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.
--
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
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think that this the opposite of good. It is pure rent-seeking. If everyone does that, you end up with the medieval guild system. Want to bake and sell bread? Sorry bro, you must be in the baker's guild to do that. No, you can't just join the guild. The best you can do is to beg for an apprenticeship with a guild member, and after a decade of working for pitiful wages and playing politics, you might earn your cushy guild job. Or the son of a baker might get that job instead. In such a system, nobody has any incentive to work on innovation or efficiency.
Today, you would end up with a system where you can't fill your gas tank by yourself, because the gas station attendant union lobbied against it, nor change your own car tires, because once the car replaced the horse, the blacksmith's union transitioned from changing hoof irons to changing tires.
There are never enough cushy union jobs for everyone. The net effect is a transfer of wealth from the the people who are not in union jobs to union members through increased product costs.
I am not as rabidly anti-union as the Mindkiller podcast people, and think that historically, unions were probably net-good at times. From a gut feeling, collective bargaining feels more acceptable if exploited factory workers do it than if a cartel does it. But messing with the forces of a functioning market is rarely beneficial.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Your essential point is well received: the jury had an opportunity to consider the evidence pointing towards innocence, and we should take the jury verdict and do Bayes updates on evidence which they already considered, and we should also remember that post trial, the probability of any evidence surfacing is strongly dependent on the direction is pointing, 'not only is he guilty, but we have found evidence for another 100:1 update towards that conclusion' does not make for a terribly exciting podcast.
However, I would set my threshold a bit lower than you. You basically say to update away from the 'guilty beyond reasonable doubt' verdict, you would require evidence for 'innocent beyond reasonable doubt'. I think this is a bit of a high bar. If new evidence pointing to innocence 10:1 is surfacing after the trial, then that might already call the verdict into question, because juries tend not to give out numerical probabilities (not that they would be qualified to do so), and reasonable doubt is not a fixed probability value either.
Personally, I have stronger faith in jury verdicts reached using forensic evidence. I think juries have a tendency to over-update on eyewitness accounts. Here, two key pieces of evidence are not only eyewitness accounts, but hearsay. (Permissible hearsay, but hearsay still.) I don't like that at all. Not only have you all the usual unreliability of eyewitnesses, but one of the key checks on outright fabrications by witnesses, the fact that such fabrications will land you in prison for a lengthy stay, is completely missing. If you claim that Alice shot when you in fact saw Eve shooting, you have to consider the possibility that other evidence will surface which will prove you wrong. "He confessed to me" is the ultimate he-said-she-said situation. Even if evidence later surfaces which clears the accused beyond any reasonable doubt, he might still have confessed to you, people lie all the time. Nailing you for that will basically be impossible.
The second account, plus the knowledge of the damning details of the crime make a malicious witness unlikely. If any shenanigans were going on, it would have to be on the investigative or prosecutorial side. That is unlikely, but not impossible. Plenty of people here seem to believe that defense attorneys who try to get guilty clients acquitted are immoral. From that, it is not a huge distance to 'prosecutors who know the defendant is guilty should subvert due process to get a guilty verdict'. I hope that these attitudes are less common among lawyers, though.
Without diving deeply into the case, I will however not say that the verdict was incorrect.
IIRC, the Guardian mentioned that a prosecutor wanted the case reopened, which would be unusual because prosecutors are rarely anti-death-penalty activists. However, given their usual spins, it likely just means that the prosecutor wanted to identify the DNA on the weapon before the execution, and the outcome 'it got there due to bad evidence handling' was embarrassing but acceptable and they were fine with the execution proceeding.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
"A technicality" is a fuck-up big enough by police or prosecution that a judge believes or the law says that guilt can not be established with legally obtained evidence or that some behavior was so beyond the pale that the best response is to let the guilty walk free to disincentivise similar misconduct in the future.
We are generally not talking about 'prosecution made a few spelling mistakes' here. A defense attorney who gets their client of the hook, even with some far-fetched technicality, is doing their job. If you don't like the common law trial system imported by the founding fathers, there are plenty of jurisdictions where a defense attorney is always just a figurehead, consider moving there perhaps?
Yes, a good lawyer might get their criminal client to walk away freely by playing the role society has assigned for them to play, and that criminal might commit further crimes. But I don't see a big difference from a doctor saving a criminals life.
Of course, a line would be crossed if the lawyer themself break the law to ensure their client is aquitted, like bribing witnesses or tampering with evidence, and anyone who engages in this is a scumbag. But just pointing out why your client should not be convicted due to a matter of law is their fucking job.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
bad for overall messaging
I very much disagree with that. Generally, I am very much in favor of treating your audience like people capable of following your own thought processes.
If Big Yud is worried about x-risk from ASI, he should say that he is worried about that.
One should generally try to make arguments one believes, not deploy arguments as soldiers to defeat an enemy. (In the rate case where the inferential distance can not be bridged, you should at least try to make your arguments as factually close as possible. If there is a radiation disaster on the far side of the river, don't tell the neolithic tribe that there is a lion on the far side of the river, claim it is evil spirits at least.)
I think you have a disagreement about what aspects of AI are most likely to cause problems/x-risk with other doomers. This is fine, but don't complain that they are not having the same message as you have.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think there is a vast gulf between 'I don't want to have kids for whatever reason, and if a sufficient number of people feel the same way, I am fine with humanity slowly fading' and 'fuck all humans, launch the nukes'.
At the worst, it is more like driving an ICE car in a world where climate change is a thing than personally melting the ice caps.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
If you live in a society of laws, you are already not optimizing for preventing victimization. Our loss function is not the sum of innocent police victims and crime victims. If we gave police the powers to kill on sight anyone who they were reasonably sure was a reasonably bad person, it could well be that the number of crime victims saved would be higher than the number of innocents summarily executed by police. But such police states tend to devolve into dictatorships in pretty short order, because there is little in the way of safeguards. This frequently leads to a much higher loss of life down the road.
While it is not commonly admitted, I will grant you that the price we pay for living in a non-totalitarian society where laws impose restrictions on the state is paid (among other things) in victims to crimes which would technically be preventable if we tapped every device and abolished due process.
If we accept that this is the way society sets its priorities, then sacrificing a few more future crime victims to safeguard due process against prosecutorial misconduct just seems more of the same.
Of course, we can debate the exact boundaries for throwing a court case out. Fucking your co-council is generally not the sort of misconduct which sees the defendant walk free, but tampering with witnesses or evidence would be different.
Generally, there are some professions in society where unprofessional conduct can result in innocents losing their lives. We rely on physicians, truck drivers, electricians and so on to do their job reasonably well. The only difference with police and prosecutors is that society would technically be in a position to prevent loss of life due to their fuck-ups after it becomes apparent. But again, this is a price consistent with the priorities of a society of laws.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
The US has a tradition of "punishing" prosecutorial doofusery by letting guilty criminals go rather than, say, getting the marshall to paddle the delinquent prosecutor in open Court.
This is the part I genuinely like best about the US justice system. It is a brilliant work alignment which penalizes a partisan investigative and prosecutorial system for misconduct in a way which really hurts their utility function.
If you imposed some penalty on misconduct, the result will be that people who cut corners to secure the conviction will be regarded as heroes who sacrificed their career, money, or liberty to put a murderer behind bars. With 'evidence becomes inadmissible' etc, these people are more likely to be considered assholes who ruined a lengthy team effort and enabled the murderer to get off 'on a technicality'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Perhaps I have read too much Heinlein, but that non-citizens clause feels utterly bizarre. An alien might be forced to commit treason against his country if he is drafted by the US. As an intuition pump, consider an American civilian working in Moscow. If Putin decided to send him to fight Ukraine, I am very sure that the US government would consider that some kinds of rights violation.
I vaguely recall a scene from a civil war movie where an immigrant on a pier in NY was first given a certificate of citizenship and then a draft order, which is IMHO the proper way to do it.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I think one adult, one vote is a Schelling point we should not break away from without any need.
It is true that most US citizens would not be effective in a civil war. But even among the people who would be able to fight, most are not willing to fight a war over the issues of US politics. Dobbs or Obamacare or Immigration might infuriate people, but not to the point where they would be willing to murder their neighbors or die in some trench over it.
If we give the special forces rifleman the franchise even though it it unlikely that he would decide to support a side in a civil war, should we not also give the arts student the franchise given that it is unlikely, but possible that she would become an excellent drone pilot?
Ruthlessness is helpful in winning military conflicts, so you should award extra votes for the psychopaths who would be willing to nuke NYC over Dobbs.
The price to pay for having voting power proportional to military might is that you have civil wars sometimes, whenever both sides feel that they are stronger than the other one. Expect elites to form their own loyal armies in preparation. We know the end result of that, it is called feudalism. Of course, while medieval societies could survive the odd civil war over some election dispute or succession, industrialized warfare is much worse.
The present system is a much more civilized alternative. Violent gangs and jihadists don't get an over-sized share of the votes. Instead of spending billions in nuclear weapons programs and stealth bombers, elites can just spend their money on TV ads to influence the outcome of the election. Given how bad nuclear war would be, even the psychopaths are better of that way.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
"Progress" is very much not a linear spectrum. It is more like a tree of decisions which society navigates. Was the criminalization of drugs progress? Is their decriminalization progress? Who should get locked up for which sex acts? How do we balance fundamental rights against each other? In what ways should developing countries become more like Western societies? Should the US intervene to prevent atrocities or not? How do we balance rights between children/youths and their parents? Should adults be required to wear seat belts? Fossil fuels drove the engine that abolished serfdom, industrialization seems a requirement for any non-terrible society. How do we balance that against not exacerbating climate change? How much should we care about biodiversity?
Of course, there are some big milestones of progress which can be put in something like a linear order. Slavery bad. State discrimination by gender or skin color bad. Rape bad (even when in marriage). Locking up adults for consensual sex acts generally bad (but views differ in case of prostitution). Hurting kids bad (in most cases). Hurting non-human animals bad.
But this is not something you can fit a straight line through and extrapolate: "In 2200, people will think we were monsters because we killed plants" does not sound right.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I generally think that both nice, harmonious and disturbing, disharmonious works of art can be appreciated. Some people like classical music, some like punk rock. Some watch My Little Pony, some watch Chernobyl.
With texts (now that I am out of school), audio, video, paintings, theater, opera, sculptures, video games I can mostly decide what I want to consume.
Not so with architecture, in most cases. I mean, if I don't like Disney castles, I can stay away from Disneyland. Perhaps it is even feasible to stay away from a shopping mall if I think it is a crime on good taste.
But most of the buildings I visit are not this way. Picking a school and employer uses complex scoring functions, and 'do I like the building?' is not gonna be in the top ten deciding factors. For living accommodations in cities, there is even less slack to spend on architectural taste: if by some miracle I find a place which fits my other criteria, I will not care if the facade is raw concrete or if some sick fuck decided that the outer walls should weep blood like in some horror movie.
So in my point of view, most big buildings should not strive to be expressive in the same way as literature or video games are. Making them extra ugly is uncalled for, but making them extra nice from the outside is also not necessarily: schools are places were we store kids so they don't distract their parents from working, making them super nice looking would simply sugar-coat that fact. The kid getting thrown in the trash can by some bullies will not be very appreciative of the scenery. Nobody visits the DMV because they really like it there. Of course, buildings should be comfortable from the inside, have good light, short walking distances etc, but this is a rather straightforward optimization problem.
So my gist is, if it is not a new art museum or opera house or villa for some rich guy, you probably don't want a fancy artsy architect who has read Heidegger, just tell some civil engineer what your constraints are and let them optimize.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Well, the current minimum residency for EU citizenship is Malta with 'just move here and invest'.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Of course, almost any system that allows for absentee voting seriously struggles on this point
One way to avoid this would be to have voting booths in place where people are likely to vote -- embassies, military bases, hospitals, nursing homes. Just say that a mail-in envelope has to have a stamp certifying booth usage. Of course, state officials would have to rely on the testimony of federal institutions like embassies and military branches, but these are surely more trustworthy than relying on their citizens being truthful when they certify that they have not shown their ballot to another person.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
Well, in her youth, she was a member of the MSI, which was explicitly neo-fascist. Her current party, the FdI shares a lot with them in both membership and logo.
I will grant you that if she is following the classical fascist playbook, she is doing a piss-poor job of it (not that she could get away with it), so describing her government as fascist is probably not helpful.
Still, I think that it is helpful to keep peoples political ancestry in mind a bit, and her roots are not in some moderate Christian conservative right, but in the fascist far right.
If we reserve the phrase 'far right' for parties who are explicitly campaigning on building death camps, then it will not be a very useful phrase because almost nobody, including the NSDAP would qualify.
quiet_NaN
1mo ago
I suppose that by 'blood' you mean ethnic heritage, not service in the foreign legion or occult rituals.
I think ethnostates are overrated. Italy is not genetically uniform, and there is certainly no neat genetic cut-off between German-speaking South Tyrolese and the people living north of the Austrian border. The Sards form their distinct ethnic cluster. None of this matters very much, and few would think that Italy would benefit by granting South Tyrole to Austria and give independence to Sardinia so that Italy can get closer to being an ideal ethnostate.
Being an ethnostate is compatible with being a static agrarian society. Defend your borders, don't let the filthy foreigners in, raise a lot of pure-blooded kids to carry your ethnicity forward. (Take care not to get conquered, though.)
Being an ethnostate does not seem feasible for empires (Rome, Britain, US were/are all notably multi-ethnic), nor does it seem very beneficial for modern globally competitive information societies. Even societies in East Asia which we might perceive as ethnically homogeneous, such as Japan, South Korea or Singapore (not a bastion of wokeness) have naturalization laws requiring residency of 5-10 years. Technically, you don't have to let in foreigners to become technologically advanced, you can also just grant professorships to your own citizens who studied abroad, but this will reduce your applicant pool by ~90%. And societies which are seriously xenophobic might place little value in young people living among foreigners for a few years.
The adjective to describe the gulf states is not 'successful', but 'rich'. The smallish populations inhabiting them simply won the geological lottery, and used their undeserved wealth to import serf while denying them the wealth tied to citizenship. (Political participation is reserved strictly for the elites, of course.) This makes some cruel sense from the point of view of the native population. But unless you are suggesting that being an ethnostate affects the odds of fossil fuels being found in your land, their example can hardly be adapted to other states who have to compete for their GDP. Also, money can prop up a lot of things which would not be stable otherwise, it bribes their own citizens to stay quiet and also buys a lot of fancy tanks which can keep the serfs in check. I am not convinced that Saudi Arabia will be a good place to be twenty years after the oil is gone.
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.
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