anon_
14d ago
I can imagine a DA who wants to make it a hate crime arguing that they were specifically targeting gay men.
This seems pretty obviously true: they were on Grindr and so they were targeting gay men.
Which I guess goes to the general incoherence of hate crime enhancements in general.
anon_
14d ago
I agree there is a kind of DOS attack here where a bad actor can sow chaos. I think we also agree that this probably wouldn't work at any kind of scale or reliability.
anon_
14d ago
Previous centuries didn't have a 9 minutes video of a handcuffed man dying in front of a crowd.
anon_
15d ago
It's probably the other way around -- just like only Nixon could go to China, only an anti-woke hawk could reach detente with the NGO complex.
anon_
15d ago
I mean, sure. But sentences are set by the legislature.
So you could say 'no mandatory labor' but it would also be fine to double every prison sentence and then say "1 extra day credit per day worked"?
anon_
17d ago
If Sotomayor doesn't make it to the next D President, she'll look as dumb as RBG not resigning under Obama.
anon_
17d ago
I kind of think this is a good reason to centralize all of this stuff -- births, deaths, marriages, divorces, name changes.
When my kids were born, we had to take their county-issued birth certificates and send them into the SSA.
anon_
17d ago
The constitution vests the power of determining electors in the legislatures of each state, Congress can't touch it.
Weirdly that's only for Presidential electors and not for Congress.
Or at least I'm not aware of any analogous caselaw about the manner of congressional elections.
anon_
17d ago
This is by far a less convincing argument than some of those candidates just being loony.
anon_
21d ago
I mean, this is obviously not true -- the State will prosecute DV even if the complaining witness is actively hostile to the prosecution.
I agree factually, but this is a matter of will not fact.
anon_
21d ago
Someone familiar with the CCTV system needs to authenticate the video
I thought there would be some exception for evidence that is effectively self-documenting. Sure the defense can try to claim it wasn't their guy or that the timestamp on it is wrong, but it seems unnecessary from a basic epistemic perspective to require that proactively.
They don't exactly have the manpower to take on every single theft case that gets reported.
Because there are so many. If thievery and crime was rarer, they would have more manpower per case which would lead to a higher conviction rate. Which would lead to crime getting rarer.
It's easy to blame bullshit on your political opponents, but it's hard to offer any realistic alternatives.
Well Rudy has gone off the deep end now, but a couple decades ago he pioneered a pretty good alternative in NYC.
anon_
21d ago
Zooming out a bit, how exactly are we going to think about punishment in the context of a prison?
My view is that there is obviously some minimum standard of treatment to which a prisoner is entitled: sufficient food and medical care, reasonable sanitation, guards that don't beat them up, etc....
If the consequences of declining a work detail would go below that, that seems entirely wrong. OTOH, granting extra privileges above the minimum standard in exchange for doing a work detail seems entirely good -- even proper insofar as it teaches a positive correlation between effort and reward.
anon_
21d ago
Setting a BIOS password would allow an attacker to install a modified version of the loader that performs decryption (which is not, itself, encrypted, because obviously). The attack would then have to leave the machine, let it be used at least once by the legitimate owner (thus entering the correct password) and then return again to harvest whatever they wanted.
This is a well-studied attack pattern.
anon_
24d ago
I don't understand the middle step here. If you put the correct address on it, doesn't the actual voter get the absentee ballot rather than the bad guy.
- Register other people with accurate information but without their knowledge
- ?????
- Election fraud.
What goes in step 2? Do you have to stake out the mail and try to nab the ballot on the way there? At scale?
Seriously, I'm not trying to be too skeptical here, since (1) is already sketchy, but realistically is there a plan here?
anon_
24d ago
If your organisation worked in pre-war Gaza where Hamas ruled uncontested, you were not really in the position to tell them to go fuck themselves if they require that you extend paychecks and diplomatic privileges to a few jihadists.
This is true, but I read it the other way -- it is impossible to do charitable work in certain places without hiring, funding and aiding the repugnant parties (who are in large part responsible for the mess in the first place) therefore one should not do that work.
I've heard horror stories about MSF and other NGOs that are subject to various extractive schemes -- one spoke about how in a particular African nation they could only hire "licensed" trucking companies and the only licensees happen to be friends with the local President For Life and how the money they spent on trucks invariably ended up funding the very conflict causing the injuries that they were (notionally) there to treat. At some point the ethical principle of neutrality has to take a backseat to the practical effect of their actions.
anon_
24d ago
The point being that, even if we stipulate that everyone involved is a consenting adult and no harm will result, incest is still absolutely prohibited. Strip away all "rational" reasons for caring and there still remains a primordial element that people recoil in horror from.
Isn't the primordial revulsion just the reification of the prohibition?
You seem to suggest that the visceral reaction is somehow separate or disjoint from the explanation of how that came to be. That is itself a pretty big claim.
I do think that reason in the sense you're ascribing as rationale (e.g. those relating to persuasion) are not isomorphic to attempting to understand how an innate reaction might have come about.
anon_
27d ago
I think this is a weird expectation because, frankly, whether or not there is a new war isn't entirely up to US decisions. A foreign actor may, potentially, act in such a way such that the correct response is (unfortunately) military action back against them. You can't expect, necessarily, that any President won't be sitting in the Oval Office when that happens.
That's not to say that the President doesn't have a lot of agency here.
What I'd expect in the best light from any Presidency is not to instigate or embroil us in conflicts without very good reason but, if necessary, to respond in the way most likely to advance our interests.
In some cases that will be ending a war. In some (rare) cases that will be starting or joining or escalating a war.
anon_
1mo ago
I also don't want my tax dollars given to StarLink. They are a large private for-profit venture and are not a fledgling industry that needs a financial boost.
The purpose of the program is to help deliver broadband to areas that don't have it.
Whatever you think about the program itself, I can't stand the practice, seemingly universal now, where everything program has to be about every goal.
anon_
1mo ago
If both parents have the same recessive condition, yeah. It's a big thing that genetic counselors will counsel for.
anon_
1mo ago
North Carolina gerrymandering. Pretty explicit. Appealing to the VRA was a fig leaf; the easiest way to satisfy it would have been to draw reasonable districts.
That's actually an interesting question. It's not clear to me from first principles (I understand Gingles makes it clear what SCOTUS thinks the VRA requires) whether packing minority voters into majority-minority districts or diluting them across other districts are both/either/neither to be found discriminatory.
I think you're right that some combination of pack/crack can be overtly discriminatory, but it just seems weird to me that the opposite actions are discriminatory. There's no clear 'arrow' nor is it manifest whether it's the voters in the packed or cracked districts are discriminated-against -- and surely it can't be both concurrently.
[ And as a normative factor that I think is irrelevant to the discussion, I think majority-minority districts are probably bad on net because to win them, politicians needs to take extreme positions which are (a) bad in themselves and (b) prevent those politicians from appealing to wider (e.g. statewide) office and are a kind of weird glass-ceiling kind of thing. ]
anon_
1mo ago
and it's not clear to me that voluntary adult incest leading to pregnancy leading to abortion is a common enough situation to even need an exception drawn for it, or harmful enough to require one.
It's not common, but it's also not terribly smart for a civilization to knowingly and intentionally bring into the world babies with such severe deficiencies. I understand horrible things happen by accident all the time and we should have grace and charity to those cases, but incest is taboo for a good reason ...
anon_
1mo ago
I think most people that vaguely agree that censorship is bad might not agree if the next words out of your mouth are "and therefore we don't have to accept the results of the election".
He can't do (1) because Putin knows that and so he's in a shit position to negotiate. You can't do anything where you want it more than the other guy.
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