WandererintheWilderness
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User ID: 3496
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
I think it’s very hard to describe something as both “wrong” and “true”.
I disagree. 24/7 totalitarian surveillance of all citizens at all times would also "work", far better than racial profiling. I am absolutely confident that it would drastically reduce the murder rate. But we still shouldn't do it. It'd be a bad thing in itself, an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on hundreds of millions of people 24/7 - in the same way that perpetually being looked on as possible criminals/rapists/illegal immigrants every day of their lives is an unacceptably demeaning condition to impose on the tens of millions of non-white American citizens. (Similarly, parents should not be monitoring their children every second of their life beyond their toddler years, even if that does result in slightly more children who get run over crossing the street.)
In other words:
more young black men killed by black men, a TSA that pats down Asian girls, more expensive ICE operations, etc. how can you describe something as wrong if it reduces bad things in the world?
I think that the cost of normalizing racial profiling would in fact amount to more bad things than its implementation would prevent. Above I spoke of the distributed psychological harm done to all POCs from having to live in a society where it is normalized, but that's only the tip of the iceberg. The horrors of slavery, segregation and lynchings are not so far behind us that we should laugh off the chance that reintroducing racial stereotypes into the Overton Window would allow for their return in force. Not in five years, but in fifty? A hundred? Slippery slopes exist. Give the ape brain's anti-outgroup bias an inch and it will take a mile, far in excess of what can be rationally justified.
I don't understand how this is supposed to be a reply to what I typed. What I wrote: "Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong." You: "But it works! It's efficient!"
WandererintheWilderness
16hr ago
Certainly that's a valid concern, and a key reason why I would strike "schools and child-care facilities" from the list at least. But even if you believe that it's being used as a Trojan horse for this less savory gambit, I do think the principle I describe is valid in itself, and should be implemented even if divested of the excessive add-ons.
and you don't care about immigration enforcement anyway?
Not the person you're replying to, but as far as I'm concerned, that is neither here nor there. I care very much about the enforcement of anti-rape laws, for example, or indeed laws against cold-blooded murder; but even if some reliable statistics should show that in a Bayesian sense, the culprit is more likely to be black than white, I would still take the principled stand that the police should not be allowed to let that statistic enter into the identification of suspects.
Why not? Because it's wrong. Because it's wicked and counter to the fundamental dignity of Mankind. Because it perpetuates harmful stereotypes far out of proportion with the actual statistical fact, which if unchecked may be used to excuse vast-scale mistreatment of POCs as it was in the past. Because it is an insult to the memory of all black victims of slavery and segregation. A hundred reasons. I could talk about utilitarian concerns and the greater good, or I could talk about the moral necessity of making racist heuristics taboo for the sake of human dignity and civilization - I think these are ultimately two ways of looking at the same thing from different paradigms.
At the end of the day, yes, we're "supposed to ignore" this "huge point of data" for the same kind of reason that the government isn't supposed to install telescreens in every home. Whether it would work is not the point. It's wrong.
Protect Sensitive Locations – Prohibit funds from being used to conduct enforcement near sensitive locations, including medical facilities, schools, child-care facilities, churches, polling places, courts, etc.
Na, this isn't the middle ages, no sanctuary, sanctuary is in your home country.
I think that's rather misconstruing the point of the request. The idea is not to create Hunchback of Notre Dame-style sanctuary areas, but to prevent misuse of ICE as an authoritarian tool - to prevent "immigration enforcement" being used an excuse for the state to send armed goons wherever it pleases, and especially where they can intimidate political opponents. The list above does seem a bit over-expansive, but the principle is sound. Above all, in the current climate I would not want ICE anywhere near a polling station during an election, just as a question of principle - and surely you'll grant that in no plausible scenario could that particular restriction result in substantially hindering immigration enforcement.
(Do I actively believe Trump would order ICE agents to threaten people into voting Republican? No, not really. But blah blah Caesar's wife blah blah. And indeed, even if the agents behaved impeccably, doing this would open the Red Tribe up to endless accusations otherwise from the Blue Tribe, and be fertile soil for a whole new "stolen election" craze. You do not want to live in that world.)
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
To steelman in the point, in a Bayesian sense, the fact that in this case it turned out to be unjustified should update future officers away from shooting in similar situations with similar levels of uncertainty. That makes whether it was a "good shoot" or "bad shoot" in an absolute, hindsight-is-20/20 sense a meaningful, useful question, even if it doesn't impinge on the legality or morality of the event of Good's killing as it actually occurred.
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
Sure. But suppose you're a civilian bystander/activist/obstructionist and you've been subjected to unwarranted violence by one of four or five masked ICE guys - even if you can pinpoint which five guys were there at that time via subpoenaed records, you still have no way of pinpointing which actual guy did it should the five close ranks and go Spartacus. I'm sure there are ways out of this still, but it massively complicates the process of getting one's dues.
WandererintheWilderness
19hr ago
More to the point, "terrorist" should be reserved for people who are actually trying to create a climate of terror in order to have an outsized effect relative to the amount of firepower they've got. That's what terrorism means. Random mayhem, however violent, is not terrorism if that is not its aim.
it revealed that the latter was merely instrumental, and they are actually perfectly willing to sacrifice fairness and meritocracy for equality.
I think you're failing to properly model DEI proponents' minds, here. They still want fairness and meritocracy, but they start from the unassailable premise that there cannot be legitimate reasons why a meritocratic test would show a racial or gender skew, therefore showing that the outcome of a process is racially or gender-skewed proves that it wasn't actually fair and meritocratic. This is not sophistry, this is what a large amount of people actually believe.
WandererintheWilderness
1d ago
Isn't the entire debate about what is and should be literally criminal?
Given the talk of "sets of norms" and "ostracizing", I thought this was about non-law-based norms.
Such an existence depends on the personal not being political, and the way that happens is exactly by the formation of "common decency", of a set of norms and rules and behaviors that people conform to without significant argument or complaint, with those who cannot conform being ostracized.
I don't think that follows, at least not trivially. A liberal's answer - this liberal's answer, for example - would be that, quite the opposite, the personal becomes political because society ie the body politic tries to screw around with people's personal lives. In fact, I rather think that for the personal not to be political, you would need a maximally liberated society, a society where the very idea of taking issue with another citizen's behavior would seem nonsensical, if that behavior is not literally criminal. Then, and only then, can all people live secure in the knowledge that their life is their own, without feeling that their happiness is under siege every waking moment.
I am not a full-on anarchist or libertarian in terms of the political systems that I think can produce good outcomes in the long term, but I do believe that "people can do what they want forever" is an essential component of the Good, and that government is good largely insofar as it gets us closer to that ideal (with the obvious epicycles about the government being empowered to infringe on freedoms in the interest of collective survival, as people need to be alive to be able to do what they want).
WandererintheWilderness
2d ago
In my youth it was Asterix and Tintin being more sophisticated than Marvel and DC.
But Asterix is far more sophisticated than 50s Marvel ever was. (Of course, that says more about 50s Marvel than anything else. I'm not sure it's more sophisticated than Carl Barks's Donald Duck from the same period.)
He's not Donald Goose, is he?
Neither here nor there, but I vividly remember one of the 90s TV cartoons having a whole episode B-plot about Donald having a dark family secret he was trying to keep buried, and it turned out to be that he's actually a goose. Not Ducktales, Donald was hardly in that. Maybe Quack Pack? House of Mouse? One of those.
Poverty is not just a matter of monthly expenses, but of how much or how little leeway you have in case of an emergency - of how financially secure you are. If my house is worth $10 million, I know that worst comes to worst (say, if I get into a terrible accident and become permanently disabled), I could always sell the house, move someplace much smaller, and eke out a living for a good long while. This knowledge is a balm for the soul in moments of anxiety and I'm going to be very upset if you drastically shrink my safety net out from under me.
WandererintheWilderness
3d ago
On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win
This seems like a square (if obviously non-malicious) example of that "consensus-building" thing the rules prohibit. And, in point of fact: hello! I want them to win. Not without qualifications, I have considerable misgivings with aspects of the mainstream "woke" left, but I still find them the least bad option.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
This is an interesting point. I would hesitate to say "uniquely righteous" with no qualifications, insofar as providing information about evil deeds you were privy to if and when investigators reach out is considerably less virtuous than proactively volunteering it. If he did Know Things, then sitting on the information for that long isn't great. But it certainly casts Trump in a better light than not speaking out at all.
You're of course right that there are unknowns and gray areas, but… I'm just stuck thinking of things like the "massage" anecdote summarized in this old effortspot. (Its central thesis that there were no "real" Epstein files has of course suffered just a bit lately, but that's not really relevant to the point I'm making.) By accounts like these, while not all the girls Epstein liked were necessarily that young, we are very much not talking about him sleeping with normal prostitutes some of whom happened to be younger than they looked. Epstein seemed to specifically get off on shocking and "corrupting" ingenues, breaking their boundaries.
If I learn that my good buddy Bill has romantically dated seventeen-year-olds, or that he once hired a busty prostitute and still went through with the act after learning that she'd lied about her age - then yeah, I might be inclined to leave it at a private admonishment. But if I learn that my good buddy Bill has been hiring ordinary teenagers he's never met before to give him massages, then exposing himself to them when they arrive and attempting to escalate from there? In that case he's not the Bill I thought I was friends with. In the name of the friendship we had, I might give him one (1) chance to mend his ways, but if anything about his apology sounds phony, if I get the slightest hint that he's carried right on in months or years to come - then yeah, I'm calling the cops, or at least a local paper or something.
Obviously Trump wouldn't have been privy to this specific kind of encounter. But when we talk about Epstein sleeping with teens, we're very much talking about him liking to prey on ingenues, about a kind of soft-coercion at best - about a pervy taste for deflowering the young. We are not dealing with a comparatively excusable scenario along the lines of "you're sleeping with a lot of cheap whores, and it's a fact of life that some whores are actually 17, and even if notice noticed, it'll be materially apparent to anyone who sleeps with a lot of prostitutes that sleeping with the 17-year-old isn't actually qualitatively different or more wicked from sleeping with her 18-year-old colleague, so you develop a kind of YOLO attitude about it". That very much affects the extent to which I would judge an associate of Epstein's for keeping silent about what was going on if he did know.
As to how plausible it is that Trump did know… again, this set of tastes doesn't seem to me like something Epstein was trying very hard to hide to people who came to the island. Surely you would notice that while you're leading your buxom beauty back to the bedroom, Jeff is pawing at a nervous-looking girl in more casual clothing (never mind whether you can tell exactly what age she is)? And this is assuming he doesn't actively hint at his ability to procure such girls to you when you first come to the island, because he doesn't know what you like yet and has to find out somehow. Besides, the apparent veiled references to it from Trump seem pretty believable. But I will grant you that it is the most tentative part of the chain.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Perhaps I should have specified "was an active pedophile", but I should have thought context and common sense made it obvious that I was not speaking about hypothetical preferences on Epstein's part. Granting the implicit "active", active pedophilia is a type of rape and so the post you're replying to does in fact cover this case.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
Are you really saying that there is no such thing as a moral duty to report or otherwise act upon knowledge of evil deeds committed by others? If you're a passive witness to a murder or rape, and could identify the culprit, it's not at all immoral of you to move on with your life and keep the secret? Really?
I think you've misunderstood me. I never argued that Trump was himself attracted to underage girls. What I view as pretty likely is that Trump knew that Epstein was in that business, and yet did nothing to report and expose him; not because he was himself interested, but because he didn't care/couldn't be bothered/preferred enjoying the other perks of being pals with Epstein to doing the right thing and getting on Epstein's bad side in the process.
I'm not sure why you went off on the tangent about Musk and what he knew, as I never brought him up. I agree that Musk probably didn't know, but then it's not clear that he ever even got as far as the island. I feel like it would be considerably more difficult to have actually attended one of the "wildest parties", and still not realize that there were sketchy things going on. Wouldn't there be an interaction somewhere along the way of Epstein making it clear what range of girls he had on offer, to let the guest have his pick? And judging by all the leaked material and reports, does Epstein sound like he would couch such an offer in such carefully-guarded terms that an uninformed, intelligent man genuinely couldn't pick up on the scandalous age of some of the options? Maybe I'm picturing this all wrong, but that's where I'm coming from.
And no, I don't especially expect that this will have real consequences for Trump. It's just that it should. If your buddy is an unrepentant rapist then you have to turn him in, it's not enough to politely say "not for me, Jeff, thanks" and keep sleeping with the adult prostitutes he fetches for you. "The President knew about a serial statutory rapist and did fuck-all about it" should be a scandal to rock the nation all on its own, never mind whether he personally partook, and it's very depressing that it isn't (though yes, certainly the muted response is downstream of the boy-crying-wolf dynamics from the Left lobbing spurious accusations at Trump every Tuesday such that when a genuinely outrageous one arises it barely registers).
That depends, do you think Noam Chomsky is intelligent or not? 😁
I think he might very well be morally complicit, in the sense described above ("knew Epstein had unsavory hobbies but couldn't be bothered to do anything about it").
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
I meant in the moral sense (and, as FttG said, the reputational sense), not in the strict legal sense. I thought describing the alternative scenario as "ethically exculpatory" made this clear and I didn't need to specify both times.
WandererintheWilderness
5d ago
"Knew Epstein was a pedophile and still palled around with him" is pretty bad in and of itself, making him an accessory through inaction. Conversely, "somehow missed all the red flags about Epstein being a pedophile despite palling around with him" would be pretty damning for Trump's intelligence even if it's ethically exculpatory. So if you establish a sufficient degree of regular association between the two that it has to be one of the two, you have a pretty tight case for Trump either being complicit, or incredibly dumb. Your only way out is to argue that Epstein was so good at covering up his sins that an intelligent man could genuinely hang out with him repeatedly without ever suspecting a thing; and does anyone seriously believe that?
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
Define "torture"
"Deliberately inflicting serious physical pain on an individual" seems like a good, no-frills definition that avoids relativistic semantic creep where any less-than-maximally-homely prison can be called a "torture prison". I am not trying to play language games here, I am talking about the thing where CECOT detainees are allegedly beaten to the point of injury on a regular basis - not even as a punitive measure for specific documented misbehavior within the prison, but at the whim of the prison staff, including an hour-long beating meted out to all newcomers. You don't have to be a Scandinavian hyper-altruist to think that this is barbarous conduct that the US should on no account be condoning, let alone subsidizing.
(I'm not a fan of corporal punishment as it exists in Singapore, but that's still a different story. Caning over there is an actual judicial sentence, carried out in an orderly, controlled way with proper healthcare provided to the convict afterwards. This may not be our civilization, but it's recognizably a civilized process with limited scope. And even then, I still think the US paying Singapore to cane people would be a step too far.)
If you want to argue that the reports of the beatings etc. at CECOT are fabricated, well, color me skeptical, but that's a factual disagreement I can live with. If the reports are accurate, however, I don't think there's anything hyperbolic about calling it a "torture prison".
Venezuela was run by Maduro, who refused to accept them.
Well, tough. Where was the famous Trump bravado then? The principled thing to do in the face of such an unreasonable demand, IMO, was clearly to call Maduro's bluff and just fly them to Venezuela anyway. If Venezuelan authorities don't want to take them into custody, just set'em loose outside the airport. If my neighbor's aggressive dog hops over the fence and starts causing property damage in my yard, it's not actually up to him whether I toss the dog back over to his side of the fence. That's just… ridiculous. Particularly if I'm a zillion times stronger and wealthier and influential than said neighbor. (It'd certainly take something more than an Official Refusal from him for me to even consider paying out of my own pocket to place the dog into the custody of some third party, never mind whether that third party would abuse the dog or not.)
WandererintheWilderness
9d ago
But @Eleocharis wasn't even talking about the gentleness or lack thereof of the deportation process! The point is that the US specifically arranged for them to be shipped to the torture prison, as opposed to neutrally dumping them back in their home country and letting events take their course. "We shouldn't under any circumstances actively pay Bukele to put people in his torture prison" is pretty fucking different from "we shouldn't deport illegal immigrants back to El Salvador because Bukele might put some of them in the torture prison".
Ah, right. I think we were talking at slight cross purposes. When I said "because it's wrong", I meant that I wanted to designate "openly racially profiling minorities" as in itself "a bad thing", harm done to minorities as a class, as per the framework I outlined in my latest reply where living in a society that racially profiles imposes a significant psychological cost on any person who might be targeted by it, whether or not they actually are. (In contrast to how you seemed to consider the first-order effects of racial profiling itself to be neutral or negligible, and only look at outcomes, ie how many guilty vs innocent men get detained, how unpleasant it is to be briefly detained if innocent, etc.)
I did not mean "it's wrong because it's wrong" as some sort of completely abstract "if someone racially-profiles in the middle of a forest and no one hears it, Baby Jesus still cries" position, though I suppose I can see how you got that impression.
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