wraelk
11d ago
Even just recently, with the governor kidnapping attempt, who's conviction of those indicted was actually overturned because the majority of said group was federal operatives egging the entire plot on. And that overturned conviction was reversed by a higher-judge.
Can you provide some more information on this sequence? Particularly the bit where the conviction was overturned, as I'm having trouble finding anything about it.
What I've seen on this is that the initial trial had some convictions and some acquittals, with entrapment being presented as part of the defense, and then the court affirmed on appeal for Adam Fox and Barry Croft, who argued that the court didn't let them focus on the entrapment aspect as much as they wanted to.
Which, maybe they're right, but if this is just the appeals court going "we're sticking with what the jury said", that seems significantly less bad than judges fighting each other over the conviction, which I can't find evidence of.
wraelk
15d ago
At scouts as a kid, the Dreidl was crackerjack, so there's been some effort. And in middle school chorus, the token chanukah songs were normally pretty good. So it's not impossible.
Yeah I vaguely recall someone coming to our schools a couple times, maybe making some latkes, and learning some songs. Systematize that, bring a basket of challah and some chocolate coins for the dreidel gambling game every year, and it'd be a fantastic initial impression.
But I think it would drop off pretty heavily in adulthood, because while I remember Diwali celebrations in the office quite fondly, I don't remember any Hanukkah equivalent, and I know I have Jewish coworkers. Which speaks to your initial point: Judaism doesn't seem to have much interest in us getting involved in their holidays. So thus I claim the "holidays" for Christmas and Christmas alone, as Diwali lands much earlier, the Asian New Year is later, I have never seen anyone genuinely celebrate Kwanzaa, and New Year's is basically a Christmas extension.
wraelk
15d ago
Happy Holidays My most boomer take, I hate the phrase Happy Holidays.
You've linked Andy Williams' Happy Holidays/The Holiday Season medley, which is the perfect subversion of the original and the general "happy holidays" sentiment: its chorus is Happy Holidays, but 90% of the lyrics are about Christmas and no other holidays are mentioned at all.
Which is in my opinion the best way to respond to the Happy Holidays term: I mean Merry Christmas, you mean Merry Christmas, we all know that Christmas is the only holiday that really registers on anyone's radar. Happy Holidays means Merry Christmas, it is an entirely Christmas-owned term. If the Jews want us to get Hanukkah in there, they better get started on doing some outreach and getting people on board, because right now my second favorite December holiday is Diwali. It's got nothing to do with Christmas, but the snacks are great and the celebrants are generous with them.
wraelk
19d ago
I agree completely, I get incredibly frustrated every time I see this.
Most of the time I see "var" in C#, it's because the dev didn't want to have to track down the exact details of the type they're making a variable of because they understand the general shape of it but the wrappers and type details are annoying.
But the details of that type are important, and if they can't trivially figure it out when they're first writing the code, the other dev who comes in 2 years later to fix a bug with the code is going to have a way harder time.
In theory it's only supposed to be used for trivially-inferrable types like an int, but I very rarely see that because... if it's obvious it's an int, it takes exactly as much time to type "int" as to type "var".
wraelk
22d ago
They did phrase it as "why are you going after Iraq, Iran is who you should be going after" though, which paints a slightly different picture.
https://www.commondreams.org/news/2007/08/29/israel-warned-us-not-invade-iraq-after-911
There's a big difference between "the Empire remains a relevant force" and "it's just the Emperor again" though. A fledgling New Republic dealing with an Imperial remnant force with its own local goals that the Republic is spread too thin to deal with is very different than "if the Imperials ever catch our fleet, we're all dead".
And while the remnants often have something unique that make them a threat to the New Republic, it's rarely a "superweapon" in the sense that the Death Star was one.
- Thrawn himself was his "superweapon" and rather than being a weapon of mass destruction, he had highly tailored and specific tools that let him punch above his weight with the ships he had and his grab bag of tricks.
- Ysanne Isard had a Super Star Destroyer, but that's just a conventional ship: her real threat was her planning and information-gathering, which eventually led to her master plan of taking over bacta production. Trying to choke out a key military supply is wildly different than anything the Emperor has ever tried.
- Warlord Zsinj had a superweapon, the Nightcloak, but it was incredibly limited, an array of satellites that would block out light from reaching the planet. Functionally pretty much indistinguishable from orbital bombardment. Most of Zsinj's threat is his conventional fleet.
Not to say there were no Death Stars: the Sun Crusher is the one I want to call out as being the most boring "well what if we made a Death Star but better". But notably, the Sun Crusher spends very little time in the hands of the Imperial remnant, first serving as an escape tool and then falling into the hands of a troubled young Jedi. So there we have the Death Star, but not the Empire.
My favorite riff on the Death Star was Darksaber, where the main plot was a Hutt finding Bevel Lemelisk, the original architect of the Death Star, and trying to get the minimum-viable-product version of the Death Star, where it's just the laser and nothing else. This is a threat the New Republic has to take seriously and deal with, though it turns out the whole project was a train wreck and it's destroyed the first time it tries to fire the laser to clear an asteroid in its path.
The lack of any of this adjustment is one of the problems with the movie sequels: the First Order is played as exactly the same threat and type of threat as the Empire, with Death Star 3 and similarly overwhelming fleet, and the New Republic is immediately relegated to a background entity so that the good guys can be exactly the same as the Rebels.
I'm not going to personally defend this perspective. I'm just here to point out that the data-based argument that samiam makes doesn't actually refute the "alpha fux, beta bux" argument as incels normally formulate it.
There are certainly philosophical arguments that can be made (really, that's more or less what's going on upthread), and I'm not even ruling out the idea that there's a data-based argument that does refute "alpha fux, beta bux", it's just not this one.
I am not an incel and disagree with many aspects of their arguments: the best I can muster is a "there but for the grace of God go I".
wraelk
2mo ago
Slightly off topic, but I think you may be targeting an incorrect formulation of an incel argument with your second myth (alpha fux, beta bux)
The concept isn't that the women will cheat on the provider, but that they'll eventually settle for a beta provider after spending their 20s sleeping around with alphas, and potentially continue to cheat with the alphas while being married to their beta husband.
You provide as counterargument that few children come from cuckoldry, but that doesn't really address the claim: no one's claiming that the women are having children with the alphas, that would be an insult that even the beta husband could probably not ignore, and would likely lead to the "beta bux" drying up quite quickly (modulo divorce asset division). Instead, the claim is that the women are having large amounts of sex with the alphas before settling on a beta husband, and (more weakly) that they will often continue to cheat with the alphas.
I looked around a bit for a source for the "alpha fux, beta bux" term, and Rationalwiki (who if I recall correctly is fairly anti-incel and thus has no reason to give them an easier-to-defend term) cites Heartiste as the origination of this.
But most women are not that beautiful. For the majority, an “alpha fux, beta bux” strategy will net them, if they are in reasonably good shape, a decade of fantasy-fueling sex and miserable relationships, culminating in marriage (and a bank-busting wedding extravaganza) to a doughy herbling who must know deep in his bones that he is paying dearly for damaged product which better men than he used for free back when it was fresh off the shelves. He must also know that his rode-worn beloved who is about to execute the final stage of her indentured beta male servant plan considers him a second-rate alternative to the lovers of her past. If women don’t think this galls the betas who must accede to these liberated, feminist-friendly conditions, they are in for a rude awakening when they discover how quickly the hubby herblings give up on life and on pleasing their cackling sow wives.
wraelk
2mo ago
https://old.reddit.com/r/theschism/comments/ovvnlg/the_playbook_that_codes_itself/h7do9q8/
State vs debate vs sneer
wraelk
3mo ago
Yeah, that's a fair point: there might be some difficulty finding people from nothing, but I absolutely believe motivated extremely-online people could compile a list of ICE agents who were willing to state it on Linkedin.
Trivial inconveniences might matter there, but it's clearly something that's doable.
wraelk
3mo ago
This is wild to me: I'd say "yes sir" to the garbageman, assuming he was asking me a question where it made sense and being reasonably polite to me.
Or to someone I've actually hired to do a job for me, I'm pretty sure I actually have used it with the pest control people.
I'd use it for basically any interaction in a professional setting: if someone's working a job they deserve at least that much respect, assuming they're not being rude or disrespectful to me. I'd honestly expect both of us to be using that terminology back and forth.
wraelk
3mo ago
But this is broadly what we would expect, in a world where ICE anonymizes themselves: when people want to attack ICE, they need to do it while they're on their official duties, because they don't know which people at home are ICE agents. Attacks that are prevented by anonymizing ICE don't happen, because ICE anonymized and thus the attacks were prevented.
We can't examine the counterfactual world where attacking ICE agents at home is easier, since we're not living in it. Conceivably some of these attacks could have been replaced by attacking agents at home, if it were easier to do so.
wraelk
3mo ago
There exist people who make that much, but it doesn't scale: a random person can't suddenly decide "I'm going to be a culture warrior" and reliably earn a six-figure salary from that career decision. For every person that does, there will be dozens who languish in obscurity and make no money.
wraelk
4mo ago
Wouldn't keeping editing but removing deletion be pointless? You could just edit your post, change it to the text "[deleted]" and get effectively the same result as deleting it.
wraelk
4mo ago
About 70% of our effort-posts, if posted on Reddit, would immediately face accusations of being AI. Even things written in, say, 2020.
I actually had this happen to me!
I made a detailed comment about a particular video game strategy in the game's subreddit, probably around 2020, long before writing it with AI would have been plausible.
This year someone responded with "if this wasn't written when it was I would think it was AI"
I guess given the context that's a compliment?
The entire religion is predicated on the Messiah returning and the Temple being rebuilt on these grounds.
Would the Messiah not just remove the fallout? If anything, it'd be a pretty good indicator that it was time to rebuild, plus now there's no existing competition for the site.
And radiation actually maps pretty well to existing divine wrath, specifically the Ark of the Covenant curses from 1 Samuel.
But after they had brought it to Gath, the hand of the Lord was against the city, causing a very great panic; he struck the inhabitants of the city, both young and old, so that tumors broke out on them.
... For there was a deathly panic throughout the whole city. The hand of God was very heavy there; those who did not die were stricken with tumors, and the cry of the city went up to heaven.
One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it.
The easy test case here is cannons: they were well-known in the 1780s, they're clearly not useful for personal defense since they're tremendously unwieldy and are only really militarily effective in a standing battle, and they've got the potential for mass casualties loaded with grapeshot or other shrapnel, or property destruction loaded with explosive shells.
So, were cannons privately owned at the time of the Constitution's writing? Did the Founding Fathers take legal steps to ban personal ownership of cannons? Doing some scanning, my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons, I certainly can't find any landmark case saying "well rifles are fine, but cannons are too far". People mention private cannon manufacturers, privateers, and private artillery companies, although I will note that a lot of this seems to come out in response to Biden saying "you couldn't own a cannon during the Revolutionary War" during a speech, so it has become a culture war thing. And the Massachusetts militia gathering cannon at Concord was the kickoff of the Revolutionary War.
Rifled cannons are currently banned, but that seems to be part of the NFA in 1934, well past Founding Father influence, and smoothbore cannons appear to still be legal.
wraelk
7mo ago
RFK Jr. sounds like a corpse.
You said JFK. Barring some new information, he is a corpse.
wraelk
7mo ago
But people go to the hospital for a different set of problems than they're fed chicken soup by their mothers, as evidenced by the fact that children with mothers still end up in the hospital at times.
With childcare it does seem like we're looking for simple skills: I'm sure some people would want nannies that are teaching their kids algebra, but there's clearly a demand for "keep them fed and clean and away from electrical sockets" level of childcare.
The bigger issue is I think trust: the actual tasks are simple but having someone reliable enough to do them every time, not cut corners, and not take opportunities to enrich themselves with access to the family home is a little more difficult when we're trying to bring costs down.
wraelk
8mo ago
if at any point he had stated he was opposed to gay marriage
This actually happened though: https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obama-still-opposes-same-sex-marriage/
Did his base turn on him in an instant? It seems like they reelected him instead.
wraelk
9mo ago
Yeah, but at least the TIEs have a reasonable case for skipping the hyperdrive: they're designed to be cheap and fast (which is why they don't have shields either), and they're always operating from a planetary base or capital ship because the Empire intends to have those everywhere it's going to be conducting operations.
Why the Jedi Starfighter doesn't have one (or rather, why they chose a non-hyperdrive-equipped fighter for the Jedi) is a mystery though: the Jedi typically go in very small numbers to out-of-the-way locations, and seem to have a pretty sizable budget. Agility and speed is clearly a benefit with Jedi precognition, but... what happens if your foe destroys your hyperdrive ring and now you're stuck in a middle-of-nowhere system? The answer's clearly "carve your way through the enemy base, steal their ship, and leave", but it's hard to imagine that you want that to be the plan.
wraelk
9mo ago
The Empire or Republic only really seem to have symbolic control. They stick up a flag, but other than that, I don’t think they actually control much beyond the core worlds.
I don't know how much made this into Disney canon, but in Legends a lot of power was held by regional governors, the Moffs. Someone out far from the Core wouldn't necessarily know much about the Emperor, but there was a local Imperial force with a Star Destroyer or two and plenty of stormtroopers that would be their local taste of the Empire and generally had pretty strong control (albeit with a lot of corruption).
Tatooine just wasn't a planet the local Moff cared about at all, which is why Jabba had his palace in the awful desert planet instead of a paradise planet like Naboo or even one that was kind of similar to Nal Hutta.
wraelk
9mo ago
Huh, you're right, Jedi Starfighters are like half the area of an A-wing. That's wild, previously I would have said they were one of the larger starfighters in the series. Something about how the art and/or game cameras always show them up close, I guess?
Actually, something's off. Slave 1 is 21.5m x 21.3m x 7.8m= 3,572.01 m^3, a Jedi Starfighter is 8m x 3.92m x 1.44m= 45.1584 m^3. Now go look at the asteroid battle scene from Attack of the Clones: does the Slave 1 look nearly 80 times as big as the Jedi Starfighter?
Back to the broader point, I think this is inconsistent with Maiq's hypothesis: new military-grade hardware is coming out throughout the series and is apparently available enough that the Rebels can get their hands on it. We don't see the Rebels having to make do with Clone Wars tech (and even that would only be ~20 years old, the equivalent of someone using a F-22 Raptor from 2005 today): they're using some old fighters but also have fresh from the factory equipment regularly. And since the Rebels probably don't have special contracts with the military companies that are also selling to the Empire, that suggests that all you need to get a fresh-off-the-line ship is credits.
It does seem to support pusher_robot's hypothesis that they're having trouble making truly large jumps technologically: the new stuff and the old stuff are roughly equivalent in power level, it's just about optimizing how the same tools are used. That's how you end up with weird things like the B-Wing.
wraelk
9mo ago
Most of the starfighters used by the rebels are relatively new: the B-Wing first saw combat 4 years before the Battle of Yavin, the X-Wing appears to have been less than 10 years old at that point as well, although there's no clear answer on when it was developed. Apparently originally pitched to the Imperials rather than the Republic though, so that's a cap on how old it can be.
It does seem like they have trouble making paradigm-shifting advances though: the Y-Wing is Clone Wars era and while it has problems, it's perfectly capable of performing on the same level as more modern fighters, it's not like we saw anyone complaining about getting assigned a Y-Wing instead of an X-Wing for the Death Star run.
Some weird regressions too: I initially thought Obi-Wan's hyperdrive ring in Attack of the Clones was something that got improved upon for the Imperial era, but the N-1 starfighters in Phantom Menace had integrated hyperdrives, so that was just a deliberate design choice.
While mistrials can be declared for a bunch of reasons, your article is very clear on why there's a mistrial:
They didn't find Fox and Croft not guilty, they were unable to decide whether they were guilty or not, which means a hung jury, that mistrial status, and generally a retrial: this was a pretty high-profile case, it would be very surprising for the courts to say "eh, we don't really care about this enough for two trials, let it go". Their co-defendants Harris and Caserta, who the jury did acquit, did not have a second trial, and if Fox and Croft had managed that they wouldn't be getting a second trial either.
You can argue that the courts stacked the deck to make sure the second trial had a better chance of finding them guilty, but that was clearly a reasonable possibility even in the first trial, or the jury would have just acquitted as they did for Harris and Caserta.
Still no judge overturning the convictions: Fox and Croft were still in the indistinct "haven't resolved this in a court" status after the first trial, a second trial found them guilty (still by a jury), and then the appeals court decided the jury's decision was from a trial that was performed adequately and didn't need reexamination.
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