Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1hr ago
I don't know that visible punishment as its own end is why we have punitive justice.
As others have covered, I vigorously disagree. Others ends can be legitimate as well, but retribution is a good reason to do punitive justice. Retribution is a good and legitimate motivation and the inclination to suppress it is perverse. Mere restorative or preventative measures deny victims of crime their just outcome.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7hr ago
Sometimes, yeah. We tacitly acknowledge this with all punitive justice - we may not be able to make a right, but the best we can do is visible punishment of transgressors.
Additionally tit-for-tat is a better game theoretical strategy than cooperating with a defectbot.
In any case, the situation can't be addressed with cliches, at least not adequately. The response like what @satanistgoblin is expressing above is largely about the complete intellectual and moral bankruptcy of people that have excused all manor of political terrorism in the past (including the recent past, when BLM rioters killed dozens and destroyed billions in property) suddenly deciding that a riot that got out of hand requires tracking down everyone present and charging them under novel interpretations of statute that had never previously occurred to anyone.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
I love the United States! We're the fucking best. Almost everywhere else sucks by comparison and even the places that are pretty good are on such a small scale that they're more akin to nice states than major nations. Nonetheless, being the best doesn't ensure that there isn't just a secular decline in quality of life across the world, which is what I think would happen if the Pax Americana recedes. To that end, I hope we do reassert our authority with a Monroe Doctrine style of foreign policy.
And to paraphrase Curtis Yarvin, I'll bet you 50$ that if you look around your neighborhood, you'll notice 0 changes over the next 4 years attributable to Donald Trump.
We could talk about deportations, but on a small scale, I do credit Trump for appointing Supreme Court justices that sided with Grants Pass. Cities not being able to stop bums from camping in parks really would be a pretty terrible outcome that would be immediately obvious to everyone involved. They may or may not realize what the cause of that effect is, but pretty much everyone would notice bums camping in parks freely.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
My view is that the appropriate response to this is for the incoming DoJ to open an investigation on every single person pardoned with a statement that "no one is above the law". Did they do anything? I have no idea and neither does anyone else, but the sitting President just pointed a glaring GUILTY spotlight at them by preemptively insisting that they're definitely not guilty of anything. People that can't be convicted by a jury don't need pardons. Would they be able to make this blanket pardon stand up in court? I have no idea, but I think we should find out whether the President actually has the ability to preempt any efforts to bring justice to his cronies.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
3d ago
I was just telling someone that I'm glad we're leaving the darkest years of American governance in my lifetime behind, but it appears that we're leaving it in the same sense that a dog that just took a big shit in your living room can be taken outside and you're still stuck cleaning up. The final days of this administration have been worse than I would have guessed by a pretty wide margin.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
If the intent was to ban TikTok, they would have just banned TikTok. The intent was to stop having one of the most used social media applications in the United States owned by the chief adversary of the American government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
There is a relevant in that first sentence. Let's try it out with different subjects and objects to see if we would call that a ban:
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The law signed in April mandates a ban on liquor sales at Total Wine if bottles are not labeled.
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The law signed in April mandates a ban on Toyota produced in Japanese-owned factories rather than American-owned factories.
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The law signed in April mandates a ban on cheeses if the milk is not sourced from FDA-inspected farms.
I would not describe these as "bans". They impose requirements (divestment from ownership by an adversarial government in this case). Perhaps they're bad regulations, but they aren't bans on the products in question. That ByteDance is apparently going to elect to sunset the application rather than take the money and run is strongly suggestive of the real value being non-monetary advantages to the Chinese government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4d ago
In fact, it's not even being "banned" at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
At some point we're going to need the Bart Simpson meme but with "it's a vibe shift". Jokes aside, it really does seem like the election marked closure for quite a few prior modes of restraint when it comes to blunt communication. It's too early to say if this is going to stick as a meaningful change, but I'm glad of it even in the short run.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
How weird. That's not the link I dropped in! Fixed to a functional one now though.
The fastest American alive vibes with it on the track. Noah Lyles is probably a pretty good example of a black nerd in general. Per his Wiki:
Lyles has posted on X that he has asthma, allergies, dyslexia, ADD, anxiety, and depression.[62]
He is also an anime fan, and has been seen carrying Yu-Gi-Oh cards during competitions.
He's just also blazingly fast and engaged to a Jamaican sprinter, so he doesn't really fit the '80s stereotypes!
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5d ago
In concurrence with @BahRamYou, I think what you're observing is the atrophy of the nerd culture that we grew up with. Many of the quintessential nerd hobbies are just things that people do now. Sure, maybe it's more nerdy to be really into one game than another, but the vast majority of young men play some sort of video game, so it doesn't really stand out to be really into one of them. The band nerds might still be kind of a specific thing, but when I see the local university's marching band, they don't really strike me as a particularly nebbish group. There are still socially awkward kids, of course, but they don't really seem like they have the comparative advantage in things like gaming, computers, anime, and so on. Maybe there's some other nerd subculture that replaced it that we're too out of touch to appreciate? I don't know.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6d ago
I read 'em even if I don't really have anything to say about them. They're good! You're not just yelling into the void.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
Gotcha. I was looking more at the skill part of things rather than the game knowledge part of things. Beyond a certain point, yeah, you wouldn't bump into anyone making that sort of basic error when it comes to understand itemization and game mechanics. Even if they couldn't exactly tell you why a certain trinket mathed out to being the best in slot item, they'd still know enough to go check Icy Veins, see that it's best in slot, and cheerfully equip it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
Yeah, I actually looked at selling my character around that time because it was a pretty close to BiS Death Knight at their apex of overpoweredness and I wanted to go do other stuff. I think it was worth about $500 (which would be a bad ROI, but good if you just didn't want to play more).
So, sure, that's a thing, but I also just bumped into quite a few people that just didn't seem all that interested in game mechanics but were willing to play a lot. I know these weren't purchased accounts because some of them were people that I'd hop on Discord or Vent with and they were nice enough guys, they just didn't care to go learn that that you always want to save Swiftmend for when Wild Growth is coming off of cooldown so you can maximize the healing boost on it, or that downtime on Flameshock is immensely costly because you'll wind up wasting free Lava Burst procs. These aren't exactly complicated mechanics, but if you don't know them then you don't know them, and if you don't really internalize them then you'll consistently fail at it under pressure. I ultimately just had to settle on the reality that I'm an obsessive nerd and that if I was going to heal for a casual raiding group (because I don't want to lock up four nights a week playing a game) then I have to tolerate playing with people that are going to put out shit damage and stand in fire. They're not bad guys, they're not even idiots, they're just bad at a game.
On the bright side, healing a mediocre group through difficult content with one of my best friends was one of the more entertaining things I've done in any game and the numbers on the parses wound up being world class precisely because people stand in fire and can't kill things fast.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
I think the narrative that he's a deeply insecure man that really, really, really wants to be cool is basically accurate.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10d ago
I don't think this is true. I used to be a pretty big World of Warcraft guy and encountered people with much, much more play time than I had and excellent gear that were straight up terrible players. It's interesting to consider why they were getting carried in raids, but they pretty obviously were, because you'd bump into guys with much better gear that you could easily smash on damage meters anyway. In contrast, a buddy of mine that posted top 100 world parses on healing meters for some difficult bosses didn't actually play all that much. Beyond some necessary amount of time to learn a game well, people just kind of get capped out on their skills and stop improving.
If the point is that they're making incredibly basic mistakes... yeah, the above still applies. You could look at damage logs after and see highly geared players doing things like failing to keep DoTs on targets, letting their own buffs fall off for significant chunks of fights, and other egregiously incompetent play.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
There are a lot of things that you can get surprisingly good at with just a one-hour investment daily. I picked up running about 10 years ago and currently run right around an hour per day based on logs (some variance by week, of course). This results in ~55 miles per week of running and now, nearly 40 years old, I'm competitive with college runners. If you offered me more running or more books, I'd absolutely take the running - I'm just limited by injury avoidance. Of course, if I really wanted to dedicate myself to aerobic fitness, I could tack on another few hours of biking and swimming without much of an injury tax to pay.
Of course, I could still fit in more reading as well - it's not like my schedule is genuinely that tightly packed. The point is that at some level, you have to start picking and choosing which things you want to be good at and when you're going to stop trying to self-cultivate and just play Slay the Spire or something. I think reading 33,885 pages in a year is great. I think being as strong as @FiveHourMarathon is great. I think being an excellent parent (as many Mottizens surely are) is even better! But, ultimately, one is limited in their mental and physical resources and we cannot be all things to all people.
So, yeah, I guess the punchline is that you're overestimating books to the average local denizen in all likelihood. I like reading (and read voraciously as a teen), but I don't like it more than going to bar trivia with friends, going to my run club with friends, watching the Bills game on Sunday, or just shitposting on the internet. Replacing the latter with more reading would be good, but I bet I won't do it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
Yeah, this is a good and correct point. I waffled a bit about how I wanted to phrase it, because we certainly do have fundamentalists and not just a few of them. My objection is that phrasing it as "a fundamentalist religious tradition" suggests to me that this is a uniting force that is a key element of the current Trumpist movement. While some fundamentalists are part of that movement, they aren't exactly steering the ship - JD Vance is Catholic, Musk isn't religious, Vivek is (I think) Hindu, and the Cabinet nominees are a mishmash of different religions and constituencies. So, what I mean to say is not that the United States lacks fundamentalist religions, but that it isn't a fundamentalist nation and the Trump coalition does not emphasize fundamentalism. I unironically think integralist Catholics have more political sway with this administration than young Earth creationists.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
That level is almost certainly associated with real risks for liver and cardiovascular diseases, but my bigger worry would just be trajectory. It seems to me that if someone can't go down from five drinks per night, there is a pretty significant chance that they will eventually go up instead, and that this is a ratchet.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
what does The Motte think about moderate drinking?
As with almost every single thing, I think it's likely to be a marginal effect. Seed oils, a bit of booze, grassfed beef, some vitamin or other, high fructose corn syrup, caffeine... whatever. I think properly measured these things all pretty much blend into the background and have no meaningful impact on general health, wellness, physical ability, or longevity barring an actual significant deficiency or severe overuse. Stay reasonably lean, move around a bunch, pick up heavy things from time to time, and that'll get almost every bit of predictable benefit that you can get from health choices.
Every time I dig into studies that say otherwise, they appear to be complete garbage.
(For the record, I think drink at least somewhat too much and expect that it comes with at least some adverse risk down the road - I'm not trying to come up with some cope for why I'm actually totally fine.)
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
There are broader arguments here, but I want to pick at a couple of the smaller bits:
a country with a fundamentalist religious tradition
This condition is neither necessary nor sufficient for something to be referred to as "fascism" in any meaningful sense. Nazism was more occult than religious, Pinochetism doesn't have much relation to religion, Oswald Mosley wasn't interested in Anglican authoritarianism.
To be more direct, the United States doesn't really have much of a fundamentalist religious tradition - it's a religiously pluralist country where the largest single religion is Catholicism, and it's a squishy strain at that.
violence
The American right broadly and Trumpists more narrowly are just not very violent at all. The central example of right-wing violence during the Trump era is a single riot where the only deaths were one of the rioters and a couple geezers that got too excited and had heart attacks. This wasn't nothing, I didn't like it because I don't like riots, but the political violence in the United States has been primarily racialized (BLM riots and associated violence) or Islamist (various acts of terrorism) for decades.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
14d ago
I broadly agree, but with the footnote that you don't really need a radical break, you just need a consistent policy of saying that no on one showing up from Central America is actually a refugee. This is (in principle, not practice) easy to accomplish, because approximately none of them actually are refugees. Almost all of them that say the magic words and claim to be threatened aren't. Their countries suck, their countries are super violent, everyone there is at risk all the time, but no, they're not actually being targeted for political, ethnic, or religious violence. Recognizing every ridiculous and obviously false claim to refugee status was a much more radical approach than doing the opposite.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
16d ago
I think being a homer is pretty analogous to the snail darter situation. The person involved probably does intellectually realize that they're playing fast and loose with the facts, but they want it to be true and they're willing to sand off any rough edges around the facts to get where they want to go.
Depending on the circumstance, there are definitely things where I would prefer that my interlocutor thinks I'm bullshitting them for personal gain than that they think I'm just such a simpleton that I don't grasp the facts. I unironically think it's more of a show of respect to say, "I think you don't really believe that and are making an instrumental argument" than saying, "I think you're incredibly stupid".
Accepting the terms of the thought experiment, I would still want retributive punishment to match the crime. Even if you could absolutely assure me that a man that robbed my home could be turned into just a perfectly decent man and that no punishment would impact others, I'd still want him caned. He deserves the suffering for inflicting it on others and to deny his victims that penance is an injustice. So, yeah, that's probably not a reconcilable value difference.
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