Supah_Schmendrick
No bio...
User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
Practicality, for one. If your restrictions can be trivially circumvented by a constituent member of the organization publishing "in their own name" instead of in the name of the organization, you haven't meaningfully impaired or restricted anything, and have just incentivized the organization to go underground.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
My individual natural rights come from Gnon. And are therefore inalienable.
Of course individual rights are alienable. What "right" to life does a murder victim or conscripted soldier have? What "right" to free speech does a nativist Britbong have? Etc. etc. Even the founders admitted that rights only exist where people demand them and are willing to back up those demands with force if someone tries to take them away.
Where do organizations, fictitious entities that don't exist in nature, derive their rights from?
Hypercooperation and the formation of organizations is hard-coded into us.
At the very least, the organization would have the same rights as its constituent individuals, no?
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
on paper the idea that individuals have free speech, not organizations, is perfectly coherent.
No it's not, it's completely bonkers. An organization - especially something like a think-tank - is just a group of people gathered for a common purpose. Anything that a member of the organization says can trivially be rebranded as the speech of one or more of the organization's component members.
Supah_Schmendrick
2mo ago
If some/all of the movement's core assumptions are incorrect, that would poison the entire edifice - e.g. Marxist thought might be the largest published corpus of philosophy or economics ever amassed, but it wouldn't be hard for one person to be more correct because the Marxist edifice is chained to fatally-flawed premises.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
the PREMIER weapon in modern warfare (for cost-effectiveness, anyway) is not tanks, fighter aircraft, or cruise missiles, but a $25 Chinese Amazon drone with a $2 explosive warhead.
Or a $300 thermal camera.
I think that the face of warfare has changed a lot since the framing of the US constitution. In the days of the war of independence, men using small arms, i.e. guns similar to the ones privately owned for hunting or self-defense, made up the bulk of land military capability.
Yes, but those men had to be organized and equipped, and the expensive stuff - heavy cavalry and artillery - were what won most wars.
While today military small arms still play an important role in combat, especially in in urban areas, they no longer rule supreme. Artillery, armored vehicles, air and drone strikes are force multipliers for ground operations.
Each side had well over 200 cannon at the 1759 battle of Kunersdorf, or approximately one cannon for each 250 combatants.
As best as I can tell, as of January 2023 Ukraine had approximately 1,600 artillery pieces and roughly 700,000 men under arms, or approximately one cannon for each ~440 combatants. Even if that 700,000 number sweeps in a lot of non-combat personnel, the ratio of guns to combatants in major open warfare hasn't changed all that much.
And although there really is no civilian counter to organized air power, per press accounts (fwiw) imaginative civilians are dunking on established defence establishments these days in drone tech, development, and deployment.
A war where one side has such assets (such as a tyrannic federal government) and the other side (such as freedom-loving Americans) does not have them will likely be very asymmetrical. The US military has proven capable of mostly suppressing insurgents in the Middle East even if they are armed with RPGs, which are crucial to counter armored vehicles.
The U.S. war of independence was also a massively-asymmetrical conflict against a highly-capable enemy with experience in such conflicts - the rebels never developed a military establishment that was as disciplined, organized, equipped, and motivated as the Brits, who had significant experience putting down colonial risings in North America, Ireland, and India. Things don't change as much as you think.
Compared to patriotic Americans the insurgents in the Middle East had a few key advantages:
- Birth rates above replenishment, where life is cheap
Both Russia and Ukraine have had absolutely atrocious birth rates for ages, and they're going at each other hammer and tongs just fine.
- A religious ideology which emphasizes the importance of violent self-sacrifice
Not present in Ukraine either, or indeed in colonial America. People motivated themselves with secular causes just fine.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Oh, so when we make Felons a class of people who can't own guns, are we doing something unfair?
Insofar as "felons" means "people the democrats like, feel sorry for, and/or totemize," then yes.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Why wouldn't they accept a compromise that gets them PART of what they want? Surely they're capable of adapting their position to make such a thing 'fair'.
Because getting the policy enacted on the object level is only part of the motivation for partisan political affiliation and advocacy; there's another whole part rooted in the will to power, the desire to impose one's moral and aesthetic will over others, or just the desire to see opposing moral and aesthetic views stamped down/out.
To steal an old New Yorker cartoon - "it is not enough that dogs succeed, cats must also fail."
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
What is the dividing line between the 1954 attack on the United States capitol by Puerto Rican nationalists and the January 6th riots?
The nationalists' fellow travelers eventually took power and pardoned them. At least, so far that's the political difference.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Or not, and force a reckoning.
People can stay inconsistent longer than you can berate them over their hypocrisy.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
That depends almost entirely on how close the relationship is between group membership and criminal activity. MS-13 gang members? Good case! Right-handed people? No case at all.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Why wouldn't this work?
Because there is still no no willingness in the U.S. to take the steps necessary to prevent smugglers from bringing millions of people either outright illegally or on various asylum claims of various (though mostly extremely dubious) merit.
And because one party has realized that pumping the number of immigrants of all stripes made citizens is beneficial for their electoral outlook.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
As a California attorney who went to school with, and now professionally deals with, prosecutors, they are definitely not all smart. They generally have craptons of sitzfleisch and are workaholics. But raw brainpower is not necessarily a pre-req.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Interestingly, plantation owners tried to keep poor landless whites away from their slaves because they believed the "white trash" would be a poor influence on their slaves.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I think it's more complicated than that. A lot of ex-indentured servants mingled with black servants and slaves in the early colonial period, and a supermajority of slave owners (~70%) owned less than 40 slaves, most significantly less than that. Plus, slaves near urban areas or major transportation routes were frequently rented out as industrial (for men) or domestic (for women) labor, remitting most of their wages to their owner. Those slaves obviously were much freer to develop relationships in the general population than agricultural workers bound to a single plantation or homestead.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become. I wouldn't object to this particular piece framed as an argument that Trump is VeryBadActually, but this smug tone intended to reward their readers with the sense that they're hearing serious truths, and that they have precisely calculated 162 lies is incredibly annoying. That figure then gets repeated by figures like Pete Buttigieg as though it's actually a serious empirical measure of dishonesty, furthering the sense that they're the party of facts. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just sick of it, but it sure feels like it's getting worse as party apparatchiks try to create an impression of the official truth.
Mark Halperin, a high-priced political analyst, just said "The media now has, it's a single mission: [to] stop Donald Trump from winning." I think that's probably right, with "media" defined as "everything to the left of FOX."
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Otherwise all the people who vote for thepoliticians who enact the policies about homeless people you dislike, would be proving those positions correct no? If popular voting is the arbiter.
Not to "well-ackchewally" up the place, but voting for a politician who is an amalgam of dozens of policy positions, and who may or may not ever actually carry through on those positions doesn't actually mean that the voter endorses everything the politician ultimately does (e.g. tory voters who wanted less immigration to the UK and voted for politicians who repeatedly promised less immigration but still got mass immigration anyway). Up-voting a particular comment in a debate is a much clearer signal of what exact position is being supported.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
My point here is that many of the drug addicts you despise are actually struggling desperately. Most have had difficult lives. Some have loved ones that care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others don't have anyone in the world who cares about them, either because they never had a family, or because their families died, or because they alienated them through their behaviors.
But calling someone "dysfunctional scum" or "druggie" or "biowaste" isn't the way to start these conversations. That's the kind of language people use to dehumanize others.
Career criminals often have difficult lives, and sometimes have loved ones who care deeply about them and want to see them get healthy. Others embody the stereotype of someone who turned to crime because the street was the only place where they could find community and a semblance of social contact.
None of this changes the fact that most crime consists of profoundly a-social acts which are a plague to the good order and function of everyone else around the criminal class. The community of those who do comply with the law, who do not prey on their fellows excessively, retains the right - indeed, arguably the obligation - to expel such people from their midst in order to preserve and safeguard the benefits that compliance with law brings. Yes, declaring the criminal hostis humani generis or homo sacer - is a type of dehumanization - it is a declaration that they criminal is someone whose deeds have been adjudged to be wicked and thus set outside the social order. They have been expelled from the community, and no longer receive the benefit of the community's promise of collective defense and care.
In a well-worn metaphor, it is the social body rejecting criminals and siccing its immune system on it. Of course, this response can be deployed too aggressively - a social auto-immune disease. But that a system is capable of malfunction does not mean the system has no function, or that one must be ashamed of it.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
What other eternal truths build and uphold society?
(1) given changing circumstances there are no truly eternal social truths; the meaning and effect of social moves changes with time and circumstance, so repeating previous social moves will not always produce the same results.
(2) humans, in general, are pretty crap at figuring out what they want out of society, and how to achieve it. Their judgment about which social moves are appropriate is not to be trusted.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
All those people in 2021 calling inflation “transitory” genuinely had thought hard about their predictions and genuinely were wrong.
Smart people are best able to rationalize away their personal biases, or cloak their disingenuous wishcasting in plausible-sounding theoreticals. Assuming good faith in all cases is naive, as is assuming that good faith isn't polluted by, e.g. political incentives.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I think it’s usually that they displayed great verbal ability at a young age, didn’t care about math, then never really cared to learn because they could always coast on their writing/verbal ability.
Hey, I resemble that remark!
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
I thought foot binding was a largely upper-class phenomenon as a result of a Versailles-esque status-game gone bonkers, which then spread among the general population?
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Switzerland literally has the highest percentage of foreign-born population out of all Western European non-microstate countries.
Yes, but 85% migrants are from Europe, and 44% are specifically from other first-world countries like France, Spain, Germany, Austria, the UK and Italy. Also, there is no low-skilled foreign helot class being imported as in the US and UK. "The admission of people from non-EU/EFTA countries is regulated by the Foreign Nationals Act, and is limited to skilled workers who are urgently required and are likely to integrate successfully in the long term. There are quotas established yearly: in 2012 it was 3,500 residency permits and 5,000 short-term permits." Further, the Swiss don't appear to have nearly the problem of islamic radicalization that France and the UK do, and aren't shy about tackling it when it looks like it might become an issue.
Supah_Schmendrick
3mo ago
Given the finding that second-generation immigrant populations commit more crime than their first-gen parents did, shouldn't this actually be a warning sign - "if the current number of stabbings is bad based on 2000-level immigrant populations of [x], how bad is it going to be in 2044, when the current migrant populations of [5x-10x] turns over to a feisty second generation?"
Yes, because committing terrorism (or, more relevantly, conspiracy to commit terrorism or attempted terrorism) is equally illegal whether one or many people do it. The organization isn't restricted because it's an organization; it's restricted because of the illegal purpose.
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