And you ask, How magnanimous is Lockheed-Martin? I tell you yea, they profit one cent off the dollar when Hellfire smites an apostate's wedding.
I recognize the necessity of health insurance, I endorse it verbatim as part of the bulwark against single-payer. I understand they have to make hard decisions, because healthcare is triage, and when resource allocation literally is life-and-death, cold calculation is required. This makes it better, it does not make it good. While I'm at it I guess I also should clarify that I see no good in a man being murdered in the street. This may cause deaths downstream, I assume no one's taking that CEO role now without United providing private security, that cost, likely trivial as it is, may be pushed on the consumer, so a rise in rates or claims denied and both lead to reduced life outcomes and death. On the other hand if it causes them to approve claims they otherwise wouldn't, we might see life downstream of this, but I'm not saying let us do evil that good may result. It was murder, and his condemnation will be just. I only plea to history in what constitutes "prosocial" behavior: Thompson was a plebeian who made himself a patrician, and civilization continued all the same through those periods where noblemen who profited from commoners' deaths still feared earthly vengeance.
It doesn't matter if it's 8%, the misdeed is not meted off the margin.
jake
11d ago
What's prosocial about profiting in death?
Health insurance is a fleeting necessity. It's been useful as structural opposition to American single-payer, but AGI approaches as does the panacea, and the industry will cease to exist by 2100. Healthcare as a whole has to put a price on human life, health insurance does too, it's the cold calculations of what's needed to stay solvent and I would only say remain attractive to investors where this latter is necessary to the former. Not when it's simple profiting, and that's what's happening here, profiting in death.
There is nothing prosocial about that behavior. Civilization does have a long relationship with profiting in death, but the avarice underlying that is iniquity's millstone we trudge ever against. Great men have been driven by their want for something to make the most lasting achievements, but it is grossly reductive to categorize it as greed. If that is a fair term, then it applies truly to precious few men who have ever lived. Better to know those traits are found commonly, and those great men were motivated by something ineffable and gestalt, rather than mundane greed.
So to suggest, in this not being prosocial, that civilization was not raised on the line of people being murdered randomly in the street, is to view it in a hypermodern and wrong lens. Thompson was not a random person, he was a modern nobleman who led an organization that profits in death and reaped finally a historically appropriate reward. That historic archetype did fear murder in the commons, so whoever among them today who do not fear being struck down, or who did not, they are or were living in that hypermodern lens, and that's not civilization, it's castration.
AGI approaches, the panacea approaches. Some here, I hope all, will live to see the extinction of health insurance, but regardless, by the end of the century it will be gone, as will the majority of occupations in healthcare, and civilization won't bat an eye. In 200 years it will be a morbid curiosity of 20th and 21st century life, and probably considered in studies as part of humanity hurdling the real problem of the lost jobs and purpose caused by AGI. But those are the things that matter, not "lost" profit opportunities, and not a nobleman dead in the street.
jake
14d ago
The only definitive point I see in the video is the visible gas on first discharge. The Station 6 demonstration video shows it releasing gas only when the bolt is cycled, but that video is in daylight and what appears to be warm weather. There is a moment where it's possible he was racking the slide, but there aren't enough pixels to say that definitively, same with when he first fires and it's possible the slide was moving back, or it was just recoil. In the typical circumstance I would trust Ian's assessment, here I don't know what he sees in that blur to call speculation about it being a Welrod-type "conclusively wrong." He just says he watched the surveillance video, and maybe he's seen the actual source video, that would still leave an explanation needed for why the NYPD thinks it's a Station 6.
Police believe the shooter used a B&T Station Six, known in Great Britain as a Welrod pistol, according to police sources. The gun doesn't have a silencer but does have a long barrel that enables the 9 mm to fire a nearly silent shot. The gun requires manually cycling ammunition from the magazine.
Leftist terrorism seems very unlikely. Why an insurance exec and not oil? Why either of those and not a politician? If he had the patience to learn a gun, make a suppressor, go in with a plan, not freak out — why not do all that with a rifle against a comparatively hardened target? Or why not use a bomb like the Red Army Faction and Alfred Herrhausen? There's no objective, no real victory, and that applies to revenge, but the widower motivated by the death of his wife gives us something specific, the leftist looking for someone who "needs killing," why would he ever start with insurance? The target and method say vendetta, not politics.
Looks specifically like a pistol with an integrated suppressor and manual action, in the vein of the B&T Station 6, and 9mm casings were recovered at the scene.
Video demonstration: https://youtube.com/watch?v=n8XHxUlg0F8
The shooter in the video manipulates the back of the barrel (rather than racking a slide) after each shot and makes the same sort of jerking motion required to eject spent cartridges from the Station 6. He also does indeed appear to clear a misfire, but not a serious one as he was able to eject the cartridge and chamber and fire another.
I don't know about a paid hit. When was the last time an American exec was killed like this? I asked Grok for examples from the last 40 years, it pulled only the 2001 murder of Federal Prosecutor Thomas Wales. Other than it being suspected as a paid hit, I don't see these as exactly analogous, and on that note, today, isn't every online-classified-tor-bitcoin-assassin a fed? Who has the means to find a guy like the shooter but lacks the means to, say, cover their wife's cancer treatment? Major league corporate shadowiness also doesn't feel right, again I'd wonder where are the other examples, and I'd think at that level they just have the guy killed on his yacht and that sends whatever message they want.
Revenge seems simplest. Tech, energy, banking, all those could have myriad motives. Health insurance CEO, revenge crushes everything else on probability. So ex-SF guy loses his wife to cancer after she was denied coverage, decides to kill the CEO of their insurance company. As ex-SF he would have the skill, and to have made it through SF selection for whichever branch, he'd have outlier motivation and resolve. Everything necessary to coldly decide to kill another man, and then kill that man in such a manner as we see in the video. And probably get away with it.
jake
29d ago
These three images are found in the article: 1 -- 2 -- 3
None of these images show gunshot wounds. These show children x-rayed after a bullet was placed beneath their heads or neck.
These are radiological findings of actual gunshot wounds to the head: 1 -- 2 -- 3
Image searching "cranial gunshot wound radiological imagery" is all you needed for the debunk.
Quoth the article:
These photographs of X-rays were provided by Dr. Mimi Syed, who worked in Khan Younis from Aug. 8 to Sept. 5. She said: “I had multiple pediatric patients, mostly under the age of 12, who were shot in the head or the left side of the chest. Usually, these were single shots. The patients came in either dead or critical, and died shortly after arriving.” Dr. Mimi Syed
That's damn bad luck she only had fakes to hand over. Guess we'll have to take her at her word, same for the journos and editors who applied I would estimate at approximately zero scrutiny and negative intelligence. On that note,
I believed the story because there's a huge number of people talking about what they saw treating casualties in Gaza
Nobody treating casualties in Gaza is a reliable source. The Israelis sure as hell aren't reliable either, but you are talking about the bleeding-est of bleeding hearts. These are people truly incapable of thinking about the conflict in terms any more complex than the immediately real of what they see treating the wounded. There is something admirable to those who go out of neither ethnic nor religious obligation, felt, implied, whatever. A white Catholic doctor treating those people, as I'm sure exists, is doing good, but they're never thinking critically. Critical thinking does not lend itself to going halfway around the world to treat war casualties. Critical isn't the same as clear, you know, they might be the clearest thinkers of all. Like, what the hell is everybody else thinking? People are dying and we can help. But if it is, that's warm, it's goodness, while realpolitik is frigid. If they're told an Israeli soldier shot the child they're treating, they will believe it, because they don't have it in them to doubt those who told them. Doubt would send them packing, but really, the doubt would make it so they never went.
I do not. I honestly have no desire to go looking for footage of children being gruesomely murdered, no matter how much it might strengthen my argument on an online forum. I'm aware that this is a dodge, but I'm sure you can appreciate that not only is graphic footage of child murder extremely hard to stomach, it is also banned by almost all major platforms and is frequently removed after it gets too "popular". I regret seeing the clips that I have seen and have no desire to repeat the experience.
This is a place for evidenced discussion and the evidence you provided is fake. To be clear, I don't believe you're commenting in good faith, I believe you're doing a good job at disguising mundane antisemitism. Namely because if you had seen as much graphic footage as you claim, you would know acute gunshot wounds to the head don't look like that. So either you're practicing sophistry in service of your point, or if I were to extend faith, it would mean you're too naive to yet comment on this issue, as it would be total indictment of your ability to assess the truth of things, such as your supposed videos. You take those bullet images uncritically, I must assume you take "graphic footage" equally uncritically. To match your anecdote, I've seen a lot of modern, graphic war footage over the last 15 years and I have not once seen a video anything like you describe.
So basically, pics or it didn't happen. Provide the video or stop citing it as though it has any bearing. I don't want to witness the child victims of war, but I've heard this so many times that I'd rather see it to know the truth of it than be forced to continue only speculating. I would certainly rather see it than take you at your word, because I will not take you at your word.
jake
1mo ago
The justification for this ruling was that unstable people listened to Jones, right? So Jones is culpable. I don't even agree with prosecution under "incitement of imminent lawless action," it goes against our entire philosophy of law. If a person who would not otherwise commit a crime, would do so if told by the right person, they can't be held accountable. If for no other reason than the continued function of civilization, we are required to hold all adults as solely responsible for their actions.
To maintain civilization we must also be free to challenge all "established" narratives, at any time, for any reason. The United States owes its continued existence to its foundational documents assuming the worst. 1A assumes that unchecked, the government will lie, so people must have legal protection for calling out those lies. 2A even more so, which accounts for the possibility and need for violent revolution. i.e.; "1, so you can shed light on their tyranny, 2, so you can kill them if all else fails." It assumes bad actors will appear and so enshrines the ability to fight them, while holding the spirit of the whole, the whole of the people in good faith in vesting the power to fight them with the people.
It's also why, and you can call it wasted rebelliousness, I consider this as absolute moral mandate to call Sandy Hook a hoax. The government conspired to destroy a man for questioning it, downthread there's debate about "He would have had to pay less if he'd done it/well actually he might be sued for more if he'd done it," yeah but not much more, and that's the point. His punishment for questioning appears to be in the realm of the monetary punishment for having committed it. It's a hoax. The system is a hoax, that it's unquestionable is a hoax, everything about it could be true, and it's still a hoax.
Gun control is never happening. So the masses laugh as in this ruling the families make the short lives and most violent deaths of their children part of nothing greater than a soon-forgotten joke. It's disgusting.
jake
1mo ago
DiscourseMagnus naming Paul Hill resulted in me reading about a number of abortionists who were killed or who people attempted to kill. Garson Romalis was one, a Canadian who interned in Chicago in the 60s. An OBGYN, he saw wards of women suffering from folk remedy abortifacients, by his time rarely dying or at least per Wiki "only about one each month." But the severity of complications from those failed remedies are what he named as his motivation to supporting its legalization and performing abortions. I wonder about the demographics of the ward, of the most common ethnicity of the women he treated and the specific circumstances of each.
I am unsurprised by infanticide in less civilized peoples, and in those peoples who are otherwise civilized but who live in times like war and famine that demand cruelty. That's a switch, that's knowing you're going to die, or your entire family might die, it's the survival response changing the brain. A people murdering children, in your article so many daughters because of whatever marginal social and economic benefits rather than "We're going to die if we don't have a son", well I guess I don't consider them people. And such concerns do not exist in the United States, the majority of abortions performed here are out of convenience. I do think if the purchase and prescribing of emergency contraceptives and antiprogestins shortly after conception are included in the totals, the numbers are to a measure inaccurate, but that's only some, and only if they are.
As for the last, abominable was my echoing Magnus. She isn't violent or criminal but she is deeply immoral, and I think I've now described her enough that her behavior should be clear. I love her as I love all my friends, but the way in which I know her means I would never pursue her for dating and marriage. She doesn't match with me. Where I find her attractive is that she's a tall and thin woman and my sin is desire.
You're probably right, intelligence is probably a hard snare for me even as I say I don't care about it, but knowing her has cultivated in me a cynicism and suspicion that will always persist. So be it.
I should put more thought and words into the following, and I probably will, but it's the topic here.
I don't want to couch the following too heavily one way or the other. I love women but I don't generally respect them. The most intelligent woman I know, the one I most enjoy talking with, is also the most morally abominable person I know. I've told her that, I call her that directly as I chastise her to do better, she halfheartedly justifies herself, and our conversations move on. I don't know if "right" is something she could consider me since I would question her concept of rightness, but she knows I won't be swayed, and our odd interactions continue. However better I am it's not by much, it's only distance keeping us from sleeping together.
As is loved repeating here, women be, men do. Philosophers have seen this as intrinsic good, so do I, it's God's intent. My aspirations are all in pursuit of a beautiful wife and many children. I don't expect or want her to match me, only match with me. So in a decade people might see her only value as what I saw in her, but everything I did was so she saw value in me. I see this as good, that the whoever whose quote I can't remember and can only poorly paraphrase, this graceful being elevated above the coldness of the world, pursued because it is the way of things for her to be pursued, and that itself is her good value and her virtue.
Loved, honored, but not respected. A man is respected for what he has made himself; a woman is honored for what she is. And that's the mother.
I suspect the majority of women find the idea of pursuing an abortion, not emergency contraception, maybe not abortifacients a few weeks after the specific moment of conception, but decidedly no farther than the first trimester, as morally unfathomable. This is because the argument that a fetus is not a child is ruthlessly cold logic, and most women are not ruthlessly cold beings. They are mothers of man, and no words exist to convince her the baby growing inside her is not human. It is her child.
The delineation of fetus and child is the kind of argument a man makes with other men, and it's still a coinflip. Name a single political matter in our world resolved on the cold logic of women. Welfare, maybe? That's just pragmatism. There isn't one, that's not how women think. They vote for it, why? Consensus, they go with the flow and become the river. Resistant to perturbations and attempts at diverting unless overwhelming, in this they maintain, as is their glorious purpose, so only unquestionable power can overcome, for good and ill. Consensus even when morally offensive? Yes, because she can go in the booth, and amidst whirling thoughts and feelings of consensus and the powerful quiet voice of What if you need one?, even as she would never get one, even as she pulls the lever for it, she still means it absolutely when she tells herself "I will never get one."
Plenty, what, half of the opposition, more? Heed a different consensus and silence the quiet voice and pull against.
But I think there are some, few in total, where the knowledge of these creatures wearing the skin of women would end the debate. Those who crafted rhetoric in the name of women using a method of argumentation that doesn't work on women. How does it persist? Because it works on enough men to keep the debate there, rather than the grand deception. Those creatures don't care that a human is inside them, because they don't like it, they don't want it, and things they don't like are Other and may be killed without thought.
This is the most charity I can give the subject, and what I think is the most charity that can be given. Anything less is the final argument against suffrage.
jake
1mo ago
It's what your quoted text observed, 57%, while Florida requires 60% for changes to their constitution. Far more conservative Missouri passed it with 51.9% Yes vs. 48.1% No, as amending the Missouri constitution requires only a simple majority.
Florida Amendment 4, and the following appears to be the full text:
Limiting government interference with abortion.— Except as provided in Article X, Section 22, no law shall prohibit, penalize, delay, or restrict abortion before viability or when necessary to protect the patient’s health, as determined by the patient’s healthcare provider.
Missouri Amendment 3, full text, and summary:
A “yes” vote establishes a constitutional right to make decisions about reproductive health care, including abortion and contraceptives, with any governmental interference of that right presumed invalid; removes Missouri's ban on abortion; allows regulation of reproductive health care to improve or maintain the health of the patient; requires the government not to discriminate, in government programs, funding, and other activities, against persons providing or obtaining reproductive health care; and allows abortion to be restricted or banned after Fetal Viability except to protect the life or health of the woman.
A “no” vote will continue the statutory prohibition of abortion in Missouri.
The constitution vests the power of determining electors in the legislatures of each state, Congress can't touch it. For example, California prohibits the checking of IDs in their elections (for all obvious reasons) despite it being entirely constitutional for the California Legislature to redefine their method of electoral college voter assignment as a popular vote open to all persons residing or even just currently in the state.
Article II, Section 1, Clause 2:
Each State shall appoint, in such Manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a Number of Electors, equal to the whole Number of Senators and Representatives to which the State may be entitled in the Congress: but no Senator or Representative, or Person holding an Office of Trust or Profit under the United States, shall be appointed an Elector.
&
"In McPherson v. Blacker (1892), the Supreme Court affirmed the ability of a state to appoint its electors based on electoral districts rather than a statewide popular vote, describing the power of state legislatures to determine the method of appointment of electors as 'plenary,' and suggesting that it was not limited even by state constitutions.**"
What Congress could do, in the imaginary world of unchecked supermajority power and lockstep ideological alignment, is define federal electoral fraud as an act of war, define the perpetrators of federal electoral fraud as unlawful enemy combatants and/or as guilty of treason, and summarily execute them. A nightmare for many reasons and not hyperbole so much as total fantasy driving the point of "Congress can't really do anything." Not anything within the system; declaring the entire government of a state as fraudulent and criminal, sending in the army to arrest them all and run the state via martial law while they get everything sorted out is within their "power," insofar as the sovereign can ultimately do whatever it has the power to do, but that's not the question.
jake
1mo ago
How much can I dislike Trump without it being TDS?
What do you dislike about the man that is original to your person? Your specific and personal preference, informed to the best of your ability from neutral sources? And what do you dislike about the man that actually or effectually originates in those with TDS?
Take my brother. He doesn't have TDS but he has beliefs that come from it via journalists with TDS. He likes Trump-as-the-comedian, but hates the effect he views Trump as having on the degradation and divisiveness in political rhetoric. Degradation maybe, I can't be partial as I'm on record so often talking about my contempt for WASP decorum. Divisiveness no, that causation is backward. They could have taken the constituent concerns behind Trump's success, chiefly economics. "Doesn't matter how outsourcing benefits the wealthy, it hurts domestic jobs." Done. "Racism and xenophobia are bad but it's not racist to understand the basic economic impacts of minimally restricted immigration on the labor pool." Done. Legitimize those concerns, Trump loses issue-level success. Acknowledge voter concerns, Trump loses structural-critical-level success. A pivot, a good economy, they win easily, if not in 2020 then 2024 and beyond. They didn't. They screamed racist and ran hoaxes and every time one failed instead of pausing for contemplation they doubled down. Again and again. We are in Year 8 of them doubling down on Trump. We are in Year 12 of ever-intensifying racial rhetoric.
I could go to other issues but I won't save this. Some of my friends often talk about whatever latest bad story of Elon Musk. I think when I listen to them, how pleasant it must be to live in such a world; that everyone who disagrees with you is incompetent and evil.
There's nothing aligning about acknowledging a person's strengths. I'm a fan of Dropout and especially Brennan Lee Mulligan, and I'm amused, probably in some way like the father is at his four year old being petulant but in a fundamentally innocent and harmless way, when the guy rants about capitalism. His life is the hyper-niche product of the absolutely relentless process of profit-finding in capitalism. He would be nothing without it, or in a communist paradigm, a scarily effective apparatchik. Still, he's brilliant, funny, earnest and full of love, however misguided, and he is just terrifically naive. (As many but not all good artists are.) Liking the guy doesn't mean I agree with him, and that I disagree with him isn't an indict for the many things he's good at. Trump is the living embodiment of "being good at things," that's just first-principle truth as extrapolated from language. To be "effective" is to be described in terms that categorically apply to Trump, so for him to be "not" those things, not competent, not effective, not intelligent, a conman, a huckster, those indict the language rather than the man. You would need to invent new words, and the etymology of those words would just be "Yeah he's competent, but he's an asshole."
Doesn't mean you have to like him, doesn't mean you have to agree with him. The world is as it is and has always been because the groups of people who disagree with each other in and over making the biggest decisions are each very good at what they do. History's decided on the narrow margin between competing competents.
jake
1mo ago
You mean this one?
On June 28, 2017, Kobach, in conjunction with the Department of Justice, asked every state for personal voter information.[6] The request was met with significant bipartisan backlash; 44 states and the District of Columbia declined to supply some or all of the information, citing privacy concerns or state laws.
Make the argument he faced near-total bipartisan opposition, sure. Don't make the implicatively false tie with the 2020 General and the patently false "didn't find any."
jake
1mo ago
Judicial power trumps state power, and left-aligned judges have been prolific at stopping Republican attempts at legislating electoral security; why would they be any more cooperative in investigations obstructed by hyperblue municipal bureaucracies? Beyond that, while fraud has been something generally talked about, it was not a matter du jour of the 2016 electoral cycle or the 2020 electoral cycle, its prominence today is novel to post-9/11 American political discourse.
Money is an incentive for defection, but there must be an interested purchasing party and goods to deliver. Daniels is a porn star who had evidence of having had sex with the President, of course she was going to be handsomely compensated for the story. A poll worker would have no story merely saying "This many ballots were fraudulently filed," even an interested party would not likely pay them, because that testimony is worth nothing.
The procedure for striking ballots as fraudulent is not a poll worker coming forward and saying "I fraudulently filled 10,000 ballots." The procedure is the poll worker comes forward and says "I applied a secret watermark to these 10,000 ballots; forensic expert team A will prove all 10,000 watermarks are identical and were indeed produced by the same process and human hand rather than being an artifact of printing or processing; forensic expert team B will prove I am the individual who produced that watermark all 10,000 times."
Goes to court. Forensic teams successfully tie poll worker to a ballot. Yes, a ballot, 1 ballot.
9,999 hearings to go, because every single ballot must be individually proved as fraudulent, else a legal ballot be illegally struck. See the scope of the problem?
You also assume this as a complex process requiring many people be aware. We don't know how many people are required to flip elections because the process is closed to audit. It could take dozens, it could take hundreds, it could take a handful of people placed at the exact link in the chain where boxes of fake ballots can be introduced and laundered with boxes of legal ballots. We don't know, and this by the way is and has been my entire point throughout my time talking about fraud on this site. When I say "We have no way of knowing" I am describing the act of criminal fraud. It is tax fraud for a corporation to have numbers closed to audit and it is electoral fraud for a government to have ballot numbers closed to audit.
jake
1mo ago
Stealing an election implies not getting caught.
The essay elaborates specifically on how those programs weren't caught. COINTELPRO was a lucky break-in. MKUltra was uncovered while the government was looking at something entirely different, after decades of nobody coming forward. We know, generally, the CIA was running guns and drugs, but the extent is unknown, and what they do today is likewise unknown. How much does the CIA hold in unaccountable bitcoin, for example? It's certainly not $0.
What are your "priors" for no fraud? I can conceive of what those priors would necessarily include.
Necessity? This assumes consistent electoral legitimacy and this is a necessarily irrational belief. There is no basis for a necessity prior.
Morality? It requires an unwillingness to break the law. It's no longer journalists making the comparison, a general calls him Hitler, Harris calls him a fascist. True or false, there is no basis for a moral prior.
Journalism? The modern media establishment would neither investigate nor report on systemic leftist fraud, as they would be reporting on themselves. There is no basis for a journalistic prior.
Investigations? The FBI has been working against Trump since the Obama administration, they were working against him while he was the sitting President. No evidence supports the impartiality of the agency. Additionally, Republicans have only recently been made aware of the potential fraud occurring beneath them, and the areas for that potential fraud are hyper blue cities of purple states. How do Pennsylvania Republicans investigate fraud in Philadelphia? Who's cooperating with them? More, in states like California and Oregon, who would possibly investigate leftist fraud? There is no basis for an investigative prior.
A note before the last, since your priors can only rationally hinge on this: in the United States, to strike a ballot, it must be proved how that exact ballot is fraudulent. A hypothetical poll worker who fraudulently fills out 1,000 ballots and washes them together with legitimate ballots cast at their precinct has no fear of reveal or recourse because in this instance there is no method to differentiate legitimate and fraudulent ballots. It would not only require the poll worker to admit what they did and the exact number, but also be able to identify and prove with court-accepted evidence what ballots they cast in fraud, as it is illegal to destroy a legitimate ballot.
Courts not hearing the cases is all you have, and it would be fair were it not for the above. The citizenry has no method of auditing elections, and it should surprise no one that a crime that is so enabled by the system its revelation all but requires its perpetrators come forward has such little evidence. I would say in real fairness to the courts, what were they going to do? Pause the process for citizen journalism? I would say it, but leftist judges in random circuits have no problem making sweeping constitutional rulings. It is as simple as this: the matter was not given a full hearing by SCOTUS, their declination to hear the case is the strongest argument, but what would they hear? What results from what formal investigation? No, it is the strongest evidence because it is the only evidence, it is very weak evidence indeed.
jake
1mo ago
I wouldn't expect Republicans of a given swing state to be able to thoroughly investigate the electoral procedures of their blue island cities. More, up until 2020 there was no serious consideration on the right of leftist electoral fraud. They weren't looking for it, weren't thinking about it, now that they are, we might expect investigations. Especially with the next Trump administration.
A low level government bureaucrat probably belongs to the group of people least likely to defect, save for those in criminal groups where defectors are killed. It's their job, for many it's the best they can get, why would they defect? Moral concern begs the question.
jake
1mo ago
2016 is a starting point, but it is only a weak indicator of inability or unwillingness. I indict the administration of elections at all levels, so an adequate steelman incorporating the 2016 general election only pushes the question back. Were they unable to inject large numbers of fraudulent ballots? Or were they unprepared and failed to inject enough?
A common oversight on this subject is the thought that stealing national elections requires national coordination. It is in the interest of the California Democratic Party to win California elections, if they are fabricating large numbers of ballots in the general, they can achieve the immediate goal of maintaining local power while achieving the incidental goal of the state's electoral college votes going to the Democratic candidate for president. Same for Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Philadelphia. It's the simulacra, the copy without an original. Many small groups who benefit from stealing local elections, who with no explicit cooperation steal a national election.
jake
1mo ago
What is the steelman for the establishment being unable to steal elections?
Not unwilling, unable. Arguments from unwillingness, such as the ostensible criminality of mass electoral fraud, are tautological, as they assume the ability to read minds. Arguments of it being unnecessary are supremely tautological, as their first assumption is legitimate elections. Tautologies are not steelmen.
That sufficient measures exist to stop illegal voting; that sufficient measures exist to prevent the mass injection of fraudulent ballots; that relevant executive agencies have an interest in auditing elections and investigating to the fullest extent and neutrally charging electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the courts have an interest in neutral hearings of electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud; that the media has an interest in investigating and neutrally reporting to the fullest extent electoral fraud, so leftist electoral fraud. The caveats of "fullest extent" and "leftist electoral fraud" are necessary, as no national-scope investigation has happened, and while there are rarely stories of left-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes, relative to those, stories of right-aligned individuals being charged with electoral crimes occur far more frequently. For the sake of charity, I will agree the inclination to criminal behavior as equal among the left and right, it is however no question that support for criminal behavior is a dominant ethic of the modern left. For these, the probabilistic assumption is one side is caught and/or reported on less often.
Do also consider the history of American conspiracies; principally, that evidence indicates coordination and silence are solved problems.
And to repeat myself, "it's a crime" and "they didn't need to" are not positions of a steelman. Not unwilling, unable.
jake
2mo ago
The story was cats.
It's a matter of taboo. If it's normal in Haiti to eat cats or dogs, I would expect a non-filtered-for-assimilativeness population of Haitians in the United States to have members who catch and eat cats or dogs, just as I would expect them to catch geese, which they have done. Also deer, which I only speculate about, but we wouldn't find it expressly unusual for a foreigner living in the US to hunt and eat deer, and this returns to the point above. If it's normal for them to do it there, then given 20,000 normal Haitians moved to the US, the probabilistic assumption is they have done it here.
I also hold above all other Scripture, the Great Commandment, and believe with my whole heart that loving your neighbor as yourself means loving every neighbor.
What does it mean to love your neighbor as yourself?
jake
3mo ago
The barely teenage groupies who had sex with guys like Mick Jagger were raped. A 14 year old girl is not capable of consenting to sex with a man of that level of fame. They were adolescents caught up in a wave of historically unparalleled wall-to-wall social and peer pressure. The music was good and they could feel it, but those teenage groupies had no context, they were fans of the Beatles and the Stones because they were that-which-is-most-popular. I'm sure you've seen the Beatles on Ed Sullivan; those girls didn't spend the entire performance screaming because they were there to hear the music. This phenomenon can be seen today with Taylor Swift. She is measurably popular because she is popular, and I say that as someone who likes a fair number of her songs and who doesn't care what she's chosen to do with her life. Back then, what would show a girl's "fitting in" more than for one precious moment being the desired object of one of the most famous men alive?
Much of this applies to the teenage girls who were legal adults, who while I would say in their case had nothing happen justifying prosecution, were nevertheless coerced with a lie. The lie of status, the story is perceived status, but it was always and only ever fake. "For that moment, he wanted to fuck me" for that moment, an immensely famous man on a world tour unsurprisingly wanted to have sex with a young and attractive girl who would do anything for him. She tells that story for the exact reason that she wasn't good enough; else she would have married one of those guys, or we would know her as a model or an actress. I'm sure we do in some cases, but those guys went to a lot of places, and those places had a lot of groupies. They weren't sleeping with future models every single night, even though they could have been sleeping with actual models every single night.
All that aside, of course it's not unthinkable, because we live in the time when it isn't unthinkable. But if you had some method of traveling to 1960 and conveying absolute proof of the consequences of the sexual revolution, it would be unthinkable, and it would have never happened. They would see the evidence and they would know it made everything worse. And even ignoring everything else here, everyone knows we happily indulge in things that aren't bad for us, been to the store lately? Seen the sinful glut of Oreo varietals choking half the shelves of the cookie aisle? Four kinds of Funyuns, ten of Doritos, several dozen flavors of Pringles? Who's that for? (It's me, and I love it. Get it?)
Sexual traditionalism is nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when they forget to put their condom on and blast STDs and unwanted babies out into the commons.
Yeah, well enough, though your point might be a bit unclear. Ultimately I'd just stake Chesterton's Fence on the subject, whatever it's ostensibly about, it sure did work for a very long time.
jake
3mo ago
The mitigation of risk is the natural result of technological progress. It isn't always bad, penicillin and the whole of medical research being obvious examples, it's also not always good, see my above comment. Contextually I thought I was clear, it seems not, that I was describing specifically "protection from the highly predictable consequences of poor choices." A person who does something unjustifiably foolish and knows it's foolish if for no other reason than its possible consequences, deserves whatever they get. Living in society means you're going to get sick, it's not unjustifiably foolish to live and go about among other people. Living in temperate climates is a hair different as maybe it would be ideal if most humans lived in a climate like Southern California, but there are resources we need that come from harsh climates, and we've long since adapted to living in climates that require heating in some parts of the year and cooling in others. It's also not the same sort of risk, not today; two hundred years ago if you were unprepared by say, not bothering to get enough wood to burn to keep yourself warm in the winter, you'd deserve whatever happened.
And I say this, people say this, because the American Democratic Party would operate in a categorically different manner if it couldn't campaign on protecting its voters from the consequences of their poor decisions. What would they be if they couldn't deliver on abortion and welfare? What would they be if they couldn't back the mass importation of foreigners who will be dependent on government subsidy? For my money they'd be far stronger, as remaining options and ideological inclination kept them as the natural allies and champions of domestic, native-born labor — the platform they once owned.
jake
3mo ago
Those high-status men are still fucking the help, it's just now they don't have to worry about troublesome heirs. That's why men of status supported the sexual "revolution," not liberty but the libidinous enabled to sleep with whichever women they wanted. It's David and Bathsheba replayed again and again on our entire civilization. Their beautiful wives and beautiful families wasn't good enough, so make it "easier" for the help, rather than harder for those despicable men. Remove the negative consequences from that specific act, which have indeed drastically decreased, but if I compare a maid being tossed out to the subtle and myriad horrors of modern life as a woman I'd say it's at best a tie, and a tie that favors tradition. What benefits some all too often harms most and social pressures and economic interests have a funny way of taking once-niche-choices and demanding them of the whole. Like pressure to become Strong Female Protagonist when most would rather be Stay At Home Mom.
Seatbelt laws are nominally about safety, they're practicably about preventing all the work required when someone gets launched through their windshield and meat crayons the road. Regardless, Big Seatbelt isn't dictating national elections.
jake
3mo ago
This may miss the forest.
The individual abortion may be typically "eugenic," for a particular definition of eugenic, in that it stops poor, unmarried women from having children, or having more children, which means they use less welfare.
Collectively, access to abortion, and welfare, may be highly "dysgenic," though again for a particular definition of dysgenic. Abortion is a kind of incentive, in that it makes a once-risky behavior less risky. Welfare does this too, so do condoms and hormonal birth control. These are prophylactics and contraceptives and treatments centered around the relationship, and since men and women produce children, I'll stick to heterosexual relationships. What's their status? Worse categorically. Dating, courtship, marriage, and childrearing; historically poor, all but nonexistent, also historically poor, a toss-up, some cases best-in-history, many and possibly the mode of cases rife with mental illness. Marriage in particular, the lack of it, the preponderance of single-mother households. What conditions brought this about?
Casual sex. If casual relationships had a positive impact on the psychological growth of a person, making them "better" at being married, we would know. What we see shows they don't. Later marriages, later first children, fewer children, more children in single-mother households. That last of which has categorically poor life outcomes. Why does the behavior persist? What conditions allowed for it in the first place? Abortion, condoms, birth control. Single mothers, add welfare and child support.
That the best of us, the people who should be producing platoons of little copies of themselves and their spouses to help our charge into space, instead have one or two, maybe three, is a tragedy. Yeah AGI is going to solve it, yeah I'm on record about the Simulacra Age and how Japan is going to be so poised for leaping ahead specifically because of their low TFR, but I think a lot of humanity is good and I want it to stick around. Pretty much all of you are pretty cool, I'd like for more of you to be around. I'd like my closest friends to stick around, to have the little copies of themselves to be friends with my kids so when they're grown they'll have some same sense of the joys I've had and continue to have. But most of them aren't having kids, and some of that is motivated by political rhetoric that functions to encourage mostly whites to not have kids, while then complaining about the economics of low birth rates and using those to in part justify dropping tens of thousands of foreigners on middle America.
That rhetoric is why I don't dignify the possibility that all the negatives above are still somehow consequentially "eugenic."
The executive-holding political faction in the most powerful country in the history of humanity derives significant power from maintaining access to abortion. This is not an appropriate interest of government; maybe it's equally inappropriate for the government to prevent abortion, but I can confidently say on the category, that of the two sides, the "Protect us from the consequences of our own actions" party will in all cases be infinitely the lesser. We are highly intelligent animals, we are meat computers, we learn and improve through consequence. Freedom from consequences is axiomatically harmful to human actualization and that's half our politics. These people vote, their politicians hold office. We sent men to the moon in a decade, now there's an oligarchy-appointed presidential candidate who at least at one time supported funding the transitions of incarcerated illegal aliens and a nontrivial number of her voters support her for no reason greater than her promise of protecting their "freedom" from having children. Abortion isn't eugenic, it should in virtually all cases be understood as the definition of dysgenic behavior, lest words mean nothing at all.
jake
3mo ago
How do we have a discussion when you ignore the evidence staring you in the face? The evidence of fraud is the inability to audit results. If a corporation's books have unauditable numbers year after year, people will go to jail. Why is this not the standard for American elections? You repeatedly present the tautological "They wouldn't cheat; they aren't criminals." You don't get to claim this, one you could know every single elections department worker and poll worker and poll volunteer in Alleghany County and it still wouldn't be an argument, and two, it is insultingly untrue to present the institutional American left as having a moral compulsion against breaking the law, most definitely including "felonies." (Also, Pennsylvania was won in 2020 by Philadelphia, no matter how great your familiarity with the mechanics of Pittsburgh politics, it says nothing about the notoriously corrupt Illadelph.)
Maybe 100 years ago a guy could make it through court by taking the stand and saying "I'm just not the type of guy to have done this." Today, that guy would go to prison. I see the retort, "If there's no evidence" -- there may be no murder weapon, but there's means, motive, and opportunity. Circumstantial evidence yes, people do to go prison over circumstantial evidence, but I only make this comparison for the lack of investigation when any one of these meets criteria. A system closed to audit is means; the transferal of executive power is motive; a dominant ideology among poll workers is opportunity. There should be investigations in every state at a minimum every 4 years. I'd support it in my blood red state, as would almost if not universally the voters in this country who could characterize themselves as if nothing else "not left." Yes, when Trump wins in November, voice your doubts, clamor for investigation, I agree. We should audit every election, in every state. Prove it, everywhere, every time. Behind you 100%.
As for paper trails, we still don't know the depths of MKUltra because Helms had so many records destroyed. We know very little about the CIA's drug smuggling because they learned to keep looser books. They don't need records, they would need conversations, those surely happened, but if nobody's recording, nobody goes to jail. Also keep in mind MKUltra included mid-20th century-cultured-American university personnel giving highly psychoactive substances to individuals who did not consent. Stopping the next Hitler from getting to power? C'mon man. It's also feasible for disparate and especially mostly unwitting actors to converge on one goal. Atlanta is individually corrupt, Detroit is individually corrupt, Philadelphia is individually corrupt. Not hard to see their local corruption being incidentally congruous with a separate national objective. But to be clear, I do take somewhat more to the former, I would argue for some level of national conspiracy, insofar as on election night in 2020, the knowledge Trump was to win was received by a central source and propagated to those separate necessary parties who oversaw the injection of fraudulent ballots. There are also assumptions of numbers, we don't know the process, it is closed to audit, we have no idea if, were we able to examine the system, we would find a glaring "at this step it'd be trivial for a handful of actors to introduce significant numbers of fake votes."
And here we return to the inability of audit as proof of fraud. If an electoral system cannot prove itself to be free of fraudulent activity, like the mass injection of fraudulent ballots, that is itself an act of fraud. I describe a criminal act when saying of the system "It can't be audited," that is itself a crime. Though, even without this, you remain wholly mistaken on where the burden of proof lies, and on this I put most vital emphasis: I owe you nothing, the people owe you nothing, because myself and more than a hundred million of my fellow Americans are under no obligation to prove ourselves when we fear the government as having become criminal. The government however is obligated not only by the intrinsic bindings of our nation, but by the very essence of the social contract to prove, whenever demanded, that they aren't criminal. If they can't, they are.
jake
3mo ago
What has to be understood about this discussion is the American left is better if they commit electoral fraud. It means they believe what they say, that they really do view their opposition as so grave a threat -- to whatever they hold sacred -- they are willing to take extreme measures to protect themselves. That left, who speaks and acts with capricious concern for constitution and law, have spent most of the last decade giving every indication they would steal an election if necessary, and you are calling them a unique kind of liar. You treat them with a cynicism even the most lefty-hating righty commentators don't hold. You won't find MacIntyre musing on the left not believing in what they march for; 0HP might observe on the meta their level of investment in a given position but he wouldn't categorically reduce the movement to having no conviction in what they say they believe. Hyde's most famous lines all implicitly consider their being genuine believers and Carlson knows them as zealots and speaks of them as such.
"They don't need to" begs the question in assuming they haven't. They needed to for most of the 20th century, we know they had fraud machines dominating major cities during that time, through JFK. What, they just stopped? As the economy exploded and the US reached ever greater hegemony, the corrupt interests packed up? Of course not, the system put selective pressure to produce the sorts of bureaucrats and politicians who don't get caught, and who exert control within their hierarchies such that the system further protects their ways of corruption. Pivotally on the election, which when we look at your field of arguments they fall apart one by one until you're left with "Well despite all that, they didn't." A process that produces a quantity result that cannot be audited is necessarily unfalsifiable. In literally any other circumstance an unfalsifiable number would be presumed false. Why not elections? Why not the thing that decides who has power?
"It hasn't been a problem until now," yes, and until the last 10 years the American government hasn't been in a dead sprint toward anarcho-tyranny. We haven't had such material reason to believe they would defraud a nation until now, and raising the novelty of our concern is not an argument.
"Gish gallop" is also not an argument, nor is your false dichotomy. Even you, which I say apropos your ideological inclination, must understand in the pure hypothetical, fraudulent actors would face extreme risk if they went all-in on flooding the machine with fraudulent ballots before the results are known. If they undershoot they lose, if they overshoot they hazard blowing past the polling margins while producing rows of precincts with ≥100% actual or effectual turnout and thus reveal themselves. It's no stretch to understand this as a priming of the narrative, something that requires no knowledge on the part of the individuals in the PA DOS responsible for actually making that statement, as the fraudulent actors anticipate as, like 2020, they will need some number of fraudulent ballots delivered after midnight November 6th, which is when they will have the totals so they will know the approximate number to inject to stay within the polling margin.
As for arguments from complexity, I wrote on this about a month ago. American history has immediate examples of conspiracies involving very large numbers of actors who never came forward. With "democracy and the future of the country" at stake, the ideological component of conspiring for the greater good is more than fulfilled. But this is just a reiteration of the above, that the only argument is "They wouldn't." They would, and their failure and now continued refusal to build a system that proves they don't is the only evidence anyone needs on the matter.
If I had to guess about you, and of course I am probably wrong, but I know this is the case for my brother and a couple of my dearest friends and so I know for many others -- I know they think my view, this view of the world is very bleak. They don't want to live in a world where the American left needs to cheat to win. There's a frightening finality to it, an upheaval of fundamental beliefs about the way of things. I definitely understand if nothing else the discomfort they have at the Trump Right being the good guys, which they feel is the necessary consequent to admitting a stolen election, but it isn't. Everybody can be and often are wrong about many things, like viewing me as a pessimist. I know I'm more optimistic than anyone I know, I don't think anyone on this site is as optimistic as I am about the future, and my optimism does include anticipation of a very dark period, but I see us getting past the issues of today, without war or calamity, I see us reaching the singularity and becoming post-scarcity and settling the stars. The shadows in the hearts of men don't discourage me, they embolden me, I know we'll make it through, but I know we'll make it through by understanding the world as it truly is. The world is what it is, reality is, all unaffected by our perceptions and by what we want to be true rather than what is true. The things we know in this life that are worth loving and worth working for all still exist, and we love them as they truly are even if we're not quite right about what they truly are. They exist in a world that does have shadows, they exist in great spite of those shadows. We just can't ignore the shadows. Know them, name them, chase them. Win.
What's the incident rate of men in these situations killing their wives and their wives' families? A light Wikipedia search and then a couple questions at Grok turned up nothing specific.
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