Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Intra-Hispanic prejudice is alive and well between immigrant groups in the US, too.
As an interesting example of this in real life, when the LA City Council got rocked by a leaked recording of some hispanic councilmembers speaking, erm, "bluntly" about racial matters in local politics, the remarks casting aspersions at the city's Oaxacan community (a Mexican state heavily dominated even today by fairly unassimilated Nahua, Maya and other indio groups) had just about as much impact as ones making fun of the city's black political elite. See, e.g. news coverage here.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
something else that happens to have FAA red-green lighting (which wouldn't make sense for a military stealth drone experiment or for alien aircraft)
Seems like a decent disguise, though.
Supah_Schmendrick
12d ago
I agree. I just wanted to say that vigilantism isn't just limited to extrajudicial killing.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
You want some kind of civil wrongful death statute, otherwise someone who gets killed by a reckless driver or due to a defective product couldn't get money damages for it.
Supah_Schmendrick
13d ago
Vigilantism isn't just when someone ends up dead. Spiderman is still a vigilante when he leaves perps bound and webbed for the cops to find (fits the legal definitions of battery and false imprisonment).
Supah_Schmendrick
16d ago
Mass shootings are easier, as horrible and macabre as it is to say it. Soft institutional targets that don't move and don't have to be tracked down.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
If you're suicidal, you're most likely in a deep, deep depression. Depressed people don't exactly have high motivation or impetus to do stuff, and assassinations - even if you're not planning to survive it - take planning and effort. Tracking down one random person (who presumably, because of their high-profile statute, puts effort into maintaining their personal privacy and security) and actually getting to them with a lethal weapon of some type seems like an awful lot of work.
Supah_Schmendrick
17d ago
I said the lion's share goes to higher salaries and higher admin costs. The abstract of the study I linked in my comment:
The United States far outspends Canada on health care, but the sources of additional spending are unclear. We evaluated the importance of incomes, administration, and medical interventions in this difference. Pooling various sources, we calculated medical personnel incomes, administrative expenses, and procedure volume and intensity for the United States and Canada. We found that Canada spent $1,589 per capita less on physicians and hospitals in 2002. Administration accounted for the largest share of this difference (39%), followed by incomes (31%), and more intensive provision of medical services (14%). Whether this additional spending is wasteful or warranted is unknown.
31% + 39% = 70% - over two thirds of the U.S.'s increased per capita physician and hospital spend over Canada's is down to those two things. That's "the lion's share" by any measure.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
I think it's down to the fact that Christianity lays out the right philosophical substrate for it by venerating the immaterial and rejecting material urges.
Wouldn't Buddhism be the motherlode of such ideas, then?
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Your anger at health insurance companies is misplaced.
The insurance companies, the AMA, and the feds are locked together in a perverse cycle that produces a system that somehow spends even more on healthcare than socialized medicine countries...but the lion's share of the extra money goes to doctor's salaries (artificial scarcity driven by the AMA, med schools, and residency limitations) and ever-increasing administrative costs (additional regulations and insurance bureaucracy).
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
To which I would say, would your model predict:
(1) Trump wouldn't prosecute Hilary in 2016?
"Trump" isn't a unitary figure - the people who would have had to prosecute Hilary were the DOJ, which Trump was embroiled in a...contentious relationship with, given his termination of his first AG (who, incidentally, had a long history with Hilary as colleagues in the Senate), and the role of senior officials at DOJ in promulgating and sustaining the Russian Collusion hoax. Any order Trump gave to try and prosecute her would not have been obeyed.
(2) The lack of major civil unrest, stochastic terrorism, or any major backlash to the repeal of Roe v. Wade aside from some Democratic electoral wins in 2022?
How quickly we forget. There was at least one significant attempt at actual terrorism in the lead up to the Dobbs decision, coupled with strategic DOJ non-enforcement of (and thus tacit condoning of) the laws against harassment of judicial officers. There then followed a propaganda smear campaign designed to gin up impeachment efforts against conservative justices, notwithstanding similar conduct from liberal justices.
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
One problem is that it contradicts the tribal narrative that presidential competence is important, which is a narrative that Blue Tribe has invested appreciable cultural capital in over the years, going back at least as far as Reagan
This is true. However, are the people who create tribal narratives and invest cultural capital the same as those who have an interest in and/or ability to oust POTUS?
Supah_Schmendrick
18d ago
Zooming out a bit, another interesting pattern is, for lack of a better term, "reasoning break points". There's a lot of evidence that Biden's family is corrupt and that Biden himself is involved, but evidently not quite enough evidence for anyone on his own side to do anything about it. Likewise, there's quite a lot of evidence that Biden is meaningfully senile, to the point that his own side forcibly un-nominated him for the presidential race. And yet, somehow, he's not quite senile enough to actually remove from office. One might expect these two issues to compound each other sufficiently to tip the scales on either, but somehow they aren't quite enough even in combination.
I disagree; I don't think "being his party's nominee for President" and "being President" are meaningfully similar.
Biden's senility is a severe liability as a candidate, because being a candidate involves being the focal point of a large PR campaign centered around one's own speeches, appearances, and general celebrity. You manifestly can't do well at that if you can't speak coherently for more than a few minutes, are visibly shuffling aimlessly around the stage, and are otherwise out of it.
However, Biden's senility is not as severe a liability when it comes to actually being President (at least from the standpoint of the institutional Democratic party). All he needs to do is physically be alive to occupy the office; most of the decisions get made well-downstream from him, and those that require Presidential input can mostly be handled by his kitchen cabinet/advisors a la Edith Wilson. Whether or not he's compos mentis doesn't have any impact on the flow of money and influence to Democrat constituent groups/activists, or the implementation of Democratic policy priorities by Democratic-aligned actors within the bureaucracy.
Supah_Schmendrick
22d ago
Delinquents need to be beaten, murderers and rapists need to be hanged, and it all needs to happen as swiftly as possible so as to impress the right connection in the mind of the criminal between the illegal act and the punishment.
Hence the right to a SPEEDY trial.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Contrast this with Obama who was willing to make ideological or party based cabinet nominations like Hillary Clinton, even though she was absolutely not an ally of his
Obama picked Hillary as Secretary of State explicitly because she wasn't on his team - it was a deal to get the Clinton machine on his side for the general election. Plus, Barack had read "Team of Rivals" recently and was enamored of trying to have a Lincolnian presidency. They certainly didn't agree on policy - it wasn't an ideological pick.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
I don’t think, other than the American Civil War, you had something quite so polarized.
The 60's and 70's were absolutely that polarized, as were the '50s for some conservative groups. Things were always both wilder and more normal than you think in the past.
Supah_Schmendrick
25d ago
Those are all still excellent subjects - just not in the ways the authors envisaged. Talking about the failures and successes of AID efforts in Africa; of COVID policies, of the persistent backfiring of foreign aid, the corruption of the UN, BRICs strategizing and world supply chains, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
26d ago
But it's weird to me that the video game industry is so woke considering that the user base is so anti-woke. Why aren't there anti-woke game publishers?
(1) Ethan Strauss's "Undecided Whale" effect: The majority of money spent on AAA videogames is spent by young men. However, women control far more total discretionary spending than men overall, and can be spurred to spend on some games. Therefore, there's a significant incentive for executives looking to expand their sales figures to try and appeal to women, which given the recent massive leftward political shift of young women, often results in the insertion of hamfisted political messaging.
(2) Overrepresentation of Trans and other sexuality/subculture minorities in STEM. This one isn't complicated; transwomen, furries, and other nerds with odd subcultural affiliations around gender and sexuality are overrepresented in programming and among the type of monomanaically-focused near-autist who are more likely to go into intense knowledge-work professions like game design and creation. Thus, they're perfectly positioned to influence products from within.
(3) Standard labor law and NGO pressure-group tactics. See Hanania and Rufo.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Isis wasn't US backed.
Not directly, but we sure backed a lot of "moderate" Sunnis in Syria that turned out to be Al Qaida wannabees or even affiliates. To say nothing of what we did indirectly through NATO via the Turks (who, to be fair, were mainly focusing their special hatred on the Kurds)
Some hamas fighter was in isis and brought her home as a souvenir ? That's my best guess, I give up. How?
It's actually worse than that, somehow. I'd post the substance of it here, but it's really quite NSFL; if you want the gory details, go to the link. TL;DR - she was captured by ISIL, had horrible shit happen to her, was sold at least five times as a child sex slave before finally being forcibly "married" at 15-ish to a Gazan fighter. He was captured by coalition forces, but then smuggled through Syria and Turkey to Egypt, from whence he took her back to his family in Gaza. There she was kept as a sex and domestic slave for the family - she was at one point married a second time to this guy's brother. The children of rape she bore them are still in Gaza, being raised as Arab muslims.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Anyway, how many Mexicans were launching rockets at El Paso and San Diego?
Not quite rockets, but the cartels are absolutely using drones to track the Border Patrol, and electronic warfare devices to disrupt our own, signalling quite sophisticated capabilities.
Of course, the reason they're not shooting rockets at us is because the cartels have no interest in trying to destroy the U.S., because we're the cash cow they milk their money out of, whether in the form of smuggling fees for migrants trying to gain access to our labor markets, or sales figures for drugs they supply to our hedonism markets. If October 7 had been a coordinated drug-smuggling operation instead of a violent attack, I somehow don't think the Israelis would have responded with bombs.
Was there some operation where an organized group directed by the Mexican government (or whatever group controlled the territory) came in and killed and kidnapped a bunch of random Americans?
Yes. Pancho Villa's attack on the U.S. Army garrison and nearby town of Columbus, NM. Militarily, it was much less effective than 10/7 - the attackers suffered far more casualties (over 100) than they inflicted (17). It still provoked a months-long US invasion that reached hundreds of miles into northern Mexico by U.S. troops and several small pitched battles against both rebel and Mexican government forces that resulted in several hundred casualties. The only reason it wasn't bloodier was that the terrain of Northern Mexico was so inhospitable and so lightly-settled that all belligerents were limited to small cavalry (or automotive) patrols. So there's actually a parallel here.
How many people would tolerate what's happening in Gaza if Gaza were located in South Africa? Depends on who was doing it and who was getting it done to, naturally.
There was an actual genocide perpetrated by U.S. backed "rebels" against arab religious minorities such as the Yezidi during the Obama administration, complete with the taking of women as sex slaves (at least one of whom "wound up" - three guesses as to how - in Gaza and was recently rescued by the IDF, actually). Barely anyone gave a shit.
The Arab world is currently engaging in a "near genocide" of Christians which is definitely an ethnic purge. I don't see any breathless news coverage of this.
During the recent civil war in Ethiopia a couple years ago, the Tigray people in the north of the country appear to have been subjected to an attempted genocide. Don't remember any huge news coverage about that - we were too busy freaking out about the end of the Trump Administration.
South Sudan appears to be undergoing yet more hideous racial violence between arabs and black african tribes which has displaced more people than the fighting in Gaza, and is being characterized as an attempted genocide. Don't see that leading headlines in U.S. papers, or causing protest movements on U.S. campuses.
There were plenty of war crimes committed in Myanmar's counterinsurgency/anti-drug fight in the Shan during the last decade or so - here's a few from an Amnesty International Report. This one made a bit of a splash because one of the groups being repressed were the muslim Rohingya group, which dovetailed well with reflexive American senses about who is oppressed and thus is an appropriate target for pity. But I don't recall it generating nearly as much vitriol as the Gaza war.
This was just 30 minutes of Googling by a semi-aware person. I'm sure I could find more...there's no shortage of suffering in the world.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
You're neglecting the other dynamic among high-participation GOP voters (the ones most likely to turn out for the primary, as well as to volunteer, donate, etc.) - that of the "former partisan who took his institutional role and oath of office seriously" once installed, i.e. discovered a strange new respect for the status quo once he actually faced the prospect of having to implement his prior policies on a disapproving department he now ran. The formerly rock-ribbed conservative jurist who suddenly is desperate to find any way to avoid actually implementing the positions he enunciated before being put on the bench. The bright firebrand Jim Hacker getting sabotaged by suave Sir Humphrey Appleby and immediately caving.
There was, and remains, a desperate hunger for conservatives who can credibly signal they will actually do the things they campaign on instead of just getting absorbed into the DC liberal borg.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
Yeah, that kind of grasping behavior is not virtuous of the acquaintances. Asking a friend of means if they are able to help is not wrong; implying that you are owed it is bad manners.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
My grandfather taught me to solve chess puzzles with him from old magazines, kicked a soccer ball and threw a baseball with me, took me to the local small community college's football games and tried to explain what was going on (in retrospect he failed mostly because the gameplay was so sloppy it defied normal football analysis). Took me to local small-town orchestra concerts, went on small hikes in the hills, etc., talked with me about my favorite books, dinosaurs, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
1mo ago
It would be virtuous and convey a positive incentive for you to significantly reward the person who leant you their charger. We want people to cooperate and help others, even strangers, and reaping a (presumably highly-publicized) windfall reward for doing so would be a good model. The gesture also is virtuous in that it demonstrates the billionaire's acknowledgement of social, civic, and reliance ties with others in the community, and sets a standard of expecting people to treat those who render them aid well, if they have the means to do so. This is in line with other morality tales from western culture with similar themes, such as the fable of Androcles and the lion's paw.
In my experience, the legalese is there not for the people actually signing the contract, but instead for the people trying to resolve disputes about the contract years down the line. You're not trying to snow the other side; you're trying to get the completely unrelated judge or future lawyer to take your side in the future. Many of the strange phrasings are references to standard language which can be reliably interpreted in a particular way so long as the standard remains current, or attempts to cover every possible base and contingency.
It's not the lawyers you need to gish gallop, it's the judges. And if you do that, you're not going to like the results. You want courts to be predictable.
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