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Walterodim

Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t

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joined 2022 September 05 12:47:06 UTC

				

User ID: 551

Walterodim

Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t

0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 05 12:47:06 UTC

					

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User ID: 551

...keeping Rawlsians off the court really are that important.

I hadn't even conceived of framing it this way, but this is exactly right from my perspective as well. The one that pops to my mind most recently is the Grants Pass case, but really, it's the echoes of Robinson and the later dissents in Powell where I just keep thinking, "what in the world are we talking about?". The idea is that a status can't be criminalized, but an action can. The dissenters in Power (and Grants Pass) insist that things like alcoholism and homelessness are statuses, so you can't criminalize things that are downstream of that status. What in the world are we talking about? Applying that logic consistently, absolving people of any meaningful agency, is completely unthinkable to me. Yes, even if you really, really, really want to be drunk in public, I think the police should show up and tell you that's enough for the evening. Yes, even if you don't currently have a home, I think the police should show up and escort you out of the park. More importantly when considering the case law, I cannot fathom that there is a federal right to be drunk in public or sleep in parks.

Or, rather, the Democrats may not be “authoritarian” in the strictest sense of the dictionary definition, but that’s because the Democrats wrote the dictionary and defined the term to mean “bad in the exact way that bad conservatives are bad” (this is almost literally true; a lot of the current authoritarianism discussion comes from a construct invented by Theodor Adorno called “right-wing authoritarianism”).

I will grant that we're all going to prioritize different types of authority differently and process various exercises of power differently, but I am baffled that anyone would feel the need to hedge this way while attempting to steelman their opponent. No, my position is not that there's a dictionary problem, it's just that Democrats are flatly more authoritarian than Republicans. Not because of some idiosyncrasy in verbiage or because I think arms rights are more important than abortion rights, but as a generalized temperament with regard to almost all of the things that I care about.

The current Democrat preference is a whole lot of expert-trusting for a massive bureaucracy that meddles in everything. If you're a large business, get ready to record lots of racial and gender data so you don't run afoul of federal equal opportunity statutes. If you're a landlord, get ready to have people funded by the DoJ try to ascertain whether you're being racist. If you'd like to buy a showerhead, make sure you check whether it's one that you can adjust the flow regulator on or you're going to wind up with one that is saving the planet instead of giving you a nice shower. If you'd like to consume some raw milk, well, that's not safe enough for you and you may not engage in voluntary transactions with farmers, even if they label it clearly. For each of these and a million more, the Democrat position is just, "well, yes, that's a good thing". I will grant that it's a sort of benevolent authoritarianism, but with a hat tip to CS Lewis.

This isn't to say that Republicans don't have use power, or don't use power in ways that I don't like, but it is to say that I will absolutely stand on the belief that Democrats want to exercise control over many, many more aspects of my life than Republicans. We haven't even talked about Covid, firearms, and taxation! Those are bigger issues, but I really am just referring to the general temperament and style of governance. Republican administrations simply do less than Democrat administrations, and they would do less still if they would get around to firing half the bureaucracy in the fashion that Vance and Vivek suggest.

Any aid sent to Gaza will feed Hamas first, but it does not follow that we should therefore let Gaza starve.

Does it not? That seems like exactly what follows. If you'd like to win, you can't go around supplying your enemy.

I am aware that this line of thinking is both unpopular and putatively internationally illegal. I find the conclusion that you're actually obligated to feed your military enemy so bizarre that I feel like I must surely be misunderstanding something about the position.

Let me give an analogy. Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.

I wonder if Bezos intended the layer of Straussian reading that's available here? Perhaps it's just because it's my pet issue, but I remain surprised at how hard it is to get people to agree with me that electoral legibility is an absolutely crucial part of legitimating democracy. It's not enough to have very serious experts tell people that it's the safest and most secure election ever, it must be genuinely hard to imagine how the election could be rigged.

I would probably default to trying to prevent international organizations from operating in my country if I didn't have a great reason for believing that their actions would be helpful to my citizens. To put it lightly, UNRWA does not clear that bar for Israelis.

Matt makes the argument that Walz got the crowded theater analogy backwards, but even more than that what rings alarm bells in my head is the phrase "Or hate speech."

The whole thing should ring in your head as an incredible example of what a blubbering idiot Walz is. He confidently, bloviatingly says, "You can’t yell “Fire!” in a crowded theater. That’s the test. That’s the Supreme Court test!" and this is just completely wrong in every single way. It's not the controlling precedent. It's considered an example of terrible law. Even at the time that Holmes penned the line, this was a paraphrased dictum from his opinion, not a test. He didn't just misunderstand the context or modern meaning, he got literally everything around it wrong in order to line it up with his desire to control speech. We have a man running for Vice President that doesn't understand the basics of the First Amendment and confidently cites a Supreme Court opinion that isn't a controlling precedent and that he doesn't understand. The whole thing is a damning indictment of Walz and the party that nominated him.

Yes, exactly, this is what I meant when I said that there are problems with treating betting markets as truly predictive. In sports, these are referred to as "public teams" and I wouldn't be surprised to see these sorts of effects among people that place a few bucks on Polymarket as a hobby. My objection isn't that betting markets are perfect, it's that conscious manipulation will tend to lose out to people that want to make a buck because it creates perceived positive expected value opportunities. People that think there is conscious manipulation or that they personally know which direction the market is biased in should simply bet against that position and enjoy the free positive expected value.

Around midnight, his odds briefly dipped under 60%. Was it manipulation? I don't think so.

There are certainly problems with treating betting markets as truly predictive, but I think claims that they're manipulated are kind of weird. The great thing about betting markets is that if someone tries to move the market for the sake of trying to push an agenda, someone else that thinks their view is wrong can simply bet back in the opposite direction. There isn't really any good reason to expect manipulation to be stable - if there is a positive EV option available in a tolerably liquid market, someone will take it. The people that insist that Polymarket isn't reflecting the true odds should go make themselves some money!

FYI, gotta approve that one, it's showing as filtered for me. Get that mod hat on and let that post through!

(Or don't, I don't actually know what's in it.)

Yeah, I neglected to mention that part, that these laws unambiguously do not work. The idea of a bunch of teenagers just deciding that they have to be sober because it's illegal to drink is comical. No one is actually being saved from binge drinking by a 20-year-old not being allowed to have a glass of wine with a steak. But hey, on the bright, every now and then my wife neglects to bring an ID with her and it saves her from having a dangerous intoxicant with dinner.

For politically obsessive terminally online weirdos, our habits will remain the same. For normies, they will be annoyed by political ad but otherwise remain unchanged. There is only a small, niche group of people that actually care, but aren't already enmeshed in this nonsense constantly.

federal enforcement of 21 as the drinking age

When I was young, I wondered if I'd stop caring about this one once I was well beyond the age that it was directly relevant to me, but no, the further I get from it, the dumber it seems. The arguments are so cliche that we've already all heard them a million times - these people are old enough to vote, old enough to fight in the military, but not old enough for a beer? Self-evidently ridiculous! We can even easily visit other countries with lower drinking ages and observe that nothing much happens differently without these dopey laws. Worse still, the effect isn't just on the underage, it's in pointless enforcement up and down the age spectrum. Nearing 40, I still need an ID to buy beer at a grocery store. Everyone involved has to pretend as though this isn't a completely retarded ritual, we all agree that there's really nothing to be done about it, the federal government decided that you need to card everyone and the company dutifully implemented a system where it's not even possible to sell a beverage without doing so. A small thing, really, but a constant reminder of how much I despise the petty, authoritarian weasels of the American federal government.

This depends heavily on our definitions of corrupt.

  • If you mean "corrupt" in the sense of what is prosecutable under current SCOTUS interpretations of corruption statutes, it's almost impossible that any deal would qualify because Musk's companies do produce things that serve some legitimate government purpose.

  • If you mean "corrupt" in the sense that the word is used colloquially to refer to someone receiving an obvious benefit that's outsized compared to the delivery, I would consider it an object-level question of what was contracted, what was delivered, and what was the price.

  • If you mean "corrupt" in the sense of political patronage, I would agree that it is this for anything where Musk's company isn't the clear best choice. Of course he's going to get the benefit of the doubt.

  • If you mean "corrupt" in the sense that a libertarian might use it, I would say anything above roughly $37 is a corrupt relationship because Musk has always relied on the government for massive grants and subsidies for projects of questionable utility.

Truth be told, my gut instinct is towards the latter. I remain unconvinced that Teslas are anything other than silly toys with superficial environmental signaling value. My inclination is to distrust large programs directed at friends of the government. But really, if pressed on the matter, I would lean towards the patronage model as a more realistic way to think about the world. Patronage seems very important to understanding how power structures actually work, is so ordinary in history that complaining about it being corrupt is about as useful as bitching about nepotism, and I don't really even have that much of an objection to it

Low: buried the dog.

Sorry man. We know they won't be with us long enough, but it's still rough.

Not very often, only when I actually think about it. Honestly, I think 19-year-old me would kind of think current me kicks ass. On the flip side though, I am ashamed of the way I treated women that I cared about when I was young. I'm glad I'm not that man anymore, but I can't imagine that they should know or care about that.

My closest friends, at least just the very closest ones, are great guys though and I love when I go home and see them. If anything, I'd say that they turned out better than any of us could have expected and fills me with warmth to consider.

I don't feel like I have any meaningful way to give input on changing motivations, but this part of things seems like a good area for focus. You don't need a degree to live your life and be independent. For many goals, a degree can be instrumentally useful, but if the core goal is really just earning a respectable living, you don't need one. You need to pick a specific skill, develop it, and show up and do it in a tolerably reliable fashion. Which skill? Whatever. Learn to do auto body, wait tables, drive a forklift, put shingles on... whatever. The specifics do matter to how much money and opportunity you'll have, but the point is that you'll make a respectable living and be a respectable man if you just pick something and do it well. You don't need a bullshit political science degree to make a buck sanding bumpers down for painting.

I say this with pun slightly intended: The Dems appear to be mostly out of ammo.

They spent it at the right time. Michigan voters are already returning ballots in huge numbers. Remember, elections no longer happen on the first Tuesday of November, they happen over the course of five or six weeks and then take another week or so to actually count (or a month in California).

Aside from the egregious, aggressive, absolutely blatant 14th Amendment violation that makes this anti-constitutional, the most glaring thing to me is how incoherent the idea of a "forgivable loan" is. That's not what a loan is. Per Merriam-Webster, a loan is:

an amount of money that is borrowed, often from a bank, and has to be paid back, usually together with an extra amount of money that you have to pay as a charge for borrowing

If you're informing someone up front that you don't expect the money back, you are extending them largesse or patronage, or perhaps you are providing them a fee for service, but you are not offering them a loan. There were many things that were terrible about Covid spending policies, but this might have been the absolute king of them. The PPP "loans" were never really intended to be paid back, they were always a handout to keep things moving and allow businesses to skip out on doing actual commercial transactions. Framing them as "loans" was intended to attach a couple strings, but these were mostly just helicopter money dispersed with the knowledge that there would be a huge amount of outright fraud and even more casual fudging of the program to collect money. Maybe that was a good idea, maybe it wasn't, but these weren't loans in any meaningful sense. Nonetheless, because they were called loans, now everyone that just took a totally normal loan with a totally normal expectation that they would pay it back thinks that PPP loans being treated that way justifies "forgiving" their loans too.

I could see this becoming a more frequent tactic, just calling handouts to fake businesses, affinity groups, and other favored constituents "loans" that are explicitly designed to never be paid. Really, it's a brilliant tactic, because the recipients don't even feel like they're just welfare cases, they feel like they've received a totally valid loan that they have met the terms of. I do wonder if there's an exploitable tax loophole here - no direct payments for me, thanks, I'll just take the money as a loan with no required payments until June of 2250.

If we can send emergency money to Lebanon, Ukraine, Israel and everybody else, then we should have no problem doing the same in The US.

Yeah, we should stop doing that too. Much of it is probably squandered or embezzled for the same reasons I would expect this to be. I don't want more of my money confiscated on the basis that maybe it'll help someone somewhere if we just shower them with more cash.

This is my least favorite right-aligned argument. I'm not all that excited about funding Ukraine and Israel, but I'm also not all that excited about federal spending on hurricanes. States are big, they have economies the size of medium to large countries, this doesn't need to be a federal spending priority. If North Carolinians are getting screwed because of a lack of spending, they should take it up with their governor. The federal government should fill roles that are too large for states or require coordination solutions; a small coordination role for FEMA makes sense, but there is no reason that North Carolina can't pay for its own recovery budget.

looney jumps the White House fence

These are the ones that really blow my mind. Some of the other stuff is genuinely difficult, but in these cases, we've got stuff like an incompetent Secret Service agent just getting straight up trucked by a crazy guy because she's too weak to do the basics of the job. Growing up, I thought that if you jumped the White House fence, you'd be immediately sniped, and if you weren't, you'd get blown up by mines, and if you danced around those, you'd get shredded by guard dogs. It turns out you just get confronted by a frail lady when you get to the door.

There seems to be a genetic component to that even though this is also a field where there are those trying to deny race differences.

Shouldn't the quality of the field in general make you a bit suspect of the line of causality here? I don't doubt that Native Americans engage in a lot of dysfunctional alcohol use, but I do doubt that the alcohol is what's causing the dysfunction.

More broadly, it's just kind of weird that alcohol putatively reduces societal health, but a map of state-by-state alcohol consumption is just about anti-correlated with longevity. Similarly, many of the hard-drinking countries around the world are doing great, and the places that don't drink are dysfunctional hellholes with short life expectancies (with the exception of a couple wealthy Gulf oil states). I suppose this is largely a product of wealthier places being able to buy more alcohol and the individuals that drink the most aren't doing great (Simpson's paradox style), but it's hard for me to look at Germany and France and think that they're actually missing out on a ton of longevity and productivity due to all the beer and wine.

Arkansas and Alaska both have high murder rates and low lifespans. I don't think alcohol bans are the reason for that, but they're not exactly advertisements for the edification that comes from these policies. In contrast, the hard-drinking Upper Midwest has low murder rates and long lifespans.

So, yeah, you can probably ban alcohol and reduce consumption significantly. That won't necessarily cause the Al Capone apocalypse. But it also won't usher in an era of long lives and peaceful living.

Besides, it's not like you're looking to ban all bookshelves, this is about common-sense restrictions on assault shelves. Civilians do not need access to 14-foot-high bookshelves!

Jokes aside, it is interesting to contemplate where the lines get drawn on things that are concerning, things that seem obvious to some, and so on. Dozens of dead kids per year ain't nothing, but I have never heard anyone seriously propose bookshelf safety measures.

I am not broadly sympathetic to the "took errrr jerbs" line of anti-immigration arguments. Maybe there's something there, maybe there's not, but whether it's immigrants or just other domestic laborers, I'm not impressed with rent-seeking in the form of artificially limiting labor supplies.