quiet_NaN
8d ago
Illegally entering the US is not a crime which warrants a lifetime of imprisonment, or what might be an adequate monetary equivalent to that.
If someone is trespassing on your property, and steps on a landmine you placed and gets his legs blown off, you can not simply tell the judge that since the trespasser was in the wrong, he does not have any cause for a complaint.
I see no reason why people who shouldn’t be here in the first place are getting benefits denied to US citizens given there’s no federal right to compensation for government mistakes/ errors / negligence.
While the US government claims sovereign immunity over a lot of things, there is still the FTCA.
WP gives an example:
In 2022, a navy sailor successfully sued under the act after being hit by a vehicle driven by an active-duty military member, and received a $493,000 settlement.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
This clearly does not meet the standards of a criminal trial in any civilized country, including the US. He did not get to face and cross-examine his accuser.
Given that what is at stake here is El Salvador locking him up long-term, I feel it is reasonable to require similar standards of evidence to a criminal trial.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Okay, what is an adequate compensation for likely having to spend the rest of your life in some Latin America prison? At what monetary sum would you be indifferent between getting locked up and getting the compensation and being free and getting nothing?
Presumably, a million US$ will not buy you freedom, but 100M$ -- if invested wisely in campaign donations -- might see you getting freed within a year and living in a mansion for the rest of your life.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Most of the stuff you mention is entirely orthogonal to ignoring the court system. Police getting deployed is a political decision, and the safeguard against politicians failing to stop violent protests is to vote them out of office. Law fare -- while problematic -- is explicitly using the court system.
If you have a story about someone who was imprisoned for a gun regulations charge, and the courts ordered their release and then the democrats said "haha" and kept them imprisoned indefinitely, please share it.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
In most civilized countries, "if you deport me I will face a lengthy prison sentence without a court trial which would vaguely meet Western standards" would be reason enough to grant asylum.
From my understanding, El Salvador is not planning on making the people Trump sends them into upstanding citizens of their society. Instead, they will simply lock them up indefinitely.
Given the harmfulness of being locked up indefinitely in a country with a spotty human rights record, I would argue that this demands due process on the scale of a capital crime trial. In consequence, it is closer to executing someone than to deporting a Canadian whose work visa expired back to Canada.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
In quality adjusted life years, this pales in comparison to the Iraq war.
Most civilians the US killed in Iraq were killed within the rules of engagement. While scholars of international law might have various ideas about the legality of invading Iraq, but from my recollection there was never a US court injunction against using bombs in Iraq.
The crimes which really enraged the public were not the median civilian killed by a bomb, but outliers like Abu Guraib. This is just a consequence of humans being scope insensitive, but also, you are who you are on your very worst day -- "but have you considered all the days of my life when I did not kill anyone" is not a very successful defense.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The problem with this approach is that it establishes terrible incentives. If the argument "that was a mistake, but it is a done deal, and no court order in the world can change this" was sufficient, then there would not be wrongful death civil suits.
If individuals or governments fuck up in a way which is beyond repair, we don't shrug and say "well, luckily for you, the antique you recklessly destroyed was beyond price, so there is nothing you can do to make it right, off you go". We use money to approximate the damage. Sometimes we award punitive damages.
Of course, the prison in El Salvador is as likely to follow the whims of the US government as gitmo is. If Trump makes it a priority to right the wrong his administration did, that guy could be back on US soil in 24 hours. It only takes a court to set the correct incentive.
Perhaps award to him or his family 1000$ in federal funds for the first day he spends in El Salvador because Trump's goons ignored a court order, and double that every day afterwards, up to 1% of the defense budget per year. I am sure that the administration would rather get him back then pay him a billion in taxpayer money.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
I happen to recognize the legitimacy of Abrahamism as the moral doctrine of at least three distinct human civilizations, so I don't find any difficulty there, both sodomy and dressing provocatively are "sins" in those places for reasons that are both practical and internally consistent.
This sounds like moral relativism to me: dress according to your religious community standards (whether it is a burka or just non-provocative western clothing), follow your community's sexual norms (whether you have three wives or one, and how old they have to be when you marry them), follow your religious communities dietary restrictions (especially regarding pigs, cows, humans, shellfish) and so on.
And you must recognize this because that is indeed why we deny children autonomy. Why then not do it for the mentally ill?
[...] insofar as one recognizes that delusions are a thing, you need to confront the fact that consent is an ill suited tool to attack this moral issue.
The fact of the matter is that humans did not evolve to be perfectly rational agents. As the sequences teach us, we are all loaded with our own biases. We treat the median adult as sane not because they are a rational actor whose map matches the territory who try to maximize some utility function, but merely because all the systems which did not engage in the polite fiction that people are sane have had much worse outcomes as the people who would take paternalistic charge of mankind are not sane themselves.
That being said, while I might deny that there are sane people, I will concede that some are way more insane than others. A demented person starving while wandering through the woods is likely lacking the coherence that we can apply the fiction of sanity, and we should institutionalize or MAID them per their living will.
Young people have two handicaps: first, their map is often even less accurate than that of adults simply because they lack experience, and second they are probably even more impulsive. As a crutch, societies have decided to lock certain autonomy behind age limits. This is manifestly unjust -- a tenth percentile 20 yo is likely less sane than a 80th percentile 10 yo, and yet the former can vote, consent to sex, enlist in the military, take on debt, immigrate to Saudi Arabia and so on. But until we find something better, age is a Chesterton's fence we should keep.
Still, I think that recognizing that our system is somewhat arbitrary and unfair, we should try to respect the choices of those whom we deny autonomy whenever their choices seem sane.
- An 8 yo who wants to wear a red t-shirt instead of a blue one should get their wish, all things being equal.
- A 10 yo who wants to get a facial tattoo should be denied -- presumably, there is a broad consensus among adults that they would have regretted getting such a tattoo at that age.
- A 14 yo who wants to enter a relationship with a sugar daddy should likewise be denied, as there is a broad consensus that this will be harmful to their development.
- A 14 yo who wants to quit school and live in the woods should be denied, but if they want to quit school to start a trade apprenticeship that is a different matter.
As a moral toy model, give the minor a minority of votes over their life and distribute the rest to adult society. At a very young age, they have little voting power, and only get autonomy to do stuff which a majority of society supports. At age 18 (or 21 or whatever), they gain majority, and have 51% of the votes, which means that they can do whatever they want, no matter how ill advised. Morally if not legally, it would make sense to have a continuous increase of their voting power in between these two points. Perhaps at age 17, they have 40% of the votes, so they get to do whatever at least 1/6th of the adults considers age-appropriate. Just because we don't give them full autonomy, we should not disregard their opinion entirely.
Likewise, mentally ill adults. Generally, I am against involuntary commitment of anyone who has not run afoul of the law (otherwise, sentence them normally, then give them the option to serve their time in a ward instead) unless it is very likely that they will die on the outside within a year. Plenty of people locked up in psych wards object to being locked up for entirely rational reasons orthogonal to any mental illness they might have.
I could understand being afraid of people using "sluggish schizophrenia" and the like against political opponents
I think there was recently some MAGA legislation trying to make Trump Derangement Syndrome and official medical diagnosis.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I would not count medicine as STEM. Also, there are plenty of subfields of medicine which are not very subject to ideology.
I would expect a Nazi obstetrician who wants to help Aryan women to give birth to new soldiers and soldier-makers for the Fuehrer and a minority ethnic radical feminist obstetrician to show a high degree of instrumental convergence in the long run.
The subfields ob medicine which are controversial -- like gender stuff, or perhaps psychiatry -- are generally few and far between. In most stuff which is tangentially related to medicine and controversial, the controversy is orthogonal to the science part: abortion, death penalty, MAID, embryo selection, germline editing, organ donation debates are all not about what is the case, but what we should do. Sure, sometimes activists smuggle in arguments masquerading as science, but mostly there are no open questions of fact there.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
You can find red paleontology enthusiasts they’re called creation scientists.
That parses a bit like "you can find spiritual astronomy enthusiasts, they are called astrologers".
YEC goes with paleontology about as well as geocentrism goes with astronomy. I mean sure, there are likely people with a mainstream degree in paleontology who found work giving YEC's a veneer of respectability, but I am doubtful if in their heart of hearts, they actually believe in YEC. It would be like someone studying electrical engineering and then denying that electrical currents exist -- sure it might happen, but I would call that person either deceitful or insane.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think this line of thinking misses where the wound actually is - it isn't that conservatives are absent from the academy, it is that the academy can't function in their absence.
I apologize for my STEM arrogance, but I would claim that if a discipline can not function without having followers of any particular ideological bent, it is probably bullshit.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
In my experience studying physics at a German university, there was little in the way of ideological purity required.
Generally, STEM seems a useful niche for contrarians. While subjects such as art, literature, history, law, medicine, sociology, psychology, economics all include things on which the predominant ideology has an opinion about -- you can not really use colonialism to explain the behavior of bacteria, or blank-slatism to design a more efficient motor, or Marxism to explain semiconductors, or social darwinism to prove a theorem, or religion to predict the movements of planets. Sure, the Nazis tried to establish a non-Jewish German physics, but that attempt did not even last as long as their "thousand-year" empire did. The woke ideology can mostly be seen on a meta level, by asserting that institutional sexism is the only possible explanation to a skewed gender ratio. This certainly can be a problem if you apply for a professorship, but not on the levels below that.
Of course, German universities are likely a bit different from US ones. Basically, what was required of us was passing exams and taking a few lab courses. Granted, visiting the lectures and studying with others helped, but I did not see a lot in the way of mobbing -- people who did not like you generally just left you alone. Few people had the time for an outrage campaign in any case. In general, nobody cared much what you did outside university.
From my understanding, it is common for students to live on the campus in the US, which makes the university much more central in the life of the students and (presumably) enforces greater conformity.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
My point was purely meta, I am absolutely fine with the argument "in the current political climate and given the replication crisis, it seems likely that the people who devote their lives to studying the outcome of gender interventions are more motivated by activism than by genuine scientific curiosity, and that a lot of them have already written the bottom line when the study starts. Then, they engage in cargo cult science to find the argument leading to their preferred conclusion. As the activists outnumber the scientists, they can use the mechanisms of peer review and grant-making to sideline authors with a lesser or opposite bias. Thus, all their studies are to considered unreliable and we should default to our priors regarding the benefits of gender interventions in minors."
I might have some disagreements with the argument (especially with its sibling being applied to climate science), but these would mostly boil down to object level questions about reality (including institutions) which are at least in principle fathomable by the scientific method.
It is the difference between Kelvin boldly stating:
I need scarcely say that the beginning and maintenance of life on earth is absolutely and infinitely beyond the range of sound speculation in dynamical science.
and a more modest:
Explaining life is currently very much beyond physics, and we lack a paradigm to even make progress on that question. It might be different in a hundred or a thousand years, or it might remain thus forever.
quiet_NaN
12d ago
Presumably a chicken bought in a supermarket is already very dead. The only ethical question this raises for me is the buying of a chicken corpse produced for human consumption -- which would probably depend on if it is free range or factory farmed.
Likewise, plenty of people have sex in circumstances where a resulting baby would have plenty of genetic, developmental, or social disadvantages. Drug addictions, chemotherapy (?), parental genetic disadvantage, parents not invested in a relationship, parents who were exposed to ionizing radiation and so on. This is fine as long as they use appropriate contraceptives and ideally have a firm commitment not to bring any fetus to term, but often people are very negligent over these things. Granted, the disadvantage of a baby born from a union of first-degree relatives would be much larger than that of a baby from a random drunken hookup, but Julie and Mark are extra responsible with birth control, so I don't see an issue.
Let us try two more scenarios:
A and B are two adult males of sound mind who have sex. They were tested for STI before, use condoms and are not in other sexual relationships with anyone.
C is a 30 year old woman who works as an elementary school teacher. One Saturday, she goes to a shopping mall. She is wearing a blouse which shows a bit of cleavage and a skirt which goes to her knees, as well as some makeup. The shoes she wears leave her ankles clearly visible to the public, and she makes no effort to cover her hair. She is not accompanied by a male relative.
To quote you:
As designed, harm has not occurred in these situations. Do you feel like the people (who indeed are numerous) who feel something morally reprehensible has occurred in both are engaged in silly superstition, or are you willing to concede that morality has more dimensions than the singular concern for harm reduction?
I think it is hard to argue that billions of people recognize some moral truth when they react with disgust to your examples while also claiming that the billions of people who react with disgust to my examples are just engaging in silly superstition.
This is a sidebar from a debate on the medical merits of the Dutch protocol, but the idea that you can't object to such things on metaphysical grounds seems silly to me given the arguments in favor of transgenderism as a theory of GD are also on the level of metaphysics.
I firmly believe that we should see gender interventions only through the lenses of patient autonomy (which we generally deny minors, rightly or wrongly) and outcomes.
If someone argues "woo, gender is just a social construct, so it is fine to raise your XX child as a boy", I would be just as opposed to that.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
Good news, with your attitude, you are not alone.
- Jehova's Witnesses believe are opposed to blood transfusion for reasons which are orthogonal to the experimental method.
- Many religions are opposed to most forms of sexuality and/or contraception without any evidence that it leads to bad outcomes.
- Likewise, dietary restrictions.
- Some people believe that various forms of genital mutilation are beneficial or required not as a matter of empirical evidence, but for inscrutable cultural reasons.
Of course, if you want to convince the grey tribe specifically, just stating that obviously blood is sacred or puberty blockers are evil or pigs should not be eaten is not going to convince anyone.
Edit: I wrote that taking "gender transitioning prepubescent children" as a straw man for puberty blockers, but on further reflection I think that I would even cover gender affirming surgery. Sure, I think that operating on the genitals of ten-year-olds is a terrible idea, but that is contingent on empirical observations about the state of medicine, and if our tech level was higher, I would be open to evidence that it is beneficial for kids to change their gender a few time, or that placing a brain in a robot body increases QALYs for that matter.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I think that there are plenty of medical interventions which can not be opted out after the fact.
A tonsillectomy can not be opted out after the fact, and yet it is regularly performed.
Generally, it is fine to study such interventions -- even randomized -- if you keep within the overton window of standard practices or have good reason to believe that your treatment will lead to a better outcome for patients. Nobody suggests rounding up kids and then randomly assigning them to the control or the puberty blocker / tonsillectomy group without any medical indication.
Also, a non-intervention can have just as severe consequences, and as a utilitarian, I do not believe that there is a fundamental moral difference between an act and an omission. Puberty blockers have permanent side effects, but so has going to puberty. In a world where the blockers exist, a doctor who withholds them is taking the responsibility for letting puberty happen -- just as a doctor who withholds antibiotics to let an infection kill a MAID patient is not very different from one who uses barbiturates instead.
Both puberty blockers and puberty have failure modes such as suicides. If and when they can be used to gain QALYs is an empirical question. Presumably, the path of expected best outcome depends a lot on the individual in question. A kid in 1980 whose reaction to growing breasts was to try to cut them off, and who attempted suicide over not being a boy might be different than a kid in 2025 who decided that they are non-binary after five others in their class already came out as non-cis.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I think that partly, the strategic failure of the left is an instance of tragedy of the commons: individuals following their personal incentives, to the detriment of the collective outcome.
Basically, people don't optimize their behavior for big picture success, but for personal success. Being a moderate is boring, especially among the people who are into political activism. Perhaps the most electable Democratic candidate would be a reincarnation of Bill Clinton. But it is trivial to score political points by saying "we do not want another rich cis-het male white candidate". It will boost your standing in your group so much, signal that you are not some sell-out but a hardcore believer in the cause.
On the right, things are a bit different. The Fuehrerprinzip is a right-wing idea, after all. Sure, you get a few radicals who show their bravery by flying the swastika, but mostly they realize that Nazism is a toxic brand. This tendency to form a cohesive block is somewhat frightening compared to the squabbling left, where fission is common.
The failure mode of the US left is the French revolution, where every day the radicals will find their enemies of the state so that the guillotine baskets will be full by nightfall, while the failure mode of the right would be fascism, where party loyalty prevents any insiders from speaking out against crazy ideas.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
It is not false positives. Nobody could possibly mistake an European tourist for a central example of the kind of illegals Trump voters want out.
This rhymes with revoking permanent residency for foreigners who use speech in a way contrary to the goals of the Trump administration. The message clearly is: We might not get rid of all the woke snowflakes with US passports, but it is open season on any lefty foreigners who are only allowed to be here at the pleasure of wise King Donald.
quiet_NaN
15d ago
"When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.
To be fair, the Democrats throwing the book at him was downstream of him denying the election result and vaguely encouraging his goons to stop its certification. So one might equally well say: "Try to occupy the Capitoline Hill, expect to end like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus".
Except that DC did not actually go all Nasica on Trump. The SCOTUS decided that presidents have immunity from treason, and that was the end of it. Sure, the DAs tried to get him for every technicality they could, but given him the kind of sentence his supporters got for J6 was not on the table. Nor did Biden use his newly cemented immunity and veto powers to drone strike Trump (which probably would have been a bad thing -- normalizing political murder has its own downsides).
I will also grant you that Biden was part of the rising nepotism, preemptively pardoning his son for all crimes he might have committed.
But the attitude displayed by Trump and put into words by you is 100% that of a tinpot dictator or warlord. Likely every US president likely needs a bit of a narcissist streak -- "I am the one who can serve his country best as the president" is not a very modest thought. But with Trump there is not even a pretense for doing the job for the common good, it is all ego with a side of kleptocracy. I would say he is half-Lannister: he can only be relied to pay his debt to people who wronged him, no matter how petty the grudge.
It might be illustrative to constrast Trump with GWB. Both were reviled by the left. The policies of W were actually a lot more damaging than the policies of the first Trump administration. W used torture as a matter of national policy and started two different wars which achieved little beside killing a lot of people and fattening the military-industrial complex on the taxpayers dime. The Swedes gave Obama one of the most ridiculous Nobels ever simply for not being GWB. The phrase war criminal was frequently heard on the fringe left.
But when Obama came along, GWB faded from media attention. No AGs were especially keen on getting him whatever way they could. He remains a welcome guest at state funerals.
I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency. He did not incite McCain to take over DC to continue the Republican rule. Nor would he himself pulled any J6 shit if the SCOTUS had awarded the presidency to Kerry instead. In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.
Trump does not. His instinct is to flip the game table if he loses. And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Imagine Mark Zuckerberg now. Facebook implemented Signal-type end to end encryption, with PFS and OTR and everything, and also Zuckerberg very much bends the knee and kisses Trump's ring, and still the people in his administration organize their illicit, leaky chats on the open source nerd niche messenger instead of the mainstream one run by his all-American megacorp they probably had preinstalled to talk with their buddies.
Also, technically, I think that the NSA is at least as competent as Moxie. The main problem with them is not that they have a massive conflict of interest, because their day job is breaking encryption to spy on Americans and everyone else. The probability that the security community would roll out backdoored encryption to spy on an administration might not be larger, but it certainly seems much higher than the probability of Signal being a NSA operation.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Could you please Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.?
The atmospheric detonation of nuclear weapons is impossible to hide from any industrial nation which chooses to investigate or any number of NGOs. Any theory which claims a nuke was dropped on the Houti would also need to explain why this did not lead to Iran and Russia making claims to that effect, and why fricking Greenpeace as well as dozens of other Western NGOs decided to sweep it under the rug. By the time you have added all the required epicycles, you might as well claim that the nuclear strike was coordinated by lizardmen who were combating space aliens.
Also, scintillation is a process in which ionizing radiation excites (roughly visible wave-length) photons in a material. What happens in CCD sensors is different, you get pixel noise as gamma rays, neutrons or charged particles produce electron-hole-pairs in the pixels which lead to a depletion of the charge of the pixel, just as light does. The camera acts as a semiconductor detector.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.
Hard disagree. Both morally and (I think) legally responsibility to keep classified information classified rests with the people who have security classifications. Private citizens should not commit illegal acts to obtain classified info (unless there is a moral imperative to let the public know, as with Snowden), so if he had hacked Waltz phone, then he would be in the wrong. Also, Washington leaks classified info to the press all the time, and journalists generally report on it.
Him not tweeting about it before the bombs fell is already going above and beyond what would be reasonable -- normally you negotiate confidentiality boundaries before you give a journalist info. Of course, there is no way to authenticate the chats as real, it could also just be one insider playing with sock puppets.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
have literally no stake in the outcome of the political process in the USA.
I would argue that foreigners have very much a stake in the political process -- they are the ones getting deported, or bombed for that matter. Having no say is different from having no stake.
Also, I do not think that "don't go to big protests" makes a good Schelling fence. There is nothing fundamentally different between going to a protest and having re-tweeted a meme which the regime decides is Not Funny. So what you end up with is that foreigners in the US should behave like people in China. Only it is even worse because with the CCP you at least know beforehand what will likely piss them off, and you can only guess if the next administration will kick you out for having owned a cybertruck, or a bluesky account or being a member of the German AfD or whatever.
If you want naturalized citizens to take part in the political process, training them to keep their head down before they have their citizenship seems obviously counter-productive.
quiet_NaN
16d ago
I think that "hindering a policy agenda of an administration" could be applied much more broadly than that.
For example, a Harris administration could have decided to deport all Tesla or Twitter employees without US passport on the pretext of them harming their economic agenda. Or an administration could deport all foreign journalists which lean a way the regime does not like. Or you could kick out all foreign professors who do not fall in line with the administration. Or prevent international conferences on topics which you would rather not see discussed. Or deprive areas where the other party is in power of international tourism.
At the end of the day, it benefits a nation greatly if it can make binding commitments about permanent residence being revoked only with due process. In the past, the US was able to attract the very best immigrants. If a highly qualified immigrant is willing to forgo political expression as a condition of their residency they might as well immigrate to China -- getting deported from there as a Westerner is likely less of an ordeal than getting deported from the US is.
Note that for Europe, the outcome of the great depression was even worse by many metrics.
There is a reason why some worship the economy as a malevolent Outer Deity. When angered, its destructiveness can be on par with Adonai.
I am vaguely in favor of carefully testing the limits of what is offending the economy when there are good humanitarian reasons for it (e.g. in healthcare), but the US -- which historically was the biggest proponent of free trade -- becoming protectionist feels more like directly defiling the its altars and expecting it will continue to grant its blessings.
More options
Context Copy link