MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
No bio...
User ID: 896
That consideration is biologically hardcoded.
It may be hardcoded, but the point I was making is that Abrahamic religion considers both buggering a man and allowing yourselves to be buggered to be womanly, or at least sufficiently deviant that a sodomite isn't a real man. If machismo-based homosexuality is hardcoded, then Abrahamic religion has successfully overcome a hardcoded belief, to the benefit of humanity.
On the substantive point, I think the crux of our disagreement is that you see the problem as too much female authority (young men being figuratively buggered by teachers and social workers) whereas I see it as the absence of positive male authority (young men growing up without the kind of authority figure that it is possible for them to respect in the way that men need to respect authority). In the absence of either kind of authority what you actually get is the kind of young man for whom buggeration (or at least judicial rhaphanidosis) would be an improvement.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The police in Rotherham weren’t “institutionally classist” (the police are in any case obviously ‘working class’ under the British class system).
The working class are far more snobby ("classist" is not a word) against the underclass than higher classes are. This is a universal phenomenon - people are most snobby against the class one rung below their own. Although I don't think institutional snobbery on the part of working-class cops was the problem - the class-related problem was soft bigotry of low expectations among middle-class social workers. It wasn't just "We can't expect the poor dears not to rape kids - it's part of their Mirpuri Pakistani culture." It was also "We can't expect the poor dears to go home to their mothers rather than hanging out with foreign rapists in minicab offices - it's part of their chav culture."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The way it is explained in the UK context is that "functional literacy" is the ability to read a story in a "quality" newspaper like The Times or The Guardian and understand it well enough to answer questions about what happened. That is a much higher standard than just being able to read.
Back in the day, literacy was assessed by self-report. The census taker would ask you "Can you read?" and write down the answer.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
McDonalds is the most well-known public-facing minimum wage job, but I don't doubt there'd be stolen valor vitriol over CostCo too.
Costco notoriously pays above market and doesn't hire temporary workers, so it would have to be Walmart.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
High-end spectator sport has always been high status. More than half the traditional British social season is spectator sport.
There is a separate issue that specific sports can acquire a lowbrow connotation (like association football in the UK for most of the 20th century) because an alternative is higher-status, but the NFL never fell into that bucket. The Ivy League is primarily an American football league, for crissakes. To a WASPy blueblood, "The Game" is a football game. (Compare the UK, where "The Varsity Match" is a rugby game).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This was a pretty well compensated job, and not one that engenders a "kids should have a menial summer job so they will learn the value of demeaning manual labour" type attitude.
"Kids should have a summer job so they learn the value of hard work" was a completely normal viewpoint among upper-middle class parents as late as 2000 in the UK, and I assume it was so in Canada as well. It would have been even more normal when Kamela was a teen in the early 80's. I went to private school and Cambridge, and about half my social circle (myself included) were expected to get paid summer jobs by their parents, and about a third ended up doing menial jobs of the standard student-job variety. (I only know one person who worked at McDs specifically).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Admins can't delete revision history. Only "oversighters" can do that - this is a rare permission held by 41 people on the English wikipedia, of whom 15 are actively using it. (Compared to 419 active admins).
Given that the addition of "He dindu nuffin." to the Wiki was vandalism - as @TitaniumButterfly points out there is a link to the source for the quote (a BBC interview with a family member), and the line isn't there - the quick reversion is unsurprising. There a lot of editors following changes to high-salience pages in order to revert vandalism quickly.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
[Refinement: "power over women" -> "power over abusers, most of whom happen to either be women, or are acting womanly".]
Bacha bazi is machismo-based homosexuality and exists in a very different cultural context to western gayness-based homosexuality. Machismo-based homosexuality is a much more common pattern over time and space (from ancient Athens to US prisons) with varying degrees of consensuality on the part of the boi, but the key point of commonality is that it does not consider buggering a man to be womanly, only allowing yourself to be buggered.
You are trying to map a conflict going on in the post-Christian west to a pre-Abrahamic conflict going on in Afghanistan. Before the spread of Abrahamic religion, machismo-based homosexuality was the default. The Levitical prohibition on men having sex with men (which is reiterated in the New Testament and the Quaran) is very obviously a response to sexual practices that were actually happening (and probably happening licitly - hence the discussions about male temple prostitutes when modern argue about what the prohibition means) around the time and place where it was written. As far as I am aware, it is the first time an authority condemns the man who buggers (rather than the man who allows himself to be buggered) as a sexual deviant.
FWIW, the issues around bacha bazi are one of the many arguments for why Pashtun Afghanistan is so backward that the Taliban is a genuine improvement, and given that the west has lost the social technology to bring societies up from goatfucking to medievalism we should let someone who still has it rule there. The middle-class Kabulites who appear in all the famous "before" photos were probably an artifact of Soviet rule, and mostly managed to bug out anyway. (There also just weren't that many of them)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Whatever you think about their respective congnitive decline, Biden is physically frail in his old age in a way Trump is not.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Neurotypical people with high IQs learn how and when to pretend to be stupider than they are very early - I can see my 4-year-old son (who has a diagnosis, but is noticeably less autistic than his brother or either parent) doing it already. So if you did meet a 160-IQ neurotypical, they would come across as being as smart as necessary under the circumstances, not as smart as they actually are.
You would identify that person because they have enjoyed improbable success in multiple different g-loaded activities, not because they are scarily bright in person - scaring the normies is, after all, stupid.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Nate Silver's analysis is upstream of the Polymarket prices, in the sense that everyone who trades serious amounts of money on Polymarket is reading Nate Silver and either agrees with him or has a good reason for disagreeing.
Both polls of superforecasters and prediction markets are ways of aggregating a range of information including the opinions of bona fide subject matter experts (which Nate Silver is), not a substitute for subject matter expertise.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
To be precise, a degree is a good investment because it signals the discipline you don't have (alongside a mid-tier or better IQ), allowing you to get certain types of entry-level jobs which require it.
If you have the discipline problem you say you do, then getting a generic degree will cost you more than most (that is necessary for the signal to be credible) and benefit you less (because you will suck at graduate jobs and be miserable until you are fired).
If you are doing a typical blue-collar job (solo trades jobs are different obviously), you are checking in with the boss multiple times a day. If you are doing a graduate professional job, you are checking in with the boss 2-3 times a week. (Scrum requires a daily check-in, but is only acceptable to programmers who see themselves as white-collar professionals because the daily Scrum call is explicitly not run by a manager. When the daily Scrum call is used as a tool for beating up slow developers, the Scrum team stops producing code and starts producing resumes). You can be productive with much less discipline if you are working closely with your boss.
If you are able to hack physically tough blue-collar jobs like construction, then your personal graduate wage premium is much smaller than it is for the average college attendee, who is a woman.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The California Coastal Commission are pretty equal opportunity assholes, to be fair. I wouldn't be surprised if "Rocket Man Bad" was the excuse and general pigheaded misanthropic NIMBYism was the reason.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Exactly - the Dublin regulation says that if an asylum seeker illegally moves from one EU country to another, then they can be returned and, critically, the EU country with primary responsibility is obliged to take them back. If a genuine refugee, they don't cease to be a refugee (the country with primary responsibility considers their application for asylum in the same way as if they hadn't crossed the second border), and they can't be sent back to a dangerous country. There is a similar arrangement between the US and Canada. There could probably be a similar arrangement between the US and Mexico if the US offered the Mexicans a large enough bribe - probably in the form of a large number of visas for Mexican citizens.
The reason why the US can't just deport every Salvadorean asylum seeker who entered through Mexico back to Mexico is that Mexico is a sovereign state and doesn't have to accept them. A huge part of the problem with modern-day refugee law is that every country with a lot of refugees inside its borders is by default trying to get them to illegally enter another country so they aren't their problem any more. (The reason why the US can't just deport them back to El Salvador is a matter of American laws implementing the Refugee Convention).
Involuntary relocations of refugees from one safe country to another (negotiated between the two countries) were a common part of immediately-post-WW2 practice, and are explicitly contemplated by the Refugee Convention in certain situations.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The Byrds of Virginia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia are not related. Strange but true.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This version is not quite right historically. Japan was on the Allied side in WW1, but didn't do much fighting.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I like this argument, although I prefer the inverse "I may be more neglectful and cause more damage because it doesn't belong to me." There's a reason its generally not advisable to buy a used car that was previously a lease or a rental.
FWIW, the big car rental companies (Hertz etc.) get premium prices on the second hand market because they maintain their cars better than private owners. (Most ex-lease cars are sold "approved used" through franchised dealers so they command premium prices for a different reason)
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Of course it is. We can declare anyone to be anything. We could declare them to be attack helicopters and ship them off to the front lines in Ukraine. But we would be lying if we did that.
Under both the ordinary English and the technical legal meaning of "refugee", a refugee does not cease to be a refugee if they illegally cross a border from one safe country to another - they just become a refugee who has committed the crime of illegal immigration. The countries that ratified the Refugee Convention said that we were taking "deportation to a dangerous country" off the list of possible punishments for refugees who commit ordinary crimes. (The Refugee Convention includes an exception for refugees guilty of a "particularly serious crime", although judicial interpretations of ECHR Article 3 and, as far as I am aware, the US Constitution don't).
You can declare that you are not going to grant any kind of legal long-term residence to refugees who illegally enter your country from another safe country (and the UK tried to do this) but it won't be effective unless you can find another safe country to deport them to (as the UK tried and failed to do with Rwanda), or violate the Refugee Convention by deporting them to an unsafe country.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Wouldn't SpaceX rockets be Jones Act compliant anyway? They are built in the US, owned by a US company, registered in the US, and (in so far as they are crewed) crewed by US citizens.
The idea that wet Jones Act shipping between Miami and Puerto Rico costs more than space Jones Act shipping between Starbase and a US Mars Colony is scarily plausible. So is the idea of angry longshoremen trying to fix this problem by picketing Starbase and being zapped with Elon's latest death ray.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The laws say "you must apply in the first safe country" - doesn't happen.
Slightly oddly, the Refugee Convention doesn't say anything about applying for asylum at all - it assumes that everyone already knows who the refugees are and that they are already in their destination countries. This makes sense given the historical context, which is that the Refugee Convention was written to cover the specific situation of post-WW2 refugees who couldn't be repatriated for various reasons. The Refugee Convention was never fit for purpose as the a forward-looking instrument and the body of refugee law that has built up around it is incoherent as a result. I have an effortpost planned on this point once my sons stop bringing viruses into the house.
The idea that refugees have to apply for asylum in the first safe country comes from a misreading of Article 31 of the Refugee Convention, which says that refugees can't be penalised for illegally entering a country if they are crossing from a dangerous country to the first safe country. But a refugee doesn't cease to be a refugee just because they illegally cross from one safe country to another - the second safe country can prosecute them for illegal immigration but this doesn't solve the problem that you can't (without violating the Refugee Convention) get rid of them without finding another safe country willing to take them.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The fact that you are lumping together masks (a reasonable public health intervention that had, in fact, worked against OG SARS but which authorities had continued insisting on long after it was clear that they did not work against COVID-19) and vaccines (a personal health intervention which dramatically reduced your chance of death or serious illness if exposed to the virus, which authorities made a misguided attempt to mandate based on secondary public health benefits) says more about you than mask compliance says about the masses.
Blue tribers with room-temperature-and-above IQs did not “bend over” for the vaccine like NPCs - they agentically sought out vaccines for their own selfish benefit (and were right to do so, as shown by the differential mortality and morbidity in red and blue states which only shows up after the vaccines are available). See this accout of highly agentic behaviour, both by the VaccinateCA volunteers and the people using the site to chase vaccines as an example.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Washington, notoriously - which is why the US doesn’t have Presidents-for-life.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
By contrast, the sense I get from Blue Tribe is not "the process has succeeded, we have discovered his crimes and punished him for them", but rather "we've barely scratched the surface, he's obviously guilty of a thousand times worse offences, and the fact that he isn't in jail is an indictment of the system."
From a sane anti-Trump perspective, Trump's worst crimes are the rapes (where in a non-clownworld justice system he unfortunately gets off because of the statute of limitations and the he-said she-said lack of evidence), the unlawful retention of classified documents on a grand scale, and the various frauds committed as part of the attempt to overturn the 2020 election (of which the fake electors scheme is the most clear-cut crime). Both Jack Smith federal indictments (one for the documents, one for the election) are stalled because of legally dubious rulings by Trump-appointed judges. The Georgia election indictment is stalled because Fanny Willis couldn't keep her legs closed, which isn't the same but probably feels like it to people who have been brought up to believe that slut shaming is BAAAD. In none of these cases did the case get far enough for Trump's guilt or innocence to be relevant.
So the Blue Tribe position is "We caught Trump, we nailed him, and he is getting off because he successfully corrupted the US justice system before leaving office."
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.
Most countries have partisan press - the UK obviously, but also France (Le Figaro vs Le Monde at the quality end), Germany (FAZ vs SZ) etc. America had partisan press for most of its history (Citizen Kane is about this), and does so now. The idea that there is one respectable paper per major city, and they all form an ideological monoculture such that you can talk about "the Press" as something that should eschew political bias, is what is weird and is driven by specific features of the US advertising market in the 2nd half of the 20th century. I don't think "there is no single newspaper and/or TV station which is generally accepted as impartial" makes a country less democratic.
There is a very obvious innocent explanation of the "ballot dump", which was trailed by both sides before the election - as in the Trump campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden because they are stealing the election", and the Biden campaign was saying "there is going to be a late break to Biden and Trump will wrongly claim that it is evidence of fraud." The root cause is that (unusually) there was a large partisan gap between postal and in person votes, because fear of COVID-19 was a partisan issue.
In states which can't open postal votes early (which includes all the key swing states in 2020), in-person votes are counted faster than postal votes, because the envelope opening, signature verification etc. all take time and have to be done before you can count the ballots. [In states which do open postal votes early, the postal votes are counted faster than in-person votes because after opening but not counting them they are neatly stacked, all right-way-up etc. As a result Texas and Florida both looked competitive in the early stage of the count until the in-person votes started coming in].
In states where in-person votes are counted at precinct level and postal votes are counted at county level (which is most states, but I don't have a list handy), the in-person votes dripple in over the course of hours, whereas the postal votes come in in big lumps - especially when a big metropolitan county like Fulton or Wayne posts a batch of postal votes.
Everyone who was paying attention, including Trump, knew that there would be a late break to Biden in key swing states for these innocent reasons. Trump "knew" (in the legally and morally relevant sense) that the "ballot dump" was not evidence of fraud, even if his supporters didn't.
He also "knew" that the Dominion voting machines lie was false - the version of the story he was running with involved claims about the ownership of Dominion which were contradicted by the public record. (Smartmatic had Venezuelan connections, Dominion didn't).
I don't think that Trump "knew" that the gish gallop of hinkiness that the right-wing internet started putting together within hours of the close of polls would not find enough dodgy ballots to throw the election into question because I don't think anyone knew that at the time. But he did know that it was a gish gallop - that if he wanted to get it adjudicated in the time available (based on his behaviour, I don't think he did) he would need to be clear and focussed about what he was alleging (he wasn't). When Trump tries to take his best evidence of fraud to a sympathetic audience, you get something like that Trump-Raffensperger phonecall. Trump's people are trying as hard as they can to make specific allegations of fraud which Raffensperger can admit or refute (Trump himself is not helping), Raffensperger's people are saying "We already investigated that - there is an innocent explanation that we can show you offline." and Trump is saying "Oh no you didn't."
That isn't what a co-operative fact-finding process looks like, or even an adverserial one conducted in good faith. I have worked for unethical bosses (Fortunately, not for much longer than the duration of a contractual notice period), and Trump's end of that call sounds like a boss trying to get a subordinate who is slow on the update to falsify documents. "NASA needs to know that the O-ring is clean." "But I checked, and it's burnt half-way through." "Who do you believe, the boss or your lying eyes." "Excuse me?" "I need you to be a team player." etc.
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