anon_
1d ago
The shorter bill was voted down GOP budget hawks because it suspended the debt ceiling for 2 years. Senate Dems already called for the House to go back to the original negotiated one.
I think it's the start of a serious intra-GOP conflict.
anon_
12d ago
Natural resources are not a primary or even secondary predictor of national production. This is a silly leftist meme.
anon_
12d ago
To sum it all up (and to not be hypocritical about brevity being the soul of wit) if you're going to write a fantasy epic that is very long, write the transcendental and heroic.
I'm a bit confused. Why does the length of the work have to be so strongly coupled with its lens?
There are many short works that focus on the transcendental and heroic, as are many long works.
There are also many long works that focus on "it's complicated to do the right thing in a world with many loci of power" as are many short works.
anon_
12d ago
US prosperity is downstream from the cultural and social mores that much of the world widely admires.
anon_
12d ago
because EU "Democracy" cannot allow a real Right Wing.
It's interesting that "right wing parties in the EU are necessarily anti-semitic" is such a horseshoe statement.
anon_
12d ago
In the decades since, we've spent trillions on our foreign misadventures and have only enmity to show for it.
I have traveled to a lot of places across the globe and the overwhelming sentiment I've received is "America fuck yeah". Whatever enmity there is seems largely restricted to either cultural/political (relative-)elites and some parts of the Arab world over Israel.
Moreover, the meme of widespread animosity against America is the indirect product of anti-American cultural project. The US remains one of the most sought after places to immigrate.
I do actually want to agree that from a practical perspective many of these misadventures were totally useless! But that's just on a geopolitical plane. We spent trillions (and our own soldier's blood) for nothing. But don't get sucked into the "America bad hurf" meme on the side.
anon_
15d ago
This is a fine argument for just desserts, but not for escalation. Their own methods, sure, but a lot of this is far beyond.
anon_
18d ago
I think you are conflating being soft on crime in a policy sense (e.g. some knob that increases or decreases the relative punishment) and adopting procedural guardrails (e.g. some knob that tradeoff accuracy(x)specificity).
anon_
18d ago
Of course. This is essentially impossible to prevent. Power cannot be destroyed. And it's always absolute, however many lies it hides itself behind.
That's not quite true. Power cannot be destroyed, but the utility of power is, at some point, super-linear and so dispersal of power functions in practice to dampen and diminish it. This was figured out (at least) as early as the Roman Republic.
Moreover, power can be bound up into systems of formal ritual and circumstance that act as a similar dampener. Again, the Romans stumbled upon this, as did many other effective ruling structures. Even in absolute rule, the emperor would exercise it from a specific place and in a specific manner.
I am simply demanding that whoever holds power act as a responsible steward and punish criminals. A sovereign that doesn't have the power or inclination to do so deserves to be deposed. Which is why many a dysfunctional democracy turn to dictatorship. Not in a tragic bout of madness, but in a quite pragmatic demand for a ruler, any ruler, that will take his basic duties seriously.
And likewise I am demanding that whoever holds power also refrains from using it against the innocent and, in particular, against threats to their political power.
These are not incompatible goals, but you're kind of glossing over the insane difficulty of it. Creating a system that punishes the guilty and not the innocent with any kind of accuracy/speed and that is resistant to corruption remains an unsolved problem. You're posting here saying "I demand they do it" doesn't actually solve anything.
Of course, within the three goals of accuracy/speed/fidelity, there is a tradeoff margin, and it's totally fair to say "they should prioritize X over Y or Z over X". But that doesn't appear (?) to be the case.
If the political system of your nation is designed so as to prevent the consolidation of power to a degree that it becomes impossible to rule, then it is ripe for a coup.
It is better to be unruled than to fall into dictatorship (or worse). I'm reminded of the last part of this book review in terms of the tradeoffs between ungovernability and ability to slip into collective psychosis.
anon_
19d ago
OK, to be super explicit:
Crime has a very easy and effective solution to it that is known to every civilization: ruthless and immediate enforcement of the law. 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. Criminals need to fear the law as a basis for civilization.
Yes, this would be ideal if it could be accomplished on exactly the terms that you lay out.
The obvious problem (and come on folks, you're not really this dumb not to get this) is that if you empower any actual institution composed of human beings with the ability to quickly hang criminals, then control of that institution becomes a key locus of power which ends up being used, as power always does, to take spoils and entrench itself. This is such a recurring pattern in historical record as to be a meme -- oh, look, the body for public safety turning to infighting and executing its founding members -- lol.
This is especially true when building a machinery that can then be turned around when someone decide that "hate speech" is now criminal and starts sending journalists and others to jail (happening right now over the.pond) or whatever-it-is-they-are-on-about-today.
Look, I'm not actually here to preach soft on crime bullshit or to suggest that punishment should be slow or that criminals shouldn't fear the law. But things are the way they are for a very good reason. This isn't even a plausibly-useless fence! It's a fence coated in innumerable layers of blood.
anon_
20d ago
Once you have this basic thing done, you then encounter the two long lasting problems: organized crime and impulsive deviants.
There's an obvious third problem.
anon_
20d ago
I think the Tumblr post about "do not have kids with psychopaths" was on the discourge-dysnenics side of the line.
anon_
20d ago
There is no metaphysical or metaethical reason why one should inherently care about the suffering of those who are not even constitutionally capable of agreeing to or following the social contract.
Indeed.
And yet there is a valid question about whether you should care about creating such a person as compared to them not existing or as compared to being someone that can follow the social contract.
anon_
22d ago
Broadly yeah, but I think there's some nuance here. One can flatten the classically-liberal economic view to (C) but I think most (?) would readily acknowledge that if shipbuilding is a genuine matter of national security then we should do something. Just not either of those things.
IOW, the CLE view here is less about ends and more about means.
anon_
22d ago
What /u/gillitrut said, but also the interstate system in the US is pretty good and it turns out to be cheaper[1] in a lot of cases to put stuff on a truck.
[1] Cheaper than a Jones Act vessel, more expensive than a notional free-market vessel.
anon_
22d ago
I would say that we should just repeal the Jones Act and not do tariffs. Indeed, if tariffs would have a similar effect on prices as the Jones Act (potentially worse) they undo all the benefits of repealing the Jones Act!
Tariffs would not impact Alaskans trying to export crab to Los Angeles.
anon_
22d ago
This is really unfair. I think the classic-liberal economics view here is:
- If shipbuilding is a national security interest, you should fund or subsidize it directly from the public fisc
- Pushing the costs onto a subset of the population is ineffective, inefficient and distortionary
- Economics does not at all prescribe what the goals should be, only that once-chosen, the means to achieve them.
anon_
22d ago
I also fully support US shipbuilding for security reasons.
I do think we can do a lot better in terms of crafting a policy that does so without the distortionary effects that the Jones Act does and in a way that's fundamentally more fair.
Part of the issue to me is that the Jones Act imposes the cost of maintaining a national shipbuilding industry in a completely non-uniform fashion. And because it applies only to domestic routes, it effectively penalizes domestic trade within the States (especially Alaska, which is ridiculous given its criticality) in factor of foreign trade with other countries.
What's the opposite of a scissor statement?
A null statement?
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