muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
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User ID: 1018
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2d ago
The hypothetical was an extreme to illustrate the point. Yes, in practice, enforcement isn't perfect, so a week is too short and you want escalating sentences. The point that effective policing is higher leverage than increasing sentences remains.
I am not convinced it is relevant to the point or real life. The police that appears within a minute to 100% of crime scenes is practically impossible yet causes major consequences of the stated hypothetical. You can make many points with similarly strong but unrealistic assumptions.
If I assume an existence of a 100% effective at 1-month drug and crime rehabilitation program (criminal turned into citizen who will never commit a crime and is no longer drug addict), it is obvious that we should use such program to rehabilitate all criminals. I believe lot of progressive politics are result of median democrat who believes in such program, that with "enough" social services, one could disrupt the school-to-prison pipeline, problem solved. To some extent modern prisons are outgrowth of similar Victorian era ideas. The problem is that such programs don't exist.
Coincidentally, I agree that the legal processing time from arrest to punishment should be reduced. It is more effective to discuss it more realistic assumptions .
Isn't most crime committed by young people? There's a steady supply of fresh young people, and arresting them 5 years after they're young isn't even going to stop them from having kids to form the next (on average) generation of criminals. Like the US, today, does up arresting most violent criminals for long periods of time eventually, and it hasn't fixed the crime problem.
Your hypothetical did not stipulate age limits, by the way. Most criminals start young, too, as teenagers, so a shoplifting 14-year old would be in prison before they turn 20. And even in the US, most prisoners go free eventually. Most crime can't committed by re-offenders unless they have an opportunity to re-offend. If you get to "tag" every criminal today and put them all permanently away with 5 year lag, all habitual criminals are gone after the first wait period, and there will be left only those criminals who started committing crime during those 5 years. Further 5 years down, they are also permanently removed from society. Within the rules of thought experiment, I think this should work to reliably but slowly reduce the number of criminals around.
I agree that realistically it wouldn't be like this, but again, the experiment as specified is not realistic.
This is, IMO, just true. Consider a hypothetical: Prison sentences are capped at a week, max. But, within a minute of attempting to shoplift or steal a car, the police arrest you, take back the stuff you stole, and send you to jail. What do you think would happen to crime? Conversely, consider another hypothetical: Life sentences for stealing at all, but you'll be arrested and put to jail sometime around five years after you steal. What do you think happens to crime, given how bad at planning for the future low IQ criminals are? I think crime in the first scenario would be much lower than today, and crime in the second scenario much higher.
First hypothetical: Many, many police officer hours will be needed to achieve it. Perhaps, within a generation, people will learn not to steal.
Let me present a small variation to your first hypothetical. The police will appear within a minute of attempted theft in 90% of all attempts, and everything happens as you write, the thief gets a week in jail. In 10% of cases, nothing happens to the thief. It is still super unrealistic clearance rate in any country not governed by totalitarian surveillance dystopia of magical fairies, but more realistic, as there will no be human society where the police are 100% effective.
In this altered hypothetical, I expect that thievery will be extremely common. What is one week in prison for almost unlimited amount of free stuff, and you get to network with other prisoners? I expect the police would be so demoralized that they soon stop enforcing the rules. They may join the thieves, even, and the whole 90% rate will collapse.
In your converse hypothetical, assuming it happens as stated, with 100% effective police but 5 year lag period for enforcing a life sentence to thieves -- my conclusion is totally opposite. I presume that stealing will dramatically drop in after the 5 years lag, and possibly wither to nothingness in following decades. If you read statistics in the ACX post, it is quite clear that most crime is done by repeat offenders, who are incapacitated in prison. Some or many first-time offenders become repeat offenders as they enter the criminal way of life in prison, but in your hypothetical they have life sentences without parole and that is not a problem.
Again, realistically, it would be terribly expensive and assumes magically competent cops. Thieves would also become more violent if there is only a little difference between the punishment for a theft and murdering witnesses to the theft.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
4d ago
The entire reason job tracks(with a few exceptions like teaching and law) go through university is so that they can have gen ed requirements attached
"Gen ed requirement" is distinctly a US feature, found mostly in US universities and universities influenced by the US model. In the UK and continental Europe, you get to pick a specialization and perhaps may pick an elective or minor, but no always.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
13d ago
A peace activist might say that nobody wins in any war, as the price measured in material cost and human lives is often enormous compared to any gains.
While Russia is not winning by its original stated victory conditions, Ukraine is not winning either by its own stated conditions (no territorial concessions), which look more unlikely for Ukraine to achieve by each day. Slow Russian progress implies that currently Russia is *losing less'.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
22d ago
And both of you can be honest with your feelings rather than bottling them up.
Never believed this nugget of folk psychology. If emotions were truly something that are better dealt with outbursts of profanity rather than "bottled up", it would imply people most eager to use profanity and insults would be the most emotionally balanced. After all, if the folk theory is right, they should have nothing bottled up because they regularly let it all out? In my experience, it is rather the other way around. It is the constantly decently mannered, outwardly respectful people who are most likely to show good quality of character, are more likely to do genuinely nice things and avoid gossip, rude comments and dominance plays. More constant the decent behavior, more honest the character. More profanity-prone person, less likely you want to stay around them.
It is an observation that plays nicely with CBT that I've been exposed to: emotions are more like habits or a muscle than pressure cylinders you can't control: the purpose of the therapy is to build habit of not entering the destructive or unproductive mental states. Not far-fetched that embracing a behavior playfully makes it easier to habitually access associated mental space in other context.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
Do you prefer to deal with the man who is upfront about what he wants, or with the one who obliquely implies it, forcing you to guess what the price may be or if you are ever going to get what you ask for in the first place?
I don't think this a useful way to think about the situation. It won't come down to choosing between dealing with two different men, but one man in either of hypotheticals. Keep track of the rest of the society where these hypothetical men can operate, too. If you get a corrupt official who keeps up the pretense that s/he won't take bribes, s/he wants to avoid getting caught. This means they may still process your paperwork, only slower. The official who is openly corrupt will expect a bribe for anything favorable to happen. More open the expectations, more sure there is nothing you can do about it. It would suck when dealing with a low-level clerk. You won't deal directly with POTUS, but openly corrupt POTUS won't likely cause less corruption in the government.
The only good thing about a publicly known corrupt guy is not the public knowledge, it is that public knowledge can be acted on. There is nothing good about a known corrupt authority when everyone knows them to be corrupt and everyone also knows that everyone knows they won't be successfully prosecuted and stopped.
If your argument for voting for Trump comes down to arguing he is publicly corrupt, where does this leave you?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
Perhaps if you think that brand of corruption is a good thing?
What good will come from public servant being blatantly corrupt? When everyone knows that corruption is against the public mores and generally not done --- some people will choose to do evil anyway, covertly, but the effort not to get caught in public is a tangible cost. Some people on the margin will be uncertain of the cost and choose the public mores. When everyone knows it is permissible and can be done out in the open, within a generation it is becomes the definition of public mores. The rare few who don't do it are those who are weird enough to have their own moral code for no visible benefit. Others will call it prudishness, or soon call them opponents to public mores.
Happens to be one of conservative arguments against licentiousness that I find persuasive.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
If slaves had a possibility of having a child (and of course, no all of the Gaul was enslaved, merely administered), it does not make "losing a war and either dying or becoming a slave" a good procreation strategy in Caesar's Rome. The dead, naturally, have less children than those who live. Many of slaves had fairly unpleasant jobs that expedited their death. Unwanted infants were let to die off by exposure. If allowed to live, slaves' kids were going to have much worse nutrition and ahem quality of life and employment prospects compared to option "my parents did not lose a war and become enslaved", which contributed to their ability to procreate.
The best one can say is that the part sof W-European genetic ancestry who were not well-adapted to alcohol has had many of generations to die and get replaced by better adapted parts of the gene pool. If excess use of unwatered Roman wine was a contributor to how the Gaul lost to the Romans, it demonstrates the process was not a pretty to look at.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
I am the son of these people,
Are you certain? After the Gaul population lost to the Romans, significant portions died and-or were enslaved. If we take Caesar's claims at face value, about one third of the population. If it is a propagandist claim inflated by factor of 10x or 100x, still humongous amount of people who never had descendants.
They lost their culture to the extent that precious little is known of pre-Roman Gallic culture and the language spoken in France is classified as Romance language, heavily descended from Latin.
Presumably the people least adapted to unmixed wine have died off by natural selection during the generations.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
1mo ago
Alternatively, societies with lower baseline murder rates and longer lifespans can tolerate negative effects of alcohol use. They remain in relatively good place after the alcohol-related problems have taken taken their toll. Whereas if your society has problems ... there are very few societal problems that can't be made worse by increasing the number alcoholics and other addicts around.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
Gorbachev wasn't that much younger. Andropov was 1914, Gorba 1931, barely 17 years difference. Why fixate on Gorba? There have been younger presidents since forever. TR had 15 years on his predecessor, JFK 27 years, both promised plenty of new policies. (Kennedy was born during WW1 while Eisenhower and Truman fought in it).
The Soviet gerontocracy problem was not simply about age of the general secretary. The problem that in 1980s, the politbyro had been staffed by generation of Brezhnev, implementing Brezhnev policies since Brezhnev. Then Gorba decided to try to implement large-scale changes to the Soviet state that weakened the authority of the dictatorship.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
The term "neo-liberal" originates from a 1951 Milton Friedman essay, Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects.
...A new faith must avoid both errors. It must give high place to a severe limitation on the power of the state to interfere in the detailed activities of individuals; at the same time, it must explicitly recognize that there are important positive functions that must be performed by the state. The doctrine sometimes called neo-liberalism which has been developing more or less simultaneously in many parts of the world and which in America is associated particularly with the name of Henry Simons is such a faith. No one can say that this doctrine will triumph. One can only say that it is many ways ideally suited to fill the vacuum that seems to me to be developing in the beliefs of intellectual classes the world over. Neo-liberalism would accept the nineteenth century liberal emphasis on the fundamental importance of the individual, but it would substitute for the nineteenth century goal of laissez- faire as a means to this end, the goal of the competitive order. It would seek to use competition among producers to protect consumers from exploitation, competition among employers to protect workers and owners of property, and competition among consumers to protect the enterprises themselves. The state would police the system, establish conditions favorable to competition and prevent monopoly, provide a stable monetary framework, and relieve acute misery and distress. The citizens would be protected against the state by the existence of a free private market; and against one another by the preservation of competition. The detailed program designed to implement this vision cannot be described in full here. But it may be well to expand a bit on the functions that would be exercised by the state, since this is the respect in which it differs most from both 19th century individualism and collectivism. The state would of course have the function of maintaining law and order and of engaging in “public works” of the classical variety. But beyond this it would have the function of providing a framework within which free competition could flourish and the price system operate effectively. This involves two major tasks: first, the preservation of freedom to establish enterprises in any field, to enter any profession or occupation; second, the provision of monetary stability....
I agree that afterwards, it has became a poorly defined slur, used most often by leftist academics opposed to neoliberalism and adopted by nearly no one.
But if we map the arguments we've heard here, and in the other thread, to your analogy, we'd be getting things like "the Church of Mormon is a myth!" or "I'm a Christian, and if there was such a thing as Mormonism, I think I would have heard about it". It sounds like blanket denial, even as the other side is pointing at church buildings and the missionaries standing on the street corner.
I can think two better mappings. The crux that makes it different from most of other is that "cultural marxism" is a descriptive term that was never widely used as ingroup denominator, though it makes sense as theoretical construction.
During the George W. Bush years, many leftists here in not-the-US drank all the US leftist messaging about then-political enemy of American Evangelical Christians without much critique. Some people honestly think the US teeming with sex-crazy corrupt religious religious cultists called "Evangelicals", lead by nightmarish ministers who look something that crawled from 1st season of True Detective and Witchfynder General, who are generally corrupt and fully intend to subjugate women and instill visions from Handmaid's Tale.
If I thought it would matter, I could say things like "I have met Evangelicals, they are different from us bu not like the media portrays" or "if there was a conspiracy to turn Handmaid's Tale into reality, I would have heard about it" (and be not believed).
Another example: Patriarchy, as defined by feminism. Yes, there have been social and cultural organization models where men had more rights than women. Yet also the strong forms of "patriarchy" as an all-encompassing cultural force that must fought everywhere, all the time, that both needs to eliminated in our minds to remove hurtful notions and social expectations and also in the social world to remove privileges and old boys networks by setting up quotas ... yeah, we do get arguments lke "patriarchy is a myth" and "I am a man and if there was such a thing as patriarchy that supports me with my career, I think I would have heard about it".
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
I am thinking of Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman. I never read it, but I have heard perhaps 50% of it. None of the anecdotes start with Mr Feynman trying to make an elevator pitch, "I am an interesting character, you should read this book about my super interesting adventures". Like JTarrou's comments, they get to point right in the beginning.
My recommendation: red-team the sales strategy.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
(0) Some products and services are so complicated to manufacture that making them competitively requires certain size.
(1) If the megacorp has monopoly / oligopoly / regulatory capture on the markets, they can deliver more than enough largesse to both owners and the management without need to optimize their processes. (Boeing receives orders because not everyone can buy Airbus planes without doors that disintegrate midair -- Airbus has limited production capacity.) And if you have the capital, you can buy off the competition, which is easier than try to fix your corporation.
(2) Running a company like a planned economy is bad, but perhaps running it with an internal fake market economy is worse. Stands to reason that you try to design a fake market with both benefits of market and benefits of integration, it is easy to mess it up and obtain only the downsides of both.
I do wonder why we we see more acquisitions leading to mergers than "unmerged" companies. Why own a megacorp when you could own a collection of leaner, smaller companies? Capturing large enough of size of the market beats the command-rule inefficiencies? Perhaps, (3), the modern IT and communications makes the command economy to work well enough on the scale that wasn't possible with the tech-level of 1970s?
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
One aspect of "empire building" is that size of your empire correlates with your position in the company hierarchy, and your position correlates with your compensation.
I generally believe in more in free markets than in planned economies, and consequently I am capitalism-pilled on of the Western corporate organization structure. It looks much too much like a Sovjetized planned economy. Like in a planned economy, management upwards from middle level in the hierarchy is seldom compensated for their management and leadership skills. They are compensated because of their advantageous position in the food chain: if the leadership has a vision, they can't make it happen without giving orders through middle strata. The feedback back up ... comes through the middle strata. The productive units and teams of the organization have learned to communicate and align their work with the distant cousin units ... through the middle strata in the hierarchy. In any large enough white-collar company, the cost of management-level failures are diffuse and difficult to blame on anyone in particular. Individual contributor level productivity failures can be pinpointed on the individual and their manager. When whole organization no longer meets the targets? Much more difficult to prove who was in charge of the failure. Stock owners may complain, but don't know enough of the day-to-day operations to demand informed precise corrective actions.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
I have a two-fold argument that single-mindedly sticking to unsophisticated meme replication like "voting is a civic duty" is a great thing and major reason why the civilization keeps working.
First, let us consider the probability of your act of voting mattering. It is minuscule. Only person affected by the decision is ... you yourself, and perhaps handful of other people in your immediate vicinity. (Like, you get to argue about voting or not voting with your dad.) Voting often feels pretty stupid when I look at the results: my decision to vote has never had any consequence.
On the other hand, the above is true for any action most of people take, nearly all of the time. Anything I do barely matters in the grand scheme of things. Yeah, sure, my daily actions have consequences that affect my life outcomes and my family and my work, but all of them would be lost to rounding errors in national statistics. Yet the aggregate sum of barely noticeable actions of millions of other people results in what people call, everyday experience.
For me, this kind of naive everyman existentialism makes voting feel less special kind of stupid. It is equal kind of stupid as everything else in my life: practically nobody cares, except me and those near me. Suppose I quit my job and go live as a hermit in the woods. Personal tragedy, statistically indistinguishable from a rounding error.
This brings us to the second part of the argument: The only way the aggregate can do anything organized is by adopting mental frameworks that strongly encourage keep going in the face of absurdity that your actions barely matter.
Let's talk about something not related to elections. Why have we not dissolved to total anarchy of constant thievery and villainy? Perhaps because the people who disregard the duty "not to steal and mug" get arrested? A laughable notion: the police and judicial system just barely manage to arrest and punish some of the most egregious criminals. The system can project up some deterrent and remove the most constantly nasty part of the population to prisons, but that is of concern only to marginally criminally inclined. I presume you're in the US: According to BJS statistics, estimate rate of violent crime victmization is 22.5 violent victimizations per 1,000 persons in the US. To pick another statistic, about 1,087,000 arrests for simple or aggravated assault were reported to SRS and NIBRS. That is about 5.5 per 1,000 persons. 4:1 ratio. (The other arrests for violent crimes won't really affect the rate.) Rate of convictions I can't easily find, it is probably smaller. It is a very crude calculation, but it suggests that majority of violent crime won't result in an arrest.
If a significant part of the population decided to embrace the thug lifestyle and loot shops and mug people for living starting next Tuesday (and be any determined about it), all the combined law enforcement in the country would have extreme difficulties in keeping up. (In average 20th century civil war, actual fighting was done by approximately 5% to 10% of the population.)
How do you avoid 10% of the population descending into scum and villainy just because they realize they can? Everyone rationally computes the utilitarian calculus and/or studies ethical philosophy and concludes, "bad idea"? Not a behavior observed in the real world. Far more commonly observed successful strategy: average Joe single-mindedly sticks to principles like, "I will not steal or rob because it is wrong" that are based on not-so-deep ethical framework they probably misunderstand and would fall apart in a scholarly argument. Which brings us near to the conclusion of my essay.
In a modern society, barely anything that each individual does, matters. To successfully do anything that matters, individuals must coordinate their actions. Thus, they need to convince themselves that doing it is worth it despite it barely mattering. You don't convince most people to do irrational things with rational arguments, but instilling irrationally strong principles that do not budge. If the "voting is a civic duty" party is large enough, in aggregate they may decide an election. When they do not, just by existing they at least force the candidates to hold a campaign, which matters less but isn't fully inconsequential.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
If a plumber, doctor, or teacher causes injury or damage due to being intoxicated on the job, he can be sued for negligence in civil court, even if the intoxicating substance (whether alcohol, marijuana, or some other drug) is legal.
Notice that in this scenario, there was injury or damage that would not have happened in a more sober environment. And it won't work as well as zero-tolerance, because many substance users think "I am not that high, I won't cause a dramatic accident". And usually they won't cause dramatic accidents, they will only produce substandard work that makes other people's days worse on the margin.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
Cultural marxism is slightly pejorative descriptive name for critical theory ("a social theory focusing on critiquing and changing society" per Wikipedia) and other programmes by likes of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and Gramsci. All considered themselves Marxists or descendants to Marxist thought, but turned into considering cultural, sociological forces instead of classical Marxist materialism.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
I still don't understand why anyone has to answer for Tucker, but no one has to answer for these weird academics / officials. More people watch him? Ok, but academics are taken more seriously. Position tends to trump numbers from my experience.
Strategically, it is a good outcome to have academics who are taken seriously on your side. Serious academics are influential, they have a job where they get to espouse weird and unpopular ideas to students and other academics, and many people won't bat an eye. A decade or two later their ideas may be an established academic tradition with a peer-reviewed journal. Media personality who starts espousing weird and unpopular ideas might become weird and unpopular, and taken less seriously. It is unfair. Winning often is, from loser's point of view.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
2mo ago
By contrast, in 1939, Stalin knew that a commie revolution in Germany was not in the cards. It is true that with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, he gave a ton of resource aid to Germany which enabled the Blitzkrieg. I am unsure how militarily sound that was as a strategy, in hindsight. I have a hard time imagining Western Allies to decide to enter a land war with Russia to rid the world of communism, so Hitlers defeat of France likely bought the USSR no security.
It wasn't a wise strategy, but Stalin did not expect France to fall as quickly as it did -- nobody did.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
More to the point might be a worry about special pleading. This is different from backsliding, because the special pleader is the person who makes exceptions in their own favour. It would not be right for most people to do what I propose to do, but I am special; so I am left off the moral hook that others are caught by.
Special pleading is a form of inconsistency in which the reasoner doesn’t apply his or her principles consistently. It is the fallacy of applying a general principle to various situations but not applying it to a special situation that interests the arguer even though the general principle properly applies to that special situation, too.
An argument about special pleading won't get resolved without showing the supposed principles are inconsistently applied.
What is the standard sentencing for car drivers who kill other people in cars? Is it different if they kill pedestrians? If The_Nybbler is right, the driver gets probation for both, and the principle is consistent. (Consistently callous.) One could raise the sentencing waterline for all kinds of vehicle-caused deaths, too.
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
People who have the ol' good clinically diagnosed autism often have limited range of interests and poor understanding of everyday things, including cause and effect.
Nerds have great obsession about how things should be according to their own pet theories. Normies won't care about irrelevant things, unless it is necessary or beneficial (and then it is no longer irrelevant)
muzzle-cleaned-porg-42
3mo ago
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Picked it up because it is a "classic" and supposedly provides a view to pre-WW1 European civilization (from point of view post-WW1 disillusioned intellectual).
I have troubles reading it, it is superbly boring. Plot-wise, nothing interesting happens. Castorp, nominal protagonist, is both boring and detestable. Reading it has been a depressing affair: perhaps 5 pages at one go and I feel cravings to read anything else. Sometimes boring characters can be salvaged by inspired writing and humor or irony, but alas, I see no such redeeming qualities. Major disappointment after Buddenbrooks, which was quite readable with all the family drama.
I know little about Confucianism, but isn't there an idea that duties go both ways and generation to generation? Joe should cover for Hunter, but also should have acted as proper father in other respects by uprising an upright son; Hunter should cover for Joe and handle many other filial duties virtuously (acting like a proper father to his kids, too). The Biden family and Hunter specifically shows very little Confucian virtue. I have not much respect for Confucius, if he praises a single act that coincidentally aligns with Confucian virtue that otherwise continues a cycle of unvirtuous behavior.
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