Jiro
5mo ago
Republicans are never willing to punish employers, despite these being the obvious targets for enforcement as they have names/addresses/Tax-ID where punishment can be executed.
If you try to punish employers you get pushback about how we are hurting all those "hardworking people who are just trying to support their families".
Jiro
5mo ago
It is unclear how useful anything that was or could have been found out in the break-in was or would have been. This is almost certainly not entirely true or explanatory. And anyway, wiretapping is always portrayed as a simple in and out, but no one talks about the long-term effort required to sift through phone calls all day to find the useful content.
I assume it works the same as in companies; an executive orders something with no understanding of how difficult or inefficient it is. Either everyone is afraid of giving pushback or he just won't listen to any pushback, confident in his own ignorance, and so it gets done.
Jiro
5mo ago
Beware that if you are arguing with someone, deciding that they have a mental health problem is a magnet for motivated reasoning.
Yes, which means that the station will also be a problem if there are existing homeowners who are left there withouyt building new apartments.
But RR's scenario is that the luxury apartments are built instead of "a mostly empty parking lot used by a small number of commuters into the city," In that case, luxury apartments would be more attractive to thieves than the alternative.
Jiro
5mo ago
If there were apartments built by it, they would probably be "luxury apartments" with fairly high rents (as is typical for new construction). Why should that attract unsavory characters?
Luxury apartments with high rents tend to be more profitable to rob.
Jiro
5mo ago
Politicians campaign under the system as it exists. If the popular vote elected politicians, Trump (and Hillary) would have campaigned differently, and Trump could very well have won the popular vote in 2016.
Jiro
5mo ago
"They're being brutal towards us instead of the Jews" isn't hopeful either.
The problem is that "Gazans don't like Hamas" doesn't mean "Gazans would be peaceful without Hamas".
Jiro
5mo ago
On what grounds do the Gazans hate Hamas? If it's a twenty Stalins sort of thing where they hate Hamas because Hamas hasn't been able to kill enough Jews, that a kind of hate still doesn't leave much room for hope.
Jiro
5mo ago
Something vaguely similar to what would convince them to crowd aboard a rickety wooden ship to cross the ocean to an untamed wilderness or buy a Conestoga Wagon and head 'west' braving various dangers and risks to stake a dubious claim on some land.
Heading west has lots of risks, but requires few resources (especially, few resources by the standards of people who don't use electricity or plumbing) If it took a million dollars or even $50000 to head West, nobody would have done it.
Jiro
5mo ago
I challenged you directly if you think you should excuse blatantly immoral and destructive conduct under the idea that US hegemony is good.
No, you didn't. That's like asking someone if abortion is bad and then saying "I challenged you directly if you think murder is bad". You can't just assume that abortion is murder, even if you're going to argue it.
Jiro
5mo ago
Could there exist information where lying about it or not releasing it would be to the benefit of the people of the country?
Lying and not releasing it are very different things.
In the current political climate, early middle age white people are probably more likely to be an FBI target than almost anyone else. It's hard to accuse a trans black woman of being a white supremacist. Also, they probably have more to lose from an FBI investigation than anyone else; you can't lose your job or family if you don't have one.
Jiro
5mo ago
Dictatorship and corruption aren't synonymous. There's some trivial sense in which a dictatorship is "corrupt" because the dictator can violate laws for his own benefit, but it isn't necessarily corruption in the sense of there being whole classes of corrupt people and cultural expectations that push the government towards being corrupt.
Jiro
5mo ago
I'm not convinced that that has anything to do with HBD, actually. First of all, Africa has ethnic boundaries that often don't match borders very well, and not much tradition of nationalism outside ethnic boundaries. Second, it's just hard to get out of dictatorship once you're in it. One group can't suddenly decide to be noncorrupt all on hts own, and the power needed to stop corruption by fiat enables corruption by the group with the power. There's also the familiar poverty trap where you have to help your family members rather than save for yourself, which also leads to "you have to be corrupt because your family members will require that you use your position to their benefit".
Jiro
6mo ago
The real life version of that cartoon is a patient who has a condition unrelated to his weight, but which is less fanciful than an arm falling off, and the doctor mentioning weight and ignoring his actual condition.
Jiro
6mo ago
You are taking that cartoon out of context. It isn't saying that the patrient's arm fell off because of diabetes. It's showing the patient complaining about one thing, and the doctor telling him routine boilerplate about losing weight that has nothing whatsoever to do with the patient's problem. The patient is not ignoring the doctor's advice about weight, the doctor is ignoring the patient's complaint by mentioning weight.
Note that the cartoon nowhere says "diabetes" or "fat shaming".
Jiro
6mo ago
Every acupuncturist I know tells me to see an acupuncturist. It's funny how that works.
And every evolutionary scientist will tell you that to learn about the origins of life, you need to avoid creationists and should go to someone whose background is learning evolution. Sometimes when X tell you to see X, they're correct.
Jiro
6mo ago
Plus your children will get 25% of their DNA from your mother in law, which means they'll probably be somewhat like her.
Assuming these undesirable traits are not in your wife, that means that they probably will have less than 25% of any DNA associated with the traits, or more likely, the traits are just learned and not genetic.
Jiro
6mo ago
Listening to the FDA here won't work well. But somehow I doubt that "I look at the food and decide whether it counts as processed" will work well either.
I know what they say, but I also know that only a couple of very weird people would endorse that conclusion. "I have equal obligation towards family and random strangers" is both rare, and mentally and societally unhealthy, and I'm not going to take seriously any system of morality that requires it.
People here have a habit of taking seriously the most absurd of conclusions without ever doing sanity checks on them.
Jiro
6mo ago
Why should an opoid addicted piece of white trash who was born to two parents who were white trash deserve American citizenship more than a Venezualen who fled socialism and crossed the Darien Gap just to participate in the greatest nation on Earth?
Why should my poor, mentally ill, uncle be given better treatment by my family than a random homeless person?
Jiro
6mo ago
A corollary is that to make DTR culture work at urban population densities, you need something like broken windows policing to stop obnoxious blowhards ruling the streets by behaving badly and treating a request to stop as a challenge to a fight.
I'd consider a mob of people surrounding a car as such a set of obnoxious blowhards.
Because some invocations of "not real X" are wrong doesn't mean that all are.
Remember Woke Institutions is Just Civil Rights Law. That's inherently non-capitalist.
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