distic
2yr ago
It's one of the quirks of the criminal justice system that fraud against an individual or company is not uncommonly punished way worse than defying the fed. government.
Fraud against an individual or company is less important but it is easier to hide. I think the rational punishment is proportional to b/p where b is the benefit for the criminal and p the probability to get caught. If you have 50% chance to be caught stealing a 100$ bike, the punishment for that should be roughly 200$ so that on average you get nothing. If you put it at 100$ stealing bikes is a profitable business model.
I think it is assumed that people do not get much benefit through the contempt of Congress/court, and get caught quite easily. On tax evasion, the explanation might be different.
distic
2yr ago
Russia
I think you do not understand that Putin does not care about the economy or the people dying. Russia is not the richest country: its GDP is smaller than Italy's, and if you consider the ratio by inhabitant it's even worse. Russia is not the most populated country in the world: its population is just twice France and half the US. But Russia is the biggest country on earth. So Putin somehow thinks that the destiny of Russia is to expand its territory as much as possible, whatever the consequences. And also, to mitigate the effect of the war, he just abducts people. Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian people have been deported to Russia.
Europe and energy.
It takes its root in 20th century history. During the fifties, there were people (like e.g. Günther Anders) that hated the industrialization process in general. You have to understand them: in their eyes, the industry was responsible for Verdun, for Auschwitz and for Hiroshima. For them, the nuclear bomb was the symbol of this process, and they did not want anything to do with it. Nuclear power plants looked related to nukes, it seemed like an obvious symbol of everything that was wrong with the world. Those people inspired the political ecologist of the first generation (and eg Greenpeace), they put the anti-nuclear fight at the heart of their ideology. So now you have ecologist parties that hate nuclear power all over Europe.
On top of that, you can add:
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a bit of well-understood interests: oil production firms are funding anti-nuclear associations, and some European politicians like the former Bundeskanzler Gerhard Schröder have been bought by Russia.
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some understable fears: remember that some years ago there was Fukushima.
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some deficit of science understanding. Somehow burning gas seems more natural than atomic energy.
China.
When the former french president F. Hollande met with XI Jinping, Xi told him that he was worried about the future of the Communist Party. Under Mao, the Party was the vector for national unity. Then, the Party was used to give prosperity to Chinese people. But now the times of huge economic growth come to an end. Year after year, the chinese economy is growing less. So the Party should have something else to offer to the chinese people, mainly the young people. The thing he came with is ideology.
Thus, now, ideology is China's priority. The ideology is more important than the economy. The ideology claims that the Party is always right, and that it protects the weakest. Ideology says that a strong power is important to protect the population, that individual freedom is dangerous. Thus, it is more important to continue the zero covid policy, as abandoning it would contradict the ideology.
distic
2yr ago
But it's both more productive for American interests and much easier given the general character of Russia to just push NATO east, keep things contentious, and let nature take its course.
I agree, but not completely. East Europe did want to join NATO because they felt threatened by Russia. And they did not just imagine this threat, Russia has been very aggressive toward its neighbors for years. Think about Georgia and Moldova. It has also supported dictatorships and corrupt regimes eg in Belarus and in Ukraine. The US did not have much to do for it to happen, east european countries were actively pursuing NATO membership. On the other side, the fact that NATO was threatening Russia by expanding east is mainly bullshit. I'm pretty sure the US were able to nuke Russia from Turkey during the cold war, they never needed Estonia for that. And worse, now that baltic countries are in NATO, the US certainly do not need Ukraine to threaten Russia. Having NATO in east Europe is only a threat to Russia if you think Russia has a right to invade its neighbors. It does not mean that US were interested in making friends with Russia anyway. They never liked that Europe was buying Russian gas and having business with them. Perhaps they should have tried harder, because in the long run it might be in their interests (so that they do not confront both China and Russia at the same time), but I'm not sure it would have worked anyway.
distic
2yr ago
But that is the same with death. If you give people the power to kill others, they will certainly abuse it. They can abuse it for censorship reasons, for example: I do not like what you said so I will find a false reason to kill you. How is that any better?
But this is the same with the justice system then : you give people power to put others in prisons, but then it will be misused. It has been. Why is that that we should have total freedom of speech but not close the prisons? Censorship, like prisons, can be controlled by laws that define precisely when it is possible to censor and when it is not. After all, there are cases where we allow censorship (saying falsely that there is a bomb in an airport, death threats,...)
distic
2yr ago
Now there is a shift, a formation of new nations. Modern France or England are already France and England only in the geographical sense. The brain is American; the body is gradually being mullattized (mixed marriages, mass immigration of Blacks and Arabs). As a result, new ethnicities are gradually emerging, with a new history, a new religion. Already this France resembles France of the 18th century only as much as the «Holy Roman Empire of the German nation» resembled the original Roman Empire.
This is bullshit. Whoever wrote this does not know France at all. Sure, we are closer to America now. Sure, we look less like 18th century France. But does America look like 18th century America? This argument is shitty. Modern France does not look like 18th century France because we have cars, planes, trains and computers. Nothing to do with America by itself.
The relationship to the economy and to the culture is not at all the same in France and in the US. It's not that French people oppose freedom to own weapons, it's that they do not even understand why anyone would not oppose it.
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Currently, there is a strike in refineries that would have created an oil shortage if the government did not react by using strategical reserves. Can you imagine that in the US?
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There is a national ban of headscarves (or actually any kind of religious or political symbols) at public schools in France. Can you imagine that in the US?
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In the last presidential election, we got an actual socialist at 22% (the guy is anti NATO and thinks Taiwan should belong to the US). Macron got 28% and Le Pen 23%. Can you imagine that in the US?
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Healthcare and retirement schemes are state-controlled. Can you imagine that in the US?
distic
2yr ago
Apart from the absence of separatism and ethnic grudges and diversity and ex-empire going around, the United Kingdom have the ever threatening cultural americanization of the local culture
They have huge problems too. Spain has Catalunya and Belgium has the partition risk of the country. Anyway, the monarchy won't go away if it is just useless, it has to become a part of the problem to be challenge. I do not know how it could create more separatism or more ethnic grudges.
distic
2yr ago
You are right, I claimed more than I intended. I would say that basic word-based reddit censorship, like censoring the word "nigger" or even the so-called (((echo))) has not really harmed the debate, even if it gives place to ridiculous cases like on /r/themotte.
There are other cases where reddit censorship is worse than that, like website-level rules against "transphobia". Those rules are very bad in my opinion, however they are nothing close to the Russian system of censorship. It is still possible to express opinion against transgender identity in most western countries, mainly because people can speak somewhere else.
distic
2yr ago
I didn't want to go further than "there are practical cases where it is acceptable to use a bit of censorship", so what you say seems ok to me.
distic
2yr ago
But it seems to me that in countries that implement a strong censorship, like eg Russia, the justice system, including prison, is a lot more instrumental than reddit censorship which has yet to prove dangerous. The justice system has to establish what is true or false (for example did you and did you not murder X?), and this power on truth is the very basis of polical censorship (remember 1984 Ministry of Truth).
Once you've been able to stop people saying something small you don't like hearing, why would you stop?
Because the law is well written and only allows you to ban harmless things? That's like death penalty. If you kill criminal, why wouldn't you kill political opponents? The answer is that you can't because it isn't allowed. Why is it possible to draw a line for the harmless use of the justice system and not for the harmless use of small censorship?
It's also an outcome we've literally watched in history on multiple occasions.
Just like the justice system has been used for repression a lot. Or the army. Russia used poisoned tea to kill political opponent, so is drinking tea a first step toward political assassination? The only thing that could convince me completely is a proof that the censorship as it exists is already dangerous. There are other restrictions on freedom of speech (eg you cannot publish classified material). Is forbidding the word "nigger" really more dangerous than allowing the government to keep secrets that no one is allowed to tell?
distic
2yr ago
Well, my personal problem with libertarian arguments is precisely that they are absolute and unbounded. I think it is actually a trade-off between freedoms. Most of the time freedom of speech must win but sometimes it is harmless if it does'nt.
distic
2yr ago
As I said somewhere else, there is no reason why monarchy would collapse. There are other european monarchies: Belgium ; Denmark, Spain, Luxembourg, Liechtenstein, Monaco, Norway, Netherlands, and Sweden. None of them has a monarch as "beloved and omni-temporal" as Elisabeth, yet the monarchy survives. It survives because no one has any interest in killing it. You would get a lot of trouble, a constitution to change, and more importantly a president that could be a competitor to the prime minister. It is threatening for the parliamentary nature of the regime, as the personification of politics strengthens the power of presidents everywhere.
The idea of monarchy is based on a popularity contest is as anti-monarchist as you can get. A political regime where the head of state is chosen according to his popularity is called a Republic. In a monarchy, it's the continuity of the institution and the tradition that give the monarch legitimacy. If Charles abdicate, it means that he, or his family, or even worse the people, can actually choose who the monarch will be. Then, just end the monarchy and elect a president, because that is what you are asking for.
distic
2yr ago
I'm not sure you get it. I do not think the important part of it is about "making everybody else live according to my principle". Most people do not care that much about what others do. It's more that my freedom to live some kind of life enters in conflict with the freedom of someone else. For example, if someone wants to live without ever hearing "nigger", this person has to enforce a ban on the word. The person might not really care about what people do everywhere where they aren't, they just don't want to hear it. But the only reasonable way to enforce the "don't say nigger to me" rule is to find allies that do not want to hear it either and to ban it almost everywhere.
You may reply that it is not the same kind of freedom, as the freedom to say something is a freedom to act, while the freedom not to hear something is a freedom to a feeling or a non-feeling. But what about rape? The rapist is the actor, the victim is just feeling something. Or what about smoking in restaurants? A rape acts on the body of the unwilling victim, but so does the word "nigger" with the ears, and so does the smoke with the nose. Politics is often about finding practical compromises between opposed freedom.
If free speech is usually preferred to censorship, it is because without it, some truths cannot be said; that the government can start to live in a fantasy world where everything he does is wonderful. Such a government is obviously doomed. So it has been decided wisely that this should not happen. But it means that as long as every truth can still be said, there is no actual danger with censorship. A ban on the word "nigger" is not dangerous, as it does not change your ability to say any truth. I think that a ban that forbids the use of the word "nigger" as a quote of someone else's words is completely stupid, but it is not dangerous as long as there is some other way to speak, as ridiculous as it might be (like "n-word").
Then, there is the usual argument: if we ban "nigger", they will want us to reduce freedom of speech even further : this is the slippery slope fallacy. What about "if they can say nigger, they will soon try to kill black people"? History proves that limiting freedom of speech can lead to general censorship, but it also prove that racial insults can lead to mass murder. Is limited freedom of speech a worse result than a mass murder? Even if you think that a limited freedom of speech would eventually lead to mass murder, you have to agree that it works both ways: mass murder are a very good way to destroy freedom of speech.
distic
2yr ago
Well there are several monarchies in Europe and none of them has someone as popular as Elisabeth as a king or queen (spain, belgium, sweden, netherlands, luxemburg,...). Yet those monarchies survive because it is not useful to anyone to change the regime. Perhaps the british monarchy will have to be less fastuous
They are not tolerating the user/mention distinction because they are lazy. It is a lot easier to write a program that removes every occurence of some words than to actually read the comments. Or perhaps they are just that stupid, I don't know.
Please don't grow the community into something bigger. Bigger community, bigger problems. Rational debate has never existed on a very large scale.
distic
2yr ago
Did you steelman the case for some censorship, though? What your teachers said seems to be a slippery slope fallacy. For exemple, "authauritarians will put people in prisons, and they will start with criminals, so we should have no prison at all".
distic
2yr ago
Abdication is very unlikely. The basic principle of monarchy is that no one chooses the king, not even the king chooses to be king. If the king is chosen by a popularity contest inside the royal family, then just extend the contest to everyone and elect a president. Moreover, it would create a competition among members of the family which is not a very good idea.
Other explanations: any country that wants to sell gas to Europe, like eg Norway. Any country that wants to sell nuclear power plants, like eg France. Any country (or company) that wants to sell submarine surveillance drones.
By the way, I do not agree with your cost analysis. It seems to me that it could be profitable for a lot of actors: Russia, to send a message (we are ready for anything); US, to hurt Russia. You say they risk to get caught, but even if they were, then what? Europe needs the US to help Ukraine. Would it be worse than when the US spied on Merkel and nothing happened? Same for other countries.
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