quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Also, nukes are not "I win" buttons. The US could not have won Vietnam simply by nuking the Vietcong, nor could the Soviets (or the US) won Afghanistan that way.
I don't think NATO would start WW3 if he nuked Kiev. I certainly hope we would not. We might decide to sell Ukraine nukes though and trust his unwillingness to not start WW3 if they nuke him in retaliation.
I imagine a single nuke hit might make quite a dent in Ukrainian military capability, but not to the point where they would be forced to surrender.
The strategy of just publishing a list of cities and announcing that you will wipe out one of them every 24h until your enemy surrenders has not been tried before, though conventional morale bombings mostly failed to persuade the populations to surrender.
One of the primary objectives of any nuclear power is not to get their own cities nuked. A big part of that is to persuade their smaller neighbors -- many of whom could likely have nukes if they considered it a matter of national survival, North Korea has nukes and has 138 countries ahead of it in the list of countries by GDP.
So even if one could defeat Ukraine or Iran with a single nuke, this would lead to an equilibrium where a lot of countries would feel the need to maintain their own nuclear weapons program, which is a worse outcome than not winning some neo-colonial war for the nuker.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Considering how many businesses there are now that refuse to take $50 or $100 bills, a $250 would be even more limited.
No problem, Trump is working on that, the inflation rate for April was 3.8%. (Yes, I know that it will still take 19 years for the currency to lose half its value, but I for one have trust in the man to speed this process along even more.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I am not really against universal background checks, but the state enforcing a law which is technically blocked by a court order seems bad.
The fix would be to limit immunity for (executive) politicians, the police and even the courts. Basically, if the court finds that a reasonable person would have recognized that your action had no legal basis, then it is treated no different than if the mob had done it.
The analogy would be medical malpractice. Doctors generally are mostly exempt from laws forbidding you to cut people up and so forth. In general, there is (and should be) a broad road of defensible medical opinions, and as long they stick to that spectrum they should be fine and not get sued about 'why did you prescribe this antibiotic and not that' etc. This changes completely when they go beyond that road. A doctor who decides to murder their patient through poisonous medication will not be treated leniently because we generally allow doctors to put substances with harmful side effects into their patients' bodies. Instead, they will be treated more harshly, because in addition to breaking an important general civilizational rule, they also betrayed the trust which societies puts in physicians.
If a cop shoots a cosplayer dressed up as the Joker, we should book him for murder. If his defense is that they thought they were supposed to thwart evil-doers, then we will say "you are sadly mistaken about what the law is, and we do not believe a reasonable person would make this mistake, and we will punish you more harshly because you betrayed the trust we place in cops".
I am simply proposing extending this principle to more cases. If the DA orders the enforcement of laws which are plainly not in force (which is the story here, from what I get from you), then any arrest becomes a kidnapping charge for the whole chain of command (although there are some corner cases where we might apply a higher standard to the DA than to beat cops, just as we might apply a higher standard to physicians than nurses).
The ideal outcome would be that the police unions would go "we checked with our lawyers, and we advise our members to not follow orders to enforce that law because they would actually commit felonies if they did". (No, it does not suffice to go after the top guy, because then you end up in situations where the top guy kills himself in some bunkers and all his goons were blameless people merely following orders.)
This would also fix that FIRE case about a sheriff and judge randomly locking someone up for 1A speech. If we treat it the same as if they had abducted their victim in a van and kept him locked up in some basement for a month, the penalties we have on the book for that should deter re-offense.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I do not like making value judgments of the form "it is normal, therefore it is good". History is full of of things which were considered normal and therefore good, which we nevertheless consider atrocities. If I were to judge behaviors good simply because they are widespread, then all the trans activists would have to do is to make teen mastectomies as common as circumcision and I would be forced to conclude that it is fine.
For the 16-yo getting a kid, it depends on the outcomes for her, the kid and broader society. Perhaps she will thrive in motherhood and raise five kids in a stable family. Perhaps she will be left by the father of the kid before it turns three, and struggle to meet the responsibilities of parenthood without any skills to earn a living, perhaps raising a kid whose trajectory through the criminal justice system is already over-determined. Perhaps if she does not have a kid she would become a brilliant medical researcher, or a serial killer.
Likewise the army. For pretty much everyone except Khorne worshippers, war is negative-sum. If people enlisting on one side of a conflict make the world a better place, then people enlisting on the other side of a conflict will make the world a worse place.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
The law which says "Don't be a wise-ass."
Which law would that be?
There is a reason that the US constitution is about 4500 words instead of just
-
All elections shall be free and equal.
-
Laws should be construed so as to do justice.
The point of having fine-grained, specific laws is that "the judge already knows what outcome is just, and will just reach for some law to justify it" is a terrible procedure. It gets you decisions like Roe v Wade, where reproductive freedom hangs on a very shaky legal decision until some later SCOTUS takes the common sense approach that the amendments did not mention abortion at all.
Nobody sane would campaign for the biggest employer in some town also getting a single vote, because that would not change anything -- they clearly have a vested interest in the local politics, and can trivially spend money on donations or campaigns on a scale which will give them a lot more influence than a single vote ever could.
"One man, one vote" is a very simple Schelling point. There is always some quibbling over details, and we end up at something like "one adult, non-felon citizen of any gender whose primary residency is registered in the municipality at the reference date", with the voting rights of alien permanent residents being up for debate.
It is also somewhat robust, because people are very expensive. Sure, a company could just pay politically sympathetic people to settle in their town, but they might spend northwards of 100k$ per vote that way, so it is much cheaper to just pay bribes to the voters already there.
By contrast, corporate entities are very cheap to create and maintain -- Delaware LLCs pay 300$ in taxes a year. So @birb_cromble's question is exactly the right one: how does this scale?
Even if there is a limit to one corporate vote per property lot, that would still leave a lot of loopholes. A family living in their own house might decide to form a holding company which leases their home back to them for a dollar a year, then cast that company's vote. Landlords would wield a lot of votes. (Seriously, who looks at the present system and says "the problem with that is that landlords have too little political power"?)
There is a reason that the US is not organized as a stock company, where everyone starts out with one share and the federal government can simply emit more stocks to raise funds, and voting power is simply the amount of shares you own. This would lead to the effective disenfranchisement of the majority. At least in a democracy, the 1% will have to spend money on campaigns to get the 99% to vote for them, and different 1%ers might be competing with different political visions rather than just their budgets.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I'm so, so, so sick of dishonest hacks confusing the brutal competition between life forms with the normal development of healthy organisms. The presence of disease or predation does not make dying before adulthood "natural," and conflating them is dishonest in the extreme.
Your "healthy organism" (that adjective is doing a lot of work, there) is very much the product of billions of years of brutal competition. There is no reason to suppose that the amoral process of evolution would find something which is morally good.
I will grant you that humans evolved for being efficient, so most random alterations (like removing a hand or an eye) you do on a human will make it less efficient, so a lot of times what is good and what is natural will coincide.
As a trivial example of the natural and the good not coinciding, a good fraction of healthy humans will have their periods about once a month, a process which I understand can be very painful simply because evolution did not give a fuck about the lives of the carriers of the genomes being free of pain. It would only care about it if the pain was strong enough that women would have frequently jumped of cliffs to escape it (and probably have given rise to genes which make them more reluctant to suicide). (I mean, you could try to define a woman who has her period as an unhealthy organism who is suffering from not being pregnant (though I would despise such a world-view), but pregnancy in humans is just more body horror, so the point stands.)
As another example, per Google's LLM, about 15-30% of adult male humans are estimated to have died from human-on-human violence in the ancestral environment. A 17-yo guy who gets into fights and perhaps ends up killing another guy is not mentally ill, but simply following a genetic script which worked perfectly well in the ancestral environment. From the perspective of evolution, he is a perfectly healthy organism, and the guy who attends university to get an office job is the real weirdo.
A big part of human civilization is to take these apes evolved for scavenging in the African savanna (or whatever) and turn them into call center workers, lawyers and so on. While this thankfully does not involve physical maiming, it certainly involves denying a lot of inherited instincts -- either through nurture or by executing people for stuff like 'murder' until they become docile, if you are a HBD believer.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
If you steal a gun and it ends in the hands of someone who murders with it, a case could be made that this makes you an accessory.
Or selling dozens of guns could constitute depraved-heart murder in its own right. Arming the local felon population is similar to throwing rocks from a tall building without checking if anyone is in the impact zone. You might not intend to kill someone, but you certainly decided that to take your chances.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I would argue that a lot of stuff is permanent and kids (or people more generally) don't understand it fully.
At least in previous generations, dropping out of school had consequences which were pretty permanent for many. Sure, there are people who dropped out of school and still got a university degree later on, but they are the exception, not the rule. Yet few if any countries try to make 16-yo's go to school against their will.
Teenage motherhood is another example. If you get pregnant at age 14 and decide to become a mother, then that decision will very likely shape your further life trajectory. Yet few states will force a 14-yo to have an abortion against her and her parents' wishes. (OTOH, plenty of red states will try to force a 14-yo to give birth.)
More mundanely, we let 14-yo's ride bicycles in traffic or engage in sports which have some risk of permanent harm, and if there is a state which bans 14-yo's from working with circular saws I have not heard about it.
And in society more generally, it is more of the same. The physical consequences of voting are very often permanent: the dead of WW2 did not come back to life when the Germans who had voted for NSDAP in 1933 voted for CDU in '49 instead. A 30-yo who picks up smoking likely has no good concept of what it is like to die of lung cancer at age 60.
Some things are almost-all downsides, almost-no upsides, and sometimes society tries to ban these for minors (cigarettes) or generally (heroin). Gender-affirming healthcare is more ambivalent, like dropping out of school is (or was, back before AI). Some will look back and say that it was the decision which saved their lives. More of the ones who are contemplating it would see it as a grave mistake in hindsight.
Even in a perfectly accommodating society (which we very much do not have), being transgender sucks (from what I can tell, I am cis-by-default). We simply do not have the tech to fully give people a body of their chosen gender with little hassle or downsides. If someone is indifferent between gender identities, I would strongly recommend them trying to be cis-by-default. Treat trans kids in school like you would treat wheelchair-bound kids -- they got dealt a bad hand, and one should certainly respect their struggle and try to accommodate them, but for God's sake do not make speeches about how brave they are. You want an environment where kids with MS will know that they can still attend school when they require a wheelchair, not an environment where kids will want to have a neurodegenerative disorder so everyone will talk about how brave they are.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
I find both sides of this CW rather tiresome. The pro-trans "well, if half of the class in fifth grade wants puberty blockers, just let them have puberty blockers" is obviously wrong, but the anti-trans side is just as bad.
With parental consent (PC), a 16-yo can marry a 30-yo and bear his children in a lot of states. Or a 17-yo (with PC) can enlist in the army and get blown to pieces in some war on another continent. Or he could murder someone domestically (without PC) and be executed for that, until the liberals in the SCOTUS put a stop to that in 2005. And of course every 10-yo has the ability to kill themselves (without PC), not granted by the SCOTUS but by physics (i.e., God). Sadly, suicide is the second or third most common cause of death for teens (though homicides are ahead of suicides in the 15-19 group, second only to accidental injury, which I find even more fucked up).
I think that the bodily integrity of people whom we don't consider to have the ability to fully consent is an important good, and one should not make it too easy for them to get irreversible changes done to their bodies.
That being said, I do not consider mastectomies to be that irreversibly life-altering. If you change your mind, you can still get implants, and we have the tech to prevent any kids you might have from starving to death (and arguably had the tech for 10k years or so).
Bottom surgery is a different category, but the fact that you focus on mastectomies likely means that it is exceedingly rare in minors. And while we are discussing genital surgery without medical indication in minors, we should probably acknowledge that the median case is not the 15-yo getting her breasts removed, but the baby getting circumcised for religious reasons of his parents.
With regard to puberty and interventions, I will notice that 'natural' is not the same as 'good'. 'Natural' is when half of the kids die before puberty, and nobody remotely sane would suggest we go back to that. We have seen how God has planned out human life, and collectively decided "fuck that guy". The natural fate of a 12-yo with no health anomaly is not puberty. It is death through asphyxiation within minutes -- basically everywhere in the observable universe.
That being said, I doubt that most people's lives would be improved by accepting/deciding that they are trans. A lot of kids have issues with their identity around puberty, for most of them accepting their birth gender is likely the best outcome as far as quality of life is concerned. But there is certainly a subset who have a different gender identity hardwired and would be harmed not helped by letting puberty happen.
This means that medical interventions must be made based on trade-offs. Anticipate how the patient would view the intervention with 20 years of hindsight. Try to minimize the excepted reduction in QALYs -- no matter if it is due to suicide, sterility, surgical interventions etc. This involves guesswork, but every moral decision in the real world involves guesswork. Sometimes you will still decide wrongly and mess up a patient's life, either way. It also involves not being in the trenches of the CW. If you think that every trans-related intervention in minors is either good, you have not grasped the complexity of the situation. If you think every intervention is bad, likewise.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Yes, or a bright teenager with nothing better to do, for that matter.
(Though there are certainly orders of magnitude more people with an LLM subscription than people with the skills and diligence to find exploits the old-fashioned way.)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
The US pcb supplier cost more than 10 times as much as the equivalent shenzhen house. They took the order (nothing special, an OTS bit you can get by the 40 foot container from china)
Just out of idle curiosity: are we talking bare PCBs or complete assemblies? There is a big difference between "I can not find a company to produce a bare six layer board" and "I can't find a company to produce electronics assemblies full of phone-density chips on a 20 layer board with buried and plated vias".
FWIW, here in Europe we certainly have companies which have both the capabilities to manufacture PCBs (like MultiCB, which will produce a bare ten-layer board in six work days in the UK, with initial costs of about 600 Euros). I had a colleague organize the component placement of some six-layer board with a large-pitch BGA with some company in Germany, and that basically worked fine.
Of course, my field is basic research, where we might need a couple of hundreds of boards and won't care too much if they end up costing 100 Euros apiece. I guess that if one needed a million boards to sell to consumers on paper-thin margins, then one would not want to use European manufacturing. And of course the supply chains for the components will mostly still lead the Shenzhen -- I don't think anyone is producing SMD resistors in Europe.
The free market is great for communicating certain information, and historically has been the only way of sending the signals that it does send. Unfortunately, it as a dogshit way to coordinate a complicated series of production and logistics processes, and will always lose out to central planning.
I think that there is a point to be made that most companies internally do not work as a free market, and the ones which try to do that (some HP CEO tried, IIRC) fail badly. However, I think it would be wrong to blame capitalism for ruining America.
There is certainly some amount of central planning required for designing and building complex products. No amount of mom&pops shops can collectively manufacture a smartphone. But I don't think that China's manufacturing power is showcasing the superiority of planned economies. If I order some PCBs from China, it seems unlikely that I dealing with a factory which is fulfilling some five year plan of the politburo, or even centrally controlled from Peking in real time. Instead, the company is likely competing against other companies locally and globally, making the business decisions which it thinks will earn it the most money, just like it would in a Western economy.
The difference between the US and China seems more that in the US, there is a certain belief that the voice of the market is the voice of God, and any interference with the market will it make less efficient and is therefore bad. By contrast, most countries recognize that the market has failure modes and may not generally lead to good strategic outcomes, and there are some decisions where it is worth it if the state puts the hand on the scale to reach some desired outcome.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
a secure piece of software
I think this is an unlikely claim. curl helpfully lists past vulnerabilities. (Fun fact: they stopped awarding bounties for vulnerabilities when people began posting AI slop bug reports, wasting their time.)
I do not think that "curl does not have any more medium-or-high level exploits beyond CVE-2026-7009 and CVE-2026-7168, so even an ASI could not have found any" is true.
Don't get me wrong, I think curl is certainly in the rightmost percentiles of software security (alongside openbsd), and an interfacing library (i.e., tons of attack surface) with a whopping 176kLOC and only 188 CVEs so far (despite heavy auditing) is pretty amazing, even more as it is written in C. It is entirely possible that Mythos will turn less-audited codebases (e.g. closed source or more niche open source) into a blood bath.
But I still think Stenberg's (not entirely dismissive) take is a good one to update on. Much of the software industry is very much on the AI hype train, and for the AI companies hype seems to be the main product. I would not expect Microsoft to come forward and call Mythos not a big deal (unless they are hyping up ChatGPT, of course), for example.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Personally, I think those insurances are clearly immoral, just like offering insurance to companies for fines due to health and safety violations.
I think this is something which could also be solved by moar dakka. Simply award damages (or impose fines, in the case of companies) which are twice the maximum coverage limit of their insurance.
If the county has unlimited insurance, then the first order of business would be to punish their insurance company. This is not particularly hard, the judges will not require Knuth's arrow notation or anything, simple high school math skills will suffice. Big reinsurance companies like Munich Re or Swiss Re have assets worth a few hundreds of billion dollars, a judge could write down a number in 30 seconds which would reliably bankrupt them.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Yes, if the sheriff is actively lying to the judge and fabricating evidence it's not reasonable to blame the judge,
Agreed. In that case, we would have another remedy: the officer deposits his affidavit under penalty of perjury, and the defense will shortly learn of what facts he has claimed. If he had just claimed "the accused posted on Facebook that he would destroy America for ISIS", and it later turns out that this was a fabrication, that is one particularly vile count of forswearing, the kind which has been punished harshly since the times of Mosaic law.
And yes, the job of the judge is very much to form a preliminary legal interpretation of the facts attested by the officer. If he just follows the officers interpretation of the law ("posting that, he threatened to shoot up a school"), there would be no reason for judicial oversight at all. In civilized countries, there will generally be a hearing of some sorts. Typically, police custody is limited to 24 or 48 hours, and if the cops want to keep you longer, they need you to drag you in front of a judge and convince them that you merit imprisonment. So the person in custody would have the chance to make their case that they merely posted a commonly used meme picture.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Other countries mostly do not elect their sheriffs and judges.
In Germany, both police and judges are civil servants employed by the state following a standard career path. While there are certainly reports about Nazi chat groups among cops and there is the odd scandal of justice once every few decades, I would say that compared to the US both institutions are relatively fine here.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
There is a concept called punitive damages. WP:
Punitive damages, or exemplary damages, are damages assessed in order to punish the defendant for outrageous conduct and/or to reform or deter the defendant and others from engaging in conduct similar to that which formed the basis of the lawsuit. Although the purpose of punitive damages is not to compensate the plaintiff, the plaintiff will receive all or some of the punitive damages in award.
Sometimes a defendant is liable for damages but did not commit an act of evil. If you crash a car into another car because a marten had chewed on some cables or conducts, resulting in your car behaving unexpectedly, that is just bad luck, and justice would be satisfied if you paid for the repair costs of the other car. If you damaged another car because you were participating in an illegal street race, that would be different, especially if you are rich enough that the repair bill would not hurt you.
If any other gang had kidnapped and held this guy for more than a month, they would be looking at long prison sentences, which would be sufficient to prevent a repetition at least in the short term and hopefully generally through setting the correct incentives. Cops enjoy wide-ranging immunities, so it is not feasible to prove malicious conduct to the point where we can just sentence them to lengthy prison sentences to set incentives.
Sometimes, the justice system will hold an innocent man in prison and he will be lucky if he gets an apology with his freedom. This can happen as a result of honest mistakes. "Given a professional investigation, we concluded at that time that you were very likely the killer, so we locked you up. Later evidence came in which exonerated you, but we could not have reasonably gotten that evidence any earlier. Sorry, shit happens." Good luck getting anything from the state in such cases. Societies reasonably does not want cops to not arrest killers out of fear they will need to pay compensation for arresting the wrong guy later.
But what happened to that guy should not have happened, ever. The police did not act in good faith, nor did the judge. There is no tradeoff for providing a huge negative incentive.
Per WP, Perry county has a population of about 9k, so the damages awarded would come to about 100$ per capita, which is hopefully enough that it will be felt by the electorate and push their gradient descent into electing less terrible officials, and generally provide a healthy incentive not to violate 1A rights.
(As an European, I think it is very silly to let a population of less than 10k have its own branch of the justice system. In Germany, an instance of an Amtsgericht (our lowest court, which would sign off on prison for being a danger to others) represents 130k people on average.)
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Bad news, like most abuse by officials it gets paid for by the taxpayers and nothing is likely to happen to the corrupt scumbags who were in charge.
This seems to be one of the cases where 'moar dakka' might be applicable. Just scale the punitive damages to the point where Perry county's law enforcement will face unemployment simply because Perry county will be too bankrupt to afford any law enforcement. Less than a million is just a slap on the wrist.
The thing which is confusing me is that in civilized countries, there is generally a narrow limit on how long police can hold you in some cell before a judge has to a-ok it. So the blame for the first two days would lie with the sheriff, and the blame for the other 35 days would lie with a judge who was willing to sign off on him staying in prison. We have judges overlooking the decisions of police because we know very well that cops can not be trusted on whom should be in prison (at least when they are not making a sworn statement which could land themselves in prison). Nor do I buy that whoever rubber-stamped that was so overworked that they could not spend five minutes reading to the case file -- how many people does Perry county hold on a 2M$ bail because they are supposedly an imminent threat to public safety, and how many of these are former cops?
I get that there are good reasons to prohibit suing judges for their legal decisions, but my preferable outcome would be for the judge to decide to change their name and move to Alaska in the hope of no longer being The Official Whose Decision Bankrupted Perry County.
I have also very little sympathy for the taxpayer here. At the end of the day, the buck stops with them -- they elected the sheriff, possibly the judge, or other officials who employed the perpetrators. As a German, let me tell you that "we made a bad decision in the voting booth and now a few years later our county is bankrupt" is far from the worst of what bad electoral decisions can cost an electorate.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
If that would have been the only way to prevent his son from being locked up in federal prison due to malicious prosecution for as long as MAGA would hold power, I might agree with you.
But my general take on the finances of the Biden family is that they would probably have managed to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver and rent him a room in the outskirts. It seems unlikely that Trump would have offered Canada sufficient concessions to get them to extradite him, "we lowered our tariffs by ten percent but in turn we got Hunter Biden" would not play well with his voters -- they were never chanting about locking him up the way they were about Mrs Clinton. Sure, Trump would probably have wasted a few millions of taxpayer money to charge him with everything on the book, but in the end he would have been a target of opportunity rather than Trump's white whale.
Biden feeling the need to do anything about Hunter was a clear vote of no confidence in the US justice system. That is already a pretty damning signal to send by the president. But the fact that he did not pick the option available to most Americans in a similar situation -- exile -- is a hundred times more damning still. It is basically saying
Fuck equality before the law. I am president Biden, and I will not get on a plane to see my son for Chrismas like he was some Iranian or Chinese exile, like he was some commoner. If the price I need to pay for my convenience is to make it common knowledge that laws don't apply to the rich and the powerful (to the degree that anyone was still doubting that after Epstein), it is a price I will pay gladly.
Basically, every one of the millions of anti-ICE protesters has more balls (irrespective of gender identity) than all of the Biden family put together. They know that the eye of Sauron could fall on them at any minute and they could charged with making a false statement to a bank a decade ago, and that they would not have a powerful daddy who would pay Trump a bribe or make some deal getting them favorable prison conditions.
A great president would say that if the government imprisoned the innocent, then the right place for their innocent son would be to be imprisoned with his fellow countrymen. A decent president would send his son to comfortable exile -- about a million times less harsh than what random penniless political refugees or Assange have taken upon them to escape unjust punishment. Only a despicable president would refuse to make any trade-offs with regards to the signals he sends to his people.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Corruption also exists on a spectrum. A company bankrolling a congressional candidate will generally not be stupid enough to make an agreement in writing where the candidate pledges to vote in their interest. No, they are merely supporting democracy and exercising their freedom of speech rights, which seem pretty unlimited for corporate citizens as of Citizens United. When the congressman later listens carefully to the company's representative making their case, that is merely because the company is a big employer in his state, not because they are a donor, you see. It will be very hard to prove the opposite.
Other cases are more blatant. Foreign powers gifting Trump airplanes. Fraudsters getting presidential pardons in exchange for investing in his memecoins.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency. But it was not a Tuesday. There is no long and proud tradition of Democratic presidents handing out preemptive pardons like candy.
With Trump, a pardon of some fraudster in exchange to cash (or investment in his shitcoins, which amounts to the same thing) is mostly a Tuesday.
Nor do I think it is sound to insinuate that the support of the Ukraine in the war was a reaction of Ukrainians buying access to Biden through his son. A lot of countries support Ukraine, not all had a president's son on some shady board of directors.
Supporting Ukraine was totally in character for US foreign policy between 1950 and 2005. To my knowledge, Ukraine does not even have a well-funded lobby organization to bribe congressmen to vote for military aid, unlike some other country which received 10G$ a year during a conflict viewed slightly more controversially in the Western world. But AIPAC makes a bad case to argue that the Dems are the party of corruption because MAGA's support for Israel's military causes makes Biden's look modest.
It is well known that there was a bit of a swamp in DC. Big donors would probably not be willing to spend on PACs if the politicians were all unwavering loyal to their ideas and the will of the people. There is certainly a revolving door between policymakers and the industries which they regulate. Nobody believes that a politician paid as an advisor for some company is really giving advice worth his salary.
To try a slightly unhygienic metaphor, if DC was a swimming pool it would be well known that people sometimes piss in it. When Biden pardoned his son for any and all crimes, that was akin to standing on the pool's side and openly pissing into it.
But what Trump is doing is getting up to the topmost board of the diving tower, pulling down his trunks, squatting at the end and letting turd after turd drop in the pool.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
That seems like a fully generalizable counterargument. "Imagine how bad the IDF must have been in Gaza around 2007 for the Gazans to elect that band of murderous thugs called Hamas as their government". "Imagine what the wife must have said to her husband to drive him to kill and dismember her".
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
The snarky remark would be that presidential corruption is not culture war, but Tuesday.
I have seen precious few people arguing here against the proposition that Trump is obviously leveraging the opportunities of office to enrich himself, his family, his legacy as a president and close allies. I think his apologists here would rather argue that prior politicians were not less corrupt, but only less obviously corrupt (for the most part, excepting Biden's pardons here), or that he is entitled to loot the treasury after his opponents tried to go after his money through lawfare, or that he is still better than a non-corrupt leftist for unrelated reasons.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Before I deleted X, I saw several posts asking why non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't.
At the risk of sharing the Ig Nobel with you, it seems to me that men might be generally more interested in sex outside established relationships, or earlier in a relationship.
From an evo-psych perspective, this is certainly what we should expect. A female mammal invests quite some resources in her offspring, so genes which promote being picky about partners and mating only with the ones which seem to thrive most in their environment is an optimal strategy. For male mammals, the situation is different, because their investment in the process is comparatively tiny. (Obviously this varies widely between species, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, etc). One complication with humans is that it is non-obvious if a woman is currently fertile or not. In response, genes thrived in humanity which make men horny all the time, circumstances permitting.
For the genes in a woman, mate selection is akin to the secretary problem. Better to wait a few months than spending years raising a child with subpar genes. (Where subpar could mean 'bad at a silly Kensian beauty contest, like a peacock without any tail feathers'). From the perspective of the same genome in a man, it is still akin to the secretary problem, but on a very different time scale, here the genes would optimize for 'what is the best investment for a day's worth of testes production?'
Obviously this gets complicated by gene-culture interactions, a gene which will cause its carrier getting stoned for adultery or ingroup rape will not thrive too much, for example.
As a man who is by inclination (if not by opportunity) a slut, I imagine that male promiscuity is one or two standard deviations higher than female promiscuity. For example, I imagine that it would be very easy for me to arrange a hookup with someone with a similar hotness score as myself -- if I was willing to hook up with a guy, which is sadly not one of my kinks.
There are probably a few men around who are non-promiscuous to the point where "join a church, court a single woman from the congregation, marry her, have missionary PIV sex, figure out if it is good sex or you have any (non-sinful) kinks in common, have a few kids" is compatible with their sex drive, but most will probably be off better competing for women more interested in sex, at least in the short-to-medium term.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here.
Not really. The Motte, child of Slate Star Codex and grandchild of Less Wrong, has strong rationalist roots. I do not recall anyone explicitly arguing here that MAGA is clearly whom God wants to you vote for and that you should not vote Democrats lest you are condemning yourself to hell in doing so. In practice, Trump is 100 times more divisive in terms of CW than God is.
Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God.
This feels about as convincing as 'quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent'.
More seriously, it is not clear to me the consciousness hypothesis is making any falsifiable claim about the observable universe, which it curiously enough shares with the theism hypothesis. (Or at least the less silly version of the theism hypothesis. There are probably people who would claim that praying to god to cure your cancer or strike your enemies with lightning bolts will work outperform chemotherapy and cruise missiles, but their claims are already falsified.)
I will grant you that life is weird, and brains capable of introspection are extra weird. But I do not share the intuition that the material world can not give rise to weird stuff. Take Conway's Life. Cellular automata are dead simple compared to the material reality of atoms and black holes. And yet Life is already Turing complete. Any observable thing my brain can do, including claiming consciousness, a sufficiently large cellular automaton could also do.
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The other problem with rational arguments for god is that they treat { Abrahamic God, no gods } as a complete hypothesis space. This is silly. There are myriads of possible creators of the universe. Absolutely nothing privileges the Abrahamic God over the alternatives from other cultures. Why God and not Rod or dread Azathoth or Waheguru or a Demiurge or that ball of noodles?
In fact, I think that if the universe we inhabit can teach us anything about our creator, it seems to me that the state we find ourselves in seems incompatible with it being all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful. Like, He created a fine-tuned universe of a diameter of more than 14 Gigaparsecs to get a tiny rock on which us apes could evolve and thrive, and He did not bother to fine tune it a bit more to prevent cancer or kidney stones? Seems like something an asshole move.
More likely, a creator would be wholly indifferent towards life. Even supposing that He had created gamma ray bursts to keep life in check would be presuming too much. Probably He is less interested in humans than we are in the dust mites colonizing our bedrooms.
I am sure that if the kind of larvae which thrive in animal dung had higher cognitive capability, they would worship the cow which produced their cow pat as a omni-benevolent divine creator which produced their world so that the insects could thrive, and claim the bovines have really strong opinions about how a good insect should behave.
I think the bigger problem is that land is simply not a good where markets work very well, because there is no supply elasticity.
The mean time between expropriations (e.g. through war, revolution, commie takeover) in most of the Western world is probably upwards of a century. This means that city land is a good investment even if you don't collect rent for it.
The Georgian fix would be to simply tax the income from unimproved land at 100%, to the point where an investor would be indifferent between owning the same building in a big city or the countryside because he would not see a single cent of the rent difference.
Fixing rent prices is just treating the symptoms, and making everything worse in the process.
Nor do I think a land value tax would fix everything. Suburban home owners would have reason to become even more NIMBY towards higher density housing, as it would also raise the LVT they would have to pay for their single family homes.
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