quiet_NaN
16hr ago
That you hate Jay Jones and hope someone shoots him? Well, you can say you hate him, but no, you can't openly wish death on him.
To nitpick, I have stated the sentiment that I would celebrate if a public figure died of natural causes and not gotten a warning for it.
While neither is a nice sentiment, I think there is a clear distinction between the wishing for someone to die and wishing for them to get murdered. One is poor taste and possibly makes me a terrible human being, but the other is calling for or condoning violence, which has a corrosive effect on civilization.
To further complicate matters, there are certainly cases where homicides are widely celebrated. The death of Bin Laden has been widely celebrated, for example. (Yes, you can argue that Obama's SEALs were doing their utmost to bring him in alive to stand trial in NY, and he somehow thwarted them by presenting a clear and present danger, so they had to abandon their objective and kill him (so the public would not be celebrating a murder but a killing in self defense), but given the general US policy of drone strikes against individuals suspected of terrorism, I think it much more likely that they fulfilled their objective. -- Personally, I would have liked to see him stand trial, but of all the deaths from W's war on terror, his is certainly in the lowest percentile of upsettingness.)
So empirically, it seems to depend on the victim if a homicide can be praised or not, at which point we are mostly haggling over price.
I am not saying that people should be able to call for the murder of anyone (and I do not think there is a CW topic whose outcome could be improved by murder, actually), I am just stating my opinion that it is hard to make hard and fast rules about these things.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
This is the first thing which makes me, if not exactly sympathetic to Trump, then at least unsympathetic to Comey.
Criminal procedure exists for a reason. There are plenty of jobs in the world where you can do just fine by sometimes taking shortcuts instead of doing everything by the book. Criminal investigations is not one of them. If you find yourself lying to a judge so that they will bless you violating someones constitutional rights, or engaging in parallel construction, then you are the villain. If you can't do your job while keeping within the law, then at least be honest, quit your job, wear a batman mask and beat up suspects in the night, don't pretend to serve the law while breaking it.
Sure, Trump going after you is roughly orthogonal to you having acted in a criminal manner, and this very much does not scale to a systemic solution, but if your allegations are true then I would consider a conviction at least a happy accident, like a bolt of lightning striking a serial killer.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that there is a vast gulf between people voting as representatives and people voting on the base.
Secret elections are obviously better at establishing common knowledge of what the base actually wants.
But for a representative, it is more important that they be accountable to their electorate. If 3/4th of the senate vote for something deeply unpopular, you do not want every senator to be able to tell his voters "no, I totally voted against this. It was all the other lying senators to vote for it."
For important personnel decisions (where there may be a lot of pressure to vote a particular way), the fix would be not to have representatives vote but just let the base vote. In secret, obviously.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.
While I am sure that the woke left punishes defectors who cooperate with Trump, it is team MAGA which has perfected using administrative decisions to go after the people who were in the past on the wrong side. I vaguely recall law firms (who by design are mercenary) who had represented people who were litigating against Trump finding themselves without security clearance at the start of the year (or at least having to do an extraordinary amount of ass-kissing to keep them).
Political retaliation is bad no matter who does it. But the way I recall it, when Musk bought Twitter, the reaction of the Biden admin was not to try their very best to burn Tesla and SpaceX to the ground. By contrast, if there was a billionaire who was as firmly committed to opposing Trump as Musk was opposed to the Democrats, I would totally expect Trump to do his best to destroy any companies where that billionaire holds significant stock.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The argument that IQ is measurable while morality is not, is just a case of looking for your keys under the streetlight. Pay attention to the race of criminals, but ignore Epstein and Weinstein, ignore the ethnicity of the Bolsheviks and the cultural Marxists, etc.
You forgot to mention them urging Pilate to have Jesus crucified.
The Soviets mostly were not Jewish. I have not heard the claim that Jewish Soviet officials were especially heinous, statistically speaking.
Epstein and Weinstein were, first and foremost, rich bastards. I do not think that once you control for "being a high society member" or "being a Hollywood exec" (which is well explained by HBD on intelligence), there is anything left to indicate that Jewish men have a higher incidence of sex pestery than gentiles.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I do not think that Merkel was that cynical. Also, she reigned for 16 years, most of them before she made the decision to let in refugees in 2015.
The Iraq war was unpopular in Germany from the get-go, and was certainly a reason why Schroeder (whose SPD is a very established party, btw) won one election with the promise not to take part in that adventure.
And Merz would gladly personally drown any number of refugees in the Mediterranean sea if it would increase his popularity.
The CDU today is not in a better position than they were ca 2014. So they would have to have been clever enough to make a 5d chess move (and under their own name, no less, instead of letting the SPD win an election and take the full blame for opening the borders), but stupid enough not to anticipate the outcome.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
What the fuck were they doing other than not being Christian before? Or is it just that they survived when the Druids got wiped out or whatever.
Basically, yes. When Christianity took over as the state religion in early medieval states, it was not a very tolerant religion. They did not suffer a follower of Freyja or Jupiter to live. Or an atheist, for that matter. Jews were the only religious outgroup which Christians did not feel the need to kill wherever they encountered them (but only on special occasions or when feeling especially holy).
(I think the Druids specifically were already on the shitlist of the (somewhat more religiously tolerant) Romans, possibly due to human sacrifices. Or that might be Roman propaganda.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
While the Democrats were hinting extremely obviously that the military / intelligence community should basically pull off a coup,
From the context, I do not think that follows. There are plenty of situations where the correct response is just to say "No sir, I will not do that", without trying to dispose whoever gave the unlawful order.
Personally, I think the winning strategy for the Democrats is to wait Trump out. Time works for them. Few economists think that his tariffs will lead to economic success, the mid-terms are coming up, and without a majority in Congress MAGA will be much more limited in what they can do.
Sure, he will blow up more boats in the meanwhile, but blowing brown people up without a declaration of war has been a hobby of all presidents in this century so far, nobody really cares. And while sending his troops into cities which voted for Harris and deporting school students is not good, in the great scheme of things it is also not sufficient reason to end the American experiment with democracy. Established, traditional politicians are doing okay under the present system, and are hopefully reluctant to overthrow everything. I sincerely hope that most Democrats are smart enough to understand that a one-time surgical breaking of the constitution to get rid of Trump followed by business as usual will not work.
I am a bit more worried about the MAGA crowd, though. They are not your traditional Republicans who have thrived under the status quo for generations. Trump is certainly spending a lot more effort on placing loyal officers in charge than he was in his first term. One man's coup-proofing is another man's coup preparation. Frankly speaking, the Trump crowd has no regard for mos maiorum, for how things are done in politics, and while the chances that GWB would pull a Gracchi and run for a third term were basically nil, with Trump all things are possible.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
This is downstream of the orders actually being legal. Saying that X is illegal and therefore troops should refuse to do X depends a lot ob X.
With this touching the 1A, I also suppose that courts might allow you to say so if "X is illegal" is a defendable legal position. For example, one might have voiced the opinion that waterboarding is torture and US troops are required to refuse to engage in it, and even as the courts decided that nah, gitmo was just fine, they might presumably still refuse to convict you under that title. (I dunno, there is probably case law here.)
The reality is that men are fairly expendable. Society can afford for 30% of young men to die in the trenches and recover fairly quickly; their widows receive help from the community to raise children, and later they marry older widowers.
I am not sure that is entirely true.
First off, men are doing more than one kind of plowing. A man can easily father a couple of dozen children, but feeding them is a very different matter. Per acoup, a lot of ancient societies did not maximize their reproduction rate (mostly by delaying the marriage of women). To outcompete other societies, you do not want to make more babies than them, but more adults.
Secondly, if you live in times where you can lose 30% of a generation to warfare, you probably can not afford a 30% short time reduction in your capability to wage war. In the first system of warfare, your ability to inflict costs on other tribes in the area will determine what areas and resources you have access to.
Today, the requirement for strong people to plow the fields in back-breaking manual labor so that your population does not starve is mostly gone, but also, most countries care about other things than just how many warm bodies they house. While there are certainly plenty of women working careers which are essential to keep a country running, I think that men generally do their fair share of economic labor. Cut out a big chunk of the workforce, and times will be bad.
I think that the preference for men doing soldiering historically comes down to the fact that humans with high T used to make much more effective soldiers than humans with low T. If things were the opposite way, and the median woman had twice the weight and three times the strength of the median man, then your heavy infantry would have been basically women only, with men perhaps serving as skirmishers. The main reason few ancient societies sent their women into battle is the same why they did not send their 12yo boys into battle -- it is simply not the competitive advantage of that demographic, generally.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Typically, with the car mechanic, the deal is that you agree on a certain amount for diagnosing, and perhaps give them a certain budget for fixing stuff. If things get more expensive, they call you so you can make an informed decision.
Also, I do not see the benefit of making people pay the actual costs of their procedure instead of the expected costs as estimated beforehand.
So, if you want to find a hospital to give birth, different hospitals could make you offers based on your health conditions and date. If they estimate that there is a 10% probability that you will need an emergency C-section, they can just add 10% of the cost of one to the offer.
This would also align incentives way better, because the hospital would only do emergency C-sections if otherwise they would run into malpractice territory. By contrast, if the hospital can just bill the additional costs to the patient, their incentives are to to an 'emergency' C-section at the first sign of troubles and then make the poor schmuck pay for it. 99% of patients will not litigate the overenthusiastic indication, and the ones that do will be dirt cheap to settle because apart from the costs of the operation, there is little in the way of damages. A scar over your abdomen might be worth a few thousand dollars, but that is basically nothing compared to a child which was oxygen deprived during birth.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Tear down the entire economy to cull the health insurance industry
Random thought: just make it legal for veterinarians to treat consenting humans. Give them immunity for malpractice for anything below gross negligence -- if you want to get a million dollar payout by convincing a jury that a doctor treated you wrong, you should have gone to a hooman hospital. As a bonus, vets are a lot less squeamish about MAID.
Alternatively, disallow health providers from price discriminating. If you bill one insurer X$ for a head CT, you better not charge any other patients more for the same procedure.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Speeding has substantial benefits alongside the risks - you waste significantly less of your life travelling and thus get more done.
For small values of significant. As a toy model, let us assume a daily commute of half an hour. Say 50% of the time, you are hampered by traffic and traffic lights from going faster. The other 50% is spent in situations where you could save time by speeding.
Let us say that you go twice the speed limit when speeding. This is breakneck speed, public menace level. Instead of going 50km/h in residential neighborhoods, you go 100km/h. Instead of going 100km/h on two way traffic roads, you go 200km/h. By risking your life and everyone else's, you save a whopping 25% of your commute time, or 7.5 minutes. Of course, for every second saved you will also spend a second in high concentration ready to slam the brakes at the slightest trouble ahead, knowing that every 50ms in reaction delay will make it even more likely that you will kill someone.
Now, there are certainly examples where going faster will save you substantial time. "It is 3am, I am at a highway junction in Munich and want to get to a highway junction in Berlin." Sure, going 280km/h will save you about half the time compared to a more leisurely pace of 140km/h (if there are no construction sites which will bottleneck your time, and you ignore speed limits meant to cut down nighttime noise). But for the average road trip, the time saved just is not all that big.
As another intuition pump, consider ambulances. Clearly, getting a patient into the hospital as soon as possible after an accident is beneficial, and this is why we allow them to turn on their siren and run red lights. So we want them to be reasonably fast. An ambulance capped at 70km/h would be comically slow. But once you get to 160km/h or something, you quickly hit the point of diminishing returns in most scenarios. I am sure it would be technically feasible to build an ambulance with a top speed of 300km/h, but nobody wants that, because the scenarios where the maximum expected utility would require an ambulance to go that fast are very rare indeed.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Well, if I were a medieval peasant living among plagues, wars, tremendous social inequality, high infant mortality, starvation et cetera, you would probably have a hard time (cultural evolution effects aside) of convincing me that the being in charge of the world was omniscient, omnipotent and omnibenevolent. "This is actually the bad place" does a decent job explaining a world supposedly designed for humans in which tooth decay and kidney stones are a thing.
It is certainly not what I believe, I am a materialist and believe that technology can turn the world into a decent place for humans to live, but it is a neat answer to the problem of theodicy.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Is the Peace of Westphalia (national sovereignty within the borders) not more like a generalization of the Peace of Augsburg? I mean, you are right that the Peace of Augsburg was technically over with the start of the 30 Year War (1618), but my laymen's gut feeling is that its concepts were somewhat recycled in the next peace.
Per WP, you are correct. Subjects were free to follow any of three branches of Christianity.
Of course, the Peace of Augsburg only settled de jure what was already happening de facto since at least 1525 (when the first ruler flipped). So I would say you have a period of 120 years before religious tolerance for other Christians became the law within the Holy Roman Empire, e.g. proto-Germany. I seriously doubt that Sweden or Spain felt obliged to respect that principle in their own states, and the pope was very much not a fan.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Nitpick:
the Catholic church in Western Europe went way too hard enforcing heresy
I am pretty sure that from their perspective, they were enforcing orthodoxy.
Also, I think the original protestant reformers like Luther and Calvin were not very much into woo. Were for the Catholic church perhaps (atheist speaking here) the most important part of Christianity was to be part of the Church, for the protestants the central part of Christianity was perhaps the bible. If Luther had had the opinion that the path to salvation went through experiencing things directly which could not be legibly communicated otherwise, I guess that he would have lead guided meditations instead of translating the bible into German. I know even less about Calvin, but my understanding is that he was likewise big on studying the gospels and living with strict rules, and light on directly gaining understanding which transcends reason.
I mean, neither of them was a deist, so they still believed in the supernatural, but my idea of a puritan service is that it is probably a bit of a dry affair, heavy on the preaching and light on hymns and songs.
By contrast, the Catholics tend to have a little bit for everyone, and that certainly includes people into spiritualism and woo. Few other branches are as much into miracles, which are at the end things you can not convince the atheists of but which you know (presumably) in your spiritual bones are true. Then you have flagellants, monks, fasting, hymns, grand cathedrals, pilgrimages and so forth, all of which are more about directly experiencing faith than through rational understanding.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Trust me - the amounts stolen in Ukraine since the first year of the war are probably $100,000,000 per day.
That would be around a quarter of their pre-war GDP, so it is less implausible than I first thought.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
I think it is probably from the period, I am much less convinced it is German. For one thing, the text is English. Also, the perspective is more Western Allied. For a German propagandist, the fact that the Allies were able to push back Fascist Italy would not be sufficient reason to suppose that the Allies could also push back the Wehrmacht in its homeland.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
The weird thing is, they haven't even gotten rid of alignment.
I misspoke. What I meant was to say they got rid of alignment for player characters, at least if BG3 is any indication. In 3e, every character, including mortals, had an alignment which was tracked and could be detected. A decent fraction of classes (paladins, clerics, druids, probably more) had alignment restrictions, so there was a mechanical effect even in computer rpgs. (Naturally, with tabletop gaming, a DM is much likelier to intervene if a divine spellcaster strays to far from the purpose of their god, and they can do that in any edition.)
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Paizo has, among other things, removed slavery from the Pathfinder campaign setting because some SJWs found it offensive
Of course, Malediction is still on the book. Personally, I would much rather be worked to death in some Cheliax salt mine and face Pharasma's judgement than be summarily sent to spend even a single eon in the tender cares of Asmodeus.
I think the underlying thing is that for SJ, the topic of slavery is simply sacred, and can only be mentioned in sufficiently pious, orthodox works, and an RPG which lets you play evil characters simply does not qualify. (Of course, half of the sacredness is in the word slavery, if the game had simply called an enslaved person a serf (and perhaps gotten rid of the slave markets), most of the objections would have gone away.)
Personally, I have a strong preference that worldbuilding should include organizations whose attitude to diversity is different from a 2015 tech company. I think that fictional racism/speciecism is fine, and actually a good way to tackle these topics without stepping on the toes real world people (except for the professionally offended). Pratchett did this masterfully in Discworld with the ethnic tensions between trolls and dwarfs. Likewise, slavery and serfdom were unfortunately common in a lot of human societies long before Europeans settled in the Americas.
Nor is including a price range for slaves per se offensive. Most reasons why a DM would require this information are non-malevolent, like "can we afford to simply buy our source and set them free instead of breaking them out". Per default, the adventurer lifestyle does not lend itself to slave ownership.
Now, if the source books had made special accommodations for PCs owning slaves -- like saying and you can get a discreet obedience tattoo for your slave which will force them to obey you, I would consider that in poor taste, just as I would consider an info box on how to use the grappling rules to rape someone. But on priors, I doubt this was what happened here.
Anyhow, I am looking forward to seeing how long it will take for SJ to get universal franchise for all residents of Cheliax.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I will grant you that it is a culture war, or even more accurately, a common trope encountered both in isolation and in the context of larger culture wars. Once the sociopaths are in charge, they will be willing to open the gates for whatever side of the larger CW going on at the moment is beneficial to their goals, with little concern about the ideological compatibility with the movement they just took over.
There have been multiple large culture wars in history, but the one which is roughly SJ vs MAGA is the one which I would identify as The Culture War in the context of this thread.
My point was that WotC is better seen as a sociopath org than as a SJ org. Sure, they will happily crave to the demands of the SJ crowd if they see it as advantageous to do so, but if for some reason Trump expended enough political capital to influence D&D, they would be equally willing to write how hobgoblins are strong, smart, handsome, modest, and peace-making, but unfortunately slandered by the jealous tree-hugging elves all the time.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Okay, I should add that I have mostly encountered D&D in single-player computer RPGs. There, the impact is much lessened. First, most of the focus is on combat even more than with pen and paper D&D. Either you win an encounter, in which case the fact that you were unable to cast the ideal spell for the situation is moot, or you get a TPK, so you reload and prepare differently. Outside combat, you are not on a timer and can rest whenever you like. Where a barbarian player would certainly have their character complain about having another rest despite the party being in good shape simply so that a spellcaster can prepare a utility spell, and a DM would be quick to point out the side effects of wasting another day, NPC party members typically are much more accommodating.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Well, Trump kinda promised he would release the Epstein files while campaigning, and I think someone in his administration claimed that she had the files on her desk after he took office.
So him going "nothing to see here" makes people wonder why he has changed his mind.
For the left, this is such a good dead horse to keep flogging because "elites are raping kids" is an evergreen hit with large parts of the MAGA base.
Personally, I do not think that the files contain video evidence of him raping some 13yo. If the Biden DoJ had this level of dirt on him, they would have leaked that.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
The best and brightest aren't getting kicked out by a 100k charge.
Not per se, no. But it will reduce the relative attractiveness of the US as an immigration destination.
Also, the fee is only the tip of the iceberg. It is clear that the Trump administration -- and the people who voted for him -- really get off on kicking foreigners out of the country. Sure, he is unlikely to send random knowledge workers to some El Salvador megaprison without any due process, but most people would prefer not to go to countries which do not want them, all things being equal.
I think a lot depends on the specific migrant and their relative prospects in different places. There are very likely fields where someone who could become a world class researcher in the US can only hope for a meager career outside the states, and Trump can squeeze these people's balls as hard as he wants and all they will say is thank you. In other fields, things are different, and the impact of Trump plus visa costs are enough to make Cambridge more attractive than Harvard. The fact that the universities are generally on Trump's shit list will not help matters, here.
For companies, the calculation is rather similar. The answer to "do we open another research campus in the US or elsewhere?" might be different under Obama and Trump.
Potato, potato. As Bierce observes,
I will grant you that killing in self-defense is meaningfully different from murder.
I might even grant you that there is sometimes a difference between killing out of murderism and accepting killing someone as an acceptable side effect in pursuit of another goal.
But I have read enough Tucholsky to reject the premise that murder dressed in uniform ceases to be murder.
If the US navy is shooting boats of suspected drug smugglers in international waters near Venezuela, arguing about the difference of that and what is generally understood to be murder is splitting hairs.
Directionally, what Obama did to Bin Laden seems to be mostly the same thing, at least based on my priors. Could be that he forced the hands of the US troops when they were trying to take him into custody, and could be that he was on the verge of giving the order for 9/11 2.0, which is why they had to storm his compound right away, but likely the US just decided that it would not bother with a trial.
Again, least upsetting murder committed by the US ever, though.
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