guesswho
9mo ago
I agree that it does less to discourage criminals than prosecuting someone solely for being a criminal would.
However, it probably much more effectively discourages criminals from entering politics, which is a good thing.
guesswho
9mo ago
And notice how we know that fact because the evidence is really obvious.
I believe China could influence our elections. I don't believe they could do it through hacking voting machines or changing vote counts, without leaving clear evidence behind.
guesswho
9mo ago
Disagree that 3 follows, because it being easy to hack voting machines is very different from it being easy to hack voting machines and get away with it.
Any large criminal conspiracy of this type is going to involve some idiot mooks on the ground and a lot of contact points for someone to notice something suspicious. And any small conspiracy is going to have to focus on a single point where any anomaly large enough to sing a major election will be super obvious when compared to the exit polls.
Whether the machines are 'secure' or not, I don't actually believe anyone can influence enough of them to change large national elections without getting caught.
guesswho
9mo ago
You might be more interested in debunking flat earthers if they dominated one of your primary social spaces.
guesswho
9mo ago
Major social media companies colluding together to prevent the voter from accessing vital information about a candidate is such a significant violation of democratic norms that it should be our entire focus when discussing election fraud.
Very much noncentral fallacy, but ok. However if we're calling shaping media coverage and the national conversation as election fraud, then Russia definitely committed election fraud to help Trump get elected the first time.
guesswho
9mo ago
You might look like a fool if you debate them, but wouldn't you want to just ask the quesiton and hear their argument so you can evaluate it for yourself?
guesswho
9mo ago
Trump literally campaigned on 'I know how to deal with corporate criminals because I was one'.
'Oh no, the open criminal we decided to turn into the messianic central pillar of our party is being prosecuted for the crimes we all knew he was committing' is not a super sympathetic position. You rolls the dice, you takes your chances.
guesswho
9mo ago
Surely this doesn't apply when the judge is openly partisan and basically making stuff up out of thin air?
Agreed, if that ever happened, it would probably be a different story.
guesswho
9mo ago
Are you claiming that he didn't do anything illegal, or that these laws are rarely enforced?
Because, yeah, I agree that rich people in the US get to break the law all teh time with very little chance of consequences. I don't think that's good, and I don't have a lot of sympathy for the one rich lawbreaker they decide to make an example of.
guesswho
9mo ago
Annoyed that the rollback seem to have entirely erased the new alt account I tried to make, BobbyDropTables.
guesswho
9mo ago
A lot has been written on how marriage and long term relationships, at least in the Anglo-saxon contest, move women right from the left.
I would expect this to mostly be a causation/correlation mix-up. Conservative women are more likely to be married and have kids, for a variety of reasons including being older, less educated, less urban, more religious, etc. That doesn't imply that getting married or having kids makes any individual more conservative than they were before.
Unless someone's controlled for all the factors, or done before-after studies with controls, or etc.
guesswho
9mo ago
I don't think I understand the central claim here.
So potentially Wade maybe got their job by sleeping with someone. Ok.
Does that make them unfairly biased against Trump and unable to try the case fairly, for some reason? Am I missing something tying these facts to the Trump case specifically?
Or is this just a purely ad hominem, this person is bad on an unrelated topic so ignore their judgement here' thing?
guesswho
9mo ago
because conservatives have had a very long lesson in politics entering even things that had long been fairly apolitical.
The knee-jerk rejoinder would usually be 'they were always political, the politics was just made explicit', but obviously it depends what you're talking about and how you define politics.
Again depending on the context, probably relating to the concept of 'white man as default', you know, 'it wasn't political when everyone looked and acted like me, it's political now that other people are being represented too.' That whole cultural dialogue is sort of an awful slog unfortunately, but it's the natural response to your perspective here.
guesswho
9mo ago
Enh, I'll just submit my mistrust and dissatisfaction with every metric and framing that would lead to that conclusion, while admitting that it is true if you accept those very common metrics and framings.
That's a pretty huge conversation that I'm not an expert on and probably don't have time for today anyway.
guesswho
9mo ago
"Stats say this crazy man only has a 1% chance of ending my life. No need to worry!"
There's a difference between 1% and .000000000001%
You mean the philosophy that leads to eugenics and "global optimization via local genocide."
Good steelman.
Spoke too soon. Fuck outta here with THAT nonsense.
Hey look, I was right.
The fact that the right thinks the left is blind to the fact that the latent potential for violence exists around all men, when this has been central to feminist theory for so long, kind of strikes me as one of those things that happens when you accept the toxoplasmic strawman version of the other side's position, instead of exploring that community and literature for yourself.
guesswho
9mo ago
Alternate theory of the difficulty conservatives have with being counter-culture: they are still for the most part, speaking demographically, the type of people that the current system most benefits and enriches.
No doubt, parts of the system are being updated in ways that will decrease the amount by which they are preferentially enriched, which is a net loss in real terms for them personally. And no doubt they can and will get extremely mad about that.
But they are still enriched by the system in both absolute and relative terms, and therefore cannot be too enthusiastic about burning it to the ground. A reshuffling would not be likely to benefit them by chance, unlike the more typical style of counter-culture member who is relatively disadvantaged by the system and might benefit from seeing it overturned.
guesswho
9mo ago
I mean, yes, but, from the article:
The key difference, however, is that Democrats did not pick the worst caricature of everything their party stands for and make them their leader. Also, while no Democratic legislature abolished the police, state Republican parties are ensuring that women have to risk their lives and health to deliver doomed pregnancies. Each side has freaks. But the problem with the current Republican Party is that the most unappealing members of the coalition, in this case Trump and pro-lifers, are the ones in charge.
The people saying that Taylor Swift is an FBI agent or w/e-the-fuck may only be known to the terminally online.
The fact that abortion is getting outlawed or regulated in a bunch of states is not. That actually affects people in meat space.
Meat space people tune in to the conversation when they find out something like that now applies to them or their niece or their sister or w/e and is frightening them.
guesswho
9mo ago
Yes, I've been in situations that escalated to real violence, none where anyone was killed but a few were people were stabbed and got an ambulance.
I don't let it make me paranoid and frightened every time I ride the subway, I don't let it make me support policies that aren't supported by statistics or utilitarianism.
Of course the potential for violence is latent in any situation involving traditional-gender-norm men... feminists have been pointing that out for a very long time, I'm sympathetic to their position. The way that this makes weaker and more vulnerable people afraid and deferential even when violence is not explicitly happening in the moment is part of what they mean by 'patriarchy'; the way that this makes people suspicious of and pre-emptively violent towards men who are doing nothing wrong is part of what they mean by 'toxic masculinity' and 'the patriarchy hurts men too'.
The fact that the right thinks the left is blind to the fact that the latent potential for violence exists around all men, when this has been central to feminist theory for so long, kind of strikes me as one of those things that happens when you accept the toxoplasmic strawman version of the other side's position, instead of exploring that community and literature for yourself. I expect myself to be wrong about a lot of right-wing positions in this approximate way, and I feel like I strongly observe this happening whenever I use feminist academic terminology on non-left spaces. /shrug.
But, again, as I understand Hlynka, they're not just claiming a difference in perspective and worldview like what would happen if you're subconsciously aware of the potential for violence in non-violent situations. They're claiming an empirical failure to accurately understand and predict the world, in ways that would justify things like applauding pre-emptive vigilantism and calling for more of it.
And I'm saying, no, I don't buy that on the empirical facts and statistics, and no, I don't buy that on some experience-driven 'sense' of how 'dangerous' the world is that exists outside the data itself.
guesswho
9mo ago
Sure, there are principled reasons to treat the situations differently, of course.
I was just responding to a very specific form of semantic argument about how to define words like 'censorship' and 'banning' and so forth. Arguments that don't rely on those semantic distinctions and the emotional associations we have to them are not affected.
guesswho
9mo ago
That is probably the largest falsifiable assumption underlying the rationale, that the noise is not normally distributed around the true signal.
The truest answer is 'that is possible and is a major weakness of the theory,' but, 3 mitigating arguments:
-
We have a 2-party system, in which each side has arguments and narratives trying to push people towards their direction. Voting simulations tend to suggest that in this situation, or even situations with 3 or 4 parties, it is natural for those opposing parties to center around the true center of public preference, and pull in either direction away from it. Since both parties have roughly similar number of devotees (which is not coincidental, they will change their positions until that equilibrium is reached in the long-run, which is part of why it centers that way in real life), we can expect/hope that the noise produced by those things roughly cancels out. (of course this conflates 'central voter preference' and 'the best government', but that gets into deeper philosophical discussions of what a 'good government' even is, which we're eliding atm)
-
Even if the population has net biases where everyone/the large majority are off in the same direction, these should be for specific issues or domains. Government is hugely complex and multi-faceted; it's possible for the government to be bad on 5 axes, ok on 10 axes, and good on 20 axes, or w/e. Even if there's some big universal bias that drives people away from the true signal on on axis or another, hopefully any axis without a singular such factor will still have pretty randomly distributed noise, and we'll do well on a lot of other metrics anyway.
-
In particular, I was comparing universal voting to some type of restricted voting where (for example) only people with a certain IQ or passing a certain competence test or etc. are allowed to vote. While it may be true that the general population of all voters could be systematically biased in some way, it's still much more likely that a smaller group selected on a specific metric, which therefore has less cognitive and experiential diversity, would have a similar or stronger bias of some kind. If you are trying to avoid systematic biases, it's really hard to do better than huge random samples in a situation like this, even if huge random samples aren't guaranteed to be perfect either. (and ofc I personally don't think you're going to do better hoping to get lucky with a benevolent monarch or any other system humans have tried, but maybe better non-voting systems are theoretically possible)
I reject this analogy on the basis that no own powerful benefits from catching large-scale financial fraud. The organizations responsible for catching it have been continuously granted more duties without corresponding budget increases for decades, to the point where they do not have the time or resources to catch or prosecute it, because no one who makes those decisions really benefits if they succeed.
Powerful people benefit from catching their opponents committing election fraud, so I'd expect the tools to catch it to actually be used.
More options
Context Copy link