DelendaEst
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User ID: 1199
DelendaEst
8mo ago
I usually see accusations of that phenomenon phrased as "it's (D)ifferent"
DelendaEst
8mo ago
W got 2 nominees in 2 terms, but notably both were in his second term. So his first had zero.
DelendaEst
8mo ago
I wanted Haley, and I like JD Vance just fine (much better than I like Trump) FWIW.
DelendaEst
8mo ago
I am very happy to see 1 and 2, and very unhappy about number 3.
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I don't have strong feelings about the substance of this either way, but it is very nice to see someone responding to a SC ruling they don't like the way they are supposed to - passing a new law. The court says the law currently doesn't work the way you want it to, so change the law don't just fight about the court. I'd hope this succeeds this even though I don't care about the merits just because I want everyone to respond to SC rulings in this productive manner.
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I think this is good and I have been advocating this plan for years. Every President gets exactly 2 picks, they happen regularly every 2 years. This lowers the luck factor in the court both high and low, makes terms a little shorter which is probably good, and should as a result hopefully lower the tensions around Presidential elections on this front.
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WTF is this supposed to be. Impeachment is the answer to this, just like it is for Presidents and other electeds. This just seems like an attempt to get a set of seemingly neutral rules which can be wielded in an decidedly unneutral manner in order to be able to force the other side's justices out even though you don't have the votes to impeach.
DelendaEst
8mo ago
FWIW I don't like Trump, and I have no idea who I will vote for since it will be a contest of which bag of shit smells least.
But I would vote for Kodos before I voted for Kamala.
Lefties hate Trump for Jan 6, which I cannot gin up enough outrage to really care about. It was one riot in a year full of them, notable only for the fact that it was righties instead of lefties, and they vandalized government buildings instead of destroying the lives of randos. Did Trump encourage them? Hard to say if he meant to, or they colluded, or they overinterpreted him, but either way it was a bad look.
But Kamala set up a bail fund for rioters. In the middle of destructive riots. The ones that did more damage than a Cat 2 hurricane and fucked up random business owners to no purpose whatsoever. Riots which ROUTINELY had been going for multi-night stretches in each location before petering out. But the idea of a single arsonist being forced to miss out on the second night of terror just because he'd been caught in the first night was so hateful to her that she organized a bail fund to make sure they didn't have to miss a single moment of terrorizing the people of the nation she was running to be VP of. Lefties think Trump is a traitor, I think Kamala is. Trump maybe encouraged a riot that didn't even do much. Kamala funded a terrorist insurgency.
DelendaEst
8mo ago
Exactly. The department heads running their departments is completely normal and acceptable and not even worth comment. The only unusual thing is that they are doing so without oversight from their boss. But even in a normal situation where the president is vital and fully engaged I'm not sure how much oversight those department heads are really getting, so this may very well be only a nominal difference.
DelendaEst
9mo ago
Some, but not at the top line. I still think SCJ are more likely to be assassinated than Trump, though I would put it a LOT closer than I did before. This is because part of the reason I had them much more likely to be killed is that they get vastly less security protection. However, if Trump's security protection is going to be incompetent then that lowers its value (though its still worth a lot more than what SCJ get).
DelendaEst
9mo ago
I think it might be a little more difficult than you think for some edge cases, but I broadly agree. I was also pretty obviously talking about policy though, which means doing it "at scale in a way that is legally/bureaucratically acceptable".
I will happily concede that the punisher walking around talking to homeless people and smoking the problematic ones would have a very high rate of success though if that's what you'd like to talk about instead.
DelendaEst
9mo ago
The problem is that both are correct. A good majority of the people who are homeless during their lives are homeless for a reasonably short period of time before they get their shit together. Just giving those people more resources would plausibly help them reduce their time as homeless, reduce how much they suffer during that time by a lot, and be a reasonable use of resources.
However a majority of the homeless at any given time are the problem sort who won't accept the help you give them, will destroy any housing you provide them, and are responsible for basically all of the negative externalities.
As with most things, the ability to identify the groups is hard, and a mechanism to provide services to the first group and harsh discipline to the second is harder and probably illegal. So instead both sides pretend the whole homeless population is one that deserves their preferred solution and I think about All Debates Are Bravery Debates.
DelendaEst
9mo ago
Yeah. "You can think those guys are nuts and everything they think is bs, but just don't say that to them and don't be a dick about it," is what the ask used to be, and I think most people are happy enough to accept that. Now it is, "you must actively affirm our bs and act in all ways as though it were true and having your own opinion will be met with consequences" which is fighting words.
DelendaEst
10mo ago
I think its a little bit the system. I think first past the post combined with primaries distorts things towards polorization in a way that RCV and multi member districts would somewhat alleviate. Like most things where there is a large and persistent problem there is a good chance that perverse incentives are the issue and a difference system with different incentives could help.
DelendaEst
10mo ago
A lot of that is path dependant though. 20 years ago you could control costs by keeping with cheap low level accommodations and facilities and declining to build luxury. But now, the luxury is built. What are you gonna do, demolish it to build shitty dorms? You can stop building more luxury and try to bend the curve back down, but you are starting from the new high level, getting back to old low level may be impossible at this point.
DelendaEst
11mo ago
But I don't think PTB blackbag ops are the real threat, I think it is culture warriors who have been convinced that the other side winning is Armageddon and they have to Do Something! Killing Trump would be a big win for those people, but he has massive SS protection at all times, and if the outcome is just Trumps VP takes office its not as big a difference maker as it could be. But the Supremes are much softer targets and would have a big effect if you could kill a coupe and Biden replaces them with lefties. Normally you'd think that Dems would actually balk at taking advantage of such a situation as that would be seen as endorsing assassins, but Dems also think several seats were stolen in one way or another, and Thomas while not a stolen seat is uniquely vile.
DelendaEst
11mo ago
I don't think Trump will get assassinated. If I were ranking potential assassination risks my top would be that if Biden is elected and has a Senate majority (even 50/50 with VP as tie breaker) the value of killing a right leaning SCJ would be very high in certain eyes.
DelendaEst
11mo ago
The charitable answer (extremely charitable IMHO, but I'm sure accurate for at least a few of them) is that they do have some non-zero chance of influencing US policy, specifically the amount of aid we give to Israel, the conditions we put upon it, and the tenor of our relations with Israel. If they can change the tenor of relations even slightly from "We got your back" to "Reign it in a bit, our support isn't unconditional" they could see that as a win.
DelendaEst
11mo ago
I would also add that Scalia and RGB actually did seem like high Value Over Replacement Justices, much more influential than the other justices of their team on the court, whereas Sotomayor does not seem to be. So I'd say that I think RGB might have even been correct to hold on because of her intrinsic value, but Sotomayor would be more valuable to her team by gaming the retirement to ensure her seat is a permeant Dem possession no matter how elections go.
I'd also say THAT is probably the main argument against overly strategic retirements. If that Chesterton's Fence gets knocked down then the composition of the court gets locked in to whatever it is now unless one party can get a seriously long string of victories to wait the justices out or the justices suffer untimely sudden deaths (RGB was a cancer survivor and might have seen it coming and planned ahead, Scalia's death seemed out of left field). And if the only way the composition changes is untimely justice death that sets up a mighty strong incentive for assassinations.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
But part of the truth of HBD is that there is variation within the races even as there are clear patterns of difference between them. It says that a highly intelligent person is much more likely to be jewish than black, not that there are zero intelligent black people. Convincing people of the truth of HBD means getting them to accept that a 99th percentile black person might only equal a 90th percentile jew means there will be way more jews than blacks at high achieving levels, but also that it means the 99th percentile black is EQUAL to the 90th percentile jew.
Honestly, the only reason a black executive or Harvard grad is assumed lesser than any other person with the same qualifications is because everyone knows affirmative action and other DEI interventions exist. If we didn't have them then we would see vastly fewer black Harvard grads, but the ones we did see would be judged more as Harvard grads than as generic black people because the former trait would not be mediated by the later.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
My first guess is that a lot of this is urban/rural just because of the fact of public transit. When I visit my sister in DC I walk and take the subway, while when I am at home I drive everywhere, just because of the material realities of where I am. So urban populations will, all things being equal, probably have a more active default lifestyle just because of this and thus I would expect they have lower levels of obesity even if both have the same diet and inclination to exercise.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
I could not agree more.
I can think of very few world views I fight more hostile than one which boils down to "Other people have every right to do self destructive hedonism, but no responsibility to reap the obvious consequences. And you have no right to try to stop them, and total responsibility to deal with the consequences for them." It is the ethos of the spoiled child writ large.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
Underlying material conditions are changing way faster than evolution can keep up with though. Even if current settings are fine for a preindustrialized civilization, and evolution in theory would adjust for this in time, it hasn't had time to do that yet.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
Remember, in real time conversations people are going to put on the spot. Either agree that this is bad, or double down. And given that giving even an inch on something that has been sold to them as a moral imperative which only hateful book burning nazis could possibly endorse, giving that inch is a big ask, and very few people will be willing to do that on the spot. That doesn't mean that you didn't put a crack in the wall and move them a little closer to being willing to admit that maybe the very worst stuff is not appropriate in schools, even if you hateful book burners are wrong about 90% of it.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
I think the term has value, but I also think most people who would unironically use it are in fact NPCs.
The useful Motte version of the term is someone who thinks not at all about issues and just regurgitates whatever talking points they have gotten from their side, such that they seem to be saying the same canned dialogue as everyone else in town, ala an NPC from a video game. This is a real phenomenon, and it is annoying to see. Even when people are not literally saying the same thing it is a ton of people saying basically the same thing. And it is particularly vexing that the things that tend to become NPC dialogue are the pithiest and least interesting things, and never the interesting content I wouldn't mind becoming widely talked about. Most commonly this is an insult which can be thoughtlessly deployed to explain why you don't need to actually engage with anything someone on the other side has said.
However, people who use the term have basically just received an insulting pithy meme about the left which they deploy as a thoughtless way to dismiss left wingers who disagree with them. Again, I think the Motte of this term is useful, and once it is explained you will see it in the wild, and it has explanatory power, and thinking about how to address the issue would be valuable. But I don't think I have ever seen it used except in the most blatant Baily fashion imaginable.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
Pedro's character was white in the original source material though.
DelendaEst
1yr ago
I hadn't heard anything about that, how are they reacting?
But dems made up the couch thing completely out of whole cloth, so the thing they lie about him having done makes him weird. Rs haven't made up anything about Walz yet, and the media wouldn't signal boost it if they had, so he is normal.
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