quiet_NaN
3d ago
But even more importantly, consciousness is not about what a creature says, but how it feels. And there is no reason to think that Claude feels anything at all.
Seems exactly like the kind of argument a p-zombie would make </sarcasm>.
For me, this seems to be a silly argument akin to "how many needles can dance on a pinhead?" We have no way to test if Joe over there is a p-zombie or not, which would be a minimum requirement to include the concept of consciousness into a world model.
First, convince me that angels exist, then you can argue about their spin numbers and I might give a damn.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
make Germany great again
I will stand by this, actually, because while it was not a NSDAP slogan (they used "Deutschand Erwache", awaken Germany, I think), I think it is a fair summary of their platform in four words.
Take the endonym of the regime, 'Third Reich'. Its explanation supposes, simply enough, that there were three times in history were Germany was great. The first time was the thousand-year long Holy Roman Empire (ending with Napoleon), the second time was the Prussian German Empire (ending with Germany losing WW1, or in the mind of the Nazis with Germany getting stabbed in the back in the back by traitor Jews and Commies in alliance with evil foreign powers bent on keeping Germany down through the Versailles treaty), and the Nazi project was promised to be even greater than these two glorious periods of German history, lasting another thousand years or so.
I concede that I would have been unlikely to pick exactly that phrasing if Trump had not used it before. I did so intentionally, because I claim that the most basic narrative -- our nation is destined for greatness but traitors and evil foreigners are keeping up from it, but now a strong man will clean up is pretty similar.
I think it is more than just combining a presidential campaign slogan with a bloodthirsty monster of history. If I tried "Lenin promised the masses Change They Can Believe In", I feel like the analogy would fall apart plenty of steps before the MAGA/MGGA one, as Lenin wanted to violently change the system, and Obama advocated working within the system.
I am also not claiming that Trump is Hitler or as bad as Hitler. I am pointing out a curious similarity (not unique to them, plenty of strongmen have campaigned on similar premises), which would be a deadly sin on LW ("how can you poison our minds by bringing politics into this"), but seems pretty standard for the motte.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
Sure. I tend to forget about that because the Oder-Neisse line was reality for about four decades when I was born and had even been accepted by both Germanies for more than a decade. Perhaps 1 in 100 Germans today would seriously consider sending tanks to change our border with Poland to acquire lands which have not had a German population in 75 years.
And while driving out the Germans of lands which they had settled long before Hitler would definitely be a war crime by today's standard, the Germans had just done the same to the Polish and Russians (and a lot of other Slavic peoples) before with a much higher death toll. Basically my understanding is that if the Red Army wanted you gone from the lands, you had a decent change to escape with your life. If the Wehrmacht really wanted you gone from the lands, you would likely just end up as a civilian casualty to the siege of Leningrad.
We were actually rather lucky that despite Hitler betting all and losing, we did end up with a lot more than nothing after the war. Germany did not share the fate of the Carthage. We did not even get the Morgenthau plan, West Germany got the Marshall plan instead for geopolitical reasons. If I had to chose between living the life of either the modal 20-yo Sudentendeutscher making it to West Germany with the clothes on his back in 1945, or the life of the modal 20-yo Soviet citizen, then with the benefit of hindsight I would pick the life of the 20yo who starts from zero but gets the Wirtschaftswunder after a few years.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This is all a bit of theater.
As long as there is a die-hard group of pro-choice activists willing to both spend money and potentially break the law to enable women in red states to access abortion, you would need draconic customs inspections between US states to block that.
Both mifepristone and misoprostol are from the 1980s and in wide use all over the world. I would assume they can be sourced in bulk so cheap that most of the costs per abortion are actually the shipping costs. There are likely sufficient activists willing to enable abortions in red states that they are willing to do the logistics for free and pay the shipping costs. It will be next to impossible for a red state to track down the senders and secure a conviction against them if they are based in blue states and local law enforcement decides that this particular violation of FDA regulations is not worth their time.
From the anti-ICE protests, this would be exactly the sort of grassroot activism I would expect the blue tribe to excel at.
And the activists could certainly make the case that any woman can technically terminate her pregnancy, they are simply providing a safer alternative to coat hangers as a public health service.
Short of new federal legislation, I do not think this can easily be changed. Banning at-home pregnancy tests would not suffice, it would simply lead to abortions occurring later. I mean, the red states could try to introduce mandatory monthly pregnancy testing for all fertile women (so they can launch a homicide investigation whenever a woman who was previously pregnant becomes non-pregnant without a baby to show for it), but even the current SCOTUS might frown at that.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
To falsify it, I would have to find a single woman (a counterexample) who would never date a man with a given political opinion.
This is either trivial or impossible. To the degree that it is trivial, I pick Greta Thunberg as the woman and "build more coal plants" as the political opinion.
I suppose that @FtttG might say that this is merely because the candidates fail to "tick enough of her other boxes", and if god wanted, she could certainly create a man who is so perfect a partner for Ms Thunberg in every possible way from gender identity to kinks to lifestyle and everything that she would date him despite his fossil fuel opinions. And that would be impossible to falsify.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
This is an incredibly bad top level post, even for a weekend.
First this seems 'boo outgroup'.
Second, liking Hitler is an extreme fringe position in Germany. Hitlers success at making Germany great again was very short-lived, and most German nationalists would not claim that a few years of ruling most of Europe at gunpoint was worth the eventual defeat, the splitting of Germany (with the East still worse off than the West today) and the destruction of the Germany cities, even if they were totally indifferent to the pain the Wehrmacht inflicted on the rest of Europe. As a rule of thumb, great leaders do not cause their countries to be ruined within a decade and change.
Or do you mean that the person you are talking about is not a German, and Hitler helped develop another nation, indirectly? The US? Israel? This would be much easier if you had bothered to proactively provide evidence, e.g. a link to a tweet or something.
Third, you can't chose what people admire you, and as a dig at Netanyahu it seems incredibly weak. I dislike his policies from the bottom of my heart, but "a fringe German Neonazi agrees with him" does not change at all how I feel about him.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
someone I think is a lesser human than me
That is a curious way to phrase it, and fails the ideological Turing test hard.
Most people have outpgroups whose members they like less than members of their ingroup. For example, they might consider the classes below them to be the unwashed masses and the classes above them to be entitled snobs who do not deserve their wealth and status. Even the most enlightened utilitarian will like some people more than others.
But to explicitly impose a total ordering of human worth is definitely Nazi-coded, and almost nobody does it these days. Even our resident immigration skeptics would rather speak of "low human capital people" than of "lesser races".
Now, you can certainly make the argument that SJ does impose a total ordering, but its proponents would say that this is merely conditional on the history of oppression, and that in the SJ utopia white cisgender MAGA-voting men would not be sent to the salt mines, but be convinced of the wrongness of their beliefs and then life in harmony with everyone else or something.
But to go from "oh, you don't like $outgroup" to "you think $outgroup are lesser humans, just like the Nazis!" seems a poor argument.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
No woman is going to turn up her nose at a man for having different political opinions from her, provided he ticks enough of her other boxes.
This seem almost unfalsifiable. I might as well say
No company will ever fire someone for being direct and outspoken, provided he is good enough at his job.
Partners and employees are package deals, and rational actors such as woman or companies often evaluate them using scores. Unfavorable traits like excessive outspokenness or an incompatible political foundation can certainly lower your score to the point where they decide that they can do better than you.
And political opinions covers a lot of territory from 'I voted for Trump' to 'I support the establishment of a Caliphate' or 'I am notorious for calling on twitter for the gassing of $outgroup'. If you are a famous and rich Hollywood actor, the median single woman is probably not going to file for divorce if she learns that you voted for Trump. If you are some rockstar programmer, a company might well decide that they will put up with your obnoxious behavior to a degree they would never tolerate from other employees. I am sure that a disfigured billionaire would be able to find a perfect wife who is willing to overlook his unfortunate appearance and see his lovable character instead, but that does not mean that looks don't matter.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
That is fair. If you ban shawls, turbans and neckties, (or even better, impose upper limits on the tensile strength of anything rope-y worn around above the belt line), I would call that very reasonable.
(Of course, for the SJ left, that is still disparate impact. And the fact that you are running a machine shop instead of an ad agency in the first place is just further evidence that you are in the enemy class.)
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Where did you read this? This completely tracks, I would like to know more.
Unfortunately, I do not recall, exactly. If I had to guess, I would say somewhere LW-adjacent, possible a blog from the SSC blogroll?
I found this on LW, which is probably not where I had read the idea originally (because I don't read most of LW). The comments there link to SSC post about obscure communications in general and an SA lifejournal article (Ctrl-F borscht).
quiet_NaN
5d ago
It might be zero-sum, but with an obvious Schelling point. The Schelling point is proportional representation (PR), where you basically just round the vote to the reciprocal of the number of representatives. If your state has five representatives and with a vote of R: 63%, D: 37%, you would end up with three seats for the GOP and two for the Dems. Anyone who prefers another distribution (2-3, 4-1 and 5-0 could all be gerrymandered) will have a hell of a time arguing that their system is actually fairer.
This is similar to how 'one man (or adult citizen of whatever gender identity, these days), one vote' is an obvious Schelling point. Sure, you can argue that instead voting power should be weighted according to some characteristic, perhaps income tax or education attainment or score on a civics test or the voters ability to fight in a civil war or number of children not dependent on social security, but the chance of convincing most of the others that any of these is actually a fairer way to assign voting power is basically nil.
I would be surprised if the VRA had actually lead to red states being gerrymandered in a way which favored the Dems beyond PR, though it certainly led to limits on how much the state could be gerrymandered in favor of the GOP. The obvious move would be to say 'okay, the VRA says the Blacks get two majority districts, so we will make districts where the majority is Black and the rest is university towns full of pinko liberals'.
Personally, I see gerrymandering as an injustice, and there is no right to equality in injustice. If the VRA limits gerrymandering all of your ethnic minorities into a single district, the GOP could push for federal legislation prohibiting putting all of your religious minorities (e.g. Evangelicals) into a single district.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
One key aspect of dating is illegibility. It starts with flirting, where (I have read that) a key goal is to maintain plausible deniability and avoid creating common knowledge. Is the other party really interested in you, or are they just friendly and generally flirty? There is a reason why "I think you are hot and I would like to have sex with you" is not the equilibrium pickup line.
Most people can't freely chose whom they are attracted to. However, I think that there is a larger dissonance between what the median woman is attracted to and what society thinks a good woman should be attracted to. Admitting "I am attracted to good-looking, rich, high-status men" marks you as a shallow gold-digger. So it is reasonable to enter a mode of cognitive dissonance where you don't notice that common trait and instead focus on how you like men for being funny or whatever.
As an intuition pump, suppose that society deeply frowned at being attracted to boobs, because they are only for feeding babies and anyhow we have formula milk now so they don't really matter. Men still have the same preferences, some prefer smaller tits, some larger ones, but few prefer flat-chested women. But admitting to that would mark them as some kind of perverts. So their brain protects them from themselves and becomes really good at not noticing how they like boobs, and will invent all sorts of other proxies or unrelated variables to explain whom they find hot. Then you come along and talk about SMV and how chest shape is really a major driver of attractiveness in women. Obviously the men would go "well, there are certainly a few degenerate men who have a boob fetish, but most men are good and don't care about boobs at all".
quiet_NaN
6d ago
I am a bit of two minds about this. The Voting Rights Act seems like a band-aid solution, and if this SCOTUS is fond of one thing, it is ripping off liberal band-aids.
But even a quokka (did I use that term right?) in an ivory tower like me who would prefer color-blind policies can see that there is a big narrative difference between 'a third of Louisiana voted for Democrats and not win a single Representative' and 'the Blacks of Louisiana overwhelmingly voted for Democrats, and yet did not get a single Representative who is Black or a Democrat'. Both are bad, but the Blacks are a much more coherent group than people who vote for Democrats. You don't know if your coworker voted for Democrats, but you can certainly make an educated guess about their racial identification.
Democracy works pretty well compared to other political systems by convincing people dissatisfied with the status quo that that they can change things within the system, but it requires a widespread belief that the playing field is at least somewhat level. If you tell a peasant in an absolute monarchy 'if you have policy suggestions, simply become a great knight, accomplish heroic deeds until the king offers you the hand of his daughter and you inherit the kingdom', he will object that this seems very unlikely to work outside fairy tales and decide to try to use pitchforks to campaign for policy changes instead.
As an intuition pump, consider states worth 300 EC votes using state legislatures to pool their electors and award them to the winner of the overall popular vote over these states, effectively forming a single superstate for the purpose of presidential elections. Suppose Louisiana is not part of that block. How would Louisianans feel about this arrangement? Would they go "How other states assign their EC votes does not affect Louisiana", or would they declare "With this setup, the votes of us will never affect the outcome of presidential elections, ergo whoever gets elected is not our president".
I think the root of the problem is that states are competing for national attention, and doing the sane thing and awarding EC votes or Representatives in proportion to the state-wide vote will guarantee that a state will not be worth fighting over. If Colorado decided to do that, national parties would just ignore it completely. "To win one measly EC vote through campaigning, I would need to convince another 10% of their population to vote for me instead of the other guy? Hard pass."
Instead, it is the interests of states to be battleground states. "Half of our voters prefer Democrats, and half Republicans. The tiniest margin will decide who gets all of our EC votes and Representatives. So you better try hard to send gifts our way to convince the marginal voter to prefer you."
If doing the sane and stable thing leads to you being ignored and borderline flip-flopping makes you the center of attention, then states will behave as if they had BPD.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
I think your example is more than simply disparate impact. If you decide that out of all headwear, turbans are verboten it seems likely that you are intentionally using this as a proxy.
A better comparison would be an accounting firm which only hires hot women. Then some Muslims complain that this is a discrimination against Muslims, because in traditional Muslim families, it is the husband who works outside the house and earns money. The employer does not give a damn about the religious affiliations of his employees, as long as there is enough cleavage for him to leer at. Is the employer guilty of religious discrimination?
Southern Republicans don't care about the skin color of the voters, they would happily win with the votes of the Blacks if the Blacks were voting for them. However, they care about the Republicans winning the maximum amount of seats, and Blacks tend to vote for Democrats, so they gerrymander to constrain the voting power of them, just like they try to constrain the voting power of urban communities or furries.
If Republicans were on record that they would rather lose than win with Black votes, things would be clear, it would be straightforward racial discrimination. This way, it seems much less clear, but I would argue that partisan gerrymandering is bad in itself.
Obviously FPTP is to blame, and the US should just adopt a better voting system. Or they should do recursive gerrymandering. (7% voted for candidate A, but due to communal gerrymandering, candidate A won 13% of the communities. Due to the gerrymandering of the communities, this won him 26% of the districts. Due to the distribution of states, this this won him 51% percent of the EC vote, so welcome your new president.)
quiet_NaN
7d ago
From a purely utilitarian perspective Nazi medical experimentation on live prisoners was an unalloyed good as they greatly expanded our understanding of phenomena like Shock and Hypothermia. This understanding has, without doubt, saved many more lives than those experiments consumed.
The hypothermia research was the rare exception of Nazi medical research in that it had actual value. Basically, it allows you to estimate how long a human can survive depending on the water temperature, which is useful because rescue crews thus know when they can stop searching. Obviously not all the people who was rescued in cold water after consultation of that chart owe their lives to it, people have rescued shipwrecked sailors long before the Nazis. I would say the marginal effect is that (1) you avoid rescuers losing their own lives due to a futile rescue and (2) you avoid opportunity costs of futile rescues -- if you know that all the people from ship A are dead, you can instead focus on rescuing people from ship B, even if it had a smaller crew. Rascher's freezing experiments have killed some 300 people. I think similar data could have been collected through ethical means, but obviously it would have taken longer.
Most of the Nazi medical research was much more dubious. Mengele would be a rather typical example, a murderous SS fuck who spend his spare time on torturing prisoners for his 'experiments'.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Yes, and that is based on individual natural selection.
The thing is, we are no longer aligned to the imperatives of natural selection. We use contraceptives. We build corrective glasses and synthesize thyroxine for the likes of me rather than letting natural selection deal with them. We have escaped from the yoke of our blind idiot god. Why should we keep this tenet when we have broken so many others?
quiet_NaN
8d ago
This. Every individual in the next generation will have half of their genes from a male and half from a female, so [i]ndividual selection favors equal parental investments in male and female offspring. Obligatory link to the sequences.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I think this will would improve things for a generation or so, but likely increasing the fraction of women in classes which reproduce unplanned will increase their fertility.
One juvenile delinquent can easily impregnate a dozen 16yo's, if there are no competitors, after all.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Another thought: if the Secret Service failed, it was a failure of the Trump administration. The Secret Service is very much under control of the executive. If Trump wanted to be guarded exclusively by members of MAGA militias, he could certainly arrange for them to be hired. He made much bigger personnel changes happen in the USG, in fact.
I concede that this mostly rebuts the "they are incompetent" claim. If your claim is that they are highly and visibly competent, but also conspiring to get the president they are sworn to protect killed on their watch, it would not be reasonable to blame the administration for their failure to anticipate this treason.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
mos maiorum
That is a good point, actually. Trump has always not given a fuck about how things are customarily done in DC, from Birtherism over election denial to tariffs based on little more than the hope that they would be too bothersome to revert. There was corruption in DC before, but it had an etiquette, like people going to the bathroom to relieve themselves. With Trump, it is all blatant, the equivalent of just taking a dump in the middle of Time Square.
So yes, getting shot as a sitting president in a world where that just does not happen any more would seem perfectly in character for him.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
This is also not a situation where things have been calm for a while, we are at war and several attempts have been made, and people have died (ex: Kirk).
Yes, you are technically at war, and yes, Kirk was killed, but the way you phrase it implies that these things are connected. Kirk was a victim of violence inspired by the culture war, but the culture war has not killed very many people for all the mind space it claims.
And yes, you are fighting a war against Iran, and Iran would probably jump at the chance to assassinate a US president, but this seems to be a problem of your own making.
Are all of our institutions really so rotten?
You can still rely on the US military. They are world class at killing elderly theocratic leaders, kidnapping foreign rulers, fighting naval battles against suspected drug smugglers, and neutralizing girl schools.
Seriously, in the grand scheme of things, the Secret Service is pretty far down on the list of relevant government institutions. Even if they failed to stop a president getting killed once per dozen years, this would not result in a lack of qualified people willing to do the job.
More broadly, Trump is synonymous with dismantling or perverting institutions or replacing them with his own cheap temu knockoffs:
- Research: His administration plans to cut the NSF budget in half.
- Higher Education: Trump has (correctly) identified universities as hotbeds of social justice progressivism. But rather than just pushing back against affirmative action, he is trying to dismantle them. For example, not allowing international student visas for Harvard will result in the best and the brightest of the world (whose influx has been a major advantage of the US in R&D) avoiding the US.
- Public Health: RFK as a secretary for health is like making Gargamel the minister for Smurf welfare.
- Multinational and international institutions: Since WW2, the US had used soft power to great effect. US foreign relations towards other West-aligned countries were based on the idea that there are deals where both sides win. NATO was such a case -- both Europe and North America had an interest in Europe not falling to the Soviets. The UN and the Security Council was another case, nobody was very keen on starting WW3. Free trade and the international rule based order were based on something similar. Trump did away with all of that. For him, deals seem to be zero sum, if the US is not fucking over some other country, that means they are getting fucked over. He snubs the SC by sending his wife of all people to represent the US and pushes his fictitious 'Board of Peace' instead.
- DoD: Not faced by budget cuts, but its mission to defend US interests is seriously undermined by Trump not having a broader strategic vision. When GWB started his wars, he at least had allies at his side and it took a few years until the magnitude of the strategic failure became apparent. Half of Trump's tweets about the war he fights on behalf of Israel have a sell-by date less than 24h in the future. Macho warrior culture focusing on the physical fitness of senior officers and Kid Rock will not make the US military better at doing its job.
- DoJ: To be fair, Trump did not start the lawfare, but boy did he double down on it. And bullshit charges which will never convince any trial jury are just half of his MO. The feds are still investigating legitimate criminals, sure, but the deeper purpose is not justice but a shakedown. Get convicted, donate to Trump, get your presidential pardon. Biden pardoned his son (likely because he felt that Trump would spend half the DoJ personnel hours to go after his enemies -- not that he was inaccurate there, sadly), which did immense damage to the perception of the rule of law, but again Trump doubled down by just pardoning crooks who did not hurt him personally and are willing to buy indulgence.
- SCOTUS: Now, Trump is not the first president to criticize the SCOTUS when it decides against him (which happens rarely enough). Biden called Dobbs -- the biggest loss the liberals faced in court in a generation -- a tragic error. By contrast, when the SCOTUS decided that Trump's dubious theories why he could impose tariffs did not convince them, he went into full-on attack mode, calling conservative justices who had voted against him "disloyal". It is clear that he expects the relationship between a president and a justice he appointed one of vassalage -- he gets them a cushy job, they vote for his interests. Past presidents have understood that different candidates may lean different ways, and picked one who cared about the same things as their side, but ultimately they did not expect loyalty from them.
- Democracy: Trump is utterly unable to gracefully accept defeat. His instinct when he has lost is to flip the table and set the board game on fire. This makes him different from any pre-MAGA politician. Sure, people have demanded recounts in front of the SCOTUS before, but that is still part of the rules of the game. Once the SCOTUS has spoken, you accept what they have said, and don't tell your followers to 'stop the steal'.
So in conclusion, Trump is the one who you would vote for if you found that US institutions are beyond saving (probably because they are woke) and should be dismantled. Sadly, his replacements are what you would expect from some banana republic. For all of Harvard's many faults, Trump University is not an adequate substitute. The Peace Nobel has not been without troubles, but does anyone seriously expect that the FIFA peace price will earn a similar prestige? Likewise the Security Council -- mostly a club of big countries with nukes who will only vote for resolutions which do not touch the interests of any of their client states, but who on occasion have aided in conflict resolution. Trump's pay-to-play Board of Peace will die with him.
Quite frankly, the only reason why I do not want Trump to replace the Secret Service with the TRUMP ELITE PRAETORIAN PRESIDENTIAL GUARD is because it would enable them to further his cause by getting shot by some dumb liberal, which would be his most effective move now. But I cling to some faint hope that he decides to take health advice from RFK Jr and croaks of measles or brain worms or whatever retro diseases are en vogue among anti-vaxxers.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Why is that surprising? He decided that the world would be better off with Trump shot, which I do not agree with for various reasons mostly orthogonal to any sacredness of Mr. Trump's life.
But once you have decided that utility will be increased by killing an important public figure, it seems perfectly rational to conclude that this will not change if you also have to murder a few innocent bystanders in the process. I would be surprised to learn that anyone in the decision chain leading to the assassination of Ali Khamenei lost any sleep over the women who died in the attack. If blowing him up was net positive, then it would still be net positive if a few innocents died alongside him.
It would be wrong to view people who engage in violence for political reasons as evil worshipers of Khorne who live and breathe death. Most of them likely share 99% of normie values, but something convinces them that this is indeed one of the exceptional cases where killing is required and they try to shoot Trump or throw the cyanide canister in the gas chamber or leave a bomb in the Wolfsschanze or sink a suspected drug smuggling vessel.
quiet_NaN
9d ago
Steelmanning an assassination is if sincere, the height of quokkadom (unless it actually is against Hitler or equivalent).
This is the motte, a site for rationally discussing heterodox opinions, some well outside the Overton window. We have Holocaust deniers, people who want to disenfranchise Blacks, or women, all kinds of witches. "Your argument shows that you are a terrible person and you should feel bad for making it" is not generally considered a valid counterargument. You are arguing backwards, "of course, assassinating Trump is evil, therefore whatever the assassin believed must be wrong." You did not engage with my steelman (which is mostly not the reasoning of the would-be assassin, from what I can tell) at all.
Now, you could certainly argue that humans should never kill other humans without due process unless these humans are evil on the scale of Hitler. But then you would have to consider Trump a murderer as well.
The Ayatollah was very much not Hitler. He was the leader (or figurehead) of a system which recently killed some 6500--36500 people (estimate range on WP), plus perhaps a thousand a year in executions and extrajudicial killings. I would estimate the total deaths during his tenure to be less than a 100k, so perhaps three milli-Hitlers. I am not crying over his violent end, though I would argue that it would have been better not to kill him for utilitarian reasons.
Unfortunately, Trump has killed a lot of people with a death toll far lower than the Ali Khamenei as well. Take his strategy of sinking suspected drug-smuggling boats and killing any survivors. The median person on a drug-smuggling boat (charitably assuming that the identification of the US is indeed correct) is not some drug kingpin who has ordered the deaths of dozens. He is likely to be some sailor who found that he can work three times as much working smuggling drugs than he can working on a fishing boat. Sure, cocaine kills (though rarely through murder), and he directly profits from that, but few would argue that he would deserve summary execution for it. (As an intuition pump, consider a US worker who helped manufacture the bombs which hit the Minab school. He knowingly profited from manufacturing a device which he knew had a substantial chance to kill innocents, when he could have opted to find a less convenient job instead. If a sailor on a drug-smuggling boat deserves summary execution for profiting from drug deaths, it seems hard to argue how the bomb factory worker does not deserve summary execution as an accessory to murder.)
Trump certainly did away with the theory that the lives of heads of state should be considered to have more intrinsic worth than the lives of other people, and for once I agree with him (though utilitarian sadly considerations apply, as mentioned). The fact that he is a head of state does not increase the intrinsic worth of his life over that of some Hispanic sailor or Iranian school girl. If an ordinary person blew up ~170 school girls through recklessness, we would call that depraved heart murder and lock him up for life. Trump has certainly ordered the intentional killing of people who had 100 times less blood on their hands than himself.
There are certainly ways out of this dilemma. For example, you could say that actually, a foreigner is worth only a millionth part of a US citizen, which should suffice plenty -- at least if we only consider violence, and not the deaths resulting from cutting USAID in half. Or you could say that officials are allowed to kill people, but then you will find your reason to blow up Khamenei gone. So you amend that they are allowed to kill people if you like their cause, but that does not seem very principled. Or perhaps you set some threshold, 'Let n be the number of people killed by an official, and k be the number of people he could have killed. If n/k>q, then that official is a vile monster who needs to be bombed, otherwise he is a respected statesman who did what the job required.'
Trump talks about bombing Iran 'for fun', and has made the threat to permanently destroy Iranian civilization overnight. If you really considered human life sacred, that would have upset you 90 million times as much as my steelman.
Thanks for the link, this is enlightening in a not very joyful way.
Frankly, this reads like a description from an industry insider who tries to be neutral and cover the viewpoints of many sides. I will provisionally update on it, it seems unlikely that someone would spend that amount of time on spinning a counterfactual narrative with that little potential for mass attention. It also feels plausible given what little I know from the finance industry and what my guess of SJ aims and methods are.
Nor is it AI, not with:
Amen.
More of McKenzie's dry, subtle humor:
On the SPLC ironically lobbying for laws forcing banks to report on NGOs:
Personally, I hate pretty much everything about the system he describes.
Allowing private businesses discretion over whom to conduct business with is good only if the market is working well enough to compensate individual decisions, and there is no systemic force which provides incentives not to work with some groups. If you have (for whatever reason) a monopoly on some good people need, like shoes or air transport or internet access, then I prefer if the state mitigates the impact of that monopoly by limiting your discretion in choosing customers.
Of course, the banking system is even worse than that, because it is tightly regulated by the USG, and the regulators have a lot of leeway:
Basically, if someone were to found a bank specifically for debanked people (excepting the OFAC list), like Nazi orgs or porn producers (though I think there the problem is more credit cards, specifically), they would not get rich by filling a niche left open by the system. Instead, the regulator would crack down on them hard at the first opportunity, and the executives would be lucky to escape with their freedom. "How could I have known that this porn producer would pay an underage porn actor with a fake ID from the bank account" -- "You could just have refused their account proactively, like the rest of the industry".
In a free society, it should be possible for the CEO of a non-criminal business to insult the president without the president shutting down their business in retaliation.
Of course, the potential for selective enforcement is not just to retaliate against banks which allow outgroups to have accounts. Consider:
This seems completely fucked up. If your lie is material in gaining a loan from a bank which you then default on, then I agree that it is reasonable to criminally prosecute you for defrauding the bank. In most cases, this will probably involve forged documents (so you are on the hook for that, which should carry a higher penalty), because when you e.g. apply for a mortgage, the bank is hardly going to take your word when you claim you own some property.
I do not particularly like money laundering, and agree that it is useful to have laws on the books against it to make it harder for criminals to spend their ill-gotten gains. However, McKenzie certainly makes it sound like 18 USC 1344 also applies to people using banking services normally while lying to a bank:
Crazy if true (which I have little reason to doubt). Reading the statue, it seems very plain that a dealer who parks his ill-gotten gains in a bank account (after having affirmed to the bank that it is not illegal funds) and later withdraws them again was not what the legislature had in mind when they wrote it. Heck, I would rather argue for either "2A only applies to its era's firearms" or "2A applies to nukes" than "1344 includes victimless fraud", because either of the first two seems much more solid than the last one.
The overall gist I get is the old 'everyone commits five felonies a day', and the USG gets to pick whom they prosecute.
Also, it seems like for the SPLC, they die by the very same sword they lived by.
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