anti_dan
25d ago
Who saves one life, saves the world entire
Out of context religious doctrine just makes you sound stupid.
Many societies have thought this way. They have tended to leave skulls.
Proudly misunderstanding the failure mode of communism and fascism also makes you sound stupid.
Except for the fact that other anti-social behaviour harms people....
We are talking about a specific arrangement where the state provides benefits to a sort of arrangement. Including and excluding different types of people is often necessary to preserve resources. There is no reason to extend marriage benefits to M-M or F-F relationships because they don't function similarly to M-F relationships.
anti_dan
26d ago
I think the pre-Trump Republican establishment has been caught up in respectability politics for most of my life and wining elections was considered non-important.
I think catching voter fraud, at the levels demanded by courts, would have required active sting operations. None were conducted. Such is the way the system is made. Ballots are instantly anonomized when cast.
Of course I prefer talking about making ongoing elections secure. Also I don't focus on 2020, as you can see, my concerns rely on things that happened before even 2016. That said, 2020 was particularly bad. Just look at signature rejection rates in major swing states. They were implausibly low.
anti_dan
26d ago
If women are, on average, disproportionally FOO, and men, on average, disproportionally BAR, then, in the hypothetical, Alice is more BAR than most women and/or Adam is more FOO than most men.
This is only relevant if you think ephemeral things like FOO and BAR are relevant, and if you think it is wise to make society-wide policy decisions for fringe cases. I, in particular, don't think the latter. You make policies for the 4 billion, and the couple thousand outliers conform, get outcast, or something different.
Its no different than dealing with other antisocial behavior like crime, just luckily most of these issues are rarer than retail theft of cigarettes and razor blades.
anti_dan
27d ago
The chance of anything meaningful happening relating to speech laws under a Democratic administration is zero. Even if they did control both chambers, which they won't, any national legislation on 'freedom of expression' would never get out of the starting blocks among swathes of Democratic congressmen and women.
This is strongly refuted by the facebook and twitter files wherein it is laid clear that intense backroom pressure was applied to suppress speech. Passing laws is hardly how the government works anymore. It is mostly about controlling the agencies, which it seems Trump is unable to do, particularly on this particular issue. The DOJ prosecuted him and his supporters more than Democrats when he was ostensibly in charge of it!
anti_dan
27d ago
Progressive implementation of the policies will not be as advertised however. You wont get new housing in the city or near the urban core, instead you will get subsidized housing foisted onto suburbs that are being made to heel ala the NJ Mt. Laurel doctrine (see Southern Burlington County N.A.A.C.P. v. Mount Laurel Township ). This pattern has been repeatedly seen in progressive states. The goal of such policies is to make the city itself expensive and rich and less violent while foisting the worst of it on people who explicitly moved away from the violence, thus ending those communities repeat as people flee.
anti_dan
27d ago
To me, 'equal rights for gay people' means that for a system of ethics to be valid, it must be invariant with regard to gender parity, i. e. the morality of an act or relationship is identical to that of an otherwise identical act or relationship, differing only in that the gender of one participant is reversed.
This seems a very odd and unique definition. The genders are not the same, so why would swapping them in any situation result in the same result?
anti_dan
27d ago
But how likely are we to find out who did it? 50/50 seems high odds. Throwing a molotov into a mountain of paper isn't exactly something that is all that easy to sleuth out. Unless the offender drove up with a license plate visible to nearby cameras or stared into one their ID is going to be pretty hard.
anti_dan
27d ago
How so? With the national popular vote you encourage such vote inflation practices nationwide. Engaging in election security would be gimping your own state's votes, better to just have the election security of a subway turnstile during rush hour. A city of 100k produces 200k votes? All the better for amplifying the will of your state citizens.
anti_dan
29d ago
I will admit, one of my reasons for wanting trump to win is not wanting to have the motte obsessed with unfalsifiable theories about voter fraud for 6 straight weeks.
2 for 1 if he gets a filibuster proof senate and pushes through the civil service reforms! The FBI might start securing elections in the future.
anti_dan
29d ago
My personal wish casting is Republicans take the legislative branch, to make all of her policy platform stillborn. And she wins the electoral college but loses the popular vote (appearing slightly more likely in recent polls). The wailing and gnashing of teeth from everyone would be amazing.
This doesn't work. The permanent staff in the executive branch like her agenda, so they will implement it. As seen with Biden's ability to massively increase immigration admittance with a few EOs. For your alleged preference, you want the opposite, Trump in the White House (stymied at every turn by his employees he cant fire) and a Democrat congress (further frustrating his purposes). A Democrat executive can enact almost everything they want solo except for increased welfare policies.
anti_dan
29d ago
How much can I dislike Trump without it being TDS?
Say you are open borders or some other core policy disagreement with him. Then just leave it at that.
anti_dan
29d ago
Russia invading Ukraine is post Trump and also post the initial increased funding pledges.
Russia invaded, almost certainly, because Biden was perceived as weak.
anti_dan
29d ago
MAGA cultists
This sort of sentiment is the issue with establishment GOP and now the never-Trumper ex-Republicans. Conservatives weren't conserving things, They were bojangling for dollars, courting their internationalist reformers, rolling back hard won wins like Newt Gingritch's welfare reforms, derangedly thinking the federal government could enable no child to be left behind, etc. They needed to be kicked in the teeth.
Trump is that kick. If he didn't exist, some other politician would have eventually discovered Pat Buchanan's writings kicked the tires on it and taken the lane. Both major parties essentially disdaining working white men was never going to be a stable equilibrium in a country that depends on that demographic for almost all of its productivity.
So what needs to happen? Adaptation. Trump wont be around forever, but JD Vance has realized what the coalition is. He knows the other party is the party of the fringes.
anti_dan
30d ago
Where did you get this specific detail from? I’d like to read up on the source.
I know him as "party worker from the 39th ward, 44th precinct"
Likewise, source on this? Because it seems the 2020 election certainly was scrutinized plenty. Why would Republicans and even Trump’s own advisers be okay with conceding the election if there was actually such widespread fraud?
2020 was scrutinized by people without investigative power. Particularly preventative investigative power, which is basically only the FBI.
The last time I am aware of a state level organization investigating fraud in a preventative measure stance is NY, where they obtained ballots under false pretenses in all but 2 out of 63 attempts. This would have been 1/63 because they tried voting using the name of a felon who's father was working the polls.
anti_dan
30d ago
I doubt he has done anything truly bad, but he does strike me as the kind of teacher that decides to break out a bunch of booze on the trip to China so everyone thinks he is cool.
anti_dan
1mo ago
I am still waiting for one more Tim Walz thing to drop. It probably wont be anything, but he has to be the least vetted major party candidate of my lifetime. He's just a walking mediocrity who has convinced himself via self delusion that everything hes ever done is slightly more impressive than it actually was, or something along those lines. So I expect one more really dumb thing about Walz to come out. Like that he actually quit the track team in high school, but insists he lettered.
anti_dan
1mo ago
"Let" is not a thing. Reagan won IL in 1980, a year we know the Chicago machine was still in operation, because the very next cycle it was caught (solely due to a single whistleblower over almost a half century+ of operation). So he overcame what we know to be approximately 100k fraudulent votes. Sometimes you simply win too hard for the fraudsters to steal.
There is minimal fraud in red counties because of historical and on the ground differences. Machines were, largely, only ever erected in urban areas, and thats where they persist. It largely was, and still is unprofitable when it comes to individual/familial wealth and power to erect machines in a town of 5000 people. Those areas that have machines are currently blue, and have been for most of their existence. The other differences currently is that the bluest areas are far bluer than the reddest areas are red. This gives you an effect of near total lack of oversight. In addition, urban areas see clustering of ethnic groups which deter whistleblowing, snitches get stitches works best in these ethnic areas. Lastly, until very recently red areas were mostly all high conscientiousness suburbs whos politics were dominated by people's whos lives can easily be ruined by police, and who have overstaffed, underworked, police itching to find a jaywalker, let alone a fraudster.
anti_dan
1mo ago
The conditions of 2020 made additional fraud easier, as seen by, for example, the extremely low rejection rates of noncompliant signatures on mail in ballots.
But yes, most elections won by a particular party who's base is urban have been historically stolen.
anti_dan
1mo ago
Personally, I think that we should treat gender dysphoria as a medical condition and leave the treatment options (from getting over it to full transition) up to the medical establishment. Kids should learn that the condition exists, just like other psychiatric conditions such as depression, but we should not bestow special status on trans kids. No 'she is so courageous for coming out', more 'I am sorry that she is suffering from GD'.
Doesnt work. Politics + Medicine = Politics. The medical establishment has demonstrated it cannot be trusted on politically fraught issues multiple times in the last decade.
anti_dan
1mo ago
It looks far more like blackmail to me. Consider what one must do to become a politician in DC, its probable that the CIA has dirt on almost everyone. In this model of the world, the House, Senate, and Presidency are just kabuki executing the intelligence community's whims. This also somewhat fits with them desperately hating Trump, because his dirt was public pre-2015, making him largely more difficult to blackmail.
The full quote is, "Whosoever destroys one soul, it is as though he had destroyed the entire world. And whosoever saves a life, it is as though he had saved the entire world." It refers not to government policy or action but to individual wickedness and acts of grace. It is also Talmudic in origin so its persuasiveness will vary.
But generally the meaning is about pulling a person into sin or pulling them from sin. What it means is your soul's fate will often not turn on the fact you've raised $1billion for charity or if you shoplift cigarettes to sell on street corners, rather it will often hinge on you coming across a person who's soul lies on the verge of two paths, on one path he becomes a healthy, relatively pious, member of the community, and on the other he becomes deranged and sinful. Say you are a tired ass dad who was cajoled into being a camp counselor and there is a sad kid. You can, destroy his soul, by taking advantage and raping him and sending him onto the path of drugs, booze, and homosexuality. Or you could uplift him and take him to the fitness center and teach him lifts and cardio and a sport. Now he's into fitness, teamwork, etc and is on the path to a good life. That would be your classic such situation.
Yes, its the total command of people's lives and hostility to dissent. A policy that benefits the community because people are being useful, and excludes people who are not is the Earned Income Tax Credit, and various child tax credits. People who don earn income or don't have children cant benefit from those things. Many such policies in the modern liberal system.
Government programs are always both overbroad and underinclusive. This is because they have to apply to massive populations. There will always be some portion of rich people who can by some loophole get food stamps, and some portion of genuinely hungry people who cannot. Such is a government program.
There is no cosmic justice in a government program. So consider the government program of marriage. Why does it exist? To simplify family formation because the government has an interest in the future children of the country. MF couples spontaneously create children in the common scenario. So government marriage was constructed as a policy, often borrowing heavily from religious marriage, which also only at the time applied to MF couples. Now, obviously some MF couples are infertile and some homosexual couples adopt children. So its imperfect at both fringes. But as we see with welfare, that must necessarily apply to any government program.
I will tie this back to one of your other statements:
This formulation just almost never works with government policies. Take immigration. There is your classic FOOBAR situation here no? Why should we allow American descendants of slaves to remain in the US, while not admitting all SSAs who want to come? Their difference is one of FOOBAR. Some had ancestors that were sent over, the others did not. The ones that did not would be better if they had been. But that isn't what we do. We aren't sending them all back or letting them all in. Because this frame is just a sort of deck stacking for either side "ethnically cleanse" or side "open borders". Its impractical to think this way when we are talking about large scale solutions to social problems.
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