Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16hr ago
A few dissident Conservatives have praised Starmer for taking advantage of Brexit to get a better deal than we could in the EU.
I am fairly uninformed about British politics but this seems like the smart play for Tories. The deal is what it is, probably fairly unremarkable for both sides, but the ability to lay claim to having done a lot better than EU members seems like pure gold.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
I don't think spotting the weak links is actually as hard as this framing makes it sound. You can allow an almost arbitrary amount of academic freedom in biochemistry and expect that there will be at least some valuable and true information that is eventually produced. In stark contrast, many social "sciences" cannot and will not ever produce any true information about the world and I think these are pretty easy to spot from a mile away. No deference is owed to fat studies scholars on the basis that the university also employs materials scientists and agricultural microbiologists.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
It is far from clear to me how all of the above lack something which happily married monogamous people have.
I don't think I'll be able to convince you then, but it's pretty obvious from where I sit, even though it's a subjective view rather than empirical.
I am sure that there are claims of the form "X couples can form a special bond in a way that people in other forms of relationship can not", which someone somewhere has made for X being "lesbian", "same-race", "dominant-submissive", "straight", "enlightened", "Christian", "black", "child-producing", and so on.
I have no issues with someone expressing such views. I'll disagree with them but I don't really have some ironclad way to knock down their ideas. I might share some of them, I definitely don't share all of them, but I think it is broadly fine to say that not all relationships are equal.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
That's what I would have said about gender woo until it swiftly moved from just being left alone into conscripting everyone else into participating in it. If people want to do something I don't approve of with their own lives, sure, that's their call, whatever, but I am now leery of pushes for normalization.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
Probably not. I suppose they say they do but I don't really believe them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2d ago
I flatly don't believe in polyamory being real as I have typically heard it articulated. I don't believe that people who share the sort of bond that happily married people share can ever exist among people that aren't monogamous. They're not monogamous couples with extras bolted on, they're people that are failing to form successful pair-bonds concocting unstable edifices based on their desire for promiscuity and unwillingness to engage in genuine commitment to another person. I really hope there won't ever actually be a push to normalize this behavior with some social obligation to pretend that I believe polygamists have relationships that are as respectable as actual marriages.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7d ago
OK, but who gives a shit? Would it change his point? Was the article he linked fundamentally false?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7d ago
The AI slop article in question is describing real events. For Silver, there simply was no need to go digging for a better source for something he had already heard about when he was just posting on X.
I am in favor of deporting men that show up looking to reside here with tattoos that plausibly resemble gang tattoos. I am not actually all that interested in trying to decipher whether the tattoos are actually gang tattoos or just kind of look that way; I want nearly zero alien gang members in the country and I don't really view it as much of a boon to get tatted up Venezuelans that aren't in gangs either. While I might be inclined to extend some sympathy to the plight of winding up in an El Salvadoran prison, I mostly chalk that up to being the pragmatic solution to Venezuela refusing to accept their people back. At the end of the day, cleaning up the absolute mess that previous regimes have left when it comes to illegal aliens, criminal aliens, and immigrants with various extremely questionable "temporary" and "asylee" statuses, I am just really not inclined to balk at the removal of tatted Venezuelans with fake asylum claims.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8d ago
Which side’s vices are worse? That’s an empirical question...
It's not. One cannot turn the question of whether international trade policy that costs some fractional percentage of production is worse than promoting racially discriminatory college admissions policies. Hell, one can't even reliably determine which economic policies are better or worse in a strictly empirical question. Most political questions are values questions, not empirical questions, and you should immediately distrust anyone that claims that their preferred policies are just The Science.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
Can't slow down a stationary object.
American statute is not stagnant. It certainly doesn't line up with what I'd like but plenty gets done.
Works better when people were dying at age 50. When the average age of the Senate is higher than the life-expectancy 100 years ago, you know something went wrong.
Wealthy people that cleared the early years never had particularly low life expectancies. The average age in the American Senate at the moment is indeed shameful but it's not a product of medical advances.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
DEI discriminates against white people: 33% - 41%
It remains interesting that people are simply misinformed about the facts. DEI policies, factually, are discrimination against white people (and Asian people). They literally cannot accomplish their stated goals without doing so, they are definitionally policies that implement discrimination. That's not an ironclad argument for or against them from where I sit, it's just the starting point that we all need to be aware of in order to have these conversations.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
I think this model will prove to be significantly more predictive of actual policy than pretty much any other model that I see people working with. When people ask, "if they were really for/against immigration, why wouldn't they do X?", the answer will frequently line up with whether it will be too mean or insufficiently mean rather than whether it appears to accomplish the stated policy preferences.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
I guess I still don't actually understand what your working model is here. Setting aside whether the new legislation would have been good or not for the moment, it seems clear and obvious that there are plenty of statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry that weren't being used. With that fact well established (at least to me), I immediately become very skeptical of anyone that tells me we need new legislation to accomplish something that they're not even trying to do with what's already on the books. So skeptical, in fact, that I tend to think there's an ulterior motive - perhaps there's some poison pill in the law I missed, perhaps they want the optics of saying they did something, perhaps they're shooting for a compromise lock-in that I don't want. From a game theoretic perspective, I would love an off-ramp from this equilibrium, but it's very hard for me to believe that the Defectbot that just did 243 consecutive tats has responded by agreeing to cooperate after only one tit.
I guess our disagreement is about whether the current laws provide statutory reasons for removal or denial of entry?
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
Supposing this rule magically came to be, would this actually solve the issue and are there any major flaws/unintended consequences I've overlooked?
Even more incentive for lawyers to drag everything out forever.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
For people upset about ICE and due process, this coverage is also not your friend. The framings- and the not-very-deep undercurrents that go against the framing- will give a basis to dismiss concern as motivated. The children-in-cage's and child-separation critiques are not going to be forgotten. The fact that not separating children from their deported parents is now a basis of criticism is going to undercut criticims of both. The media's rush to present a concerned father is going to run into discrediting disappointing revelations.
I agree, but what am I to do with that? Based on the "child separation", the "Dreamers", this case's publicity, and the general zeitgeist, it really does seem that the only policy that will actually be accepted by opponents on this is that if you have a child in the United States, you cannot be removed. There is no actual set of proceedings that could satisfy the demand that parents not be separated from their children but also that children cannot be deported with their parents. Any attempt to come up with some narrowly satisfactory resolution that would meet the due process standard that someone came up with approximately 15 minutes ago will slam into some new bad-faith litigation about why of course some deportations are fine, but not this one.
It is increasingly clear to me that getting any resembling what I would consider an appropriate level of deportations will actually just require deciding to be mean in a way that will alienate a significant number of people. My options are not between making a strong legal argument for position or just letting everyone stay, they're between deciding to look mean or just letting everyone stay. If meanness is going to be the actual deciding factor, that's what the decision-making from my side is going to have to be centered on, and I'm perfectly fine with just being mean at this point.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
We've definitely wind up with 18. My personal stance is that this is pretty stupid and 16 is fine but the incentives against arguing that publicly substantially outweigh any gain from just shrugging and saying, "well, there ya go I suppose".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11d ago
None. I think the impact of tariffs will turn out to be wildly overrated. I have no actual empirical basis for that belief or an articulable mechanism, I just kind of don't believe that Nike is actually going to have more than a marginal price change. Maybe I'll be wrong, but my current stance is that "tariffs don't work" will be even more true than many people believe.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
Whether I consider it satisfactory or not is hardly the point. There are many legal outcomes that I don't consider satisfactory, none of which I think I can remedy by electing to personally override the federal government's actions.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
In the short span of time since I've heard this case, I've been trying to digest how exactly this fits in, and it's just so remarkably brazen that I can barely articulate it. I already thought that the more immigration-sympathetic judges played fast and loose with the rule of law, but it's on a completely different level to personally aid and abet the attempted escape of an illegal alien. When it's a legal proceeding with a decision I don't like, there's at least some pretense that we disagree about the law. This doesn't even have that fig leaf.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
26d ago
The purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure two-thirds of cancer patients.
The precision of the estimate is unreasonable but yeah, the purpose of a cancer hospital is to cure some of the patients. If someone was under the impression that the purpose was to cure 100% of people that walk through the door, they would be operating under a poor map of reality.
The purpose of the Ukrainian military is to get stuck in a years-long stalemate with Russia.
Yes, again, this is pretty much the purpose of the Ukrainian military. Much like the cancer hospital, rational actors would probably prefer that it be able to achieve total victory, but because that isn't actually possible, constructing a machine that grinds Russia into a years-long stalemate is much more practical.
The purpose of the British government is to propose a controversial new sentencing policy, stand firm in the face of protests for a while, then cave in after slightly larger protests and agree not to pass the policy after all.
Again, perhaps too specific, but yeah, the purpose of the British government is approximately this. If your model of the British government was that it was entirely to serve the British people, you'd come away with a worse model than the guy that looks at this outcome and concludes that this is pretty much what the system is for.
The purpose of the New York bus system is to emit four billion pounds of carbon dioxide.
This one is just sleight of hand - the purpose of the bus system is to move a whole bunch of people, and it does exactly that. If the objection is just that systems also have externalities that doesn't really seem like it's actually arguing with the central thesis of POSIWID.
Scott's central examples of how wrong POSIWID is are all things that I think are tolerably good examples of how POSIWID is a better model of reality that listening to people tell you what a system is supposed to do. If you look at the outcomes, you'll get some reasonable understanding of what the system is constructed to do.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
29d ago
Even without a motor, cycling is just much more dangerous per mile than being in car for obvious reasons. Make a mistake in a car at 20 MPH and you're in for an annoying morning. Make the same mistake on a bike and your life is in jeopardy. Worse still, it doesn't even have to be your mistake. One of the best things that ever happened to my future self was getting T-boned by someone that ran a stop sign and hit me when I was driving a small car in my early 20s - real lesson in the fact that you can just be minding your own business and have your life changed by some reckless idiot.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
From what I can tell, most of the accusations here are very minor, though. Using immigration laws to sidestep due process is wrong, though.
In many of these conversations, the term "due process" is doing a ton of work that isn't consistent with my understanding of it. Without looking anything up and prior to these arguments, if someone asked me what "due process" meant, I think I would have said that it refers to having a clear and legible legal standard that can't be circumvented to achieve an end goal. That doesn't actually mean that it must take particularly long, that there is no discretion involved, and that there must be some remedy to having it executed. In the case of the Hamas-sympathetic immigrants, I do not interpret "due process" as meaning that they're entitled to anything other than the explicitly laid out statutory considerations, which include discretion for removal at the behest of the Secretary of State's judgment. That's it, that's the due process, it's that when you're a non-citizen in the United States, the Secretary of State has discretion for your removal. If you think that's a bad law, that's fine, but the law exists and was passed legitimately by the United States Congress and signed into law by the President.
As a matter of principle, I am completely fine with the due process leading to deportation being pretty short and shallow. You just don't have any actual right to live in countries that you're not a citizen of (Schengen and other arrangements notwithstanding). If the host country simply thinks you're really annoying, they can tell you to leave.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Yes, those are also examples of positions that people hold that empirical evidence won't move them off of. Some of that may be because they don't think the evidence is compelling, but most of it is that these just aren't questions that are amenable to rigorous testing.
I think there are good non-empirical arguments for why transing children is a terrible idea (and people have made them in this thread) but I don't expect them to be compelling to strict utilitarians, particularly the utilitarians that are credulous about any institution that cloaks itself in the aesthetics of science. If my position depended on whether some shoddy, non-replicating study is consistent with it or not, I think that would be much thinner than reaching conclusions from considering the situation with the context of history and human nature.
I think this one was always going to stick because Trump doesn't like booze. Annoying, but here we are.
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