Felagund
2mo ago
When, if ever, is it appropriate to provide an apologetic defense of Nazi Germany?
Maybe not right before an election, when your preferred VP candidate publicly follows you.
Felagund
2mo ago
On my laptop, Vivaldi, because I have too many tabs. Duckduckgo for the default search engine.
Felagund
2mo ago
Here you go:
Felagund
2mo ago
It's the generic (and often unconscious) response to people being uncivilized on the left:
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We ought to empathize with them, and take seriously whatever motivated them to such actions.
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We can't put expect anything of them, because they're uncivilized.
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We can't expect to influence them, because they're uncivilized. (And is it even right to try to sway them from it, given the justifications that they have for it?)
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Instead, responsibility should be loaded upon those who react too harshly, because they should have known better. And we should feel bad for the victims of the response.
This is precisely the same path that leads people to adopt soft-on-crime prosecutors, and generally punish those who retaliate against the lawless. It happens often when it's easier or involves less unpleasantness for the state to punish those who are otherwise productive, than those who are wild.
This is the default thought pattern that happens when sympathy and responsibility get loaded onto different parties in some conflict. It clearly correlates with seeing things as oppressor (responsible) and oppressed (sympathetic), which is tied to why it's more common on the left, I think.
See Daniel Penny, see the UK riots (and speech arrests), see opinions on cops (when unjustified), etc.
I imagine things will get a lot better for you, if the 2024 election goes to Trump, and worse if it goes to Harris.
Felagund
2mo ago
I'm probably not especially likely to do so in the future—this occasion was more to satisfy a point of curiosity (how do AAQCs and popular posts compare) than to provide a service, and the insights are now sufficiently gleaned. But if you want to check yourself, you can just go to comments and sort by top for the last month.
Felagund
2mo ago
There's certainly plenty of overlap, and you could imagine some of the posts that were not selected being so. That said, the posts that are selected feel noticeably more AAQC-y to me than do just the most upvoted ones, which seems to me to indicate that those categories do not overlap perfectly—it is not just a crapshoot, even if there's a component of randomness.
I did not mean to imply that the people mentioned here don't get AAQCs. I know that's false, some of them did this month. I just wanted to note that the ratio between posts that are well-liked and those that are of the sort that earn AAQCs seems like it might vary by user to some extent.
Felagund
2mo ago
I was curious to see what were the top comments from the last month that didn't make it here, so we have:
@Walterodim, on the "factchecking" of Trump
@functor, on the downfall of the UK
A throwaway, on ideological pressure on doctors
@DTulpa, complaining about the media response to Harris
@raakaa, on the double standard of people being against cancelling Home Depot workers, but putting up with cancelled Olympians
@ABigGuy4U, on biased fact-checkers
@DTulpa, expressing discontent with the disorderly homeless
@functor, on the problems in the UK
@Walterodim, characterizing Tim Walz
@Walterodim, on election integrity concerns with a leftist tinge
@urquan, on women, and the words of the delphic oracle
@gattsuru, on European censorship
@SteveKirk, on Musk and corporate (in)competency
@naraburns, on pro-knifing counterprotests
@Walterodim, putting media activity in the active voice
@self_made_human, on immigration accelarationism
@IGI-111, on the political effectiveness of economic idiocy
And that's the first page, down to a net upvotes of 47. (All but two had at most 4 downvotes.)
The Quality Contribution system posts seem to be considerably more effortpostish, and the ones passed over are more likely to be applause-lights. So it seems like good selection. It's interesting that the slate of posters for each kind of post is not the same—some of us (e.g. @Walterodim) seem to be pretty good at making a not overly long reply that's popular, while not making AAQC-style comments. Others of us effortpost more. Both can be good.
Anyway, thanks to @naraburns for the work in collecting these, and to @ZorbaTHut, that we have this place.
Felagund
2mo ago
The way the systems are designed really affects how they are counted. I know Arizona allows for day-of dropping off of mail ballots and requires signature verification, which slows things down, and so it can take a few days to be entirely finished. But Florida's way faster.
Pennsylvania's Commonwealth court just ruled that ballots that are in Allegheny or Philadelphia must be counted, even if they are undated or misdated. This only applies to ballots submitted on time, purportedly. The takes that I've generally seen online are that this is evidence that they have plans for fraud. The court argued this, though, on the grounds that dates are unnecessary, as the counties have other means of telling when votes were submitted (I think they scan a barcode when received). But what's certainly a problem is that this decision was written to apply only to Allegheny (where Pittsburgh is) and Philadelphia counties, the two counties that contribute the largest margin to the democrats. Given that they estimate that around 75% of mail-in ballots are for democrats in Pennsylvania, the most mail-in ballots are from suburban and urban voters, and that around 10000 ballots were not counted for that in 2022, this could have the effect of aiding the democrats by 5000 votes or so. Thankfully, this is only 0.07% of the vote, so not all that likely to be decisive.
The other interesting feature of this case is that the court ignored non-severability provisions, which said that if any provision of the act, or its application to any person or circumstance, was held invalid, the whole act is void. They did so merely by arguing for a presumption of severability in Pennsylvania laws, despite the explicit language to the contrary in this case. Voiding the act would have thrown out the entire mail-ballot system. Them striking down part of it, but not the whole thing, against the explicit text, seems the most sophistic part of the whole thing, to me.
This can still be appealed to the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania. It's blue, though, so I'm not expecting changes. Thankfully, it doesn't seem like, barring fraud, the effect will be too large.
Edit: Make sure you read the comments of @Rov_Scam, where he argues that I'm not representing this accurately or completely—I don't want to be misleading.
Felagund
2mo ago
But lawfare doesn't really require any explicitly nefarious or illegal action the way murder does—all you need is a willing prosecutor, something plausible, and a jurisdiction where you can get a jury that agrees with you.
Felagund
2mo ago
Hooray, now we're talking about the likelihood of a small-ish set of events, instead of a nebulous variety of considerations: how likely are these?
First, considering schemas like those Trump's attorneys were pushing, what do you think of the Electoral Count Reform and Presidential Transition Improvement Act of 2022? Do you think that would decrease the ability to do so? Something like that was clearly the intent of its passing.
Secondly, how and why do you expect that to vary depending on whether Trump wins? I'm not seeing anything to suggest that, should Trump disappear, the opposing sides would stop seeing the other side as entirely unable to be trusted, and worth pulling out all the stops against, and I don't see a loss here as likely to help with that in any way. Could you explain your model here a little more fully?
On the other hand, I think it is fairly likely that we get a trifecta. I'm not sure how accurate it is, but Manifold has it trading at a 24% chance. This might be a little of an overestimate (summing individual elections don't match other markets), but it doesn't seem crazy, once you consider that the three should correlate with each other.
I trust this market much less, as there's less activity, but they estimate a 33% chance of a democrat trifecta trying to remove lifetime appointments for the Supreme Court. Senator Whitehouse has said that it would be virtually certain to happen, as it would be bundled with a lot of other desirable things. (Yes, I recognize that those two do not agree.) If we go with the smaller number here, for the sake of the argument, and multiply, that gives an 8% chance. That's high! (And only considering one sort of attack on the Supreme Court, not things like packing or the No Kings Act.) Do you think that that is a significant overestimate?
To me, which party is in office seems to have little long-term effect on how willing people are to break every norm and turn more and more to just what gives power (if anything, things like the R-backed bill to require proof of citizenship should help). This may be wrong! I'd love to hear why. On the other hand, which party is in office seems to have a pretty big effect on whether the judiciary is turned to the will of activists or stripped of power.
Felagund
2mo ago
His people spent money against conservatives in the 2022 midterms so he could maintain power over the Republican Senate bloc.
Or maybe, to try to win? There were a lot of places (e.g. Arizona) where the more MAGA candidates did a lot worse in the general election.
and to a lesser extent confessional Protestantism
Thanks for the mention!
Yeah, I have no idea how the coming years are going to shake out. Looking to political data (since that's what I know has been tracked), there's clearly a large gap between young men and women between conservatives and liberals. I know South Korea's had the same problem. People don't exactly like marrying across partisan lines, so I imagine that'll be a source of some dissatisfaction? Presumably this presidential election will have one of the largest gender splits in a while.
I wish we had better religious stats, I'd find that quite interesting.
Felagund
2mo ago
Hmm. Two points. First, I don't know that I'm seeing that big of a line between what you're using as a deciding factor (Trump using dubious legal theories and severe norm-breaking to try to remain in power) and what I'm pointing to (democrats using dubious legal theories and severe norm-breaking to try to seize power). Both of these look really bad to me, perhaps assuaged very slightly in each case by there being some people in each camp thinking that they're fixing genuine wrongs. Both are sort of operating within the institutional framework, sort of not. (In the case of the SCOTUS schemes, they have components that are probably unconstitutional.)
Anyway, court packing has been widely held to be a terrible and destructive idea for years—people are not at all in favor of FDR's actions, across the political aisle. And I'm not aware of any precedent for doing things like the No Kings Act. I don't think you're realizing just how destructive the latter would be. Letting Congress move court jurisdiction to whatever justices they prefer, and instructing them to rule whatever way Congress prefers is very bad.
The continuing independence of the federal judiciary matters, and Republicans are the only ones treating that institution as worth anything.
Felagund
2mo ago
I think I agree on both points, at least for something at scale large enough to have overturned the 2020 election.
Felagund
2mo ago
But if by cheating you mean what Trump keeps claiming, which is that large numbers of fake ballots are being added to the count, then no, I do not believe it. I would need to see pretty strong evidence to substantiate this claim.
This isn't quite what you're asking for, but I believe there was some recent news that the immigrant communities in Michigan (in, for example, Hamtramck) have been shown to have substantial amounts of vote-buying going on, wherein empty absentee ballots are collected. Claims of this go back well before voter fraud was made a partisan issue with the 2020 election, in, for example, this story. Sure, I get that those are biased sources, but are they wrong? (Of course, it is unsurprising that a D-leaning political machine would be more likely to be investigated by R-leaning people.)
I don't know that that was enough to sway the election, but if he was aware that stuff like this was going on, suddenly his actions seem a bit less crazy.
You ask how a conspiracy would be kept under wraps. Well, in this case, first, it wasn't as if it wasn't talked about beforehand, as I pointed to. But second, the fact that it's an immigrant community would substantially help, as they'd be more isolated, and not as likely to speak English. I'm also not seeing what gains from defecting you are pointing to.
I think there are some people who come off well, but there are a lot who don't.
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