quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Thé SPLC is my enemy, and driving them out of the face of the earth is a good thing.
I have two objections. One is that lawfare contributes to a decline in civility. Naturally, the Democrats have done a lot of lawfare against Trump, so you might say turnaround is fair. But it will also be a further step of escalation. At the moment, Democrats and MAGA are not yet in a state of total war against each other. Heck, even Iran and Israel are not in that stage. Unlike chess, neither war nor the culture war are zero sum games where hurting your enemy and helping your side are identical.
Every move in the culture war has two separate properties, one how much it brings your side closer to their objectives and one how much it escalates the conflict. Lawfare did not work particularly well against Trump. My second objection is that it will likely not work particularly well against the SPLC. So Trump's move will simply further normalize wasting taxpayer money to harass political opponents in cases which will result in not guilty verdicts.
Organizations like the SPLC, the Proud Boys and so forth exist because what they do is mostly legal and significant fractions of the population support them. Even if by some miracle Trump secures a victory against the SPLC and a few leaders go to prison for donation fraud, this will not be a major victory. The SJ left will not shrug and say "they destroyed the SPLC, too bad that nobody is keeping tabs on the far right now". They will simply found a new organization, and hire the former employees with all their informer contacts.
quiet_NaN
10hr ago
I am sure that if we give the administration long enough, they will eventually open a criminal prosecution against a political opponent which is based on rock solid evidence, but I am less sure that it will happen in this century. Getting someone indicted is easy, but Trump's feds getting someone indicted is not evidence of anything besides the fact that he does not like the defendant, which is hardly news. Basically, if Trump manages to get a jury to convict the SPLC for fraud, that would be new information to integrate into my world view, but so far this seems unlikely.
Not that I am a fan of the SPLC or anything. I have not studied their work or designations in detail, but on priors I would assume that a left-leaning organization which designates hate groups will obviously get taken over by SJ and lose any epistemic standard it might have had. Like, if they designated ACX as a hate group for HBD that would also only mildly surprise me.
quiet_NaN
11hr ago
Importantly: we are not claiming that climate change is economically harmless. We're arguing that the magnitude of damages is deeply and irreducibly uncertain, and trillion-dollar decisions need to stop being made as if it isn't.
Is anyone actually doing this? Are the evil UN bureaucrats taking the first derivative of their GDP(GHG) model to determine how much CO2 the world gets to emit? Have they invented psycho-history?
Only the stupid and partisans claim that climate change is either non-existent/harmless or will wipe out humanity. Only very stupid, partisan economists claim that they can predict the effect of a certain mean temperature change on the global GDP within a percent.
I can do the same:
In this paper, we study the risk assessment and behavior of gas station attendants being robbed at gunpoint. We find that their predictions in the case of noncompliance vary widely. Some expect the robber to shot them in the head, others to shoot them in a knee, others to fire a warning shot first or attack customers. In many cases, the clerks were not even aware of the type of ammo being in the gun and still making assumptions about the type of injuries it could afflict.The magnitude of damages an armed addict might cause when you refuse him is deeply and irreducibly uncertain, and they should not make a decision affecting the contents of their cash register as if it isn't.
Humans make decisions under uncertainty all the time. Sure, it would help to know "if I hesitate, the robber will shoot a 9mm JHP through my left eye" for certain instead of being unsure if the gun is even loaded, if the robber has the willingness to kill and so on. But even a rough estimate of the damages (he will probably shoot someone, but is unlikely to reach a double digit body count) is usually enough to narrow down courses of action.
There are some risks which seem far-fetched. "By 2030, OnlyFans will have amassed enough porn to cause Slaneesh to manifest on Earth and destroy the future of humanity" seems not something I would even dignify with a probability. By contrast, "Climate change in the next 100 years will significantly contribute to the early deaths of at least 100M people" seems likely. "If LLMs can be scaled up to ASI, they will be unaligned" seems also very plausible.
Of course, Donald Trump has made an excellent case for reducing our dependency on fossil fuel which is entirely orthogonal to climate change. Yes, sure, most alternative forms of mobility also depend on global supply chains, e.g. for lithium batteries. I would claim that this is a higher order effect, though. If the price of oil explodes, an ICE car is just a dwelling which is too small for comfort. An electric car will still work for years before the lack of replacement batteries would immobilize it.
quiet_NaN
20hr ago
European political colours are the reverse of the modern* US convention, with centre-left parties using red (even if they are no longer actually socialist) and centre-right parties using blue
Not true for Germany. The left is red, the center-left is red, the Greens are green, but the center right is black (with some tiny sparks of yellow disappearing rapidly). The extreme right is classically brown, but the main far-right party is using blue.
quiet_NaN
21hr ago
if Tisza does go through with this, it’ll be an open admission that the system which facilitated their landslide victory and thus put them in a position to change it is unjust and distorted.
I literally do not see the problem. It is not like Fidesz wanted to help them when they set up the system. It would be like an absolute monarch who inherited the throne to birth deciding that absolute monarchy is bad and decreeing that power should be transferred to a democratically elected government. Only the terminally pedantic would whine that he only has the power to do so due to the present system being rigged, and expect him to renounce the throne and become a revolutionary instead.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Yes, I was understating the situation. In my defense, while I could google the NC without trouble, I did not find grade distributions within two minutes. Anecdotally, I would say that there is more than one person per class with the required grade, though.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
This is your obligatory reminder that gerrymandering is only so effective because you have a terrible FPTP voting system.
Proportional representation actually works quite well for legislative bodies, and mostly removes the incentives for gerrymandering. (But I am sure that every voting nerd has their pet proposal which is better than FPTP.)
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I think that this can not be reasonably discussed without mentioning student debt and artificial constraints on education supply.
In Germany, medicine are among the most favorite subjects to study. To be able to start to study directly after the 12th grade in school, you need to be in the top 10% of students or so, because there are not enough places in the university programs for everyone who is interested. Obviously there are people who will make fine physicians who were not in the top 10% of students (and indeed some of them are admitted after a waiting period). If instead you admitted anyone who you thought had a reasonable chance to pass the final exam, you would have tremendously increase the supply of physicians in half a decade, decreasing wages. I think this is exactly why this is not done.
In the US, I feel that it is linked to student debt. Doctors are expensive because studying medicine is expensive, because universities mostly do not compete on price but on amenities.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
I was actually wondering about that, and think you are probably correct. My reasoning was something like 'if five people in Iran had known, Mossad would have known, and it seems implausible that the Israeli intelligence community would have allowed an atrocity on this scale to succeed for instrumental reasons'.
quiet_NaN
1d ago
And that this action makes the abduction, rape, torture and murder of over 1000 civilians a legitimate act of warfare and retaliation?
No. It was totally a crime against humanity, an atrocity. It totally justified occupying Gaza and ruling it as an occupation force for a generation. (It arguably did not justify starving Gaza, though.)
The question how much sponsors should be held responsible for their proxy forces is not as clear as you make it out to be, though.
Consider Operation Condor, where the US intelligence community sponsored violence against left-wing activists (some of whom were doubtlessly inclined to violence, while others were clearly not), violating their human rights in the process. Obviously the US did know what was going on and could have exerted pressure, which places them in a similar role as Iran wrt Hamas. Would it be fair to call the Argentine Anticommunist Alliance the part of the US military that functionally exists to murder Argentinian intellectuals, the implication being that attacking GIs stationed Germany is fine because US (proxy) forces are already committing acts of war against you?
I think no country in the world really follows consistent hard and fast rules about what kind of aid to enemies preserves neutrality (like Europe giving missiles to Ukraine) and what kinds of aid is an act of war (like providing nukes to Cuba, which Cuba then launches against the US).
I do not mourn Soleimani, but I think that his assassination did little to diminish the capabilities of Iranian proxies but contributed to further escalation, which ended up hurting civilians in Israel, Gaza and Iran. (One could also debate why he was not killed by Israel giving that the proxies he was coordinating were mostly murdering Israeli citizens.)
Sometimes violence is the best option. You gun down the bad guy and save the day. Sometimes it leads to utter disaster. By my reckoning, Franz Ferdinand was a piece of shit monarchist whom I would not have mourned. But killing them did not solve the relationship between continental Europe and monarchs, at least not until millions had died, so him not getting killed would have been of instrumental value. I feel similarly about the late Ayatollah.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
taking meth to stay lean
If he is 20 now he was about 14 in 2017 when semaglutide first was approved for medical use in the US. Presumably he did not advertise taking meth for weight loss on social media at age 14.
In a world where GLP-1 agonists exist, meth might not be strictly the worst intervention for weight loss (chainsaw-powered amputations are arguably worse), but it is pretty much out there. "Take meth for weight loss" is a take so outlandish it makes me wonder why he is not employed by MAHA yet.
I get that young men feel that the game is rigged against them. By the time they have earned a master, LLMs may well substitute for PhDs in earnest, the prices of housing is all messed up and dating is mostly agreed to be terrible.
Still, I think influencers and celebrities make generally bad role models because they do not scale. 99% of the people who emulate one of the most famous actors or influencers will not get successful to a comparative degree. Nor does 'looksmaxxing wins youtube' an argument for why it would work more generally. Appearing in a skimpy outfit (for example) might well work on social media, but if you are a truck driver or middle manager it will not get you a raise.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
My take is a different one. 3k people killed in 9/11 is bad, sure, but his real success was to drag the US into a war in Afghanistan. Not only did the Taliban kill another 3k US and allied troops during 'Enduring Freedom', they spent more than 150 billion dollars on it. (I consider W's Iraq trip an unrelated misadventure.)
Unless my math is wrong, that comes to 50 million dollars per 9/11 victim. This is simply not cost-effective when the marginal price of a QALY in US healthcare is on the order of 100k$.
Nor was Bin Laden a comic book super-villain who was much better at hurting the US than the next in line was. Nor are jihadists motivated by fear of retaliation, Bin Laden himself was (I think) a minor Saudi noble who could have happily lived without having to work a single day in his life, but instead spent it hiding in caves doing Jihad. I very much assume that if he had known that he would eventually get gunned down by US special forces, he would not have done anything different.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
My general understanding is that Iran would prefer to support partisan groups against Israel in a matter rather reminiscent of the US support for the Mujaheddin. While I am much more sympathetic towards Ukraine than Hezbollah, I find it difficult to say that e.g. Poland providing rockets to Ukraine which are predictably fired into Russia is okay while Iran providing rockets to Hezbollah which are predictably fired into Israel is a declaration of war on the part of Iran. (Of course, it helps that Ukraine has the ability to pursue their goals through regular military means rather than terror attacks. But there is a continuous spectrum between a soldier attacking legitimate military targets and a terrorist blowing up civilians.)
Israel has meanwhile run a decade-long campaign of slowing Iranian nuclear weapon development through assassination and bombing. As an undeclared nuclear power, Israel is the last country on Earth to have any moral standing for bombing to deny nukes to others.
Or take the assassination of Soleimani in Baghdad, which caused some weak-sauce retaliation against American bases. Sure, you may claim that he had no legitimate business in Iraq, but if instead Iran had killed an IDF general in the West Bank (who likewise would not have legitimate business there) you can bet that Israel would have retaliated as well. Of course, the real retaliation for Soleimani was likely Iran greenlighting the Oct 7 attacks.
Now, it could be that I am genuinely wrong and IRGC forces have habitually launched missiles against Israel, but I recall the Biden years to be rather quiet as far as direct attacks are concerned, presumably because Iran did not want to get into a pissing contest it knew it would lose. All the escalations since Trump took office seem to originate in the US and Israel.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
This ignores (at least in the case of Afghanistan) the necessity of invasion.
From the perspective of US internal politics, one might argue that there was indeed a necessity. The voters were howling for blood after 9/11, and any leader who would not have given them some war would likely not have survived politically. But even then, the 20 years of occupation while trying to build a nation was clearly a wasted effort.
Spending untold billions to get a terrorist who really annoyed you is something which some people might think is worth establishing as a precedent, but I would hardly call it necessary. Other countries had to suffer evil men who committed mass murder against their population enjoy their freedom, and yet they survived.
For Saddam, the case was even more flimsy. Sure, he was an evil piece of shit, but so are a lot of strongmen in the region. Presumably, he had learned his lesson about attacking US allies after the first Gulf war. He certainly did not cook chemical weapons, as W claimed. His removal directly lead to the surge of daesh, which likely was much worse for human rights than Saddam.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I would not go that far. It is very possible that more than one side in a conflict is shitty. The Iranian leaders are also not getting a Nobel any time soon.
Iran is clearly a repressive dictatorship, and it is also pursuing nuclear weapons.
But I do have different standards. First, the US and Israel are clearly the aggressors here. This does not make them bad per se, sometimes aggression is required. But it does clear communication out of what might be termed a decent respect to the opinions of mankind. If you talk about bombing your enemy 'for fun', you are making an excellent argument for yourself being evil.
Second, I remember the Iraqi propaganda minister during the W invasion. His statements were about as trustworthy as anything Trump has ever tweeted, yet the Western reaction was amusement, not outrage. This was simply because few people in the West had any expectations for the mouthpiece of a dictatorship not to be a lying sack of shit. By contrast, for the most part past US presidents have tried to avoid telling direct lies or calling their opponents names. Saddam was merely a regional problem, Greenland was perfectly safe from his reach. By contrast, the US under Trump is everyone's problem.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
That seems unlikely. In peace negotiations, you generally can't chose whom you are negotiating with. Iran can't say they would prefer not to talk with the US and talk with the UK instead, nor can Trump negotiate a ceasefire with Iraq instead.
But generally the host country is one which both sides can agree on. Iran can reject peace talks in Israel, and the US can reject peace talks in Lebanon. Pakistan was something both were willing to agree to, presumably because both thought that Islamabad would not fuck them over.
Generally, the host country has diplomatic influence on the line. If they fuck over either side, e.g. by misrepresenting the ceasefire terms, their diplomatic influence with one side will evaporate. With the Taliban trouble, Pakistan is unlikely to stab the US in the back. So in short, I would trust the host much more than I would trust either side.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
I will grant you that this will give the ships of any country whose ships they deny a legitimate cause for war, just as the US blockading Iran gives any country whose ships they block an excuse to sink their carriers. In practice, third parties affected by either blockade will judge it in their interests not to start a war over it.
From a ceasefire perspective (which is what my quote was about), either blockade is an act of war, but the general narrative I heard was that Iran was willing to open Hormuz before Trump enacted his blockade.
The US has myriad option to impose their will on the world, from soft power to bunker-bursting bombs and invasions. Like the hedgehog, Iran only has one trick, but it is a very good trick. To expect Iran to bear the US blockade and not make the world share their pain by kicking the world economy in the balls would not be reasonable. This is not something specific to the Mullah regime, any country would do the same in Iran's place, international norms be damned.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
If you want to start a social media company based on the premise that the users are verified using government IDs, by all means do so. If you want to tell your kids that they are only allowed to use such media, by all means try. If you dislike porn, I hear Disney runs websites which are rather porn-free. By all means lobby Microsoft to add Mandatory User Age verification to Windows Server.
The point being that you compete in the marketplace of ideas. Plenty of companies build walled gardens and gilded cages in the internet. Even the companies which verify identities can generally decide how much they trust operating system and if they require remote attestation of some TPM chip certifying that the video feed used for ID is actually recorded by a tamper-resistant camera.
But to constrain the marketplace of ideas you would have to demonstrate that the options you dislike are actively harmful, and you have done no such thing.
quiet_NaN
3d ago
The steelman is that it will incentivize minors to run custom operating systems so they can watch porn, and they might learn something in the process both about tech and the government.
More seriously, the only reason besides utterly incompetence anyone could have to enact such a law is that they want to create a dystopia out of RMS's worst nightmares.
This law would be moot as long as people have the freedom to decide what software they run. At the moment, there are both walled gardens and platforms which with you can mess as much as you want. While anyone can buy a Raspberry Pi for a couple of bucks and run whatever software they want, kids can simply opt for a distribution which does not try to babysit them. Or run systemctl disable babysitd, for that matter. So you would need to mandate TPM chips in every device with more than four kilobytes of address space or something. Good luck with that.
And of course this would be required, but not yet sufficient on its own. How can an operating system know if the person in front of it is a minor or not? With AI, facial recognition can be tricked. Of course, the government could helpfully implant RFID chips in citizens to help the poor OSes figuring out who is who. I think the traditional location would be the forehead.
The internet has the advantage over real life that if you find yourself in a situation which makes you uncomfortable, you can just turn off the screen without having to learn how to dissociate first. Nor is this the purpose of such laws -- someone who prefers not to see unsolicited dick picks can use messenger apps which have options to block those. The purpose of such laws is to control what kind of content minors are allowed to search for. Like the internet, reality is not safe for children. Any ten-year-old riding a bike in traffic is just one bad decision away from a life-altering accident. However, kids (or those who make it, anyhow) thrive in conditions which are not entirely safe.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Anything is possible.
It is possible that aliens have landed in Greenland and any US president would therefore invade in 2026.
It is possible that an oracle has told Trump that America is doomed unless a majority of voters end up believing he is crazy.
It is possible that the Moon has turned into cheese since the last time we checked on it.
For a good Bayesian, anything is possible, but not everything is plausible. We have data how previous US administrations have dealt with Iran, and as you point out, we have Trump's public statements. Perhaps talking about regime change was a 3d chess move and he knew very well that killing the Ayatollah would not destabilize the regime, but had other reasons to do so.
Nor should we fetishize classified intelligence. Classified intelligence rarely changes the big strategic picture. Someone making an effort to follow a war from publicly available sources will generally get the gist of what is going on. Sure, once a century she might be completely blindsided by the US nuking Hiroshima, but most of the time the ministers and generals will have an information advantage of just a few weeks. Intelligence seems more useful in a tactical frame "we can kill the Ayatollah on that date" than on an strategic scale. If the US had military intelligence so great that they could avoid blunders, GWB would have invaded neither Iraq or Afghanistan.
Furthermore, your hypothetical big intelligence revelation would have to be something which involves Iran (so the Iranians likely know) and also known to the US (otherwise they could not have acted on it). It seems unlikely that it would be in the interest of neither party to tell the world about it. As a counterexample, when NATO intelligence had reason to believe that Putin would attack Ukraine, they made their concerns public.
Personally, I think that Trump's behavior can be adequately explained by his personality traits. We all remember the tweets how he predicted that Obama would attack Iran to boost his popularity. Of course, Obama did no such thing, but this is adequately explained by Obama in 2015 having at least 20 IQ points on Trump in 2026 (plus a staff of technocrats instead of brown-nosers) and thus knowing that would turn into a fiasco.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Lol, you seem very optimistic (from US perspective) about the amount of hurt Iran can withstand.
Obviously the war so far has hurt Iran far more than the US. It does not matter jackshit. Those who support the the regime mostly believe in their religion, I imagine. The Ayatollah is certainly aware that a continuation of the war will likely cause the deaths of further family members of him.
As a model of Iran, consider Gaza. Both the IRGC and Hamas are militant Shiite extremists. Israel did a lot worse than some economic blockades after the Oct-7 atrocities. They killed Hamas members, turned most of the buildings in Gaza to rubble, starved the population, and so forth. At the moment Hamas seems quiet, but they have very much not gotten rid of it. Even if regime-supporting Iranians are less fatalistic than Hamas, I do not have a good reason to assume that they are less willing to take on hardships than Ukraine.
The idea that the IRGC -- which has just withstood a bombing to the tune of a few dozen billion dollars -- might buckle under a few months of economic hardship seems implausible. "Due to sanctions, I can't buy my kids a new Xbox" is not sufficient argument when you feel your way of life is on the line. Nor will the kids of the IRGC starve.
acoup on the topic. The gist is that locals care a lot more about a war which might destroy their polity than the people in far-away, much stronger nations.
And I do want to stress that. There is a frequent mistake, often from folks who deal in economics, to assume that countries will give up on wars when the economics turn bad. But countries are often very willing to throw good money after bad even on distant wars of choice. For wars close to home that are viewed as existential? Well, the ‘turnip winter‘ where Germans started eating food previous thought fit only for animals (a result of the British blockade) began in 1916. The war did not end in 1916. It did not end in 1917. It did not end until November, 1918. Food deprivation and starvation in Germany was real and significant and painful for years before the country considered surrender. Just because the war is painful for Iran does not mean the regime will cave quickly: so long as they believe the survival of the regime is at stake, they will fight on.
There is a great deal of ruin in a nation.
If the median US voter believed that the survival of their way of life was at stake, I am sure that they could withstand the economic hardships of Hormuz being closed indefinitely. But they have enough of a grasp on reality to know that this is not the case. They were skeptical about the war form the beginning, and will not gladly suffer higher gas prices for some dubious geopolitical goal half a world away.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
Seems that Iran has closed the strait again, because the US blocked their ships.
To be honest, seems fair. A blockade is an act of war. A ceasefire where one side blocks economic activity while the other does not seems unbalanced. If Trump or Iran had merely blocked weapon systems from passing through the strait, that would be different.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
In social justice progressivism, it is racist to claim that a non-white person is racist or sexist. (It might be ok to express discomfort with the Taliban's treatment of women as long as you amend it with a claim that the GOP is at least as bad.)
Basically, racism/sexism is a cultural thing and to disapprove of aspects of non-white cultures is racist.
There is probably a scissor statement for SJP when you pick a minority somewhere in the middle of the totem pole of oppressedness. Like 'Is it racist if a Romani prefers his daughter to marry a Romani man to marrying a man from Ghana?' SJW1 might round 'Romani' to 'white' and decide that it is racist, while SJW2 might round it to 'oppressed minority' and decide that saying that SJW1 is committing cultural genocide.
In my mind, there is likely something which is terrible about any culture. These are terrible to women, those have a caste system with little intermixing, these cut off parts of kids genitals, those are gerontocratic, these have a culture heavy on organized murder, those are mostly zealots, etc.
With regard to the WaPo article, what strikes me as particular cringe is the tagline of Bezos' newspaper -- "Democracy dies in darkness". The WaPo as a light in the MAGA darkness (which is how I read the claim) would be more believable if Amazon had not just spend 40M$ on Melania.
If Trump's DoJ (he did not get around to rename that one yet, did he?) had any hard evidence that made the SPLC an accessory to some crime of a far right org they were infiltrating, they would not go after them for donation fraud.
FBI informers can get promises of immunity which may be dependable to a non-zero degree. The SPLC can make no such promises. So a rational informer will not feed the SPLC information which incriminate himself.
Furthermore, I do not think that the SPLC are actually mustache-twisting villains who want to enable far-right violence to justify their own existence. "Hi Joe, bad news. No payments this month, donations have plummeted, people simply do not care about Neonazis. Oh, you are planning to shoot up a synagogue? That is excellent news, I will have an intern prepare a list of impactful targets immediately. Do you need funds or should we rather ship AR-15's to you." <-- not happening.
In the US, you rarely go to prison just for being a member of an organization, liberty and all that. Nor do you go to prison for infiltrating an organization under false pretenses. I do not see anything stopping the right from infiltrating violent left wing organizations. I hear Antifa is a really big domestic terrorist threat. If some MAGA org wants to infiltrate Antifa and figure out their structure, they are certainly allowed to do so, as long as they do not fund serious crimes in the process (which they would not, because they do not want to see ICE agents murdered any more than the SPLC wants to see Jews murdered).
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