MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
It's arguable. Taiwan has been executing slightly less than one person a year lately. Japan averages about three a year if you don't count the Aum Shinriyko sarin plotters - although they appear to be passing more death sentences than that given that Wikipedia says they have a backlog built up of 107 inmates on death row.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I'd also like to know - many people have stoked fears about supposed healthcare "collapse", but did any healthcare systems anywhere actually do anything that could be described as collapse during the entire Covid era?
In the west, probably Bergamo and nowhere else. At least in the UK, the politics of the decision to lock down were driven by media coverage of events in Bergamo.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
To put a 5% CFR into perspective, the US military's plans for responding to a bioattack give the CFR for bubonic plague "with prompt, effective therapy" as 5%. A quick google suggests this is based on third world countries where plague is endemic, and "prompt, effective therapy" means cheap antibiotics and not much more. And of course it is a whole-population CFR.
So a disease with 5% CFR specifically among young healthy people with access to 1st-world medicine is significantly worse than the plague. I don't think we would be laughing off a plague pandemic, let alone the hypothetical @2rafa pandemic.
There is a reason why I give "Computer, what is the DNA sequence for extensively drug-resistant Yersina pestis?" as an easy example of an existential AI risk when talking to normies.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The actual Scotland-resident Scots in my social circle have about as much time for Braveheart as the English do - it is a piece of ahistorical American silliness. I can't comment on how formative it is of Scottish-American identity, but it has nothing to do with the land between the Tweed and John O'Groats.
As @Crowstep points out, the modern kilt worn as formalwear by Lowlanders as well as Highlanders is indeed modern by European standards - it dates back to the early Victorian era. So it isn't older than the US, but it is older than black tie or lounge suits. I can confirm that a Scotsman wearing a formal kilt is as unselfconscious and unironic as an Englishman wearing a dinner suit, and probably less so than an American given the falling sartorial standards bemoaned by @dieworkwear.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
When the country was majority white, I'm not sure anyone really cared if people who obviously murdered someone were put to death.
The SCOTUS-ordered moratorium on the death penalty was in place 1972-1976, at which time the US was still roughly 80% non-Hispanic white. European countries mostly abolished the death penalty back when they were still monoethnic. The other only other unquestionably first-world country to execute people on a regular basis is Singapore, which is rather notoriously not monoethnic.
So if anything, the empirical evidence points towards monoethnic countries being more abolitionist, not less.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
I don't think Heinlein believed that the Terran Federation was right about everything, or even most things. His actual politics were a lot more libertarian than the politics expressed in Starship Troopers. The book doesn't even answer (and the fandom is deeply divided on) the fundamental question about how the Federation actually works because we only see it during an existential war - is the normal form of Federal Service participation in a large peacetime standing army, or is it more like the WPA but with military discipline?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
They wouldn’t be needed anymore, because there would no longer be a need for trials for most criminal proceedings,
America abolished trials as a routine part of their criminal justice system decades ago. The purpose of the trial in 21st century America is to be a Kafkaesque nightmare set up so that the incentive to avoid it correctly motivates the participants in the real criminal justice system (i.e. plea-bargaining). The fact that most states have an explicitly defined legal process for an innocent defendant to plead guilty (nolo and Alford pleas) is the smoking gun here.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This was tried in various forms in England in the 19th century after the Victorian Gold Rush attracted enough free settlers to Australia that convicts were no longer welcome there. (The legal term was "imprisonment with hard labour"). It failed because in order to be effectively punitive for people from the kind of rough background that produces criminals, hard labour needed to be hard enough to kill a significant fraction of the people assigned it.
The Victorians were perfectly comfortable hanging criminals who committed capital offences, and there was a lot of capital offences. So working criminals to death for less-than-capital offences was ultimately rejected as cruel.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
also Switzerland - unsurprisingly given the ubiquity of referenda in that country.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
There was a period of about a month where it looked like there was exonerating DNA evidence, until the DNA on the murder weapon turned out to be the prosecutor. By that point the left-wing noise machine was in full swing and couldn't be stopped.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
If a Republican investigated and found nothing, then the MAGA Republicans would say "An establishment RINO investigated the establishment Democrats and found the Democrats did nothing wrong...", because from the MAGA perspective any Republican who doesn't pretend to believe that the 2020 election was stolen is a RINO.
Donald Trump could personally say that the 2020 election was not stolen and his supporters would not believe him - we know this because he did and the MAGA alt-media machine kicked up enough of a fuss that he had to walk it back.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The standard Dem "elections are rigged" rant is that all three federal elections (President, House and Senate) produce Republican control even if Democrats are slightly ahead in the popular vote. The electoral college is a fossil that makes no more sense than the continued presence of hereditary peers in the British House of Lords, and lots of Democrats (wrongly) feel the same way about the Senate. The Republican advantage in the House is the result of deliberate gerrymandering, including recursive gerrymandering where purple states elect Republican-dominated House delegations on maps gerrymandered by Republican-dominated state legislatures that are themselves elected on self-gerrymandered maps.
The gerrymander in Wisconsin is so severe that if it happened in a third world country then the State Department would call it a flawed democracy.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
- He's guilty.
- The prosecution was inexcusably sloppy, given that this was a capital case. Why was there no inculpatory forensic evidence? There is no reason for the prosecutor's DNA to turn up on the murder weapon, even though it isn't exculpatory. This guy isn't some kind of sophisticated super-criminal who can cover his traces leaving no evidence, and in any case he broke in expecting to commit burglary, not capital murder.
- The US has a tradition of "punishing" prosecutorial doofusery by letting guilty criminals go rather than, say, getting the marshall to paddle the delinquent prosecutor in open Court. This case seems close to the margin where the prosecutors have forfeited the right to keep their conviction, despite the guy being guilty.
- The SCOUTS doctrine about race-based striking of jurors is incoherent and unenforceable. England abolished juror strikes (we still allow challenge for cause, but its vanishingly rare) and it didn't do any harm.
American should put as much effort into getting capital cases right first time as you do into the interminable post-conviction litigation.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Forced labour probably doesn't pay for itself if you have to pay the man with the whip a first-world middle-class salary. The gap in productivity between a slave and a free worker has grown a lot larger a society has got more productive.
The cost to feed/house/guard a prisoner in the US is significantly higher than the annual earnings of a full-time minimum-wage worker, which is roughly the value you can extract from a forced worker (and more than you can get competing with the 3rd worlders on MTurk). The Nazi forced labour systems (the concentration camps that were not extermination camps, the Jewish ghettos, the forced labour of kidnapped French boys in Germany) were profitable, but the workers were not getting enough food for long-term survival, and the guards were cheap conscripts.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
There are 1-2 exonerations each year where DNA evidence that was not presented at trial unambiguously exonerates the defendant. The US takes so long to litigate death penalty cases that this number should drop slightly further as we start executing the people whose first trials happened after DNA evidence became ubiquitous.
So the rate of actual innocence among people convicted at the first capital trial is closer to 1 in 20, unfortunately.
Why does this happen? Some of it is actual dishonest and corrupt prosecutors. A lot of it is that the typical tough-on-crime conservative voter (thanks for being the existence proof, @Hoffmeister25) and the politicians they elect doesn't care if a career violent criminal like Marcellus Williams is actually guilty of the specific crime they are condemned for - he was already in jail for a crime he was uncontroversially guilty of that would be capital in a "tough" system at the time.
The more interesting reason is that public prosecutors don't have clients. For every other lawyer with a duty of zealous advocacy, there is a client who has the ability to call the lawyer off, and is morally (and occasionally legally) responsible for not sending their lawyer out to zealously advocate for an injustice. (In the UK the split legal profession creates an element of this, with a Crown Prosecution Service solicitor making the decision to prosecute and preparing the case, but a hired barrister handling the courtroom advocacy). It is hard to switch between the mindsets of "My job in Court is to make the best possible case regardless of what actually happened - in this courtroom it is the defence attorney's job to get innocent defendants acquitted and mine to get guilty defendants convicted." to the mindset of "Am I actually advancing the interests of the People by continuing to prosecute this innocent defendant?"
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The Supreme Court didn't reach the Appointments Clause issue of Jarkesy, which is therefore still good law in the 5th circuit. This is why every lawyered-up company (even lefty nonprofits!) in dispute with a union is filing "The NLRB is unconstitutional per Jarkesy" briefs.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
Very much agreed. The Soviet Union built Brutalist buildings because they were trying to build quickly and cheaply in unreinforced concrete, and something-resembling-brutalism was the optimal way of doing that given the limitations of the material. (In the same way that the optimal steel-and-glass building is an ugly, boxy, skyscraper or that Gaudi claimed that the optimal stone building is something structurally similar to a Gothic cathedral). Something like the Derzhprom building in Kharkiv is profoundly not hideous - it looks like the form is following a function. Building things that were more Brutalist than they needed to be was an affectation of Western leftists trying to mood-affiliate with the Soviets.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
The "inmates taking over the asylum" theory is that junior staffers at lefty orgs are pushing wokestupid at the expense of the mission of the org, and management are unable to stop them. The ACLU case is the opposite. A manger fired a staffer for what they claimed to be wokestupid reasons, but was probably actually just powertripping management, and the ACLU doubled down because the manager was black. Unless you think the black first-line manager counts as an inmate taking over the asylum, this is a wokestupid vs free speech type case. The Audobon case is nothing to do with wokestupid - the underlying labour law case is a highly technical issue about information exchange in union contract negotiations.
In both cases, I think management hired outside counsel and told them to put anything in that looked like a winning argument, which is standard practice in cases where the stakes are high enough. And given the Jarkesy situation I discuss further down, these things are potentially winning arguments. I doubt either the ACLU or Audobon leadership read the briefs being submitted on their behalf, although their in-house lawyers should have done and should have spotted and escalated this kind of thing. I work in a bank and one of the subjects of the fun, fun, mandatory online trainings we do every quarter is that it is everyone's job to stop and escalate if they see something that could be an utter public humiliation (or reputational risk, as the corporate types call it).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
UK is 5 years, of which at least one needs to be as a permanent resident. US is 5 years as a permanent resident, or 3 if you are married to a citizen. So this isn't going to put Italy too far out of step with the rest of the world.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
That's spacetime bending, not the world. The world moves along the bent geodesics while remaining resolutely round in its own reference frame.
"So dense light bends around him/her" remains my favourite physicist's insult.
The fifth circuit has already bitten. In SEC v. Jarkesy the 5th circuit ruled that the SEC was unconstitutional because an officer with decision-making power (in this case an administrative law judge) who enjoys two layers of civil service protection (i.e. the formal process to fire an SEC ALJ for cause can only be initiated by the SEC members, not the President, and the SEC members themselves cannot be fired by the President without a formal process) is under insufficient Presidential control to comply with the Appointments Clause. Jarkesy was upheld by SCOTUS on the basis that SEC ALJ's violate the right to trial by jury, without reaching the Appointments Clause argument.
The identical logic trivially applies to the NLRB, and at least one district court in the 5th circuit has already ruled that the NLRB is unconstitutional on that basis. Richard Hanania has a good layman's explanation. This is why there is a sudden spate of lawsuits by everyone and his dog making the argument in different districts and circuits.
Both Jarkesy arguments figure in the Audubon case, although it is less obvious that the jury trial argument applies.
SCOTUS don't want to take the case, but I don't see them avoiding it - there is going to be a circuit split sooner or later. A less conservative Court ruled that the Public Companies Accounting Oversight Board was unconstitutional on similar grounds, but the remedy was to weaken the civil service protections of the board members, not to toss the whole thing out. Thomas, Alito and Gorsuch are going to follow that decision. Roberts is not going to be the fifth vote for an opinion that blows up large swathes of the administrative state, so it comes down to Barret and Kav.
The ACLU has been absolutely hammered in left-wing circles for filing a lawsuit that would blow up the NLRB (a different argument to do with technical defects in the appointment of the NLRB General Counsel) but MSM coverage of the case focused on the substantive argument (which was wokestupid vs free speech - the employee in question was fired for bitching about her manager to co-workers, which would normally be protected under labour law, but which the ACLU said was fireably racist because the manager was black). So I think Audubon would survive, but make a lot of enemies.
Careful about "them" in the context of the Middle East.
The decision to go to war rather than accepting the 1947 partition plan was made by the governments of Egypt, Jordan, and Syria. To the extent that the Arab side is to blame for the 1967 Six-Day War (I am not going to get involved in that hoary old chestnut) it was a decision taken by Nasser for his own reasons, with the Jordanians and Palestinians taken along for the ride. Arafat is declared leader of the PLO by Nasser, and spends the next few years trying to set up a Palestinian pseudo-state in Jordan until the Jordanians kick him out. He then tries the same trick in Lebanon, during which time he gets UN recognition as the representative of "Palestine" based on lobbying by other Arab governments. Eventually Israel invades Lebanon in order to get Arafat, and he is smuggled out by the Americans as part of an American-brokered deal to stop non-Lebanese fighting each other on Lebanese territory. Arafat then hides out in Tunis seeking money from Saddam to pay for terrorism against Israel. "They" did bad things, but "they" do not meaningfully include "The Palestinians" if "The Palestinians" primarily refers to people living in Palestine.
For "The Palestinians" to have a chance of anything they need to have agency. The only time the actual human beings living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip were able to exercise agency was the First Intifada (1987-1993), which saw the emergence of a younger, bottom-up leadership based inside the territories - as opposed to the PLO which was funded by foreign governments and led by emigres. The new leadership was for obvious reasons more interested in the lives of the human beings living in the territories than the grand political narrative of "The Palestinian Cause" and was accordingly the first Arab voice to implicitly support a two-State solution.
My unconventional take is that the real missed opportunity was when Arafat was able to take back control of the Palestinian side of the negotiations and establish a Palestinian Authority led by PLO lifers rather than locals. (At the time Arafat was declared President of Palestine, he had spent four years in Palestine as a child and visited twice as an adult, one of those times being as an invading Egyptian soldier in the 1947-9 war) As of now all powerful factions in Palestinian politics (including Hamas and Fatah) are more concerned with using the Cause to appeal to foreign supporters than they are with the actual Palestinians.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is in issue in real life as much as in fiction. Up to 1900, schoolboy history takes for granted that most wars are fought by patriotic men displaying martial virtue on both sides. (Wars against Muslims may or may not be an exception depending on who is writing - the version of schoolboy history I grew up with made a big deal about how Saladin was as much of a chivalric paragon as Richard the Lionheart. In so far as an actual villain was needed, it is the snivelling, sneaky, backstabbing French or Bad Prince John and the Sheriff of Nottingham on the home front). My favourite treatment of the subject is Kipling's Ballad of East and West, which famously begins "East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet" but makes clear that it is going to refute this proposition before the first stanza is out - "There is neither East nor West ... when two strong men come face to face". The idea that both sides could be fundamentally good by the standards of the age and be fighting over a genuine irreconcilable difference is unremarkable.
Beginning with WW2, schoolboy history takes for granted that all wars are caused by the fundamental wickedness of one side. Even the footsoldiers can only be excused by denying their agency. The fact that WW2 was mostly caused by the fundamental wickedness of one side helps this transition but the actual tipping point is WW1 - the documentary evidence makes clear that the people starting the war did not think their enemies were driven by wickedness, and serious modern historiography agrees with them. But WW1 was so destructive (as in three of Europe's leading dynasties were cancelled and the British and French traditional elites were so depleted in numbers that they could no longer rule even if the people wanted them to) that conflict theory with sane actors was, with hindsight, inconceivable and mistake theory was morally unsatisfying, so people turned to "the Central Powers were motivated by wickedness" as a cope.
After WW1, institutions like the League of Nations and the Kellogg-Briand Pact are set up on the assumption that most wars are caused by the wickedness of one side and that collective punishment of the wicked is the way to bring an end to war. This is, of course, a midwit view. The "sophisticated" alternative is that some wars are indeed caused by the wickedness of one side, but that most wars are caused by the fundamental wickedness of both sides. The view that sane, neutral or good actors can have a conflict worth fighting over for sane reasons is now fringe.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
1mo ago
This is what we did before vote-counting machines existed. It's what they still do in larger countries like India.
India only have one race per election (rarely two), and they don't try to count overnight - they allow a full day for counting after several days to allow ballot boxes from remote rural precincts to be taken to the counting centre.
In the UK, we don't try to count more than one race overnight. If there are multiple races (e.g. Westminster and local elections on the same day) we count the Westminster election overnight and count the local elections the following day. Three races is about the practical limit for a full-day count - I have attended local counts with three open seats per ward, and London mayoral elections also involve three races (Mayor, constituency assembly member, and PR list assembly member) and in both cases the results come out late in the afternoon. London count the mayoral election on Saturday (polling day is Thursday) to given electoral staff and party observers time to recover from polling day - having done a day's GOTV followed by observing a three-race count the next day I understand why they do this.
Taking the largest state as an example, California had 4 major races in 2020 (POTUS, US House, both houses of the State legislature) and 12 propositions. In 2022 there were 13 major races (scheduled US senate, special US senate, US House, both houses of the State legislature, 7 statewide offices, Board of Equalization), 7 propositions, and 4 judicial elections. Add 2-3 county-level races, 1-2 city level races and 1-2 other races (e.g. school board) and you are looking at an average of about 25 races. Hand-counting that at British levels of efficiency (which are above the global average, and well above anything California could manage) would take about two weeks even if there were no contentious recounts. Americans expect the first count to be complete by the early hours of Wednesday morning, and MAGA are already claiming that delayed counts are evidence of fraud.
To hand-count all races in a typical US election in a one-day daylight count, let alone overnight, would be a bigger commitment of resources to vote-counting than any other country has ever made. There is a reason why the US adopted voting machines long before voting machines that actually worked were available - remember the Florida 2000 "chad" debacle. I'm not sure, but it looks like the US starts using voting machines around the same time that the media starts to expect next-day results. Would it be a good idea? Probably. Is it technically feasible? I don't know. The number of races you can count in parallel is limited by the size of the available count venue and the bandwidth of key senior people who need to review every result before it is announced. You also run out of sufficiently distinct colours of ballot paper. I remember the time the city council election was on blue paper and the county council election was on lilac paper - it caused several hours of delay and the administrator responsible was transferred.
Would convincing the media that they could wait two weeks for the state and local results to allow for a hand count to happen at reasonable speed be a good idea? It depends if it would actually increase confidence in elections. My gut feeling is that in today's America it would not.
Would reducing the number of directly elected positions so that there are fewer races to count be a good idea? Almost certainly in my view, but the argument about whether or not to elect the dog catcher is not primarily about ease of election administration.
No. They are somewhere between Mexico and Thailand in GDP per capita, whether you use nominal or PPP.
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