quiet_NaN
9hr ago
Yes, if the sheriff is actively lying to the judge and fabricating evidence it's not reasonable to blame the judge,
Agreed. In that case, we would have another remedy: the officer deposits his affidavit under penalty of perjury, and the defense will shortly learn of what facts he has claimed. If he had just claimed "the accused posted on Facebook that he would destroy America for ISIS", and it later turns out that this was a fabrication, that is one particularly vile count of forswearing, the kind which has been punished harshly since the times of Mosaic law.
And yes, the job of the judge is very much to form a preliminary legal interpretation of the facts attested by the officer. If he just follows the officers interpretation of the law ("posting that, he threatened to shoot up a school"), there would be no reason for judicial oversight at all. In civilized countries, there will generally be a hearing of some sorts. Typically, police custody is limited to 24 or 48 hours, and if the cops want to keep you longer, they need you to drag you in front of a judge and convince them that you merit imprisonment. So the person in custody would have the chance to make their case that they merely posted a commonly used meme picture.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Other countries mostly do not elect their sheriffs and judges.
In Germany, both police and judges are civil servants employed by the state following a standard career path. While there are certainly reports about Nazi chat groups among cops and there is the odd scandal of justice once every few decades, I would say that compared to the US both institutions are relatively fine here.
quiet_NaN
18hr ago
There is a concept called punitive damages. WP:
Punitive damages, or exemplary damages, are damages assessed in order to punish the defendant for outrageous conduct and/or to reform or deter the defendant and others from engaging in conduct similar to that which formed the basis of the lawsuit. Although the purpose of punitive damages is not to compensate the plaintiff, the plaintiff will receive all or some of the punitive damages in award.
Sometimes a defendant is liable for damages but did not commit an act of evil. If you crash a car into another car because a marten had chewed on some cables or conducts, resulting in your car behaving unexpectedly, that is just bad luck, and justice would be satisfied if you paid for the repair costs of the other car. If you damaged another car because you were participating in an illegal street race, that would be different, especially if you are rich enough that the repair bill would not hurt you.
If any other gang had kidnapped and held this guy for more than a month, they would be looking at long prison sentences, which would be sufficient to prevent a repetition at least in the short term and hopefully generally through setting the correct incentives. Cops enjoy wide-ranging immunities, so it is not feasible to prove malicious conduct to the point where we can just sentence them to lengthy prison sentences to set incentives.
Sometimes, the justice system will hold an innocent man in prison and he will be lucky if he gets an apology with his freedom. This can happen as a result of honest mistakes. "Given a professional investigation, we concluded at that time that you were very likely the killer, so we locked you up. Later evidence came in which exonerated you, but we could not have reasonably gotten that evidence any earlier. Sorry, shit happens." Good luck getting anything from the state in such cases. Societies reasonably does not want cops to not arrest killers out of fear they will need to pay compensation for arresting the wrong guy later.
But what happened to that guy should not have happened, ever. The police did not act in good faith, nor did the judge. There is no tradeoff for providing a huge negative incentive.
Per WP, Perry county has a population of about 9k, so the damages awarded would come to about 100$ per capita, which is hopefully enough that it will be felt by the electorate and push their gradient descent into electing less terrible officials, and generally provide a healthy incentive not to violate 1A rights.
(As an European, I think it is very silly to let a population of less than 10k have its own branch of the justice system. In Germany, an instance of an Amtsgericht (our lowest court, which would sign off on prison for being a danger to others) represents 130k people on average.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Bad news, like most abuse by officials it gets paid for by the taxpayers and nothing is likely to happen to the corrupt scumbags who were in charge.
This seems to be one of the cases where 'moar dakka' might be applicable. Just scale the punitive damages to the point where Perry county's law enforcement will face unemployment simply because Perry county will be too bankrupt to afford any law enforcement. Less than a million is just a slap on the wrist.
The thing which is confusing me is that in civilized countries, there is generally a narrow limit on how long police can hold you in some cell before a judge has to a-ok it. So the blame for the first two days would lie with the sheriff, and the blame for the other 35 days would lie with a judge who was willing to sign off on him staying in prison. We have judges overlooking the decisions of police because we know very well that cops can not be trusted on whom should be in prison (at least when they are not making a sworn statement which could land themselves in prison). Nor do I buy that whoever rubber-stamped that was so overworked that they could not spend five minutes reading to the case file -- how many people does Perry county hold on a 2M$ bail because they are supposedly an imminent threat to public safety, and how many of these are former cops?
I get that there are good reasons to prohibit suing judges for their legal decisions, but my preferable outcome would be for the judge to decide to change their name and move to Alaska in the hope of no longer being The Official Whose Decision Bankrupted Perry County.
I have also very little sympathy for the taxpayer here. At the end of the day, the buck stops with them -- they elected the sheriff, possibly the judge, or other officials who employed the perpetrators. As a German, let me tell you that "we made a bad decision in the voting booth and now a few years later our county is bankrupt" is far from the worst of what bad electoral decisions can cost an electorate.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
If that would have been the only way to prevent his son from being locked up in federal prison due to malicious prosecution for as long as MAGA would hold power, I might agree with you.
But my general take on the finances of the Biden family is that they would probably have managed to buy a plane ticket to Vancouver and rent him a room in the outskirts. It seems unlikely that Trump would have offered Canada sufficient concessions to get them to extradite him, "we lowered our tariffs by ten percent but in turn we got Hunter Biden" would not play well with his voters -- they were never chanting about locking him up the way they were about Mrs Clinton. Sure, Trump would probably have wasted a few millions of taxpayer money to charge him with everything on the book, but in the end he would have been a target of opportunity rather than Trump's white whale.
Biden feeling the need to do anything about Hunter was a clear vote of no confidence in the US justice system. That is already a pretty damning signal to send by the president. But the fact that he did not pick the option available to most Americans in a similar situation -- exile -- is a hundred times more damning still. It is basically saying
Fuck equality before the law. I am president Biden, and I will not get on a plane to see my son for Chrismas like he was some Iranian or Chinese exile, like he was some commoner. If the price I need to pay for my convenience is to make it common knowledge that laws don't apply to the rich and the powerful (to the degree that anyone was still doubting that after Epstein), it is a price I will pay gladly.
Basically, every one of the millions of anti-ICE protesters has more balls (irrespective of gender identity) than all of the Biden family put together. They know that the eye of Sauron could fall on them at any minute and they could charged with making a false statement to a bank a decade ago, and that they would not have a powerful daddy who would pay Trump a bribe or make some deal getting them favorable prison conditions.
A great president would say that if the government imprisoned the innocent, then the right place for their innocent son would be to be imprisoned with his fellow countrymen. A decent president would send his son to comfortable exile -- about a million times less harsh than what random penniless political refugees or Assange have taken upon them to escape unjust punishment. Only a despicable president would refuse to make any trade-offs with regards to the signals he sends to his people.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think there is a good case to be made that a fig leaf is still nudity. If I see the bare ass of someone, I will not say hm, they might be nude, but they might also be not nude because they have covered their genitals. Phrases like full frontal nudity exist to describe the notable absence of any fig leafs.
Corruption also exists on a spectrum. A company bankrolling a congressional candidate will generally not be stupid enough to make an agreement in writing where the candidate pledges to vote in their interest. No, they are merely supporting democracy and exercising their freedom of speech rights, which seem pretty unlimited for corporate citizens as of Citizens United. When the congressman later listens carefully to the company's representative making their case, that is merely because the company is a big employer in his state, not because they are a donor, you see. It will be very hard to prove the opposite.
Other cases are more blatant. Foreign powers gifting Trump airplanes. Fraudsters getting presidential pardons in exchange for investing in his memecoins.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Pardoning his son was easily the most despicable act in Biden's presidency. But it was not a Tuesday. There is no long and proud tradition of Democratic presidents handing out preemptive pardons like candy.
With Trump, a pardon of some fraudster in exchange to cash (or investment in his shitcoins, which amounts to the same thing) is mostly a Tuesday.
Nor do I think it is sound to insinuate that the support of the Ukraine in the war was a reaction of Ukrainians buying access to Biden through his son. A lot of countries support Ukraine, not all had a president's son on some shady board of directors.
Supporting Ukraine was totally in character for US foreign policy between 1950 and 2005. To my knowledge, Ukraine does not even have a well-funded lobby organization to bribe congressmen to vote for military aid, unlike some other country which received 10G$ a year during a conflict viewed slightly more controversially in the Western world. But AIPAC makes a bad case to argue that the Dems are the party of corruption because MAGA's support for Israel's military causes makes Biden's look modest.
It is well known that there was a bit of a swamp in DC. Big donors would probably not be willing to spend on PACs if the politicians were all unwavering loyal to their ideas and the will of the people. There is certainly a revolving door between policymakers and the industries which they regulate. Nobody believes that a politician paid as an advisor for some company is really giving advice worth his salary.
To try a slightly unhygienic metaphor, if DC was a swimming pool it would be well known that people sometimes piss in it. When Biden pardoned his son for any and all crimes, that was akin to standing on the pool's side and openly pissing into it.
But what Trump is doing is getting up to the topmost board of the diving tower, pulling down his trunks, squatting at the end and letting turd after turd drop in the pool.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
That seems like a fully generalizable counterargument. "Imagine how bad the IDF must have been in Gaza around 2007 for the Gazans to elect that band of murderous thugs called Hamas as their government". "Imagine what the wife must have said to her husband to drive him to kill and dismember her".
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Is presidential corruption still culture war?
The snarky remark would be that presidential corruption is not culture war, but Tuesday.
I have seen precious few people arguing here against the proposition that Trump is obviously leveraging the opportunities of office to enrich himself, his family, his legacy as a president and close allies. I think his apologists here would rather argue that prior politicians were not less corrupt, but only less obviously corrupt (for the most part, excepting Biden's pardons here), or that he is entitled to loot the treasury after his opponents tried to go after his money through lawfare, or that he is still better than a non-corrupt leftist for unrelated reasons.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
Before I deleted X, I saw several posts asking why non-promiscuous men are still chasing the "hoes" (and are complaining about them) instead of concentrating on the majority of women that aren't.
At the risk of sharing the Ig Nobel with you, it seems to me that men might be generally more interested in sex outside established relationships, or earlier in a relationship.
From an evo-psych perspective, this is certainly what we should expect. A female mammal invests quite some resources in her offspring, so genes which promote being picky about partners and mating only with the ones which seem to thrive most in their environment is an optimal strategy. For male mammals, the situation is different, because their investment in the process is comparatively tiny. (Obviously this varies widely between species, I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, etc). One complication with humans is that it is non-obvious if a woman is currently fertile or not. In response, genes thrived in humanity which make men horny all the time, circumstances permitting.
For the genes in a woman, mate selection is akin to the secretary problem. Better to wait a few months than spending years raising a child with subpar genes. (Where subpar could mean 'bad at a silly Kensian beauty contest, like a peacock without any tail feathers'). From the perspective of the same genome in a man, it is still akin to the secretary problem, but on a very different time scale, here the genes would optimize for 'what is the best investment for a day's worth of testes production?'
Obviously this gets complicated by gene-culture interactions, a gene which will cause its carrier getting stoned for adultery or ingroup rape will not thrive too much, for example.
As a man who is by inclination (if not by opportunity) a slut, I imagine that male promiscuity is one or two standard deviations higher than female promiscuity. For example, I imagine that it would be very easy for me to arrange a hookup with someone with a similar hotness score as myself -- if I was willing to hook up with a guy, which is sadly not one of my kinks.
There are probably a few men around who are non-promiscuous to the point where "join a church, court a single woman from the congregation, marry her, have missionary PIV sex, figure out if it is good sex or you have any (non-sinful) kinks in common, have a few kids" is compatible with their sex drive, but most will probably be off better competing for women more interested in sex, at least in the short-to-medium term.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
The existence of God is possibly the culture war issue that TheMotte has the highest degree of internal disagreement about, given that we have a pretty healthy mix of both Christians and atheists here.
Not really. The Motte, child of Slate Star Codex and grandchild of Less Wrong, has strong rationalist roots. I do not recall anyone explicitly arguing here that MAGA is clearly whom God wants to you vote for and that you should not vote Democrats lest you are condemning yourself to hell in doing so. In practice, Trump is 100 times more divisive in terms of CW than God is.
Consciousness is really spooky and mysterious. It seems spooky and mysterious in principle in a way that nothing else in (material) reality is. Perhaps this is an indication that other spooky and mysterious things are going on too, like God.
This feels about as convincing as 'quantum computing and consciousness are both weird and therefore equivalent'.
More seriously, it is not clear to me the consciousness hypothesis is making any falsifiable claim about the observable universe, which it curiously enough shares with the theism hypothesis. (Or at least the less silly version of the theism hypothesis. There are probably people who would claim that praying to god to cure your cancer or strike your enemies with lightning bolts will work outperform chemotherapy and cruise missiles, but their claims are already falsified.)
I will grant you that life is weird, and brains capable of introspection are extra weird. But I do not share the intuition that the material world can not give rise to weird stuff. Take Conway's Life. Cellular automata are dead simple compared to the material reality of atoms and black holes. And yet Life is already Turing complete. Any observable thing my brain can do, including claiming consciousness, a sufficiently large cellular automaton could also do.
--
The other problem with rational arguments for god is that they treat { Abrahamic God, no gods } as a complete hypothesis space. This is silly. There are myriads of possible creators of the universe. Absolutely nothing privileges the Abrahamic God over the alternatives from other cultures. Why God and not Rod or dread Azathoth or Waheguru or a Demiurge or that ball of noodles?
In fact, I think that if the universe we inhabit can teach us anything about our creator, it seems to me that the state we find ourselves in seems incompatible with it being all-knowing, all-good and all-powerful. Like, He created a fine-tuned universe of a diameter of more than 14 Gigaparsecs to get a tiny rock on which us apes could evolve and thrive, and He did not bother to fine tune it a bit more to prevent cancer or kidney stones? Seems like something an asshole move.
More likely, a creator would be wholly indifferent towards life. Even supposing that He had created gamma ray bursts to keep life in check would be presuming too much. Probably He is less interested in humans than we are in the dust mites colonizing our bedrooms.
I am sure that if the kind of larvae which thrive in animal dung had higher cognitive capability, they would worship the cow which produced their cow pat as a omni-benevolent divine creator which produced their world so that the insects could thrive, and claim the bovines have really strong opinions about how a good insect should behave.
quiet_NaN
10d ago
Remember the COVID lockdowns, when billions of school children were confined to their rooms not so much because there was a reasonable suspicion that they were positive, or because they would be competing for ICU beds if infected, but frankly because their freedom was a price the adults were willing to pay to delay the spread of the disease a bit while keeping the economy going?
Contrast with the Hantavirus. Now, I am emphatically not saying that the MV Hondius should have be dealt with using Hegseth's patented double-tap method, even though the utilitarian case seems a bit stronger than for most of his other targets due to tail risks.
But it seems to me that the Hondius should be a Dutch problem, as it is sailing under the Dutch flag. Now, if the Netherlands had cut a deal with Spain to quarantine the people aboard the ship in Tenerife, or even to fly them back to the Netherlands in a charted plane, that would still seem reasonable. Instead, it was apparently decided that the potentially infected people are the problem of their respective states, and they were quickly repatriated (apart from the crew, which is mostly quarantined in Rotterdam because the Philippines were unwilling to just charter a plane to allow their countrymen the luxury of being quarantined on their home soil).
Now, I am an utilitarian. Out of about 200 people on that ship, three have died (so far -- at least another is in 'serious condition'). Without bothering to search for the ages of the victims, let's call it 60 life-years lost (but feel free to refute that). Arbitrarily, let's decide that a life in quarantine has a quality factor of 0.5 (because half the people like Netflix and half would prefer biking instead). Locking up ~200 people for about six weeks each might thus cause a loss of 12 QALYs. The point being that even without considering the the potential for superspreaders, a quarantine would seem proportional.
Yes, containing the cruise ship outbreak would not stop a pandemic if the strain is pandemic-grade, as it is likely endemic in Argentina. However, I do not think this refutes its purpose. You might as well say "sooner or later, that naive tourist walking through the slums will get murdered for his wallet by someone, so I might as well stab him right now".
Culture war angle: different countries are going to handle the quarantine slightly differently:
Greece’s health ministry said a male evacuee will spend 45 days in mandatory hospital quarantine in Athens. Authorities said the man will be placed in a specially prepared negative-pressure chamber at Attikon university hospital.
vs MAHA:
The acting director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr Jay Bhattacharya, says the 17 Americans and one British national who reside in the US will be flown to the University of Nebraska. At a quarantine facility, their risk levels for spreading the virus will be assessed. After that, they will be given the choice of staying in Nebraska or going home, where their conditions would be monitored by state and local health agencies.
Currently, while some people near me claim that this will be the next pandemic, I am taking the fifth until Scott publishes one of his trademark 'much more than you wanted to know' articles. Long incubation period and high mortality (in humans -- the cute little rodents are fine!) certainly form a nice basis if it evolves to be more transmittable between humans. Of course, the WHO tells us that everything is fine, but these are basically the same people who told us that masks will not prevent COVID. (And the perspective of the other side is not very helpful either -- I would sooner take military advice from Hegseth than I would take medical advice from Kennedy.) On Polymarket, a Hantavirus pandemic in 2026 trades at around 10%. This is obviously limited by the usual effects -- even if you believe that the probability is zero, 10% gain over seven months or so is not that great of a return of investment. It would be useful if there were pandemic bonds traded on the open market (so one could compare their prices to what they are usually), but from what I can tell there are none.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that most civilian nuclear programs were subsidized by their government sponsors with more than a passing thought about the military implications. I am not a nuclear engineer, and it might be an urban legend, but I have heard the claim that nobody uses thorium reactors because they are less useful for weapon manufacturing.
It seems obvious that Iran wants to be in a situation where they can quickly switch from a civilian program to a weapons program.
And quite frankly, the Iranian regime would have to be foolish not to seek a nuclear weapon. At the moment, they are in a situation where Israel and the US bomb them whenever they feel like it, and they have little ability to retaliate and cause similar damage in Israel (though interdicting Hormuz is working very well for them). They would fare much better under cold war rules, where both sides will use proxy forces to fight the other and avoid a direct confrontation.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
This.
Some open-world-ish 1st and (close) 3rd person games:
- GTA 3: 2001
- Oblivion: 2006
- Assassin's Creed: 2007
- The Witcher: 2007
- Far Cry 2: 2008
- Fallout 3: 2008 (one week after FC2)
(Also, there were only four fricking years between Morrowind and Oblivion? Damn, video game progress was fast back then.)
quiet_NaN
11d ago
Democrats and younger Republicans are turning neutral to anti-Israel.
I can not speak for the Republicans (or for the Americans at all, really), but while I was never a fan of Netanyahu, I was willing to give Israel a bit of slack to crush Hamas after Oct 7. Unfortunately, Netanyahu displayed a total indifference towards civilian lives. Personally, my attitude these days is that it is sad that the religious nutjobs in the ME want to murder each other, but we can't really prevent them from doing so and should just stay the hell away from them.
At least Israel will be relatively safer for a few years, at which point they will be stronger and possibly able to deal with Iran by themselves.
I think this is going to backfire badly for him. I would claim that the natural attitude of most Americans towards Israel and the ME in general is one of indifference. Sure, some might prefer Israel holding Jerusalem for end-time prophecy reasons, and others might really prefer a two-state solution (and even be in denial about what kind of murderous thugs Hamas are), but Israel has not been a dominant topic in US politics. This was a great environment for AIPAC to work in -- their support could certainly buy a candidate more votes than it cost him in die-hard Palestine supporters.
Trying to starve Gaza made a lot of people care more about Israel, but still not to the point of being unsalvagable. Trump's war on behalf of Israel will make Israel support a prime CW hotspot for the coming years.
Israel's strategic situation without Western support is not all that great. Sure, it is somewhat tolerated by the Sunni's because they have a common enemy, which is Shiite Iran, but my take is that most of the Sunni population does not like Israel very much, which for now does not matter because they can't really vote in another king. They have a population of 10M, e.g. roughly that of Cairo alone. Sure, they have by far the best tech in the ME, but even that depends on Western pipelines, they can hardly maintain a cutting edge weapons platform for anything from submarines to stealth bombers by themselves.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that you are oversimplifying things. The utility of chemical weapons depends a lot specific conditions. For example, they were used a lot on the Western Front in WW1 (though they did not lead to a military breakthrough), while they saw little to no combat use in WW2, not because Hitler was a nice guy who would never stoop so low, but because his blitzkrieg tactics did not require area denial.
So CW depend on doctrine, and doctrine is not something which you can just pick. The Reichswehr could not simply have invented the blitzkrieg, they lacked the vehicles to pull that off. The US military is very long on equipment and rather short on atrocities. They are highly mechanized (which means that CW for area denial are less useful to them), but any war they join is likely to be a voluntary overseas engagement, and they have an electorate back home which tends to get upset over atrocities. For Assad and his ilk, the calculation is different. He did not have the mobility to do blitzkrieg, but he also did not have to consider what his electorate could stomach.
If you are not trying to achieve a tactical objective, but the goal is to spread terror, then chemical weapons are probably 10x as effective per death than bombs are, and radiological weapons might be 100x as effective as plain old explosives. That Japanese cult could have achieved the same death toll of their infamous Sarin attack by throwing a few pipe bombs into a crowded subway car at a fraction of the operational complexity of synthesizing a nerve agent. But if they had done that, their attack might not even have made the top spot in international news, and would long have been forgotten outside Japan.
quiet_NaN
11d ago
this thing that happened in early September of 2001
"Sunni terrorists under the guidance of a rogue Saudi noble (and likely backed by Saudi money) murdered a couple of thousand Americans, so obviously 25 years later we have to support Saudi Arabia against their Shiite enemies, otherwise how would we ever learn if Shiites are better at killing Americans on their own soil than Sunnis?"
quiet_NaN
11d ago
I think that this is giving in to epistemic helplessness.
Sure, the people in the intelligence community might have a better idea of what is going on, but they are not an alien superintelligence way beyond what an ordinary thoughtful person might notice.
If I go to the zoo and see a giant striped big cat in an enclosure, I will call it a tiger, instead of saying "that is probably some kind of animal, certainly a life form, but as a layman I should not have an opinion on its species when there are experts with PhD's in zoology who are much more qualified, and we should await the verdict of an expert panel and not make any assumptions about what kind of cat it is -- perhaps the zoo has painted stripes on a pony."
GWB's wars have certainly taught the world that a successful invasion can still be a disaster in terms of grand strategy. The reverse is not true, so we can certainly place upper bounds on the success of Trump's adventure from his lack of strategic success despite tactical dominance. As another analogy, if I observe a chef preparing a meal and it seems to go well, that does not mean that the meal will be tasty. But if I observe a chef yelling at the dough to rise already and threatening to pour a pound of salt into it while also setting off the fire alarm, that will very probably not result in a great meal.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
I would argue that neither qualify as a large evolutionary change.
If humans did not have the ability to digest milk and recently acquired it, that would be amazing. What happened instead is that all viable humans in the ancestral environment had the genes for the ability to digest milk, but it was advantageous not to waste any energy on producing the enzymes after you were weaned. I suppose that in lactose tolerant humans, the configuration to turn off lactase was broken. (WP confirms that is it simply two single-nucleotide polymorphism -- exactly the opposite of a large evolutionary change!)
Skin color is the same. Almost all humans in the ancestral environment were able to produce melanin. Obviously the trade-offs between getting less skin cancer and producing less vitamin D depend on the amount of sunlight you are exposed to.
More interesting recent changes (though arguably also not a large one) might be the Ashkenazi intelligence gains, or perhaps the acclimation of some peoples to great heights. Still not on a 'new proteins' level, but a bit broader than just the two SNP changes of lactose tolerance or a few dialing down the melanin.
quiet_NaN
13d ago
There are countless government insiders that have told their stories.
I do not doubt it. The problem is, I did not trust the USG's scientific rigor even before it loudly announced that paracetamol causes autism.
The fact that there are credible reports (I think) of the spooks investigating extrasensory perception in the cold war does not imply that ESP exists, the better explanation is that the USG wasted a few millions investigating a dead end (possibly well aware of the odds, just covering their base in case the Soviets got their first, but possibly also because they had true believers advocating for it, it would not have been the first time the USG wasted money).
NASA astronauts reporting and confirming observations of very bright luminescent angular objects tumbling in the moons atmosphere.
For anything observed during the Apollo missions, if I believed unexplained a bunch of people saw, I would have a lot of believing to do. Space in mind-boggling big. The surface area of the Moon is larger than the area of the USSR was. If Apollo astronauts just saw an alien spacecraft by looking out of the window, then either the spacecraft was attracted by them or the Moon is abuzz with alien spacecrafts.
(Also, the Moon's atmosphere is famously even thinner than the evidence for aliens.)
I am skeptical on priors. The aliens would have to have some basic competence at staying hidden (otherwise we would have seen CNN reports of them landing their UFO in Paris and going on a sightseeing tour. But also not too much competence, because the USG caught wind of them. Unless the aliens are big fans of God's own country, this implies that other countries also have evidence. And yet they all formed conspiracies to keep the knowledge secret, but were not successful enough to destroy the belief in aliens.
Aliens who have interstellar travel probably also have to teach one or two other things to mankind -- think Keltham in Cheliax. You might argue that it is impossible to know which technologies are actually alien origin -- perhaps they literally gifted control of fire to mankind, or taught them to build pyramids -- but none of the recent stuff feels likely. LLMs are mostly a consequence of the advances in semiconductors which have been going on for 50 years. If the USG (or any other government) has controlled fusion, or room temperature superconductors, or material with the tensile strength required for space elevators, they surely spend a lot of time keeping their mouth shut. But if there is no technological advantage to be had, then why not tell the world? Actually, with the current US president, I doubt he could keep his mouth shut even if there was an advantage to keep the aliens secret. He would bask in the attention of showing off an alien origin room temperature superconductor as a lizard basks in the midday sun.
The real question is if this is supposed to distract the voters from the Epstein files, or from how the Iran war is going.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
For example, two lesbians end up on the birth certificate and that's affirming and cute under the Uniform Parentage Act (UPA). There seems to be a trend towards "intended parents" over genetic parent.
Presumably, none of the parents there are under any illusions that they are both genetic parents. Likewise, there are likely plenty of cases where one partner is infertile and is happy to raise a kid created without their genetic contribution. This is all fine, as long as there is informed consent of all the parties involved, a lot of things are fine which would not be so otherwise, after all.
You are probably right that things are unlikely to move in the 'more testing' direction; there are likely some blue tribers around who would claim that if a woman was in a relationship with a guy while she got pregnant, any kids are spiritually his (unless she denies it, of course) and he should just pay up. And so far changing any family legislation which advantages women has not been much of a priority for MAGA either, so I doubt this is going to change.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
I think spousal infidelity either appeared with the neolithic revolution, or did already happen in the ancestral environment.
At least as long as men have gone to war, they had the opportunity to fuck around, at least if the brother of their wife is not in their unit keeping an eye on them.
For women, cheating was probably a bit harder in the ancestral environment, but I personally do not envision it like there were sabre-tooth tigers constantly circling around the tribe just waiting for their chance to eat a lone woman lagging a bit behind to meet her lover. Basically, as soon as you have cities which are safe enough to traverse unarmed, most societies will evolve norms to allow lone women to do so. This opens up the opportunity for a booty call on the way back from the market or whatever. Even in the countryside, a woman bringing her peasant husband his lunch could probably arrange a date in the woods on her way back.
I mean, sure, capitalism made it much more convenient, now There Is An App For That. But the only men in history who could really be reasonably sure that their kids were really theirs were men living in societies which were rather strict about policing women.
So my read of your argument is "what is bad about modernity is that it allows for more female infidelity than Saudi Arabia".
I think there is a common pattern where technological progress fixed a problem, which in turn created another problem, which was again fixed through technology. For example, in the good old days, child mortality was sky high. A woman might bury half of her kids or more. Modern medicine fixed that, which in turn might have meant that the population would double every generation. So we invented another ungodly modernist workaround: birth control. That in turn created some problems down the line, etc. Still, very few suggest that we should just go back to letting half the kids die of dysentery or whatever Just Like God Intended.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
One way to fix this would be to just normalize genetic testing after birth for everyone. Compared to all the other healthcare costs of giving birth, a 23-and-me style genetic test is an utterly trivial expense. It is certainly good for the parents to know if their new baby has any genetic disease, especially if they can obtain the info without ending up in a government or industry database.
And it is trivial for the father to also verify that he is indeed the father.
After all, that which can be destroyed by the truth should be destroyed by it.
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Another aspect is that in the age of IVF, women can become victims of parentage fraud just as well. Of course, it would require the fertility clinic to be in on it.
I think it would not be very hard to bodymod a man so that instead of sperm, he is squirting a fertilized egg of his preferred genetic partner. I doubt that this would lead to implantation very often, though, fertilized eggs are not very mobile. One would need a microscopic robot bringing the payload where it needs to go. Still, not something which seems out of reach for this century.
Once women can no longer be certain of their genetic motherhood, I am sure their attitude towards genetic testing will change.
quiet_NaN
14d ago
There are societies in which a man a man owns his wife (or daughter) and her sexuality (or lack thereof) in pretty much the same way a man in the Western world can own a car. In such societies, the analogy would make a bit of sense, we might say "well, you were the prison warden of your wife, if anyone else had sex with her you were clearly in on it or negligent in your duties as a husband."
In the Western world, this is very much not the case. Both husband and wife commonly have plenty of opportunity to cheat without their spouse catching them.
Personally, I think those insurances are clearly immoral, just like offering insurance to companies for fines due to health and safety violations.
I think this is something which could also be solved by moar dakka. Simply award damages (or impose fines, in the case of companies) which are twice the maximum coverage limit of their insurance.
If the county has unlimited insurance, then the first order of business would be to punish their insurance company. This is not particularly hard, the judges will not require Knuth's arrow notation or anything, simple high school math skills will suffice. Big reinsurance companies like Munich Re or Swiss Re have assets worth a few hundreds of billion dollars, a judge could write down a number in 30 seconds which would reliably bankrupt them.
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