quiet_NaN
1mo ago
While it is certainly true that the EU is not sharing their fair share of the NATO defense burden, it would be premature to conclude from that alone that NATO is hence a bad deal for the US and all the pre-Trump administrations were idiots for having the US taxpayer protect Europe.
The way I see it, the relationship between the US and European NATO countries like Germany is an unequal partnership, but not necessarily an unfair one. Germany gets the protection of the US, but it also accepts the US as the hegemon. When the US decides that they want to embargo some country, Europe generally follows them. When the US decides that China should not have extreme ultra-violet photo-lithography machines, the Netherlands make ASML comply with that rather than weighting their alternatives.
With NATO, there is at least a contractual obligation for the Bundeswehr to fight Russia if it were to invade the US, even though nobody is under any illusion about the threat the Bundeswehr poses to Putin. But the umbrella of US protection extends even over countries who are not under formal obligation to aid the US, especially in the Pacific.
I would argue that the US puts up with this because being the leader of the status quo coalition comes with certain perks. If the US had adopted a policy of isolationism after WW2, they would certainly not be the economic powerhouse they are today.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Concurring with you, I think military spending serves three roles: a) Buying stuff to win a war b) Fostering industries which produce such stuff long term c) Economic stimulus / gravy train
For (a), it does not matter where you buy, as long as they are not your likely enemy.
For (b), you want a reliable long term partner country.
For (c), there are likely key areas and companies where you want to spend money to win the next election. Basically, military spending is a money hose which you can redirect to wherever you see the biggest political advantage.
How important these various considerations are depends on the situation your country finds itself in: if Ukraine had money to spend, they would likely buy whatever gets them the most bang for their buck, while Canada is not expecting to fight an existential war where the raw number of jeeps matter any time soon.
Regarding (c), it should also be pointed out that big military projects are almost never developed in a healthy market situation. A healthy market would be that a NATO country company which wants to develop a new fighter jet will do so based on venture capital. If a decade later, it turns out that their jet is competitive, they then sell it to NATO countries, making a profit for their investors.
Instead, the typical process seems to be to first convince your government to pay for the development. If they are lucky and your project does not fail ten years in, it will be likely arrive delayed, over budget and possibly under specs. In a (c)-heavy world, this does not matter: your government will mostly buy from you even if an ally offers a superior product, because why would they subsidize the economy of an ally instead of their own?
It should surprise nobody that this socialist model of weapon development is not very efficient, especially as companies evolve to latch onto the government apparatus, extracting that sweet sweet revenue stream as their tentacles drill deeper into the administrations as decades pass by.
On the other hand, not everything can be reasonably developed in a competitive market. If Roosevelt had in 1941 simply announced the US intend to buy nukes and let venture capital fund competing Manhattan Projects, the result would likely not been that in 1945 the US could just pay 1% of its GDP for Little Boy and Fat Man.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I do not see how some tennis tournament switching to an electronic line judge has anything to do with using an LLM to judge criminal cases.
Okay, both things share the term "judge", but then I might as well say: "My municipality just decided to put up a new bank in their park. How long before the government takes over all the banks and financial independence becomes impossible?"
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
As an analogy, someone might argue that the ultimate power in society lies with the ones who produce food, for everyone has to eat. However, this would ignore the fact that there is a competitive food market: plenty of food producers are willing to sell food for some marginal profit instead of requiring to be made lords of the realm.
With the work force it is just the same. Anyone with capital to spent on salaries and PR can reliably find young persons to work for them. Provide the correct incentives, and people will work for you just almost as reliable as water powering a hydroelectric plant. We generally assign little agency to that water, because while individual molecules move in a Brownian motion which seems random to us, in aggregate we can model what water will do very well. Humans are a bit harder to model, but the principle is the same.
For quite some generations, gaining money through paid work has been the best pathway to reproductive success available for most men. As long as the boundary conditions are correct, getting some of them to work for you is easy.
I also don't understand why you emphasize fertility differences between genders in old age. The power that old people wield is almost completely orthogonal to their reproductive capabilities. Nobody gives much of a damn if a male leader is impotent or not, and it has been that way for a long time. "Leader X has knocked up five women in the last year, so his family will be very big an influential in the future, while Leader Y has not given birth in a decade, so who cares what she has to say" is a thought pattern which is alien to most humans who have ever lived, and certainly is obsolete today.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I disagree. The currency of economics is, ultimately, capital.
Sure, young men (and women) could band together and take over Somalia, and live without any older person telling them what to do.
However, most are wise enough to see that that this would be a terrible decision. Instead, they live in big cities paying high rents to older people, working in companies controlled by older people (at least indirectly), and voting for political parties controlled by older people.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Any yet Trump won in 2016 despite the common wisdom being that Clinton would likely win.
I think that there are effects in both directions.
If I think that the election result is already predetermined with a very high probability, I am less inclined to vote strategically. So if a candidate is polling at 80% in a state, I will vote for whomever I like most in general, while if two candidates are both polling at 45%, I am much more likely to the one of them whom I consider the lesser evil.
I am sure that the impulse to pick the side of the winner also exists in people. In the ancestral environment, picking the winning side of a group-internal conflict was likely conductive to reproductive success, while habitually backing the underdog was not. Rationally, this matters a lot less in representative democracies where what you do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.
Personally, I am mildly disinclined to vote for a winning candidate. Statistically speaking, I tend not to be a huge fan of most administrations, and if it is all the same, I would rather be able to say "I voted for Kodos" than sharing the responsibility.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Basically what it means is that you are roped to your partner on perhaps easy but massively exposed terrain. Easy in this sense is usually also very relative to the ability level of the pair. It means that due to a lack of protection between you if one of the pair falls, you both fall.
As a hobbyist climber who is also an utilitarian, I think going roped without anything holding the rope to the mountain is not a belaying technique, it is a suicide pact. Like most suicide pacts, I think it is stupid.
I clicked through your article. (Protip: square brackets+parenthesis make a link on the motte.) The relevant section is:
Sometimes the climbing is hard so you need to ‘pitch it’ and place a lot of protection, then quickly after, the climbing is easy but getting rid of the rope would cost time because soon after the climbing becomes harder again, or there is a glacier with crevasses in the way. A lot of the time one finds oneself moving together on easy but massively exposed terrain. Here, a slip of one can lead to catastrophe for both. You must have ultimate trust in your partner and their ability.
I am fine with going roped over the safer parts for convenience's sake. Anyone climbing in alpine territory is taking some risk of serious injury or death. Going roped without belay is only increasing your risk by a factor of two compared to going solo (assuming that your ability is similar to that of your climbing partner). Always belaying even in easy territory would of course be safest, but will also take much longer, thus exposing you more to other dangers such as bad weather.
Rationally, you would allocate a certain mortality budget (say, a few 100 micromorts -- per Wikipedia, the Matterhorn weights in at around 2.8 Millimorts) for a tour, and then pick whatever strategy is most likely to see you finish the tour while staying in budget.
I concur that risk is likely a factor which makes mountaineering attractive to a lot of people (especially men), but for the adjacent field of rock climbing, I think that improvement in safety equipment is what let to it booming in the last two decades. In earlier times, only a small fraction of people was willing to pay the mortality price of being a climber. Today, it is a reasonably safe hobby.
Of course, some climbing regions insist on keeping the original number of bolts in the routes, so that anyone lead climbing the route will risk just as much (modulo better equipment) as the original climbers did. Personally, I find this notion silly: thought to its end, an early great climber could spent a week free soloing all the easy routes in a region, and out of respect for that achievement nobody would ever be allowed to put bolts in them afterwards. Instead, I feel that it would be enough to mark the original bolts in a different color, so the glory hounds can try to climb in the footsteps of the early great climbers, while the rest of us get to enjoy the routes without undue risk to life and limb.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Oh no, Jews are lobbying for money for their pet causes. How dare they!
Breaking News: Ever interest group lobbies for handouts. Catholics. Farmers. Unions. Employers. Students. I am not sure if there is a horseshoe manufacturer association in the US, but if there is, they are likely lobbying for some federal money to help them compete against the Chinese or something.
Congress passes the budget, with some funds being further distributed by the administration according to the rules Congress passed for the funds. If you feel that the Biden administration is giving too much money to The Jews, take it up with your Congressperson. (It used to be that one could win elections on a platform of opposing the Evil Greedy International Finance Jews, but during the 40's, that became really unfashionable for some reason. So your Congressperson might not be very sympathetic to your concerns.)
I have not checked that FEMA really paid 300M$ for Jewish orgs, but even if they have, that would be about 1% of the yearly FEMA budget. Not very impressive, as narratives go. "Jewish space laser causes hurricanes" would be more impressive, but has certain epistemological disadvantages.
I am assuming that the remaining 99% of the budget was not spent on any other, gentile pet causes which have nothing to do with disaster preparedness, because otherwise, you would have mentioned them as well instead of singling out Jewish causes? If so, that would be a deal I would take any time: 99% on target spending is an unheard efficiency for government. We should totally give random Jewish organizations 1% of the federal medical budgets if that magically means that the remaining 99% will be spent efficiently on target.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
My argument was not at all about whether the no-homo policy of the fraternities was right or wrong, it was entirely about that given such a policy, a gay man looking for sex has likely better options to get laid than joining a fraternity and hoping to meet another closet gay or bi man willing to break the fraternity rules.
Tuscaloosa is a city with 100k residents, AU has 40k students. Even in Alabama, a few of them are likely on grindr.
We can of course debate if it is immoral to join an organization who requires you to be or behave a certain way in your past or present life outside that org under false pretenses.
For most of the cases, I think lying is fine:
- It is ok to lie to the question "are there nude photographs of you?" to get into a sorority
- It is ok to lie about your sexual orientation to get into an organization which has not yet adopted 'don't ask, don't tell'
- It is ok to lie to an employer about your religious beliefs
- It is ok to lie to your liberal study group about never having voted Republican
- It is ok to lie to with regard to having or not having Jewish ancestors
- It is ok to lie to some McCarthy goons about not having commie leanings
- It is ok to lie to your church community about never having been married
Rule of thumbs, if the honest answer would be "that is none of your fucking business", then lying is fine. In an ideal world, you would find another organization which offers the same opportunities, but is not as noisy, so you don't run the risk of being found out, but often we don't live in such an ideal world.
Again, the US military -- which is hardly an early adopter of woke policy -- has been tolerating closet gays since 1994 and openly gay people since 2011. It looks to me like it can still fulfill its mission despite having gays and lesbians. I propose that the mission of fraternities (whatever the heck it may be) would likely also survive having non-straight people.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I was taught that Robert E Lee was an honorable man who fought ablely for a bad cause, lost, and accepted the verdict of battle with dignity.
The word 'honorable' can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. For someone who is a military leader, his personal conduct seems largely irrelevant, I don't particularly care if he cheated on his wife or (likely) not. Nor do I particularly care that he resigned his commission to the US before taking up arms against them, Stauffenberg broke his oath when he bombed Hitler, and still I find this the least objectionable life decision of his.
Sticking to a code of honor in warfare can be good if the code in question aims to prevent wartime atrocities and preserves the customs of war which limit the hellishness of warfare a bit. Other than that, being a good warrior or soldier has meant very different things at different times in human history, and I would count this more as 'being good at your job' without any value judgement applied.
From my understanding, the slaughter in the US civil war was largely confined to the armies, with less than 10% of the causalities being civilians. The PoW camps on both sides seem harsh by modern standard, but deliberate war crimes seem to be confined to the odd homeopath making baby steps towards death camps.
The "accepted the verdict of battle" is probably where we should give Lee credit, when he had lost, he surrendered rather than continuing to fight a partisan war.
In the end, he fought an unwinnable war for an evil cause. Other people in his place might have been worse, but he seems hardly hero material to me. I think his veneration can be seen as a clear political statement "the South was correct to fight the civil war, too bad it lost". A statue of Lee surrendering would have entirely different connotations.
The US South has provided military leaders from the revolutionary war to the present day, surely there is someone who could be venerated as a hero whose main claim to fame is not that he waged war against the USA to protect slavery?
I agree about Lenin and Trotsky being more evil than Lee. Of course, the most venerated violent figure on the left is Che Guevara, who wisely did not stick around after his revolutions long enough to get his hands dirty to the degree that Lenin did. Personally, I would cut him a bit more slack than Lee. Lee presumably had visited slave plantations and knew exactly what he was fighting for. Guevara had not personally witnessed the Red Terror in Russia. It turns out that communist countries are more repressive and economically poorer than their peers in the long run, and that commie revolutions are thus to be avoided. Still, I would not say he was wrong to oust Batista, just that the ideology which replaced him lead to bad long term outcomes.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I fail to share your extraordinary disgust at Jared.
From the looks of it, his objective was to make his career, and he did his best with the cards he was dealt. You seem to be disappointed that he showed no solidarity to his fellow Blacks (by entering a white fraternity) nor to the Machine (by calling it non-inclusive) nor to the liberals. I am sure he will find a bus to throw under his fellow LGBTs eventually.
This is just what you would expect of a successful politician. Given his marriages, Trump is certainly not personally anti-immigrant, but if anti-immigrant politics get him elected, that is what he will argue.
In the end, each of us has to decide to what groups they are loyal. Some groups we are members of whether we want it or not due to accident of birth. I think how much loyalty one should show to these groups (family, ethnicity, country, gender, sexual orientation, class, religion) depends on how these groups are treating you: if your family treats you like shit, you don't have to be loyal to them. And sometimes you might decide that it is moral to defect against a group even if it is treating you well (such as an upper class member turning Marxist or a white civil rights supporter). Some other groups we join formally or informally by choice (political movements, religions, fraternities, religious orders, military branches). Some of these groups (think a dominant political party) are almost entirely filled with egoists bent on furthering their own career, others (think EA) contain a lot of people who actually believe in the mission statement. Personally, I find backstabbing in the former much less bad than in the latter, and I think that the Machine totally qualifies as a group of the former sort.
There are obvious, mechanical reasons why someone may not want to live in a frat house with a homosexual. That is not discrimination in and of itself. It’s not clear to me what a gay kid would really want out of fraternity life, other than, you know, the obvious.
I don't think that there are obvious, mechanical reasons? Gay and lesbian soldiers are serving along with straight soldiers in accommodations which are likely tighter than a frat house, which presumably has single shower cabins? Every time I go to a gendered public changing room, I risk that some gay dude who might find me hot (fat chance!) sees me naked. The horror, the horror.
I think that the straight frat guy wants two groups of things from the fraternity:
- Entertainment (partying including booze, sex, drugs)
- Connections (academic support (illicit or otherwise), making powerful friends, finding a suitable spouse, having impressive students offices on their CV)
The connections (sans the spouse, perhaps) apply equally to a gay person (and given what we know of Jared, they were his major motivation).
Contrary to common belief, homosexuals can party with straight people and have fun at it, playing beer pong or whatever.
I think that a fraternity which is explicitly anti-gay is a pretty terrible place to find a gay partner. Even if by chance the first man you make advances to is actually into men, he made the decision to join an organisation which is anti-gay for some purpose (likely the connections) and is unlikely to jeopardize that to have sex with you.
And raping your fellow frat members while they are blackout drunk also does not seem very sustainable. While your bros may or may not cover up a sex act with a woman whose ability to consent was questionable, they will likely be much less inclined to cover up gay sex, consensual or otherwise (unless the gays have already secretly taken over, but that seems unlikely).
The only point I could see for joining a fraternity for gay sex would be if they have homoerotic initiation rituals which you like. "I thought that making out with another freshman was just a humiliation ritual, but later I learned that that monster is actually turned on by kissing men. Now I feel so violated!" The horror, the horror.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Having a mutual secret is one of the best ways to bind people together, and I truly believe in the aspect of the agoge that requires young men to commit minor crimes together to bond.
I suppose by 'minor crimes' you mean the necessity to steal food from the lower classes to survive, not the killing of unarmed helots as part of the krypteia (which would not be a crime at all, as far as Spartan society is concerned)?
Bret makes a rather convincing case that the modern version of the agoge is the child soldier.
I am not saying that your statement is factually incorrect, but even the worst possible hypothetical fraternity I can imagine (say, one where committing rape is part of the initialization) pales in comparison to the horrors of the Spartans, because initiates are older, have contacts outside the group and are always free to say "fuck this fraternity, fuck university, I will just take a job repairing cars instead".
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Dead Republicans don't vote
I don't think the numbers work out. One dead republican is very unlikely to move the result of a state election, you would probably require a few thousands at least.
However, having a few thousand citizens die due to your negligence will have political ramifications (unless you are the FDA and its red tape) orders of magnitude more significant than the missing votes of the dead people.
The US is politically divided, but neither the median Trump nor Harris voter would say that it would be a good thing if all the voters for the other party dropped dead. There are plenty of centrist Americans who would not think "they let all the rednecks starve to secure the election, that is clever" but "they let uncle Billy die, how could they!"
Big disasters are great opportunities for state capability to be seen as an unambiguous force of good. People normally don't like their governments much, but a competent disaster response can turn this around for a while.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
It is rare to encounter an institution which seems so hellish on so many different levels.
From the outside view, I see a student organization whose admission criteria are opaque and not subject to any oversight, likely governed by nepotism while also providing some academic advantage to their members (at the very least, on the order of "Professor Smith always reuses his exam questions after three years, here are yours", but possibly going to "Professor Miller is a former member of our sorority very sympathetic to fellow members"). This seems bad.
The prospective members, elite females who go to university to party until they meet their future husband while also studying some liberal art which will not land them a job meanwhile also seem to make a mockery of the purpose of education. There is nothing wrong with meeting your husband in uni, but "I was studying CS when I met my husband, and now I work part-time at a software company thanks to my master in CS while also raising the kids" is very different from "I just study to meet my man so I can stay at home and raise kids".
Then the whole gendered attitude towards sex. If getting roofied at a frat party is a real concern, that means likely that the fraternities do not operate on a strict "sex is for marriage only, and we will expel any fornicators" or even on a more reasonable "I will cheerfully bear witness against any fellow frat member who drugs any woman against her will" attitude towards this. I also find it unlikely that even in Alabama a large fraction of frat boys are willing to marry someone with whom they did not have sex, so purity will only take you so far on your way to your Mrs degree.
Then the whole doublethink where a strong statistical suspicion of misbehavior is no big deal, but positive proof marks you as a fallen woman. Likely a good fraction of women sent nudes of themselves in high school, whatever, but god help you if your nudes become public knowledge. (Technically, this seems to be a bit harder to verify in the age of AI. "Are these her boobs, or is it just AI extrapolating from a bikini picture?" seems a hard question. The obvious solution is to tattoo female genitalia with complex patterns. I wonder if conservative parents would go for that to disprove AI nudes, or if they would be relieved of the plausible deniability that AI give their daughter.) Likewise, statistically daddy knows that his little girl will get totally wasted at frat parties full of horny guys, but if positive evidence of that emerged, that would damage the reputation of the sorority.
Of course, these whole gendered attitudes to sex thing is likely exasperating rates of sexual assault. If the median woman can only forget her commitment to purity if she is very drunk, a lot of males will adopt a strategy of getting women very drunk to get laid. On the other hand, a system where female promiscuity is celebrated would probably end up with a lot of males not committing sexual assaults because getting laid consensually is easier. (The men would still be scumbags as they would be committing sex crimes in different circumstances, but I for one prefer hypothetical crimes to actual ones.)
The last hellish aspect which comes to mind is simply the fact that sororities are full of young woman selected for popularity. I guess that the high school dynamics where popular kids form hierarchical cliques will also hold true in sororities. Woe to whomever the cool girls decide is not actually cool enough for their club.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The axis of that tweet says "unnatural death". It seems at least plausible that this would include drunken people inadvertently killing themselves by falling of a bridge or running into traffic.
The curfews seem like a massive confounder. We can compare the July ban (750/week) with the post ban period (1100/week), as there was a curfew in both of these going on. The only thing which we can learn from this plot, however, is that during curfews, alcohol bans seem to decrease unnatural mortality.
This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Take a young person who likes to drink occasionally, who is probably a part of some party culture. Now tell them they can not party until further notice. Sometimes, they will adopt well to it, forswear partying and getting really into video gaming. But sometimes they will become depressed and self-medicate with alcohol. Without any drinking buddies providing social oversight and making sure that they don't choke to death on their vomit or kill their spouses or roommates, an increase in alcohol-related mortality should be expected.
Also, 350 additional alcohol-related death per week are not a huge number. South Africa has a population of 62M. Mortality rates generally go in the order of a percent a year. The yearly excess mortality from alcohol would be a whopping 0.03%, with 3% of the deaths being attributable to alcohol. This is roughly equal to the deaths from lung cancer (overwhelmingly caused by tobacco) of 0.037% per year. Long-term effects of liver failure due to booze are likely a bit lower.
I am generally opposed to telling people how to run their lives to get rid of these risks. I don't drink or smoke, but at some point the health police might come for me either for rock climbing or spending weekends playing video games, and I would want there to speak out for me.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
but it doesn't result in the development of long-term, sustainable institutions of illegal production and distribution (which we see develop with any in-demand black market item).
This.
Furthermore, alcohol is significantly easier to produce than other drugs, such as methamphetamine. With meth I would likely get caught the moment I tried to source precursor chemicals. With alcohol, all the precursor substances are easily sourced in any supermarket. Building a still is probably the hardest part, but the general principle is simple enough. If alcoholic were willing to fork over half their salaries to be supplied with shitty booze, then a lot of producers of shitty booze would pop up overnight. A total prohibition on alcohol seems about as enforceable as a prohibition on masturbation, but with a lot of people actually going blind.
Of course, prohibition will still deter some people drinking in the long run. But most of the discouraged drinking would not have lead to violent crimes down the road. Your median alcohol-induced murder or rape does not happen because someone drank two glasses of wine at a fancy restaurant, or by some partying kid who was fine to spent the night at a dry bar instead of finding an illegal booze-serving place.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
That is a reasonable argument.
I think that you meant "people who have committed sex crimes against children" when you wrote "pedophiles". There is certainly a large overlap between the two groups, but using the one term for the other discards the criminals who are not exclusively attracted to pre-pubescent humans but still fuck kids when the opportunity arises and the poor fucks who find themselves attracted to kids exclusively but don't break any laws regarding their fetish.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I find it a subversive argument to act as if conservatives and other non progressives should adopt your values on this issue, and somehow it will help them from "dying on a hill". It seems like an attempt to fool them to abandon their preference, and adopt yours, without you giving sufficient due care about whether they might be right. On the face of it, this isn't a valid argument. But since it isn't a new one, there are more that can be said.
Let me try an analogy. I am pro choice of Singerian variant, which means that I don't think that fundamentally, third trimester abortions to the point of infanticide are not evil per se (only evil in so far as someone would like to raise the kid, and is deprived of that chance). However, I think that politically, it is not savvy to campaign for third trimester abortions. There is a significant demographic which is fine with first trimester abortions but which will strictly oppose third trimester ones. Also, the number of cases for third trimester are small compared to the earlier ones. Allowing 3rd trimester abortions will allow pro life radicals to pull a lot of moderates to their side with pictures of dead babies.
I don't think that policy issues generally are resolved better when they become partisan, with each side claiming an extremist position.
For the purpose of my argument, the radical pro life side ("abortions should always be tried as murder") corresponds to BLM radicals ("When we say 'defund the police', we mean abolishing it"). The moderates are the ones who dislike the death penalty or the 3rd trimester abortions, but don't really care too much about Dobbs or criminal justice otherwise. The point of view I am arguing is people who care strongly about criminal justice or abortion rights, and are fine with the death penalty or 3rd trimester abortions, but would lose popular support if they demanded that.
(Another thing to consider is that among the left, the moderates generally refuse to be alienated by the radicals, with the moderates claiming that 'When people demand X, they obviously don't mean Y, but Z'. (X: "defund the police", Y: "abolishing the police", Z: "move some of the police budget to social services" or X: "From the river to the sea", Y: "destroy Israel", Z: "a two state solution").)
Now, you could counter that late abortions are much less popular than the death penalty, and that could be correct, especially if one considers individual jurisdictions like Texas.
I think that we agree that there are some crimes which are similar to means states should use -- with sufficient procedural safeguards -- as punishment (theft, kidnapping). We likely also agree that there are some acts which are considered crimes when random citizens do them which would still be bad it we had the state do them (rape, torture). We seem to have different moral intuitions into which of the two camps the act of killing a person against their will should fall.
FWIW, I do not consider the death penalty with sufficient safe guards for sufficiently evil crimes to be a great moral failing of the US. I don't like it, but only to the point that I will write on the motte about it. I really hated gitmo, though.
I think that justice should strive to be color-blind. If there are more violent criminals in a minority, the way I would spin this is that this very likely means that the non-criminals in that minority are exposed to more crime than suburban Whites. If police is more reluctant to take action against Black men abusing their partners than against White men abusing theirs, then they are failing Black women, which is something the wokes should care about.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Have you considered the possibility that this is a case of 'arguments as soldiers'? The parent post implies as much, and I think they are correct.
I think we have had a humane method for executing people for a long time: the guillotine. A society which has to sugarcoat their killings as medical procedures (lethal injections) is simply lying to itself about still having the stomach for killing.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
my belief that the absolutist anti-death penalty stance is evil.
I disagree with you there. Modern society has the means to imprison people for decades.
I see the punishment of the worst criminals not in terms of revenge, but merely as society deciding 'you have hurt people badly enough that we will reduce the amount of freedom to enjoy to a degree where you will not be able to hurt anyone again'.
I do not believe that a state should punish murderers by killing them. Or torturers by torturing them. Or rapists by raping them. Or cannibals by eating them. There is all kind of scumbag behavior which decent society should not reciprocate.
Of course, I am also not going to glorify the median inhabitant of death row as some kind of martyr. Murderous fuck got himself caught and killed in some weird rite by the barbarians inhabiting the new world. Not gonna shed many tears for him.
--
I think that having the death penalty seems like a weird hill to die on for anti-crime people. It is not universally accepted in the US, only 12-13 states still execute people. It provides a rallying point for the people opposed to it, from BLM to pacifists.
I get abortion as a CW topic. It matters. I would estimate lifetime abortions per capita to be somewhere between 0.1 and 2. Depending on your stance, that is a lot of innocent fetuses brutally murdered or a lot of women forced to give birth.
The death penalty might have been more cost effective than lifelong imprisonment in 1800 or 1900, but these days it is not (thanks to the efforts of the anti crowd). Clinging on to it for reasons of tradition only seems weird, like running a coal powered train line through some suburb.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Personally, I am not a big fan of politicians doing photo ops after disasters.
In Germany, Gerhard Schroeder won an election this way, standing in rubber boots near some flooded village. Ever since, whenever there is a flood, politicians will decent on the affected areas like vultures on a carcass looking serious. Armin Laschet famously lost his bid at chancellorship because a photograph of him laughing at one of these events surfaced.
Perhaps I am cynical, but I generally find this disgusting. These poor people have already been visited by one plague, do we really have to subject them to a torrent of politicians as well? I mean, if a politician said 'as a sign of solidarity, I will live a month with them in an emergency shelter' that would be some serious commitment (but still net negative for the victims in the case of quite some politicians). But arriving by helicopter, getting helped into your rubber boots, making a short speech and then returning to whatever upper class home you have does not feel like a show of solidarity, but just turns the flood victims into extras in your election ad.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Short answer: I believe that the constitutional rights of a subject should be upheld. If that is generally the case, then any suspect who could only be convicted through evidence obtained illegally will go free. Like the framers, I think this is acceptable. If suspects rights are respected 99% of the time due to any effective enforcement (e.g. incentives due to exclusionary rule, punishment of police), then we are just quibbling over the 1% odd cases where deterrence of police misconduct failed and we have to decide what to do with illegal evidence. The exclusionary rule will not lead to worse conviction rates than respecting suspect rights in the first place.
If you are unable to say 'the world would be better if the cops had not illegally searched the suspect and found the murder weapon, which lead to his conviction' then you are not anti-exclusionary, you are anti-4th.
Innocent people the 4th Amendment was intended to protect.
Wait what? The way I read the 4th:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, [...]
This seem pretty narrowly tailored to express that the government (whose action the Bill of Rights limits) can not conduct unreasonable searches. Your interpretation seems to be along the lines of 'people have a right to security of their person, so the government has to make homicide illegal'.
Famously, the constitution says what the SCOTUS says it says, so if you have a SC ruling that the 4th mandates government action to protect people (e.g. by driving away natives, or defending you against a mob, or forcing states to build hurricane shelters), I will concede this to you.
It seems obvious that the constitution tries to strike a balance between civil rights and police efficiency. The 4th seems a good example here:
- On the one hand, you could not restrict police searches at all. Having police do random (or 'random') searches of homes will certainly mean a lot fewer criminals will get away with their misdeeds. However, it would also be a way for the state to punish dissidents: even if they don't find anything incriminating, having your home searched (and your dog shot in the process) is a pretty harrowing experience. Also, every home likely contains some minor fine-able violations if you look hard enough.
- On the other hand, you could say that homes are inviolable like embassies, and that police may never search them. This would lead to outcomes which I would find unacceptable: if you saw that the kidnapper took the victim to their home, there should be a legal way to get the victim out.
- The compromise is that you require judicial oversight and and probable cause. This seems much more reasonable than the other two options.
If you want to deter misconduct by police, then punish them personally for it.
You might have noticed that police rarely face criminal charges about their conduct. For example, if they get the address wrong while executing a warrant, i.e. they perform an action which has no legal basis, they are still treated very different from private citizens. A motorbike gang who decides to storm some home to look for their dope will generally be tried for robbery, while due to the qualified immunity doctrine police storming the wrong home will face no criminal charges unless you can prove that they acted in bad faith.
On top of that, the DA generally has a symbiotic relationship with the police: they need the cops to investigate and testify. While public pressure will these days make certain that they bring murder charges if there is video evidence, having a policy to aggressively investigate any allegations of police misconduct will lead to the police becoming very uncooperative, which will jeopardize your reelection chances. And the blue code of silence means that you would likely not get very far in any case.
This applies to even routine police misconduct like giving a suspect a black eye without reason. I may judge 'blatantly violating suspects rights to gather evidence to secure a conviction' as 'evil', but I am confident that a significant fraction of cops would judge it as 'heroic'. The chances that the criminal justice system would be able to punish cops enough to deter them from doing so all the time are basically nil.
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How about a compromise: the exclusionary rule can be voided if a cop takes responsibility for the violation of the suspects rights. This involves giving testimony in open court about the gathering of the evidence, asking for forgiveness for violating the constitution and committing suicide through sepukku on the spot. Any inheritance or widow's or widower's pensions will go to the suspect whose rights were violated instead of the family of the cop.
This would both of us get what we want: you would have a way to get around the exclusionary rule, and I would have effective incentives set against violating suspect rights which will keep convictions on illegally obtained evidence rare.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Suppose you are an anti-death penalty extremist*, and you view the death penalty as state sponsored murder. Perhaps you would accept ten free-range murders to prevent one state-sponsored one, perhaps you try to keep the sum as low as possible and think that the expected number of murders a acquitted murderer will commit post-release is smaller than one.
The honest thing to do would be to campaign against the death penalty. The clever thing to do would be to find what people hate most about the death penalty, and emphasize that.
One thing people generally seem to hate are torturous executions, and there are certainly activists making hay with that: whatever method one might care to propose, someone will certainly describe it as cruel or brutal.
Another thing the population does not like is if innocent people are executed. Thus anything which increases the public's estimate of the fraction of innocents on death row will also decrease support for the death penalty.
The low hanging fruits are people on death row who are actually innocent, and getting them freed through DNA evidence is good work. But you don't have an infinite supply of these. So you expand your scope to people who might be innocent. In a strict anti-death-penalty world view, getting a guilty man out is still net positive: not only do you prevent once action you consider murder, but you also increase the perceived base rate of innocents ('not proven' might be more accurate) on death row, thereby eroding support for the death penalty.
Then there is signaling value to be considered. There is little signaling value in believing a woman's rape accusation if it is backed by video evidence: anyone with any politics would agree with you. By contrast the signaling value of publicly stating that you believe accusations not backed by evidence made by a woman who has lied under oath before is much higher, because it is a costly signal for outgroup members to send. Likewise, it could be that anti-death-penalty activists might get into a #BelieveDeathRowInmates competition where getting acquitted clients who seem more obviously guilty has stronger signaling value.
Even if the activists fail to get an acquittal or a stay of execution, they still win, because it was not never about that one convict in the first place. If you get the media to report the execution as controversial, that will cause the general population to update towards p(innocent|death row)=0.5, which is good enough. By contrast, defending someone in a jury trial successfully is much less effective, because it reinforces the message 'the system works: innocents get acquitted', which is not the message you want to send.
One can debate if the Innocence Project contains anti death penalty activists, and especially such activists who would prefer a murderer to walk free (after a few decades) to them being executed. The Wikipedia page is rather positive. Of course, it also says:
The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry Scheck and Peter Neufeld who gained national attention in the mid-1990s as part of the "Dream Team" of lawyers who formed part of the defense in the O. J. Simpson murder case.
I have not studied the OJ Simpson case in enough details to have my own opinion on it, but from what I have read, the accuracy of the verdict is at least contested, and the defense certainly went above and beyond to get an acquittal. So a cynic might suggest renaming it to 'The Innocent like OJ Project'. On the other hand, they also have spent a lot of effort on clearing the name of people not on death row through DNA evidence, so painting them as 'always chaotic evil' seems wrong as well.
[*] As an European, I am generally anti-death-penalty. I find it barbaric, ridiculously expensive when implemented with proper safeguards (think US, not Iran), distasteful. But I don't oppose it to the point where I would prefer murderers to walk free to getting killed, so I find myself on the same side of the fence as death penalty enthusiasts opposed by my hypothetical radical activists.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Thanks for the background on reasonable doubt.
Where I object is when people try to smuggle in reasonable doubt after the verdict, so that the standard is >95% to convict, and if at any time afterward any other person involved (judge, prosecutor, etc) gets to <95% the conviction should be overturned.
You are correct, in the absence of numerical odds given by the jury and given that updates after the verdict are very costly, we should have some hysteresis built in for the verdict. Say we don't want to execute some man who is innocent with a probability p_k (perhaps 10%, or 5%, or 1%). What we should do is require a higher standard for conviction verdicts, perhaps p<p_k/x (Where x might be 5, perhaps). Then after the verdict, we have some slack to not revert the verdict even in the case of evidence with an odds ratio 1:x in favor of innocence.
Of course, an extremist view would be that we should never overturn verdicts and just accept the deaths of innocents as already priced in, statistically, in our p_k threshold (as long as the juries are well calibrated). However, not using all the available info (with exception of the exclusionary rule in court) seems indefensible (and I see neither you nor anyone here arguing for it). The reasonable doubt standard on judgement day likely applies on a case-by-case base, the governor who signed an execution order for a man who is likely innocent and just tells God 'well, I found that jury verdicts generally achieve your ordained threshold, and found it to bothersome to update, but look, the other 19 men I hanged were all murderers, so statistically speaking, we are good' would likely be hellbound in most theologies.
Of course, Scott Alexander advocates explicit probabilities:
And if upon the Judgment Day
God comes to me in wrath
I'll have a PowerPoint prepared
To prove I did the math
Yes, just about every successful politician is like that. Ideally, you pick out your policies well in advance so that you don't have to do a 180 in public, but sometimes it can't be avoided. Often, you can just get by with deemphasizing something you used to talk a lot about instead of actively coming out in support of the other side.
Even with the benefit of hindsight, you still might want to change your opinions because the ones which allow you to rise in a party are different from the ones which win elections.
Having a leader who has principles and is willing to sacrifice their reelection to follow their principles is better than having an opportunistic leader who will do whatever the public wants only if their principles are good principles, followed sensibly.
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