions.
In particular, the people in state government — particularly the lawyers and paper-pushing bureaucrats — you'd be counting on to push and coordinate this resistance to enforcement skew both urban and especially college-educated, which means they skew left and anti-gun. (Personnel is policy, and modern forms of government ensure urban leftist personnel.)
Second, way too many on the right are believers in "the rule of law." Like the sportsman who will not respond to a cheating opponent by cheating back because he has too much "respect for the game," they believe in the importance of procedure over outcome — following the rules and doing the right thing over getting better results. They are deontologists and virtue ethicists, not utilitarians. Fiat justitia ruat caelum. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world and forfeit his soul? Better to suffer defeat, torture, and death while upholding your values than to attain a political victory by compromising them. (Because God will reward you for the former and damn you for the latter.)
Indeed, for any "the left is doing [x], why isn't the right doing [x] back?" question you can pose, you're sure to find someone on the right insisting that our steadfast, virtuous refusal to do [x] is the thing that separates us from the left, that to do [x] back would not just be sinking to the level of our enemies, it would be to become our enemy, and that anyone who would consider doing [x] is a leftist, no matter their other positions.
Third, quod licet Jovi, non licet bovi. The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. What works for the left against the right will not necessarily work for the right against the left. Leftists can get away with doing things for left-wing causes that would see rightists punished severely if they tried to use them for right-wing ones. It's not hypocrisy, it's hierarchy.
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