MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
10d ago
Agreed that Venezuela is by far the most important thing going on right now. Iran is potentially more important, but based on the (very limited) available information the way to bet is nothing happens (in this case that the regime successfully cracks down).
I think "The President of the United States launches a criminal investigation against the Fed Chair" is a bigger deal than "10% random" implies, although I don't know if there is much to say about it.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
I'm not defending the woman's behaviour, which I described as aggravated stupidity. I am attacking the ICE agents for poor police work culminating in a legal but avoidable shooting.
Allowing your fight-or-flight instincts to override common sense, causing you to do something dangerously stupid to evade cops, is not acceptable behaviour, but it is reasonably predictable behaviour. Good policing isn't just about insisting on co-operation, it is also about making it psychologically easy for an untrained normie to co-operate without panicking. That is part of why normal beat police have, going back to the time of Robert Peel, eschewed the paramilitary aesthetic.
Even if you know they are all cops, a cop in tacticool gear is scarier than a cop in a regular cop uniform. (And a cop in riot gear is even scarier). If you are trying to intimidate a hardened violent criminal into surrendering without a fight, this is a good thing. In the more common scenario where you are trying to encourage petty criminals, peaceful protesters, and randos in the wrong place at the wrong time to co-operate without making loud noises or sudden movements that could be mistaken for a threat, it is a bad thing.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
Good point. The Deep State might have rolled Trump into doing military operations he didn't want to do, but it definitely hasn't rolled him into poasting about military operations that aren't happening.
The poasting about invading Canada, Greenland, and Panama is a character-revealing choice by Trump, as is the poasting about hypothetical kinetic operations against Blue Tribers within the US. And what it reveals is that Trump's objection to Bush-era American imperialism isn't that he opposes imperialism, its that he thinks Bush wasn't evil enough to make it work. And going into Venezuela in order to keep the regime in place, complete with the entire apparatus of domestic repression and regional narcoterrorism, but steal a relatively small amount of oil, is strong evidence that he is serious about this.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
13d ago
· Edited 13d ago
The way I see it is that nobody was trying to murder anyone, but two people committed aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy (and I'm not desperately impressed by the ICE agent by the car door either - scaring someone into fight-or-flight mode when your partner is standing in front of their car comes close to blue falconry by aggravated stupidity).
WTF was he doing standing in front of the car? Cops are trained not to do this for a reason. I don't like hostile mindreading, but the most plausible explanations are either complete failure to think or a Rachel Corrie-esque belief that standing in front of the car would hold it in place while his partner made the arrest.
WTF was she doing? Other than "A woman being aggressively approached by men dressed like hostile soldiers went into fight-or-flight mode and did something senseless" I can't make sense of it.
Aggravated stupidity in the presence of the enemy shouldn't be a capital crime (except where the enemy is a foreign enemy in an actual war) but per natural law it often is. The fool from ICE got lucky. Good didn't.
If this was regular cops, the other question would be why make so much effort to effect a marginal obstruction arrest. Unless Good had done something worse than making an illegal U-turn in an area ICE were operating in, it isn't likely that obstruction charges would stick if they did arrest her. This would have been, had it worked, a contempt of cop arrest. I'm not the kind of pro-disorder leftist who thinks that contempt of cop arrests should never be made, but they are a tool for removing assholes* from the situation. If someone who is an asshole but isn't actively criming wants to be somewhere else, that is a win-win outcome.
* This is a semi-technical term used by cops
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14d ago
While Romanians (non-gypsy) are debatably white
This is nonsense. Non-gypsy Romanians are physiologically as white as Poles or Hungarians, and the only reason why they are not as politically white is because the kind of person who cares about whiteness-as-political-identity is usually dumb enough not to understand the difference between Roma and Romanians.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14d ago
If the US was not at war in the relevant legal sense, the law against murder. They were killings in peacetime with malice aforethought.
If the US was at war in the relevant legal sense, then the double tap violated various provisions of the Geneva Conventions relating to violence against shipwrecked sailors.
The Trump administration's defence of the boat killings is basically that drug dealers are hostis humani generis. This issue is a political loser for Trump's opponents because the median voter basically agrees with him on this point, but nothing in US or international law treats cocaine differently from any other kind of contraband.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14d ago
Guilty as charged.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
14d ago
Because US intelligence was paying them to provide info on Maduro's daily habits, they realised what was going on, and wanted to double-dip on the rewards?
Because they were on Delcey Rodriguez's staff and knew about the deal she did with the Trump admin in Qatar?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
I find I frequently get into bed with the same woman more than once. Do you, Sir?
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
I think it is pretty common for academic jargon to be watered down as it reaches the masses, losing whatever small meaning it might have once had.
I think the issue isn't specific to academic jargon - it is more to do with negative terminology. Negative terminology is mostly used in phatic communication bashing the shared outgroup, and pointing out that Bad Person A may be Bad Word B but he is not in fact Bad Word C is a buzzkill.
Consider "Enshittification", which is definitely not academic jargon. Cory Doctorow only coined the term three years ago, and he used it to describe a specific process where the experience of a non-paying user of a platform like Facebook gets worse over time as the platform owner shifts from attracting users to monetization. The term is already debased to the point where it can be used to describe any case where a product or service gets worse over time, and the Wikipedia article says it is a synonym for "Crapification", which originally referred to the entirely different process where a product or service (most famously, US domestic airlines) gets worse because price competition is more vigorous than quality competition.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
This is incorrect. It would be more accurate to say that it is not only incoherent but economically irresponsible to apply an entirely different regime to ‘prediction market bets’ than we do to sportsbooks or any other form of betting.
Insider sports betting isn't illegal, but essentially every sports governing body has rules against the sort of people who might count as insiders betting on their own sport. Sometimes violating these rules involves committing broad-spectrum crimes like mail fraud or wire fraud and there is a criminal investigation into insider sports betting.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
Did they ever find out who bought the airline puts before 9-11?
(FWIW, my view remains that the puts were bought by well-connected non-terrorist Saudis with a back channel to Bin Laden, the Bush admin knew this by early 2002, and it was covered up in the 9-11 commission report).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
50 worthless internet points at evens that "left-wing extremists" in Berlin is a euphemism for Islamists.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
Also frequent fainting. My blood pressure was something like 105/60 before I gained weight during the pandemic, and I fainted about once a month.
Though more significantly, if you are just comparing two single point-in-time readings, the difference between 114/66 and 119/71 is within the range of normal day-to-day variation, and many people have slightly higher blood pressure in the doctor's office than they do elsewhere because of stress response.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
While I agree that EY is a better philosopher than the vast majority of people currently teaching in university philosophy departments, a rock with "Touch grass daily, call your mother weekly" written on it would be even better.
Analytic Philosophy as a discipline is the discipline of thinking deeply about things we don't understand well enough to have an actual discipline to think about in an informed way. "Natural philosophy" has been replaced by physics. "Philosophy of mind" should have been replaced by psychology and neuroscience. "Moral philosophy" would have been replaced by sociology and social anthropology if those disciplines functioned properly. Continental Philosophy is what bullshit looks like if you try to make it look like it was translated from French badly. Both are by definition unlikely to produce actionable insights.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
The hype mostly comes from his cultists. For reasons that are unclear to me because I wasn't there, he managed to get a large number of the readers of his Harry Potter fanfic to move to Berkeley and join his weird sex cult, which described itself as a "rationalist community" and devoted to "systematised winning" but was significantly less rational and winning than a randomly selected group of Greater SF techies. A few smart people who were attracted by his rationalist blogging were also involved.
To the extent that he matters, it is because he was the tech-elite certified wunderkind who had been banging on about then-hypothetical AI safety issues for years at the point where they suddenly became relevant, so when other tech elites suddenly realised that there were non-hypothetical AI safety issues they needed to start worrying about, some of them treated him as an expert.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
The WWW goes mass-market around the time Mosaic (1993) and Netscape (1994) are released. So there has only just been 30 years of web history that a website could have been active for.
You can see a lot of 30-year-old websites here most of which are corporate/government/university websites which are "still active" in the sense that IBM or Stanford still has a website. Amazon launched in 1995, which is now >30 years ago. As far as I can see the only 1993-4 vintage websites that are still up that are not information pages put up by pre-existing orgs are Yahoo! and the now-Yahoo-owned Altavista and Geocities.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
15d ago
I think your idea that Helberg was rolled by the journalists makes sense. But I don't think the message Helberg had hoped to deliver was particularly about growth and deregulation. Given his personal interests, and the stuff he was talking about when he was in control of the agenda, I think the message he was trying to deliver was that the US and EU could and should still co-operate on anti-Chinese supply chain policy even as the relationship deteriorates in other areas.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
16d ago
And Singapore executes an order of magnitude more, per capita, than the US. It is a stretch to call Singapore a democracy, but it is clearly part of "the free world" or "Western Civilisation" in a way which most dictatorships are not.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
16d ago
But female popstars don't attract a straight male audience with the fanservice. Swifties and Arianators (who seem to be the biggest still-active popstars with that vibe) are overwhelmingly female - men aren't willing to pay that much money to see Taylor Swift gyrate in a bodysuit while singing chick-orientated music. (Male artists who use female backing singers and dancers as fanservice is a different proposition - that isn't going anywhere and the male fanbase like it).
Google AI says that the female solo artist with the largest male fanbase in absolute terms is Mariah Carey (who was as thirst-trappy by the standards of her day as Swift and Grande are now), but her fanbase is mostly female with queers over-represented - she's just big enough that the substantial minority of straight male fans is a big number.
Female soloists with male-skewed fanbases (again, per Google AI) include Joan Jett (and the Blackhearts), Stevie Nicks, Alanis Morisette, Pink, Hayley Williams (leads Paramore), and April Lavigne. Of those, only April Lavigne does sexy, and her sexy persona is much more gothy and less girl-next-door than the singers with female fanbases. (I also think there is a pattern of female singers leading mostly-male instrumental bands having more male fanbases than female singers who rely on session musicians).
Whatever Taylor Swift and Ariana Grande doing with the minidresses and bodysuits, it is appealing to young women far more than it does to men. The Freudian analysis would be something on the lines of women wanting to be the centre of attention for their sexual desirability and therefore wanting the icons they vicariously live through to perform sexual desirability when they are the centre of attention. An interesting point about female popstars' slutty stage outfits I remember reading in a dentist's waiting room was that the outfits are designed like technical dancewear - and suggesting that part of what is going on is that "slop-creating female pop musicians" (great turn of phrase, @Botond173) see themselves as dancers (who were always more sexualised than singers).
The other point of comparison is women's athletic uniforms - where the only reason they aren't continuing to get skimpier is because they can't without an unacceptable risk of wardrobe malfunctions. It is very obvious that most (but not all) female athletes want people (probably other women at least as much as men) to look at their toned bodies. And this isn't just a chick thing - straight male bodybuilders are desperate for other men to look at their toned bodies.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
16d ago
Greater DC has an urban area population of 5.2 million vs 9.8 million for London and something similar for Paris (the French don't publish urban area population estimates). Metropolitan area population (defined by commuting patterns) is 6 million for DC, 13 million for Paris, and 15 million for London. And DC hosts a bigger, richer government and so has more government and government-adjacent jobs.
There just aren't the people to staff another industry in DC. The US is a big enough country that (apart from NYC, which does everything except government) its major cities are functionally specialised.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
16d ago
The essay deserved an F (that is 0 at some schools including this one and, bizarrely, 50 at others). Some of us think that grading rubrics giving F-quality work D and C grades in order to avoid giving earned Fs to protected groups are precisely what's gone wrong with higher education. When the F student isn't politically sympathetic, most Motteposters do.
The rule being selectively enforced here is "Undergraduates should be able to do undergraduate-level work". It isn't the specific rubric.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
16d ago
Without diving deeper into the raw data I bet that the actual situation on the ground is something like this; Close to 30% of all kids will be referred at least once in their lives.
We have now been referred to social services twice, both routine and in one case leading to a 15-minute home visit and a no-action letter, and in the other case to literally nothing at all. Plenty of mandatory reporters consider "Toddler with head injury of unclear origin" to be a mandatory report. It wouldn't surprise me if 30% of all kids get this kind of routine referral - and apart from the waste of CPS resources I don't see it as a problem.
The problem is where CPS see "free range 7-year old" as the kind of referral that needs more than a no-action letter.
Poilievre losing to Carney is a profoundly non-central example of TDS. Canada's strategic situation actually changed because of a change in US policy.
If you treat the invasion threats as the social media rantings of a madman, the US (a) elected a madman President and (b) announced and executed on a tariff policy which Trump justified to his domestic supporters as a punitive measure to force Canada to address a non-problem (fentanyl flowing south across the US-Canadian border).
The tariffs were not really about fentanyl, and both Canadian elites and Canadian voters know this. If you think "Trump wants to annex Canada" is TDS then they are obviously not about that. So the best non-TDS read is that the US has, for domestic policy reasons, decided to pursue a new economic policy that was profoundly harmful to Canada (and is explicitly repudiating his own trade deal to do so). Canadian policy should change in response to this.
It is also worth noting that if Trump's threats to annex Canada were broadly understood in the US as the rantings of a madman, they would have been ignored (or even covered up) by his supporters and signal-boosted by his opponents. What actually happened is that MAGA Twitter went off on an orgy of reciting the (mostly made-up) crimes of Canada against the US that justified the invasion, boasting about how easy the invasion would be militarily and how cool it was that Canada and Canadians didn't get a say, and discussing plans for the government of post-annexation Canada. To remain in good standing with the Trump White House and the broader MAGA movement, MAGA-aligned elites had to pretend to take the ranting against Canada seriously. I don't think Trump is planning to invade Canada, but he is very careful not to send the kinds of reassurance you would expect if a joke between two friendly countries was getting out of hand.
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