anti_dan
9hr ago
I think he misses the part that is the point at this point: The point of the education system is to employ educators. To be specific to employ educators, a slightly competent group of employees, at far above market rates (when accounting for competency, hours, and benefits). All the other parts are carrots, sticks, and rhetoric. The stick is the childcare. Childcare is expensive (even in public schools, but parents don't pay the full cost), hard to procure on short notice, etc. Thus teacher's strikes are overwhelmingly painful to parents, and thus they are very good at succeeding. The rhetoric is teaching. The cope is weeding out bad employees.
anti_dan
10hr ago
I think there's an interesting tension here. If we're looking at the position of judicial clerk as just a menial job within a capitalist economy - there's stuff that needs doing, the market selects for the most efficient person willing to do them for what they're worth - then I get you. But if, de facto, the opinions of judicial clerks genuinely shape the law of the land, then it's clearly unjust for able-bodied fast workers to be over-represented among them. Accommodations that allow for disabled lawyers to work those jobs will lead to kinder, better laws where disability accommodations are concerned.
Kinder and better are at tension with respect to laws concerning disability accommodations.
anti_dan
10hr ago
To be honest, lots of criminals. A lot of crimes are solved by police departments with a lot less resources than the FBI using some pretty hard to pin down evidence. Cell tower + LPR hits can often get you down to only a very small pool of individuals that need to be investigated further. One prosecutor friend of mine got a conviction for an armed robbery based on basically cell towers, LPRS, and a photo of underwear.
anti_dan
1d ago
No one seems to know what is really at issue. You have a bunch of folks pointing out military codes and treaties. You have other people just handwaving. You have other people citing laws about piracy. Given that the "this is illegal" side has deployed so many different niche legal theories that seem to routinely fall apart upon full interrogation, I think we've gotten to the point of clarity that this is an "arguments as soldiers" situation, and some people just want more Coke and Venezuelans in the US.
anti_dan
2d ago
To what end? Is one of these boat guys going to give us GPS coordinates on the Venezuelan El Chapo and then we are going to send in a SEAL team into Venezuela? Otherwise, a Hellfire is $150k, transporting these folks from a shipwreck to the US already probably costs about that. Housing, prosecuting, imprisoning, then deporting them 10 years later would cost several million per head.
anti_dan
2d ago
I think if the government bought at discounted bulk street value most mercs would accept it. Assembling a drug distribution network is time consuming and expensive, and probably requires you interfacing with people who want to kill you for killing their old reliable supplier.
anti_dan
2d ago
Killing the crew of a disabled ship in the water absolutely is a war crime, and a pretty serious one at that. You could hang for doing something like this in the past (I’m not sure if there are examples of this actually happening, just speaking to the attitude historically taken toward the issue). I believe this was codified at The Hague at the turn of the 20th century but it was generally accepted convention for a long, long time before that as well.
War crime conventions apply to uniformed soldiers and civilians. A core portion of the legal argument for these attacks is that these boats are not uniformed military (obviously) nor civilians (obviously) and are instead nonuniform guerrilla terrorists who fail to abide by any conduct contemplated in any war crimes regime the US has adopted.
anti_dan
3d ago
Retard is a perfectly acceptable insult from my youth, as is faggot. The loss of good insults due to PC creep is not an affirmative good in any way.
anti_dan
3d ago
Most of the concern is whether or not they're even carrying drugs, something that the admin has not been forthcoming with evidence for to the extent that they even send back survivors instead of prosecuting them.
Is it? I mean I've seen that expressed from time to time, but isn't it generally indistinguishable from generalized anti-Trump complaints like opposition to law enforcement and immigration enforcement, being pro-nonwhite persons, etc? The Mark Kelly statement which some on the right are referring to as the "seditious six" seems to me to be something he's probably said before and seems to fit perfectly into statements made about basically every Trump action of all time.
anti_dan
5d ago
You can door dash with SNAP benefits. The whole ecosystem is confusing for anyone in the upper middle class end.
anti_dan
6d ago
People are defending it because its basically true. We are talking about combat sports where Olympic level women can't make their own high school team. Where the star girl in a gym will routinely get humbled by a guy who's trying to get better at football and so is taking up the sport in the off-season.
That's not to say some men can't just be weak or unathletic, but it's silly to compare a 21 year old girl who's the best in the county to a 40 year old who works out once a week and picked up combat sports in his 30s and think that makes any sense.
anti_dan
7d ago
What I am seeing from you description is that high skill + top 1% athlete defeats 50th percentile fat guy. That isn't interesting.
anti_dan
8d ago
All combat sports would be technically limited in that way, but for wrestling and related fields, knowing the rules actually increases your ability to injure and debilitate people. Wrestling bans eye gouging, weapons, nutshots, biting, fishhooks, etc. But if you are a good wrestler in a fight, you can do those things just as much as a bad wrestler. There is no functional way to train in eye gouging because the entire dojo would be blind in a week. However, there are other holds banned in wrestling that are simple to execute FROM the legal holds, and if you just do one of those illegal things you basically win the fight by ripping their arm, knee, or ankle off of its pivot point and tearing all the ligaments. If I have you in a legal armbar, the only thing preventing me from causing you to have a useless arm is the rules, and whatever grappling training you have that can mitigate me having gotten into that position of significant advantage.
anti_dan
8d ago
What that video shows is a guy who knows nothing about BJJ starts off getting trucked by pretty middling BJJ folks. Then he gets trained up by someone pretty good, at BJJ, and then he demonstrates that against an opponent with very low stamina you can win in BJJ by basically ignoring the rules of the sport.
But MMA hasn't embraced BJJ so much because they are idiots, MMA has because 1v1 combat is messy, and BJJ has a lot of techniques that are good at dealing with messy situations. In a standup situation there's no point of it, yes, but most fights don't end when you pass an arbitrary sideline, in fact, that is one of the great things about MMA's realism is the cage shows how fights actually happen, when people are pinned in by obstacles (sometimes a mob if we are being honest). The standup prelude the the ground phase is also common in real fights, but real fights rarely get decided by a nicely placed uppercut or roundhouse. Most of it is suckerpunches, and surviving until a fight is broken up. MMA asks the question as to what you should do if bouncers and beer bottles don't exist and you get in a fight. A big part of that is on the ground, wrestling and BJJ generally are thought to have decent answers.
anti_dan
8d ago
I assume you mean at the highest levels of the sport. Female black belts can absolutely wreck even fairly experienced dudes with 50 pounds on them when it comes to grappling (not as effortlessly as a male black belt their size would, but still).
Which MA? Because this is just like not true in Judo or Wrestling. And while I am less experienced with BJJ and combined striking full MMA styles I would think Male + 50 Lbs + mild experience is insurmountable. Even in all male rooms 50 lbs is a lot, and 50 can make up for inexperience if the lighter guy isn't a much better genetic athlete than you. My primary combat sport was wrestling way back in HS. I'd willingly give up 50 lbs to any female wrestler age 18 vs me at 18. It would not be close. As a pretty good wrestler, I could sometimes take on guys 50 lbs more, but they would be typically pretty inexperienced, or just bad at sports. My best friend and I started as freshman at the same weight. I won the starting position and consistently beat him that whole year. In the offseason he grew a shit ton, and I did not. Next 3 years he consistently beats me with a 20-35 lb advantage. Muscle is pretty good.
Give an athletic guy 2 weeks and 50 lbs, your black belt is not going to get you far as a lady.
anti_dan
8d ago
Maybe. Haitians aren't known for being particularly intelligent though and oil rigging is much more dangerous than Amazon warehousing.
Of course, bosses also don't actually care about sober employees, they want you to not be high at work.
anti_dan
8d ago
Why new construction isn't happening is orthogonal to an extra 50 million bodies that need to be housed, particularly given that new wave immigrants basically exclusively live in major metros. There is no Hatian fracking community in South Dakota.
anti_dan
9d ago
I don't really have an opinion on his overarching theory, but I think he overstates the case against populism or I suppose fails to consider the case against elite intellectual consensus seriously enough. Take his subsection about crime. Sure there are studies that punishment doesn't deter crime that well. But, is punishment actually the purpose of the justice system, perhaps the populist thinks so. Perhaps they are intuiting longer prison sentences will deter crime, and are incorrect. But, if thats the case, the populist has gotten himself to the correct opinion (tough on crime) for the wrong reason, while the intellectual has tricked himself into a bad position (soft on crime), by not considering what actually matters, that being public safety.
Take, for example this case of the CTA arson attack that is taking the nation by storm. The facts are fairly straightforward, a man with 70+ prior arrests and 15 prior convictions, including a felony arson just 5 years ago, beat a social worker so badly her retina detached. Instead of granting a detention petition (itself a new creation because Illinois repealed cash bail in favor of an arcane, and time consuming first appearance court set of procedures), the judge released the Felon with an GPS bracelet. That was subsequently removed by another judge just a few months later, and then the previously convicted violent felon with a pending felony charge poured a liquid on a woman on the train and lit her on fire. This man doesn't need to be "punished by society" he needs to be "separated from society" preferably permanently. However, elite opinion on crime has made that result in the State of Illinois, basically impossible.
And we can repeat this problem over a vast array of other social policies where elite opinion differs greatly from populist opinion. You have the trans issue where elites convinced themselves that someone's subjective opinion about themself was more important than looking at their genes and junk. You have the Joe Biden decline where for years they convinced themselves a cancer riddled (as we now know) 80+ year old was just fine as POTUS because he made one semi-coherent angry rant.
And there are other issues I'd be less stridently anti-elite, but simply would point out that they misunderstand the populists because they focus on the slogans instead of what people are actually feeling. "They took er jobs" and "They are eating the dogs" are not factual assertions, they are distillations of vibes. Lots of people know guys who can't work construction anymore without speaking Spanish, immigrants do make housing less affordable simply by the numbers, trade has made winners and losers domestically and has caused us to have critical vulnerabilities to key industries in times of global instability, and they probably were eating the dogs (but also, like defrauding medicaid and every other welfare system we have)! Climate change is another one, perhaps elite consensus is right and its happening, and its man made, very few elites seem bothered by the question: Do we even care?
And in the end, thats why I think the article is wrongheaded. The failure of elites to come to the same conclusions as populists is not simply that the populist is thinking on a less abstract level, it is also that the elite has focused on a specific part of the question that satisfies them, but perhaps quite often isn't the relevant part of the question at all.
anti_dan
9d ago
I suspect "rational" in that standard is doing some heavy lifting, because otherwise the second step reads "not only must the State prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but must disprove every other theory as well (aside from aliens or Bigfoot)." That's a big hurdle depending on how strict "rational" is.
That second part (disprove all other theories) is a common out less entrenched judges use quite often in minor cases (most judges in state courts get crappy assignments when they start, like in traffic misdemeanor rooms) so they can avoid being appealed following a bench trial. A real life example I know of goes like this: Cop pulls up to a scene where a car hit a traffic sign of some sort (i dont recall exactly). Man is drunkenly attempting to remove the sign from the front window. Cop has him do field sobriety tests, which he fails miserably. Guy is arrested and refuses to blow at the station. Not guilty, stated reason is that the state failed to prove that defendant actually drove the vehicle.
anti_dan
11d ago
No? As I pointed out, they are hugely overrepresented in basically any kind of elite thing. e.g. they make up ~1/4 of all Physics Nobel prizes. I suppose they might fly under the radar for normies, but if you have any kind of intellectual inclinations, you'd end up noticing Jews (our forum is literally an offshoot of a Jewish blogger)
I think if it was Physics Nobel Prizes and things of that nature, people would easily brush it off. The real problem is their significant overrepresentation in law and media, and how they have used those positions to shape the law and the discourse in ways that, frankly, a lot of people find unamerican. You can love Ben Shapiro and Mike (?) Prager, but 99/100 Jewish law degree holders and media figures is anti-gun. Guns are a major thing that makes America American, if you are a gun control advocate, as most Jews are, that is going to be viewed very suspiciously. If you don't like guns just move to England. London and New York are basically peer cities, or at least used to be.
Another topic would be the military. America has a uniquely masculine military culture still. Most media Jews are uncomfortable with that. But its a very American thing. Again, if thats not your thing maybe America isn't really your thing.
Now, this isn't uniquely Jewish, it is Progressivism. The issue is that progressives dont really like anything that is unique about America and Jews are part of that memeplex. They are also, very prominent and successful as part of that progressive ecosystem, which is why the issues start to fester.
Another thing that I've often thought about this, and related question when people or groups are "accused" of being unamerican. Like, isn't it just an easy fix to do more American stuff? Buy a gun and get trained up on it. Grill some stuff on July 4th and celebrate America. Don't fly flags other than American flags. Don't complain about nice statues of dead guys who founded the country. Speak English, and if you can't really learn it, better hell make sure your kids sound like Tom Cotton or J.D. Vance by the time they are 18. Like, its pretty easy no?
anti_dan
12d ago
With false flags, we only seem to see those that are caught immediately. There's no intermediate categories of false flaggers whose alibis fall apart after moderate investigation. There's a missing part of the curve.
Jussie Smollett is a medium category, as was the NASCAR noose hoax. I mean, I knew Smollett was a hoax from day 1, as did basically everyone in CPD, but the media was fooled for a long period of time. The FBI seemingly was fooled by the NASCAR hoax as well and launched a full investigation.
anti_dan
12d ago
I hadnt even heard of this until you posted it, which makes it very dissimilar to Smollett in that his obvious hoax was reported as a real hate crime attack for at least a day, and in the end he was protected by his locally powerful friends. More evidence that left of center media is more reckless than right of center media.
anti_dan
12d ago
I dont think this man has been cancelled for doing his job, he was cancelled for doing his job very stupidly. If you are holding yourself out as an international court with enforcement powers, your job is to never issue an order that can upset the fiction that you are a real court. He has done that and issued an unenforceable set of warrants that no one actually believes will actually be enforced, or even carry any non-virtue-signaling purpose.
On top of that, the idea that Netanyahu engaged in war crimes is, itself, unserious and childish.
This guy is basically a martyr for international antisemism and leftism, but its a fate he chose, and should have known he was choosing.
You could spend the GDP on disability accommodations and still leave the disabled complaining. Such is the path to ruin.
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