VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
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User ID: 64
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
5hr ago
The outsized sway of DC and NY juries on federal law enforcement has seemed like a viable opportunity for reform, but I haven't seen any political operatives (conservative, presumably) actually talking about it.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9hr ago
If they're not all aware of each other's status, that just looks like an earnest Klan meeting. Didn't it come out that a majority (or near majority) of the Malheur occupiers were informants, including some of the leaders?
Honestly, some required coordination of this sort of thing might make some sense, but I'm sure it's a confidentiality risk to investigations.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Does that imply as strong of a correlation between the two incomes of a two-income household as it seems at first glance? Something like "the average 1% individual earner is married to a top 5% individual earner or higher" seems like it would follow unless the distributions are particularly oddly shaped.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
Everyone always talks about "Medicare for all", but "Medicaid for all" is probably more achievable: people with existing insurance options probably aren't going to drop it en masse because it's definitely a downgrade in provider selection (read: quality) and availability. Heck, more than half of Medicare beneficiaries now opt to use those dastardly insurance companies as intermediaries rather than traditional Medicare.
But I haven't tried to figure out the costs of doing this, this post is mostly an observation that the two nominally-similar services have different valences with the nation and politicians.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
The VRA and related court precedent demands a mutually-contradictory set of requirements on drawing districts. That Gordion knot is maybe going to be (partially?) untied by the current Louisiana case.
Although my personal thinking is that eliminating geographic districting in favor of something more like slate-of-candidates parliamentary systems is probably the cleanest of the available options. None are perfect, though.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
I have a corner of the extended family that includes a man who, after his kids were grown, divorced his wife and remarried someone slightly older than his kids and had a full second family. They are nice folks that clearly love each other and I like them, but I can tell it's been rough on them in various ways due to the age gap: the dad hit (practical) retirement age while the youngest kids (one with special needs) were still in middle school, and I know the wife has had to start working, presumably to close the budget. I know she's been having to take care of him (now in his 80s) physically too since before the last kid left the house, and I can't help but occasionally think about how she's actuarially likely to be widowed in maybe her early 60s, and how she'll handle that long-term.
Nothing against them personally, but I think they'd have been happier overall if they were closer to the same age and met earlier. I wish them well, though. Life throws things like that at you sometimes. I hope it goes well for the GP here, too.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
the power of Holocaust as a story is weakening
When I was a kid, the Holocaust was still in living memory enough that tattooed survivors were showing up to school classrooms to tell their personal stories. At the time, the last WWII vets were retiring and still alive to tell their stories. The entire era there is passing out of living memory and I suppose it isn't surprising that the emotional and political valence of those events is changing as the torch is passed.
I don't think it was ever possible to maintain that story forever: it's hard to sell multigenerational grievances generally, and worse when the aggrieved party seems to be doing "mostly fine, actually" (opinions may vary) in the present.
But I do look at these changing attitudes and wonder what will happen in the next decades as other traumas fade in the collective memory. We're already seeing politicians first elected during the civil rights movement dying in office in their 80s, for example, and Vietnam veterans aren't as able to get out and protest as numerously as they used to.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
1d ago
blacklivesmatter
Sometimes it amazes me that the BLM crowd is so content to throw their weight behind the Palestine crowd, elements of which are also funding actual genocides of Black people in Sudan and Nigeria. But the self-centered-ness of the political activist class isn't that surprising, I guess.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
2d ago
The idea that AI would need a detailed world model seems to run contra to the "It became self-aware at 2:14 AM Eastern Time" doomsaying. Skynet wasn't supposed to be rate-limited by interactive world manipulation.
And honestly I haven't seen as much motion as I'd expect on the world interaction front. Where are my automatic burger flipping robot arms? There are lots of thankless low-skill (but not no-skill) jobs in at least the food industry (meat packing, for example) that have pretty bounded motion and requirements, but I haven't seen anywhere near as much motion in those areas as I would have expected.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
3d ago
I don't know enough about movie script copyright to know the exact details.
Given a time machine, you can just plop proof of the existence of the work before Disney created it and claim it (perhaps pseudonymously) as your own. Bonus points for doing it in the most embarrassing way possible: "it has come to light that Disney plagiarized the script for The Force Awakens from a 1992 Usenet post of the same title to alt.stories.starwars, which got one reply to the tune of 'lolz that's some terrible fanfic, man' at the time."
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
7d ago
It is at least weird to me that Trudeau is dating Russell Brand's ex-wife. But I've never seen anyone else comment on that specific angle.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
"There's some chance that any human will go berserk and turn into a serial killer, so by living among humans, you've signed up for the possibility that a serial killer will kill you"
Isn't this basically true, though? It's certainly not ideal, but people are generally against constructing the sort of society in which this statement isn't true. See regular political fights over gun control, or even driving laws. Lots of people (tens of thousands in the US) die annually at the hands of plain 'ol human failure modes.
Even if you could semi-reliably identify those that will "go berserk", you'd have to wade through a bunch of legal questions to actually do something about it under current law.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
Google used to have a link to cached pages in the search results. They also used to penalize (in site rankings) showing different pages to the search crawlers and regular browsers (I assume by spot checking the difference). I remember spoofing the GoogleBot user agent at least once to bypass a paywall, though.
The digital frontier isn't what it used to be: that ship seems to have sailed.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
8d ago
The online extreme left (Piker, et al) seems to be leaning that direction, but the left-leaning normies I know IRL think the conflict is dumb but wouldn't wish harm on US service members. Several of them are veterans or immediate families thereof, for one.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Iran has hit Oman at least a few times in this conflict, despite Oman not (currently) hosting any US forces. Oman was also one of the more neutral in it's public statements (IIRC they congratulated the new Ayatollah), although I don't know if that stance has changed in the last few weeks.
I thought the "blunt melee weapons only" conflict with India a few years ago was at least notable. I'd call it funny, but there were more than a few deaths reported.
The Nine Dash Line isn't winning them friends in their neighborhood either.
ETA: Also their international fishing fleet often accused of stealing from other nations' waters.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
I agree with this take (it's poor form from someone not winning as much as they planned), but I assumed it was (intended as) a mirror to the longstanding motte-and-bailey of what the "America" in "death to America" means. Sometimes Tehran's supporters claim it only means the current government. On the other, they say the same thing about Israel and seem to have no qualms launching cluster munitions at civilian population centers there. Or supporting proxies happy enough to target Americans.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Iran also has major single points of failure in its water supplies.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Iran can ruin them and they can't do much of anything.
Iran can attack UAE's desalination infrastructure, but UAE can't return the favor? Iran's fresh water supply was on the rocks in the headlines just a few months back before any attacks. Or is this another case of "[western-opposed nation] can do [war crime], and [western-aligned nation] will resign itself to death for moral superiority rather than respond in kind"? UAE could certainly drop some air-dropped naval mines in Iran's harbors and commercial channels to cut its commercial shipping, for example, and probably could strike the critically-low dams near Tehran, since air defenses seem to be down at the moment.
That they haven't chosen to escalate isn't always an indicator of inability.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
The Houthis are more than a match for Saudi Arabia
The Saudi coalition ended that war primarily because the Biden administration pressured them to (threatening continuing arms sales), not because of the Houthis. IIRC they weren't doing particularly well even before then, but the Houthis were at least accused of using hospitals as bases in the same sorts of tactics Hamas uses, and the NGO international response was largely the similar in its condemnation.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
9d ago
Three times in the last 25 years that Pakistan has attacked India through proxies in a manner equivalent to Hezbollah or Houthi attacks on Israel.
Without even claiming any particular expertise in the conflict, doesn't Lashkar-e-Taiba claim a number of attacks that resemble those of Hamas or its associates? The 2008 Mumbai attacks killed 175 people and had a movie made about it I've heard of in the West (Hotel Mumbai, 2018), and the 2025 attack in Pahalgam was the trigger for the most recent direct India-Pakistan conflict. Those are probably the two most notable incidents, but there's not a shortage of others, or other proxies.
I'm less familiar with the details, but wouldn't be surprised if India has similar proxies, but I can't think of any offhand.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
Furthermore, they actually deployed some of those chemical and biological weapons in the early phases of the invasion
Do you have a link for this? I'm not familiar with the claim.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
10d ago
IIRC the US could have blocked Yemen's ports, but as a net importer of food (and missiles), probably couldn't have accepted the humanitarian impact of doing so. Or, at the time, of sinking or commandeering Iranian-flagged vessels carrying those missiles and starting a war.
VoxelVexillologist
🇺🇸 Multidimensional Radical Centrist
11d ago
IIRC it might have been here, but I recall reading recently that almost all of the Amish have adopted mechanized laundry.
Is there a reason a state should generally allow private actors to play "undercover informant"? Citizens aren't generally encouraged to start writing dossiers on each other even if they did say they were going to turn them over to law enforcement. Doubly so for not-even-illegal activities, some of which are constitutionally protected.
Seems at least arguably a road to privatized secret police, although I'd steelman the reverse by saying that Target should be allowed to have a loss-prevention department and take evidence to the real police. Open to other thoughts on the principles here, though.
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