One June 4th, Biden issued a proclamation banning asylum claims from illegal immigrants at the southern border. However, I can't seem to find any information about what actually happened. Did it get blocked in court? Have border encounters gone down?
- Illegals claiming asylum were turned away if the 7 day rolling average exceeded 2500 per day, and the "ban" was rescinded if that average dropped below 1500 per day.
- The ACLU sued the Biden admin for this, but didn't seek an injunction, so it should still be in effect.
I assume they don't bother updating until after the end of the month. I couldn't find anything separating the type of encounter either; asylum seekers just get lumped into the total.
Something really weird is going on on Twitter. When I go to https://twitter.com/patio11 (Patrick McKenzie's twitter), I can view the most recent few tweets normally, but as soon as I scroll down to a certain tweet (the one which I think is about turning society off and then on again though it always refreshes too fast for me to actually read it), the page immediately refreshes (with the same url) before I can read anything, and the new page (despite having the same url) only shows older tweets starting July 19th, with no way to see the most recent tweets again. The only way to go back is to close the tab and open a new tab with the same url (which has the same behavior as before).
I tested this in both Chrome and Firefox, and tried disabling ad blocker too, but it still happens. Additionally, it still happens if I use the "x.com" url instead of "twitter.com". I've never seen this behavior before, and when I check other people on Twitter, it's all normal with no weird refresh and tweet hiding.
Yes. I tried it in an incognito window, but when you aren't logged in, it won't even display recent tweets at all. Logged out users only get a random selection of unordered tweets from years ago, rendering it completely unusable.
(1) The Yemen-based Houthis strike central Israel - in particular Tel Aviv, near the US embassy - for the first time since they entered the war in November. This is both a political first - no other non-Gazan armed group struck Tel Aviv before -, and a technological first for the Houthis pointing at improving capabilities. The Houthis have previously focused only on harassing civilian Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping, the drones and missiles they fired at Israel targeted Eilat and tended to be shot by US navy, the IDF, and the occasional Egyptian fighter jets over Sinai.
(2) The ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is unlawful. This is already the consensus, but the ICJ's ruling is the latest confirmation in a long string. This case is separate from the genocide case opened by South Africa in late December of 2023, it was opened in January of 2023 by the Palestinian Authority. It has since garnered the attention of many states and representatives from Luxemburg to Namibia. The ICJ's ruling is advisory and non-binding, but it's valuable because it bolsters the anti-settlement camp and serves as legal grounding for more Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction behavior from increasingly more European trading and defense partners of Israel.
Thanks! While I may not be as sympathetic to the Hamas cause as you are, I appreciate your opinions. Unfortunately, as long as Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas, I don't think the Netanyahu governement will have the motivation to cease hostilities in Gaza. And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ. Oh well.
Very appreciated, but "Sympathetic to the Hamas cause" doesn't sound like an accurate way to describe my beliefs, unless you're using it as a shorthand for "wants Palestinians to not die and have nice things", in which case... yes, it's technically true, in the same sense that Netanyahu's cause is "wants Jews to not die and have nice things", which would lead us to conclude that anyone who doesn't hate Jews is automatically sympathetic to Netanyahu's cause, i.e. that a sizable portion of Jewish Israelis hate Jews and don't want them to have nice things.
Different definitions for the same word. Jihadis "love" Muslims and so they want them to be an Übermensch group that rules the world, I "love" Muslims and so I want them to wake up to the fact that Islam is bad fanfic plagiarized and translated into Arabic from slightly better Hebrew stories.
> And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ
As expected. The hope is that *other* states won't ignore the ICJ, or at any rate the European ones (who seem to assign a lot of legitimacy and respect to international institutions). Those states will then **force** Israel to care about the ICJ, because they will withhold weapons, trade deals, academic partnership, travel, cultural participation (e.g. sports), and so on.
This is roughly similar to how if a normal court judges you to be guilty of something, you may very well lift your feet and say "Ohh I don't care about this court, I'm nonchalant", but guess who cares about the court? The police, your (future) employer(s), your bank(s), your university, your landlord, etc... All of them would force you to care about the court.
Yes, I apologize for mischaracterizing your position. I'm of the plague-on-both-their-houses school of thought. Yes, it would be good thing if the Palestinians could have a chunk of land and a nation-state to call their own. And I acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist. And I wish that Jewish fundies weren't actively grabbing Palestinian land on the west bank, and I wish that Hamas and Hezbollah weren't actively engaged in asymmetric warfare against Israel. Considering that Hamas can't bring itself to hand back the remaining hostages — and thus remove Netanyahu's figleaf of an excuse for attacking Gaza — I don't think Hamas really gives a shit about the people of Gaza except as human shields and as recruits for long-term future struggle against Israel. And Israel is helping them with that latter goal. It took almost two hundred years for the Crusader Kingdoms to be pushed out that area. I suspect Hamas is playing a long game. But unlike Saladin, they don't have the support of most of the key players in the Arab world. I predict a stalemate of violence for at least the next century.
Apparently members of the public had noticed the shooter on the roof a couple of minutes before he actually fired. They notified the police, but somehow the cops weren't able to act on the warning quickly enough.
The organization responsible for security in the area where the gunman fired from was the local police. Maybe small-town police just aren't that competent, at least when they have to deal with threats beyond speeders and the local drunks.
Nobody is competent outside their area of competence.
Preventing assassinations isn't within the local police's area of competence, which is why the US has the US Secret Service, which gets to sit around all day and think about possible assassination scenarios and how to prevent them.
If the local police had a role to play here, it should have been getting told by the Secret Service to stand on the top of the roof. Or heck, at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the roof.
I'm worried that I might have prediabetes, but going to a doctor is inconvenient. Is there an easy way to track your glucose levels at home? I seem to recall someone talking about this in a previous open thread.
Walgreen's has an inexpensive glucose meter and fairly inexpensive test strips. Of course, you'll need to stick your finger and draw a drop of blood. I suggest that instead of using the tip of your finger, you use the side of your finger and squeezing out a drop of blood, because bruises on the tips of your fingers hurt when you use a keyboard. As a Type I diabetic let me give you some insights into blood glucose behavior...
1. If you're not producing enough insulin, you'll notice that after eating carbs you're blood glucose levels will start to rise about fifteen minutes after eating them, and they'll rise over the subsequent hour. AFAICT, from my experience, there's not all that much difference between low glycemic carbs and high glycemic carbs. Low glycemic carbs may stretch out your blood glucose rise over another extra half hour or so.
2. Also check your blood glucose levels beginning after 4 hours after eating, and finish up around 7 hours. I've noticed that the proteins and fats start to increase my blood glucose levels about five hours after eating them.
3. Alchohol has another six-hour blood glucose effect. If you're drinking wine or booze, check your BG starting about 5 hours after consuming them.
Last year, I am in person at my doctor's surgery, talking to the reception...
Me: Well, I'm not diagniosed with diabetes but I occasionally check with a blood glucose meter to se if dsub-clinical hypoglycaemia is getting any worse, but this time the meter is givin me some stupid error message I don;t understand and I was wondering if you could book me in with the nurse to test it properly.
Receptionist: I don;t think we've got a slot for months.
My doctor (overhearing, from across the room): Test them right now.
(I'm not sure if that was a warning sign or not, but shortly after my thyroid failed ... and one of the many knock on effects I have from the thyroid condition is anemia, which will probably show up even on a blood glucose meter)
My blood glucose was in fact ok .. but then a couple of months later I had rapid weight loss and heat intolerance ->more extensive blood tests get done -> grave's disease diagnosis
There definitely is, and I don't think any of the supplies you need for doing it are prescription only. Not sure though. Just thought I'd tell you some info I just ran across: There's a supplement called I think Berberine that reduces blood sugar. People talk about it as a natural alternative to metformin. The person who told me about it is well-educated, skeptical of "alternative medicine" and not one to just believe hype, so the stuff may actually be pretty good. I recommend you look into it to see if it's safe and effective.
I recently graduated from my undergrad with a degree in philosophy, and through my time studying, I had a strange repeated experience which I'm wondering if anybody else can relate to or knows what it is called. Multiple times during my undergrad, I would have an idea I believed was clever and worth writing about and I would find a way to work it into whatever writing asignments I had going. Then after submitting the paper writing a term paper, I would encounter the same idea somewhere else, albeit much better articulated and with layers of depth I had not anticipated.
The first time I noticed this, was in an Ethics course with a professor who mainly specialized in Ancients, and I remember thinking that there was something seriously epistemically wrong with his positions. I wrote a term paper, which he hated, on moral relativism, which he called sophistry, but I was convinced was more nuanced and complex than he was willing to admit. The paper itself wasn't good, but I thought the idea was at least interesting. Lo and behold, the next semester, I encountered Foucault, who had essentially anticipated and expressed exactly what I was trying to get at, although he would have gotten a better grade on his term paper. I have since abandoned Foucault, but the experience of independently arriving at a preexisting theory or idea remained.
Over time, as I read more, I found that the ideas I hoped were mine were more and more recent, sometimes even published this century, though this might just be a byproduct of reading newer material. It really is rewarding finding yourself naturally drawn along the intellectual path previously tried by great thinkers. I find this encouraging, maybe one day I will catch-up with the Zeitgeist and actually manage to have an original thought I'm not holding my breath. Is there a word for this? (other than naivete)
In most disciplines, the big historical discoveries or developments are 'deterministic': if you re-did the entire history of that field of study with different researchers, in different institutions, the same principles would be discovered in roughly the same order. See https://measureformeasure.co/blog/multiple-discoveries/.
This means that, if you have learned the precursor ideas, and are helped along by the fact that the later concepts are so to speak "in the water supply", you may semi-independently rediscover later thinkers' ideas. I had this experience when I took a class on history of economics and noticed that my way of thinking about the principles of economics was *very* close to that of the early neoclassical economists.
I'll reply with an experience that I had yesterday.
I was at a meeting, and attempting through my ADD, my wonderful current excuse, to pay attention. A guy was talking about something that had nothing to do with me and my gaze drifted over to a fully maxed-out whiteboard full of boxes and erasable lines with acronyms that all have something or other to do with my job but I couldn't tell you what. (Well you might wonder how he keeps a job through this kind of haze. You wouldn't be the only one.)
To get back to my story, my gaze for no apparent reason lit on one of the hundreds of boxed acronyms. it was OTTI, I remember. I don't know what it means any more than you do. It's amazing how much work you can do in the computer field without knowing anything at all. Anyway. A second later--so it seemed to me--the person said that same acronym, OTTI. I was amazed, and now the meeting was gone (for me if not for them), and phenomenology was now paramount.
Is it possible, like one of my pet hypotheses points out, that a certain part of consciousness travels backward in time, priming me to look at potentially useful things just before they are to become useful? Or is it a simpler idea, instead of breaking all the laws of physics, that my verbal processing is slower than my visual processing, but some of that verbal processing is still taking place, such that my eyes were directed to the OTTI box before I consciously understood that I was hearing those same letters? Thanks to the style of thinking I've absorbed from reading this blog I would have to give the weight of evidence to the latter hypothesis. But one thing true of either one is this: your brain processing has some curious and subtle ways about it that are past understanding. And I love that. Too bad about the meeting.
I got a bonus at work that same day. I think I'm way better at paying attention than I used to be, mainly as a function of how often I notice and correct my attention this year. But how did this ever work for my previous 30 year career? Somewhere up here I have a brain, and it's quite a gift, and I cherish it, broken as it is.
I absolutely agree that there is more going on in your brain than you are aware of consciously. I suppose that is why we spend so much of our lives trying to understand ourselves.
I don't have a word for this, but I think that it's a reasonably common occurrence - certainly as an undergrad I had the same experience of anticipating in homework assignments the topic of a future lecture or course. Something you notice as you study an area more deeply (at least in subjects like maths, philosophy, physics) is that there really aren't that many fundamental ideas in any particular topic of study. The basic principles occur again and again, developed and elaborated in different ways.
When you are being trained in critical thinking it's natural to look for flaws in a theory, and to anticipate how to respond to those flaws. It's certainly satisfying to find that someone published the same idea that you had, and that it became part of the history of the subject. If your lecturers were good, they likely were scaffolding you toward the next developments in your subject without making an overt deal about it. You also have the benefit of hindsight - you probably don't cherish so fondly the ideas you had that turned out to be wrong!
As an arts major, I love being mentioned in the same sentence as math and physics. I would not give any credit to this lecturer, in particular, given the fact that there were obvious decades-old flaws in the arguments he put forward. I would have liked to have been pointed in the right direction; it would have saved me a terrible essay, and I would have figured out what was wrong with my idea earlier. Instead, I remember him saying something to the effect of: "This is why we shouldn't teach young men Nitzsche."
Philosophy, maths and physics are to a large part based on axiomatic systems and deductions from those axioms. Newton's Laws allow you to predict (non-relativistic) motion, for example, and Maxwell's Laws allow you to work out how electricity flows in a circuit. Admittedly, some parts of philosophy (Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Russell, Heidegger, etc.) fit better into this type of framework than others (Nietzsche, Weil, etc.)
Your lecturer provoked a reaction in you, which is something. One of the most effective lecturers I had as an hummed and mumbled under his breath and pushed an acetate with a triangle on it around on an overhead projector for 12 weeks (he must have done other things, but this is what I remember, it happened in every class ), but at the end of the semester I somehow had a solid grasp of basic group theory. Another told horrible jokes, deliberately miswrote formulae on the board and then inspected everyone's notes to see who was 'writing down shite', but at the end I knew basic statistics. I have a lot of respect for both of these lecturers (now long retired) but that was in the era before teaching evaluations. It couldn't be done today.
If I have a point, maybe it's that your evaluation of the lecturer is too harsh. I'm a lecturer now, for what it's worth, and expectations have changed since I was an undergraduate. I think it's that I expected to have to go to the library and read and think. We were told explicitly that the notes we took in lectures were not sufficient to pass the exam at the end of the semester (there was minimal continuous assessment back then). I wouldn't get away with that policy now... this is not to say that things were better then than they are now, only different.
Recently graduated? Just a heads up, expect to have an occasional dream in the next couple years where you are still an undergrad and realize you have a final exam for a class you forgot to attend class for the entire term.
Mine is that I technically didn't graduate because I forgot or didn't see the message to show up in a particular place at a particular time, or didn't fill out the right form, or something like that.
I suspect it’s part Baader Meinhoff ( wouldn’t have named it without the earlier reply) and partly it’s just learning.
I had several experiences much like that when studying electronics. Having learned something new, I’d think a new to me idea for a circuit and excitedly show it to an instructor, to inevitably get the feedback “that’s the right idea, and here is why we don’t do it that way, here is how it’s really done”.
I think it’s inevitable and desirable that when learning we are thinking similar thoughts to those who tread the path before us.
In follow up to that, it probably also depends on how your learning flows. I learned electronics in a well structured post secondary environment. So one week I’d be introduced to power amps and feedback, and then rush ahead to ideas of how to apply them. And not surprisingly I was headed in the right direction but simplistic in my approaches.
I learned most of computer programming independently, and was often reading material far ahead of my abilities. I can’t really recall the same experiences of learning a new thing and then jumping ahead to previously unknown to me applications of those ideas. I generally already knew where things were going before I knew how they got there.
That sounds right. I especially like someone else's response that it is likely baked into the lesson planning if it is any good. Your thoughts on learning in general are well put.
I like the water-supply analogy and, indeed, your other alternative explanations. I've heard authors, philosophers, and especially artists (Rick Ruban) express the feeling that the ideas they express aren't necessarily their own; they simply happen to be the ones that get there first. In reality, new ideas are being pulled from the collective unconscious or cultural superstructure. However, you want to think about it.
Two big pieces of news related to Biden being pushed to drop out as Dem nominee, and then I'll add a third new fact which could add to that momentum.
(1) Rep. Adam Schiff just called for Biden to step down as the POTUS nominee. That is big because Schiff is viewed as one of the party's rising stars and is now the presumptive new U.S. Senator from the largest blue state.
(2) "Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to a new poll, sharply undercutting his post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him even if some “big names” are turning on him." Ooooof
He's describing having watched the recording of Biden's speech yesterday to the NAACP's national convention, i.e. a large room full of key Dem supporters/influencers. I plan to watch some of that myself this evening. For now I'll just predict that if Singal's description proves accurate it will become pretty devastating to Biden at this juncture. Many of the people in that room have the ears of lots of top Dem officeholders and/or party officials. Also the link is right there for anybody to watch the recording themselves, and/or for easy sharing by people who were in the room, etc.
I doubt it. Too easy for the truth to leak out. My rule of thumb is WYSIWYG as a starting point unless I have strong indications to the contrary. Has been working well so far.
Garrison Keillor on Midwestern sanctimonious bullies and cheap piety:
“It’s the Midwest, a culture that places a high value on modesty and self-deprecation, avoids irony, follows the rules and gives rule-breakers a sidelong look, keeps complaint to a minimum, prizes loyalty, and is well-practiced at ignoring flamboyance and foolishness and pretense.
But sanctimonious bullies thrive here, too. At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, “We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,” and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety.
There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card. She might as well say, “We acknowledge that the nondegradable plastics that come with our concession products are causing damage to the planet that our children will inherit.”
Huh. I'm not Midwestern, but I have a dim sense of the type of "Midwestern sanctimonious bully" that he mentions. Although I'm not sure how much of that is due to listening to Prairie Home Companion in my childhood, so it's possible my entire concept sprang from his mind. ;-) If they hold true to bully-type, some of them will adapt to changing social norms, and get their kicks from manipulation of whatever system is present. Maybe some have adapted to wokeness?
In this piece, he seems to have a sense of bitterness and alienation, which I don't recall being in his oeuvre previously. But I suppose that's to be expected given his cancellation back in 2017-2018? (Regardless of the truth of the allegations.)
Maybe you or someone else here can explain the appeal of Prairie Home Companion for me? I'm not in the NPR target demographic so I never tuned in, but a couple of times I was at the home of people who obviously listened to it religiously. What I heard was vaguely mildly amusing but never actually funny enough to generate a laugh - I just didn't get it.
I only got little bits of it when I was a kid, and I think a lot of the humor was fairly subtle. It's like pointing out a quirk of human behavior, and exaggerating it slightly, and raising an eyebrow at the audience.
It helps if you've had enough exposure to Midwestern culture to recognize that those were the stereotypical quirks of real people; my parents grew up in Milwaukee and Might As Well Have Been Lake Wobegon, so I got that.
And I definitely appreciated that they didn't feel the need to hammer home every joke, though I can see how if you don't have the cultural referents to catch most of the jokes en passant it would be rather underwhelming.
He got caught in the frenzy that forced Al Franken out of the senate for an alleged kiss during a skit rehearsal. Keillor was angry for a while but seems to have put that behind him.
In a recent post Keillor said he truly believes that Donald Trump can become a humble and kind man.
For Garrison it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there and he is just saying what he feels needs saying.
Keillor is just saying the obvious, of course, but this public shaming over land ownership that's so fashionable is sadly petulant -- like so much of regressive-progressive dogma.
If you perform in a ballet, your intent is presumably to entertain the audience, and presuming the ballet is performed well and for an appropriate audience, they will probably be entertained. Entertainment is a good thing, even if less so than e.g. education, and it is good that people feel a "little glow" from doing a good thing - particularly when it took commitment, effort, and skill to do so.
If you perform a land acknowledgement, what is the intent? If it's to help the Dakotah people, well, helping the Dakotah people would be a very good thing, and something you should normally feel very good about, but in this case you are absolutely going to fail at that objective. How good should you feel about a half-assed zero-effort failure?
If the intent of your land acknowledgement is to make your audience feel good about themselves in spite of their not having helped the Dakotah people or whatnot, then that's not really a good thing and you probably shouldn't feel any sort of glow for that either.
Assuming that's the case, which is not required by the wording, then why are we talking about people devoting their lives to activities? How many of those can you fit into the window of time where you're waiting for people to turn off their cell phones before a Tchaikovski ballet starts? Is the implication that she shouldn't be there at all? If so, then should ANYBODY be there? Shouldn't the ballerinas be out devoting their lives to justice? Shouldn't the audience?
But the main problem is, this section is the thing it complains about. The article is about the nostalgia of visiting Home Town Minnesota and remembering his roots; this section is an anomaly, there for the primary purpose of complaining about a land acknowledgement. (I'm not sure why Gunflint quoted it on its own). But complaining about land acknowledgements is the conservative equivalent of land acknowledgements. There are people dedicating themselves to education, healthcare, justice, but I get the impression Garrison Keller felt a little "glow" from this addition.
I think Keillor was being sincere in pointing out that the acknowledgment was merely performative and was tipping his hat to people who are doing the hard and often thankless work of helping descendants of displaced Natives.
The guy is 81 with an implanted defibrillator. I'll be surprised if he lives to see 2025. He's got little to prove at this point. I've been following him for years - decades really - and he's definitely not a conservative crank.
In the case of the venue in question – Northrop Auditorium, University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, acknowledgment down to tribal level, besides not really being helpful, is historically difficult. Native possession of that location was going back and forth between Ojibwas and Dakotas right up to Minnesota statehood.
Bonus puzzle: How were lightbulbs changed in the Northrup Auditorium’s 29’ tall 19’ wide Close Encounter UFO descending on Devil’s Tower shaped chandelier changed?
In particular, it's the sort of glow you get from kidding yourself that you're doing anything at all for the Dakotah people with your empty words-- an error which performing in a ballet is a lot less likely to lead you into.
I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence. I took a keen interest in the 2020 primaries, and Biden’s age was very much a part of the media discussion during the primary season, at least in the New York Times. Cognitive decline isn't mentioned explicitly, but in my opinion our fear of old age is inherently a fear of cognitive decline amongst other things. So I’ve gone back over some articles from around that time, and present them here. I do believe the media is sometimes (perhaps often) manipulative. Therein lies the danger of counter-manipulation. “You are being Lied To; Listen to me instead”.
1.In early 2020, the New York Times ran a series of interviews with the candidates. In Joe Biden's interview, age is raised as an issue several times.
JW: Do you think it’s legitimate for voters to be concerned about people in their later 70s running for the highest office in the world?
[Biden:] Sure, just like it’s legitimate for people to ask about whether you’re mature enough when you’re 35. I’m not joking. I mean, I went through the same thing when I was 29 years old. Well, wait a minute, are you old enough? And so, it’s totally legitimate.
Binyamin Appelbaum: So we have a 35-year-old limit. Should we have one at the top end too?The Times Debatable newsletter recently considered a range of perspectives on whether the presidency should have an age limit.
No.
BA: Should there be a top? Why not?
Because why would you? Show me where it’s been a problem.
BA: Why 35 then?
Thirty-five ——
JW: Well, President Reagan ——
Well, look, guys. I think you guys are engaging in ageism here. Now look, all kidding aside, I don’t think they’re — the voters will be able to make a judgment. You’ll make a judgment whether or not you think I have all my cognitive capability, I’m physically capable, and I have the energy to do the job. And so.
(…)
KK: Since you just called yourself the old guy — Jimmy Carter has said that he wouldn’t be up for the job of the presidency at age 80. He’s obviously experienced the job, and lived the job. How do you respond to comments like that? Are you too old to be running for president?
Watch me. Watch me. All this stuff about lack of energy. Come get in the bus with me, 16 hours a day, 10 days in a row. Come see me.
(…)
BA: Would you pick a running mate over the age of 70?
Yeah, sure I would. No, what I’m going to have to do is to balance just like anybody balances. I’m going to make sure that whoever is picked as vice president, where I’m the nominee, everyone thinks is able to, if I drop dead tomorrow, would be able to take over. Look, the idea that somebody who is 60 can’t be diagnosed with stage-four glioblastoma is no different than the idea someone at 77 won’t be diagnosed with a terminal disease.
BA: But you mentioned your adherence to science before. You surely know that the odds increase with age.
Yeah, they do. They do. But they don’t increase like they did. We’re in a situation where things are fundamentally different than they were 20 years ago.
2. As a result of these interviews, Elizabeth Warren & Amy Klobuchar were endorsed. Age was explicitly mentioned as a reason not to endorse either Biden or Sanders.
Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern.
What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77. It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.
3. Despite the NYT non-endorsement, Biden wins the nomination and the NYT goes on to damage control mode, endorsing Biden as the only alternative to Trump. Even so, it finds room for feint praise.
Mr. Biden is aware that he no longer qualifies as a fresh face and has said that he considers himself a bridge to the party’s next generation of leaders.
Mr. Biden isn’t a perfect candidate and he wouldn’t be a perfect president. But politics is not about perfection.
4. Alongside the Endorsement, NYT also run a series of opinion columns making the case for the various primary candidates. So popular is Biden among the Liberal elite on NYT that the only columnist willing to write on his behalf is Ross Douthat. Even so he can't avoid the elephant in the room.
This combination — plus, let’s be frank, Biden’s fumbling, wavering, I’m-too-old-for-this persona — explains why it’s so hard to find passionate supporters of the former vice president among pundits and commentators, real-world activists and Twitter agitators. To choose Biden over the more interesting options, over Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, is to choose the past over the future(.)
5. One phrase that sticks in my mind from the time of the NYT endorsement is some serious feint praise for Biden from the NYT editorial board. These people really didn't want him to be the nominee. The quote is hard to find, this is second hand from Michael Brendan Dougherty:
I also have to give credit to the makers of The Weekly for taking the mickey out of the panel of philosopher kings. By the end, the editorial board had talked about how, though they were reassured by Joe Biden’s apparent vigor and health, they found that the case for him was essentially that he’s “a warm body” that can beat Trump.
> I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence.
I have a slightly different claim: I feel lied to, and the mainstream media also feels lied to, about cognitive decline that has happened to Joe Biden since 2021 (and seems most likely to have happened in 2023-24). Gatekeepers in the administration assured the media, primary voters, and potential primary candidates that Joe Biden was fine when he was (and is) very much not fine. Media members assured the public, were made to look like fools or liars, and since the debate have been doubling down on cognitive decline coverage out of embarrassment and anger.
Fair. Political journalists are basically dependent on politicians for information and if you don't print what they want they can make life hard for you. I've no sympathy, journalists could have spent their career working in homeless shelters, but I think it's worth taking into account when apportioning trust.
Question: Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate, when his age was frequently cited as a concern (not because of his health, oh no, but because of the perception of voters, while amply criticizing everybody bringing up the issue for ageism - my wife is pissed about that, incidentally, the political exploitation of the idea of ageism has seriously undermined the case against ageism more generally), but the possibility of cognitive decline was consistently dismissed as right-wing propaganda?
Look back at 2020 with fresh eyes. Don't just look for what the media said (as, just like a month ago, what is important is not so much what it was saying as what it -wasn't- saying), look at Biden's campaign, how it engaged - using the excuse of COVID - in careful control over Biden's public/media exposure. This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
If Biden's cognitive state is a relatively new problem, you should be able to find some delineating line, some point at which his staffers started secluding him from the public. Instead, you'll find that they've been doing that all along. You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
"There's no way we could have known" is just absurd when other people *did* know. "Well, they were wrong then, they just accidentally became right in the intervening time" is just plain absurd. The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
>Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate?
I believe so, because it's more unvarnished - I assume Biden benefitted from some partisan bias as soon as he became the nominee, and more so as president. But he most definitely didn't enjoy the same bias prior to nomination - NYT clearly thought he was a bumbling old fool.
>what is important is not so much what [the media] was saying as what it -wasn't- saying
I agree, but I fear we're doomed to interpret that silence differently - I believe fear of cognitive decline is present implicitly in any discussion about a person's age.
>This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
The 2020 primary season was conducted normally up to mid-March, so people had a pretty good chance to take a look at Biden up to that point. If there had been evidence of cognitive decline it would have been in the interest of his rival candidates and less-than-sympathetic media to present it. As it is all they could do was present him as a bumbling old fool, and that wasn't enough. People like a bit of bumbling in a politician sometimes - Boris Johnson, Bush jnr.
As for the election campaign proper, the Dems were the lockdown party, so any Dem candidate would have had less exposure than normal during the 2020 election. So really I'm not sure what we can conclude from that.
>You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
These things are compatible with Biden being a capable but cantankerous politician who doesn't like campaigning. Like it or not a lot of special advisers treat politicians as children to boss around. Biden was mocked on SNL for telling long, rambling, politically incorrect stories. So they will have had to rein him in for reasons besides old age and I'm sure he hated it.
>"There's no way we could have known" is The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
I agree it couldn't just have happened before the debate. The issue has been building for a while, I just think it's a foggy business and the public evidence is patchy and open to interpretation. Is that because some people in the media are pulling the wool over our eyes? Probably, and those individuals deserve to lose their jobs, I just think a full spectrum distrust of the media is a cure worse than the disease.
In 2020, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term in office, but he's almost certainly not going to even run. But can we get the guy to commit to that?"
In 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term, and OMG it looks like he's going to be the nominee by default. Shouldn't we have a backup plan?"
In early 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly be our(*) nominee and there's no backup plan. There's nothing we can do about this, so I don't want to think about this. Can we just not talk about this?"
Now, the coverage is in flux but shifting towards "Biden is almost certainly not fit for a second term, and we can't not talk about this because it's right out their on national television for everyone to see. What are we going to *do* about this?"
I don't think there's any great mystery as to why these shifts occurred, nor any nefarious hidden motive at work.
* We're talking about the MSM here, so yes, he's their nominee
I broadly agree. The motives I have in mind are some mixture of partisanship, personal loyalty to the Dems, preserving ongoing access to the White House, and in this case Stop Trump.
I do remember a lot of trial balloons being floated last year, arguing for an open primary. But Biden was just really insistent on running again and at the time it wasn't obvious he would lose (he only fell behind in the polls this spring).
I think we probably mostly disagree about the last sentence.
And that probably comes down to frequency; my distrust has been building for a long time, over a lot of different issues, so "full spectrum distrust of the media" is well-warranted. Objectively considering it, if this is your first exposure to this kind of thing, yeah, complete distrust in the media probably seems like an overreaction.
If you're in the boat, I guess just keep in mind this incident going forward, minding that the media is probably going to be on their best behavior for the next few months, and see if they deserve the trust.
"Complete distrust of the media" is indeed an overreaction. Skepticism is a great defense, and not just with the media. It's a lot more trustworthy to hear something from someone they would rather not say that to hear something they want to say.
I consume liberal media sources, and listen to, though usually dismiss, things that align with liberal interests. But sometimes they report things that do not reflect well in a liberal light, and those I am much more confident in being accurately reported.
I don't quite get it. You're saying the media will say stuff they DON'T want to get out, to mislead me? I don't see how that would further their goals. Surely they would lose the audience they currently pander to in that case?
I guess I'm thinking back to the Iraq war in the noughties. Although there was some political opposition in the UK, Labour and the Tories were united for the war, and the MSM (not the right-wing press!) pushed back, came under a lot of pressure and were proved right. The BBC can still be woke and so on but it's important to compartmentalise. Like do we not trust the weather forecast? "A thing is in truth as it is in being" - reporting on who's in or out in Washington is a more nebulous thing than other topics, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. Other journalists writing about other more stable topics for the same outlet can still be believed.
Yes, I'd say if you're trusting the weather forecast, in a significant sense you're still not paying attention. You can probably trust that what they report is accurate, mind, but that doesn't mean the reporting itself is trustworthy.
The problem is that it isn't just what they report on, it is what they choose -not- to report on, something which is as nebulous as nebulous gets. If 99% of the facts say X, and 1% of the facts say Y, well, the truthfulness of the reporting becomes more questionable.
I cannot help but think that "noughties" should be "naughties" as "nought" means "naught" but I don't know it was a licentious enough decade to be worthy of that term.
Somebody please tell me this is all fake rumours and not something the Democratic machine is really planning to do, because I cannot believe they would be this stupid.
It didn't work out for them when it was Hillary's turn, and right now? After the questions raised about Biden's capability to be president and who is really holding the reins of power? The party that is so big on "democracy" just ripping up their own rulebook and imposing their anointed leader? If this is a plan by Dr. Jill or Hunter, who are the ones alleged to be gatekeeping access to Biden and advising him to cling on like a barnacle, it's damn foolish.
"The Democratic National Committee is quietly steaming ahead with plans to technically nominate President Biden weeks before the party's convention next month, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: It's the latest effort by Biden's team to stamp out the Democratic rebellion that's been pushing for the president to step aside since his bad performance in the June 27 debate.
- Once Biden receives votes from a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates, it will become exceedingly difficult to remove him from atop the Democratic presidential ticket.
- The DNC's current plan is to train state party chairs next week on how to conduct the electronic voting in a secure way. The window for voting is likely to open on July 29 and conclude by Aug. 5, according to people familiar with the matter.
- If the working plan for a "virtual roll call" holds, Biden just has to outlast his party's critics for about two more weeks.
- For the 81-year-old Biden, time finally may be on his side.
What they're saying: "We look forward to nominating Joe Biden through a virtual roll call and celebrating with fanfare together in Chicago in August alongside the 99 percent of delegates who are supporting the Biden-Harris ticket," Jamie Harrison, the chairman of the DNC, told Axios is a statement.
"We have not announced or finalized any schedules yet," a DNC spokesperson said."
Vote rigging? Us? No, no! We're just "training" people on how to conduct the voting in a "secure way" so that Joe gets the nod unopposed, and any other result is not acceptable.
At this point I think they're cutting their losses; putting somebody else up to lose against Trump doesn't really gain them anything.
If Biden loses, they can just pin the blame on Biden for refusing to step down, but if they replace Biden with one of their rising stars, and that rising star loses (which given everything seems fairly likely, not least because none of their "rising stars" are actually ready for the big game) - then that star is tarnished for failing to beat one of the least popular presidents in history, AND a large number of Democrats will blame the party for throwing away the chance at victory by kicking Biden to the curb.
They might have slightly better odds of winning if they replace Biden, but it's a very risky maneuver with very little upside to the specific individuals who would be making that choice. I doubt any of his potential replacements want to run in this particular race, either.
Thing is, for the "blame Biden" strategy to work, they have to go along with "what could we do, our hands were tied, Joe Wouldn't Go".
That isn't possible to do when the party machine is pulling strokes like this to make it a done deal *before* the convention that We're Still Ridin' With Biden.
I can see the problem where "Joe is the scapegoat and fall guy, so that means we need him to still be the nominee, but there are now rumblings of discontent within the party so we have to lock it down that it's him and nobody else" is the plan, but then they both have to (1) make sure to be standing around wringing their hands on the night when (fingers crossed, they hope) he loses with the line "what could we do, Joe Wouldn't Go" *and* (2) do their damnedest to make sure nobody rocks the boat over nominating him. They don't want to waste one of the prospective stars, but what's wrong with throwing Kamala under the bus to get her to take the fall? Unless, of course, she realises she's being set up and refuses to play along.
If this report is true, I don't know how they expect to get away with "we could do nothing" when anyone can say "but didn't you set it up so that the convention was presented with a fait accompli?"
I was under the impression that there were enough primaries favoring Biden that the primary results can plausibly be pointed to as more-or-less constraining.
From the way the prediction markets are running, it looks like Trump has about 70-75% chance of winning. Biden and Harris split most of the remainder. My guess is that whoever is picked as the Democratic nominee will pick up the sum of those chances, for something like a 75:25 Trump:Democrat odds or so.
( In fairness, a good chunk of what the Democrats are facing is probably from the 8%-9% inflation spike, which the POTUS had only very limited control over. )
As a USAian, given how the first debate went, perhaps I should be agitating for Tiger Woods to moderate the next one... :-)
A: No, Ohio changed that rule and everybody understood they were going to change the rule.
B: So what? Ohio is now a thoroughly red state; Kamala Harris's odds of victory are not meaningfully reduced if her name is not on the Ohio ballot. The Democratic party is better off with a candidate whose name is on the ballot in 49 states and can win 30 of them, than one whose name is on the ballot in 50 states and can win only 20 of them.
The only thing that matters is whether Kamala Harris (or whoever) has a better chance of winning the states which can plausibly be won by a Democratic candidate, which does not include Ohio. That's not a no-brainer: Kamala is a weak candidate and anyone else would be starting from zero. But Ohio's got nothing to do with it.
Seemingly that was the reasoning, but Ohio has now set a later date:
"Zoom out: In late May, the Democratic National Committee announced plans to nominate its ticket via a virtual roll call weeks before the party's convention in Chicago, which starts Aug. 19. But they didn't provide a firm date.
- The DNC's stated reason for front-running the nomination — Ohio's Aug. 7 deadline for ballot access — is no longer relevant because Ohio changed its law. The state's new deadline is Sept. 1.
- Internally, DNC officials rarely mention Ohio as the reason to push forward with an earlier date, according a Democratic official who's been briefed on the planning.
- "This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on 'day one,' " Harrison said in his statement.
- "So we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot."
Yeah, now they're going to democratically take everybody else off the ballot 🙄 Which I really hope is not the case, because "the fix is in" doesn't look good any time and especially not when this is in the case of a guy about whose election there were allegations of mysterious boxes of ballots turning up out of thin air in places where it looked like he was behind.
Before anyone can go "Election denial!", no, I'm not claiming that really happened. I'm saying there were *allegations* of the results being 'helped along' by partisan vote-counting centres.
Never mind the admitted "shadow campaign". Okay, that may sound slightly sinister, but don't worry - we only did it to protect democracy! Yeah, we may describe it as a "conspiracy" but conspiracies are only bad when the other lot do them!
"The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program."
What's that saying - if voting changed anything, they'd abolish it?
All I ask is that they list the nominee's closest dozen "advisors", "aides", "speechwriters", etc.
With President Bush #2 we got to know Mr. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. and their contributions daily. Since the regressive Left is keen on transparency, they should at least tell us about Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Jeffrey D. Zients, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and Bruce Reed, for starters.
"AI augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information about the state of our democracy and the Biden administration’s accomplishments."
Let's just fake up the candidate's appearance, voice, and speech-making. Trust us, we only have your best interests at heart. Why do you even need to see a physical guy in the flesh, anyway? This is the modern way of doing things. We're just.... smoothing out the bumps.
Um, isn't the whole idea of choosing a VP to "balance the ticket" pretty much the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous things that make up modern politics? The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
But instead, they always give it someone very different to the President. They give a reward to an out-of-power faction *not* by giving that faction an actual concrete share of power, but by giving them a lottery ticket for "complete power, in the unlikely event of a catastrophe". They thereby *deliberately* make fundamental policy directions dependent on the most primitive, meaningless and undemocratic basis possible: random fluctuations in one person's phiysical health. Oh, and they thereby *directly incentivise* assasinating the President, by anyone in said faction or who prefers said faction to the dominant one.
This doesn't apply to the likes of Cheney and possibly Palin who may have acted as effective co-President (the Diocletianic Tetrarchy suggests this might actually be a good system, rival factions included). But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.
>But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.<
You didn't see the pre-12th Amendment VPs then. It used to be whoever got the second-most votes became Vice President. So imagine if Biden won the presidency and Trump became Vice President. That's what President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Thomas_Jefferson
Well the VP can also be seen as a countering force to extremist actions by the president. Just look at the last election where Trump tried to use fake electors [1] to stay in power, but was stopped by Mike Pence (which is why he has to pick a different VP now). The VP can also force the president to step down using the 25th amendment. If I thought there was a risk that Trump would do crazy things again, I would appreciate it if he "balanced the ticket" with someone who would stop him if he did crazy things.
Principal agent problem. The main point of a VP is inheritance, but he's picked by the president, who would be dead or retired by the time the VP inherited, so the presidential candidate picks one based on (perceived) electoral effects on his own campaign.
I think it's signalling, so in that sense it's not supposed to have a practical justification.
In a way, it's old-fashioned identity politics. The candidate is one type of person, and so to raise enthusiasm from a different segment of the electorate, the veep needs to be from that segment too. Different regions of the country, different backgrounds, races, sexes, whatever. It's a limited one-time signal, so it has value. It says, "I consider *your* votes important, so I'm putting one of *you* right up here on the stage with me." In cases like W. Bush and Obama, part of the idea was to signal, "I may be inexperienced, but I know I'm inexperienced, and I'm taking steps to remedy that."
I think it's hard to go from a state of pure signalling, back to ground reality. And I agree that, given the actual function of the VP, using it for signaling purposes is like taking some scissors and cutting your seat belts into pretty shapes.
>The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
That might be the entire point* of a VP, but it is not the entire point of a candidate for VP. The point of a candidate for VP is to help the ticket win.
*It isn't the entire point, of course. Depending on the administration, a VP can play an important role negotiating with Congress, or re foreign policy (Biden is an obvious example when he was VP)
9 out of 45 presidents have been promoted to the office from VP. With this succession happening 20% of the time, the VP becoming president should be taken seriously as a scenario. Lincoln (Republican) appointed Johnson (Democrat) as VP to balance his ticket, and that was such a disaster no one has done it since.
Possibly, candidates only evaluate the VP pick as something to help them win the election in the first place. The succession isn't going to ever matter if you don't get elected president in the first place. In a close election, picking a VP that so much as locks in a single contested state is probably more valuable than picking one who would be a competent successor. After all, politicians aren't known for their long term thinking tendencies.
Vance has five letters, much like Trump, and Pence. Which got me thinking, Obama and Biden also have five letters. Bush has four letters. Kaine, Kemp, Gore, Kerry, Nixon, Ford, they're all short names. The longest names of recent Presidents and Vice Presidents are in the six to seven letter range like Clinton and Reagan and Kennedy.
What happened to all the long names? Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Cleveland, Buchanan, van Buren, Jefferson, Washington? My theory: bumper stickers.
Douglas Adams' Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, both remarkable works, not least for their tendency to give you the punchline of a joke in chapter 2 and the setup of the joke in the last chapter, such that you can read the books ten times and continue to find new jokes you had never noticed before) has some commentary suggesting that the ideal PR name is a long first name and a short last name. In the book, it has a Stephen King analogue, with a very similar name.
So Douglas Adams seems like he would have agreed with your bumper sticker theory, at least if a throwaway line in an oft-forgotten book is taken as representative.
Well half of those long names are non-Anglo names, so the answer to your question is probably the same as the answer to "why are there less obviously-foreign-heritage presidents as in the past?" Excepting Obama for whom that was a central part of his whole image and whose last name helpfully doesn't sound too foreign or weird.
If you meant 'Anglo' as in the common adjective 'Anglo-Saxon,' then they're actually all Anglo names since the term encompasses a certain amount of Celtic/Germanic/Dutch ancestry.
Conspiracy theories seem to be flying on social media, after the recent shooting at Trump. Some people are emotionally vulnerable to conspiracy theories anyway. After the seemingly reality-distorting pandemic, even more so. A talented con artist would know how to take advantage of this situation.
It has previously been said that conspiracy theorists like to assume that the conspiracy is competent, so we have conspiracy theories about assasins that succeed, but not ones that failed.
We seem to be seeing a counterexample here, in that Trump survived but we still have conspiracy theories.
Presumably, the conspiracy theorist needs to explain explain why the conspirators missed on purpose. (Alternatives, such as and really existing conspiracy would fail occasionally, are less attractive to the conspiratorial imagination)
The conspiracy theorist doesn't need to explain why they "missed on purpose" just that there was a plot to kill him (which was a wind's breath from succeeding)
Depends what kind of conspiracy theorist you are. Anti-Trump conspiracy theorists want to believe that Trump is liable for whatever happened, which means they need to explain how he managed to fake himself getting shot. (Blood bag in the pocket, easy, duck down and apply it to the face).
Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists have an easier time, they can point to the ridiculously easy access that the shooter had to the nearest rooftop and the fact that the Secret Service supposedly had eyes on the guy for half an hour but waited until he took a shot before they did anything. The least-crazy version of the theory would allege that while they didn't actively work with Crooks in any way, they did deliberately decide to take it slowly with the whole protection thing, and perhaps they'd been deliberately leaving weak spots in their security for savvy potential assassins to discover.
Not to mention the absurd levels of incompetence, such that even some libertarians who think the government can't do anything right are like "That's a little too incompetent to be believable".
Should this be shouted from (flat and appropriately positioned) rooftops? :-)
More seriously, even _really, really_ extreme incompetence is all too believable. And there have been allegations of incompetence in the Secret Service going back years.
Oh, sure. Unless SS agents start dying, I'm going with "incompetence". If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
>If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
True! IIRC, the traditional example was someone who was so depressed about losing a Mafia Don's money that he shot himself. In the back of the head. Three times. At _some_ point, one does become suspicious... Many Thanks!
On the other hand, truth is stranger than fiction, and there really have been people who committed suicide by shooting themselves with large guns and/or multiple times.
One guy shot himself in the chest with a shotgun and still lived.
Unfairly dismissive. Situational Awareness is alarmist but it's not "doomerist". There is a difference, an alarmist thinks there is something wrong and that it's fixable, a doomerist thinks that all hope is lost, you would be extraordinarily lucky to be able to narrowly get away with your skin. A nuclear alarmist in 1944 will correctly anticipate the Cold War and call for early sanctions and non-proliferation treaties against Russia, a nuclear doomerist will start imagining Post-Nuclear-Armageddon and/or argue that space colonies are all what will remain of humanity.
Situational Awareness is wrong but it's wrong in a very detailed, carefully reasoned, and interesting way. You can certainly do worse than reading it to know in intimate detail why the people you disagree with think in a way that makes them disagree with you. "Doomerism" is very inaccurate for a document that literally handwaves away alignment as "We will muddle through, fingers crossed" and "Hopefully we manage to enlist the AGIs to help us align the superintelligences because we would be so fucked if we couldn't hahaha". The author has a sidenote where he waves a disparaging tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky as pedigree that he is not a doomerist.
Perhaps one of the most obvious way that Situational is wrong is how it handwaves away the Data Wall, that is, why LLMs are so hilariously sample-inefficient and how we would probably run out of Internet before they reach honest-to-god AGI. He handwaves this away mainly in 2 ways:
1- By saying that we're "Hobbling" current LLMs, we impose many unrealistic standards that not even the most genius human academic or intellectual is expected to pass: You have to answer correctly on the first try, your answer must take no longer than a few seconds or minutes at most and it must fit within roughly 1000 word or so, you're not allowed to use tools, etc... It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it can explain the full breadth of LLM performance and I don't think it's a safe foundation to build an argument that calls for unprecedented USA's mass-industrialization upon.
2- By saying that Reinforcement Learning is going to save the day. I love and adore RL but saying "This technique from the literal 1950s is going to solve the most salient obstacle in the path of Neural Networks achieving AGI" without satisfactory details is just prime handwaving. The most detailed he ever gets is that LLM researchers will figure out the equivalent of "Self-Play", the trick that enables game AIs to utterly demolish humans. LLMs will "dream", or "fantasize internally", about tasks they were never given, and this will improve their problem-solving capacity.
Overall, Situational strikes me as one of those 1950s and 1960s ultra-detailed works that envisions how we will conquer Mars and have nuclear energy too cheap to meter. They were very right technically, the few places they were wrong on are not fatal to the entire plan. You could take one of those works **today** and pass it through a committee of experts to adapt it for modern tech (e.g. Massively better computers and communication) then immediately adopt it as a plan of action and it would work. You could have a colonized Mars in 50 years and energy too cheap to meter in 30 if you wanted them hard enough.
But that's not what happened, and that's what Situational ultimately fails to grasp. For all the repeated invocations of the "People in SF are so insiders with much situational awareness and oh did you know what the rumors say and the internal labs bro", Situational doesn't have situational awareness. He repeatedly compares AI to nuclear bombs, but Physicists went from "Lol what even is an atom" to a self-sustaining nuclear explosion in about 45 to 50 years, 60 max, with visible incremental progress in the same direction every year. AI experts have been ringing the "ANYTIME NOW" bell far too often since they started working in the 1950s, it's already 70+ years now, they already exceeded the time budget Nuclear Physics was achieved on.
I guess a counterexample to the above is Flight. Flight is an extremely old dream, and many people claimed to be on the cusp of achieving it before the final Jackpot (which was kinda pathetic and very non-promising when it came in the 1900s). I don't know, if I was an investor or policy maker, Situational won't quite convince me to invest a USA-worth of money and infrastructure yet. But it's very well-researched and not obviously wrong at all, and it made me view both AI alarmists and doomerists with a bit more seriousness than before.
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I wanted to say I like J.D. Vance for VP. "Why?", you might ask. IDK, mostly he seems still fresh and uncorrupted by the politics of it all.
I would sincerely like more to hear about this. I have heard friends say (and generally share the opinion) that Vance is completely amoral and corrupt.
In this view, Vance will say or do anything to gain power. He'll praise Donald Trump, who he knows is bad. His past statements about Donald Trump were true and it's hard for liberals like me to imagine that he would become a true convert (since, to us, there's nothing to convert to). Vance is completely bought by Peter Thiel, his benefactor. He used to advocate for understanding (Hillbilly Elegy) but since he started running for Senate, he uses rhetoric as divisive and as anyone in politics.
What's the argument that Vance has taken any stance, since running for Senate, that isn't maximally partisan? Any evidence that he has a moral compass? I'd sincerely love to believe that he's not just a smart, amoral opportunist. The best case here is he can be Harry Truman, another politician with a corrupt origin story who ended up being a good president.
Not necessarily for what it says, but at least for the fact that he seems to understand the field well enough to come up with a meaningful policy on his own, in comparison to other politicians who struggle even to remember the talking points on the subject that they've been briefed with.
It's plausible he's uncorrupted. My hope is that he's a "rational self interest" sociopath; much harder to corrupt, more likely to try to follow through with his promises.
Edit: Also, more likely to pivot / "change his mind".
Yeah, well, appearing fresh and uncorrupted is a good look. Ingenues, you know? I'm sure the handlers recommend it to all who haven't spent so much time in the public eye that nobody's going to believe for a second that they have an intact hymen on any part of their body or mind.
I'm reminded of a bit from the biography of James Tiptree, Jr.:
> It didn't help that her first great love ended in disaster. In "Dead Birds," ... she wrote that "Adele," the daughter of family friends, had been "a thin, magically gawky girl with a Hepburn-Garbo face of extraordinary sensuality and a quiet, secret voice." Adele was a year older than Alice and had a "reputation," though Alice refused to believe it.
> "I saw her in groups, slouching on a hassock with her tan arms around her long legs, her hair falling down on one side, listening quietly. [. . . ] When I talked to her I said the wrong thing; my clothes were different from the boys she laughed with. I spent hours thinking of what I would say to her. I wanted to marry her. [. . . ] I wanted to spend all my life looking at her, listening to her chuckle."
> Finally Alice got to be alone with Adele, on the couch in a ladies' restroom at a party. They sat close together; Alice felt Adele's hair brush her cheek and was "paralysed with love." But when Adele spoke, it was to ask her if she'd ever been with two men at once. Adele had, and it was wonderful. She would never make love to just one again.
> Alice had profoundly wanted to believe that the girl she admired was also a virgin, that within her beauty she, too, sheltered a shy, solitary intensity. Now Alice's own crush felt tainted and perverse. Then, as Alice was still trying to take in her friend's words, Adele became violently sick to her stomach. The vomiting went on and on, while Alice held her friend's head, until "there were phone calls to people I didn't know, and she went away, or was taken. A very short while later she was dead of septic abortion."
I read his book when it came out. I was moved by it. I think now that he was simply writing that memoir to enter politics. All wannabe-politicians do that. His becoming a Trump sycophant makes him rather suspect to me now.
I almost wonder whether the book was partly him probing to see if the Democratic Party had space for someone like him, and when the late 2010s showed that there wasn't, he decided to become whatever it would take to gain power with the Republicans.
He spent five years being strongly and publicly critical of Trump personally as well as of key MAGA policy preferences, to in a matter of months publicly embracing Trump and becoming an across the board MAGA policy cheerleader, so as to win a GOP primary and then election to the Senate. "Uncorrupted" is an odd choice of descriptor for such a politician....for me "weathervane" is the kindest word that comes to mind.
Yeah, I've been trying to spend zero time looking at the news. I read his book several years ago. And I agree with most of what he says. So two thumbs up in my book, and if there was ever a year where I could claim I was voting for the VP. This is it! (the big question is will my daughter buy this argument ?, "I voted for the VP and not the P.") Also a veteran.
And I should finally add, that here I am X years later, thinking I might vote for Trump. We are all allowed to change our minds.
If he was criticizing the Republican candidate to get ahead among Republicans, that's a very non-obvious way to achieve that goal. If he's a sycophant then he's a sycophant with incredible foresight.
So I observed Tisha B'Av yesterday. Your calendar may have said it was the 9th of Tammuz, but, after careful observance of the moon, I have determined that the observence of ''Adar Bet'' this year by some Jews was in error.
I was hoping for some clarity on relevant points of my life from the fast, but all I got was "Biden must resign".
Even if you were wrong and it was in fact the 9th of Tammuz, that's still a good date on which to observe a fast marking the fall of Jerusalem. See Jeremiah 52:6.
Yup, after all that "we will listen* shtick they "set their faces towards Mitzrayim (in fairness I am currently in the Sinai Desert https://youtu.be/zGx_nFV8MxM ).
Ditto for the people who came to Zachariah for magical answers to their 'halacha" question and we're therefore unable to accept his simple instruction that they listen to the prophets of old.
P.S. If my videos resonate with you please get in touch. Most Orthodox Jews are blind lemmings but the language for a utopian world is best expressed in their/our language. I'm trying to make a radically positive change in the world היום* הם בקולי תשמעו".
If you're above to hear it I desperately need your passion and partnership.
I'm not Jewish, nor do I fast for religious reasons, but my personal experience with fasts is that the clarity kicks in around day 3, along with the ketosis.
Careful observance of the moon varies from one location to the next. Before they started calculating the calendar ahead of time, different Jewish communities found that their calendars fell in and out of sync with each other every month.
Crooks was spotted 30 minutes before the shooting, on a roof, and considered a suspicious person even before then.
Trump was speaking for about 10 minutes before the shooting started.
I totally why the snipers didn't just kill him on sight, you need to verify you're not shooting one of your own and them returning fire. But simply holding off on letting Trump go up there would give you time to figure this out.
This is feeling like the Challenger explosion where people had bad feelings but no one wanted to call it off, for reasons.
Or, no one could imagine someone *actually* shooting at the former President. That would be insane.
Interesting. Wonder why they didn't dispatch someone to go check him out. Or just give one of the snipers a heads-up to keep the guy in their sights (literally) and shoot him if he pulls out a gun.
They did dispatch someone. A cop hoisted another cop over the edge of the roof to see what was going on, the would-be assasin pointed his rifle at that cop, who let go of the roof, and fell off. Immediately thereafter, the would-be assasin fired at Trump. Also, I think the snipers were likely given a heads up, as I think the southern team (behind Trump to his left) rotated north towards the would-be assasin minutes before the shooting.
The building he was on top of, seems to have been the building the local police department was using for their command center at the time. I am not making this up.
Very likely the initial USSS response to seeing a sniper on top of that particular building was "someone go tell Barney Fife to stop playing Rambo before he gets hurt", and they weren't going to shoot anyone until they had confirmation that it wasn't just an idiot local cop.
Why the local cops didn't bother to secure the roof of their own command center, is another question for which there are not enough facepalms in the world to form a proper response.
According to the Secret Service Director Cheatle, there were no security forces on that roof because they thought the slope was too severe. You can't make this stuff up.
Grrr. One of the components of the security system of my _house_ is a bunch of motion sensors. If I, as a retiree, can afford them, I think they should be cheap enough for both the Secret Service and the local cops to sprinkle them around.
Is it just me, or does the profile for the would-be Trump assassin look *exactly* like what you would expect in a school shooter? A loner with an excessive interest in guns and explosives, a bit of a loser, came to school in camo pants, bullied, little obvious motivation beyond this...
At this point, I would not be surprised if his motivation was merely "I will show them all!"
(Which would be a relief - out of all the shooters one might imagine, he's got to be the one of the least polarizing possible. Imagine if it had been a Muslim or a leftist activist!)
Almost all assassins who aren't certifiably insane fit the profile of school shooters: losers. Lee Harvey Oswald was thrice court martialed while in the Marines (once for shooting himself in the elbow) and was constantly moving from job to job, accomplishing nothing. Czolgosz was an unmarried and unemployed recluse living with his parents.
I did say “almost”! Booth is the obvious exception. I’m not familiar with Sirhan Sirhan, but Princip was definitely a loser. Rejected by the military for being too weak, no girlfriend, and living off money from his peasant father while failing his classes.
"A colleague who worked with Crooks at the nursing home and who asked not to be named described him in an interview as “the sweetest guy.” Just this week, the colleague said, the two of them worked together to find an easier way for nursing home residents to open ranch dressing packets, an act the colleague said was indicative of how caring Crooks was.
“These stupid ranch packets in the kitchen — no one can ever open them,” said the colleague, who also went to high school with Crooks. “Earlier this week he was helping me with a bunch of sick old ladies (to) put ranch on their salads.”
Crooks, the colleague said, never expressed political views at work and wasn’t “a radical.” They added: “It’s hard seeing everything that’s going on online because he was a really, really good person that did a really bad thing, and I just wish I knew why.”
There's still some polarization there. He has ties to both parties (registered to vote as a Republican, but had donated to a Democratic organization), so both sides can claim he was working for the other.
I have decided, after a bit of research, that phonics is bullshit and I don't like it. I think the root of this dislike comes from the fact that phonics teaches an essentially false model of the domain. Downstream from that are all the concrete complaints I've heard from actual parents (their kids still make weird mistakes at far too late an age, their kids have basic gaps in knowledge) and teachers (there are more exceptions to the rules than examples of them, you're confusing children who already know a bit of reading but haven't learned your rules.)
So I got to thinking, what would a version of phonics look like that pushed a true and accurate model of linguistics?
My first thought is that we don't try to hide the irregularity of the English language, and instead we make a feature of it. If English is in truth a collection of disparate sub-systems that all got merged and fused together as they also changed over time, then that's the story we tell our kids.
So to take for example the phrase "highly illogical", which is the first phrase any rationalist kid needs to be able to read and write:
I would say the prefixes and suffixes "-ly", "-il" and "-al" are three atoms ("phonemes"?) a child should be taught, because then he can break the words down into modifiers + the roots "high" and "logic".
Then would it make sense for "igh" to be an atom? On the grounds that this construction is used in Old Saxon (I'm making that up because I don't know) where it's always pronounced the same way, and is entirely distinct from "i"+"gh", where the "gh" atom might have come from eg Norse and is (predictably) pronounced an entirely different way.
So the child recognises "h"+"igh" and knows how to say "high", and then does something similar for "logic" which is also made up of atoms written in a third colour/style/whatever, because they hail from Ancient Greek this time.
I saw a Biblaridion vid a while ago explaining that irregular verbs got that way because they started out as constructions of regular aux verbs, which then got contracted and fused together, then the language changed around them but, no longer fitting the pattern, they stayed the same shape.
This is kind of what I want to do with the whole English language: extract out the true "rules of the game", then use them to build back the complete picture.
One could argue that this kind of backstory is completely irrelevant to the goal of just memorising a big vocabulary and will only add to the stack of shit to memorise.
I completely disagree because for me and anyone who thinks like me, seeing these glimpses of logic and backstory make the subject more interesting, more satisfying, and easier to get to grips with. I would argue it's easier to remember big coherent bundles of information than a smaller number of separate, context-free facts.
Anyway, does anyone have thoughts on how you could break English down in this way? I'm relaxing the requirement that it be "easy for kids" because it can only cut off interesting areas of discussion.
Montessori has a very different approach. Firstly, it uses letters made of sandpaper so kids get a feel for the shapes. That's step 1. And they teach writing before reading. They also use something called bobbooks. And start with cursive.
In case you want to learn deeply about this, I recommend Angeline Lillard's book. She's a cognitive science professor in Virginia.
> Do we have to teach children about electron clouds instead of giving them the 2-8 orbits?
No, stop going easy on the little fuckers, they should be learning about harmonic representations of spherical functions first.
Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
It would have given some background to the (otherwise completely irregular and bonkers) 2-8-8-18 sequence and just knowing it was there would have made the subject feel deeper and more coherent to me.
Dull and incurious kids would have been under no obligation to pay attention to it.
>Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
Right up until they watch an isolated atom get put in a magnetic field and m-sub-l becomes a good quantum number... :-)
But I don't think you're going to find any tool that will let a child intuit their way through The Chaos. Learning English is a mess because English is a mess.
While some people evidently disagree, I still say that knowing why there's Chaos, and having a general feeling for the way Chaos behaves, goes a long way towards making me more comfortable when I have to learn all its proceeds.
I learned to read from phonics. I still believe it's a good start, and I didn't have trouble with transitioning to English having weird spelling.
How did you learn to read?
It's possible that pushing phonics too hard is a mistake, but whole-word was such a disaster for me that I don't think I could have learned to read at all from it.
What proportion of English text is phonetic?
I agree that knowing the historical structure behind spelling is good, but I don't have a feeling for when or how it should be introduced.
I honestly don't remember, I think I could read at age three, but definitely I could read by four and a half. I think it was probably whole-word, if that's what it's called, because it would have been my grandmother and my father teaching me.
I imagine it was that because I did have trouble with words I'd never heard pronounced, where I could pick up the meaning from context but had no idea how to say them. And splitting them into parts didn't help, for years I thought "awry" was pronounced "awe-ree" not "ah-rye" because I split the word into the halves of "aw" and "ry".
I'm going to make the completely unsubstantiated claim that all of English is phonetic, it just doesn't look that way because there are multiple different phonetic languages all sitting next to each other, sharing the same symbols.
I'd rather like to know if this is true. I'm getting quite invested in it as a model right now.
If true, then you could pull out every constituent language and place them all side by side, then give every single phoneme a unique symbol, you'd end up with a single phonetic language.
Then there's a mapping between the assigned unique symbol and the token we use to write it down (made of one or more alphabet characters).
This feels very similar to what phonics is trying to do - except phonics gives you a small, efficient set phonemes to learn (and lies about the model) and what I'm talking about leads to a hugely redundant set of phonemes where there's multiple ways to make the same sound and multiple matches for the same token. Which is how English really works.
> How did you learn to read?
It would have been whole-word, but I don't remember the early days. I just read and read and read.
Are you fluent in any other language? The reason I asked is that once you learn a "truly" phonetic language (e.g., German), you'd know English is definitely not phonetic (at least, not anymore) if the word is to have any useful meaning, where pronunciation is closely mapped to the alphabet (there are always exceptions, but English is a one giant exception pile).
I remember both learning to read and my child learning to read. Both never used phonics, I guess it just was "whole words".
Obviously English as it stands is not phonetic. My contention was that English could be thought of as a collection of languages that *are* phonetic.
For this you would need to let go of the idea that one letter/diphong = one sound, which I think is a fair thing to do. If you allow your "phonemes" to be "eau", "ette", etc then French almost becomes phonetic. All "phonetic" means in this sense is a predictable one-to-one mapping between n-letter tokens and spoken sounds.
If you have a word for that you prefer more than "phonetic" then feel free to sub it in.
If English can indeed be thought of in this way, I might learn something interesting by following that line of thought. For example, we might find a rule that any word which contains old English-isms like "igh" never also contains Greek or Latin -isms in the same root. But they're probably fair game to add on in modifiers (like "isms"). I don't know if this rule is accurate but it feels like it could be to me.
Exceptions aren't the enemy, they lead to new rules and better models. I am more interested in thinking about why there are exceptions and how they come about, than simply going, "there's always exceptions" and stopping there.
I see. What you're doing is quite interesting, but probably calls for a different word because "phonetic" will keep confusing people. One thing I'd like to point out that there are variations in "mapping" of English spelling to pronunciation that don't seem to relate to the word's origins? Like "read" ("ee" or "eh" depending on the tense) or "bow" ("ou" or "au" depending on the meaning; etc. The screwy thing about English is that you never quite know from looking at a word how to pronounce it; "quay" being a perfect example of such.
At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist, and somebody who actually has some relevant background may provide better feedback.
I can visualise an app that displayed text and showed you the "tokens" that made up a word, possibly also with a little timeline of how that word and/or its tokens have changed over history.
My belief is that they'll be very few "pure" exception words, and most things will follow from a set of rules that make sense once you can see them laid out. (There might be more rules than you think, and the "rule" might look like "1700s vowel shift: 'o' becomes 'e' after this point" rather than a nice simple Theory of Everything; but still a damn sight more structured than the "English just has exceptions" free-for-all that everyone else likes to allege.)
That's an article of faith though, since I don't know the rules myself.
> At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist
No, nor am I, which is why I'm talking about it not making it myself. I had hoped that one might show interest in this post and chime in, but what can you do.
German has a much better phonetic system than English, but English is still phonetic. English has rules with exceptions; it's not just random letters thrown together. Knowing the rules alone will have you pronouncing most words more or less right.
Ok I agree it's not an either/or, and following basic rules gets you in the ballpark in English, but I still insist that the exceptions pile in English is huge. And sometimes it does feel like "random letters thrown together"! I give you the town of Worcestershire, MA, as a perfect example :-)
A lot of the weird spelling in English comes from English pronunciation changing. For example, the k in knight used to be voiced, and the gh represented a sound we don't have anymore. All those silent Es at the end of words used to be voiced. Moon, blood, and good used to all have the same vowel sound.
As you said, the main other source of weird spelling is words borrowed from other languages and using spelling that made sense in that language. But we often don't pronounce those words as the other language does, so we're not really using their systems. For example, the French pronunciation of lieutenant isn't like any English speaker says it.
I don't see any value in teaching this stuff to small children just learning to read; it would just be added confusion. "Here is what the letters sound like, and here are the exceptions" is the tried and true method. Other methods never end up working as well.
I’m a biologist working for a small cryopreservation startup in the UK. We use advanced cryoprotectants to produce pre-made frozen cell plates with the goal of increasing the efficiency of in vitro research. The idea is that instead of scientists using their valuable time to do routine cell culture maintenance tasks, we make the cells and ship them to where they’re needed, increasing the productivity of scientists through the division of labour.
We also use these cryoprotectants for blood banking. We can currently produce units of thawed red blood cells with a higher haemoglobin content than traditional methods allow. Alternatively, the properties of these cryoprotectants allow us to make these units available much faster than traditional methods, with comparable haemoglobin content.
But our start-up is very small and we’re in need of extra funding to develop and promote the adoption of this technology. I’m wondering how I could get in touch with people who might be interested in funding this work? It seems like the sort of thing that might have been good for an ACX grant but there won’t be another one of those for a while.
As far as I can tell, the venture capital industry operates mostly by contacts chains, so the best way to get a hearing before anyone who can do anything is to consider whether any of you know anyone (friends, relatives, college buddies, whatever...) who deals with anything financial. If you do, approach them, and ask them for introductions to people they know who are closer to the VC industry than they are.
If you really truly know no one like that and are still a very small operation, you might try applying to a startup accellerator like Y Combinator. If they accept you, they will introduce you to all sorts of VCs who might be interested in investing with you.
If YC is out for some reason, there are other similar outfits.
Finally, it is quite common for the early stages of small companies to be funded literally by investments from friends and family, with professional investors stepping up later when the company is more mature and can show some results. Do you have any friends or older relatives who are flush?
So savagery vs. innocence. In a modern setting, savagery might best be symbolized by internet commenters. A deep need to dominate others, a reflexive - almost mindless, except it's embodied in (to the best of our knowledge) creatures that have free will - desire to dominate and subjugate another poster, despite (or because of) the meaningless of the "fight". Many such cases.
Innocence, though, is harder to find. I always imagine kelp as innocent. But arguments that a plant, same as a lion, still ruthlessly causes needless pain abound. Rocks, maybe? Gravity might be a better choice. Any physical force. Perhaps a concrete example of those forces for symbolic reasons. Ocean waves.
What else? What might you choose to symbolize the two extremes?
I have a background in research and want to test "woo"-tech devices that claim to use mystical electrical fields or magical glass to improve your life / sleep quality. But I've gotten no responses from emailing them through their respective websites and have not found any employee emails on the usual sites. Has anyone had experience with this?
I also don't really understand why they don't respond — if it works, I post that and they get buyers. Are the companies not interested in the publicity, or they don't believe it actually works, or what?
My first thought was if they have an image of scientists as sneering, closed minded know-it-alls, and you approach wearing the tribal colours of a scientist, they could be turned off before they even give it time to engage.
That's without getting into any self-defense mechanisms built into the theories themselves - eg for stuff like reiki, "it doesn't work if you don't believe in it". In situations like that I can imagine your questions and tests are like an antimeme that could destroy their own ability to benefit from whatever it is.
I can't say for sure, but I expect these companies know they are doing a scam.
As such, they have no interest in having their devices tested. Neither have they an interest in being reachable for any reason, by customer or non- alike, except for I want to give you money but can't".
#2. Looking forward to this: whatever it is. I'm a Don Juan enthusiast. Alas, particular targets of its satire are now sometimes difficult to identify. But themes like Byron's scorn for Europe's reconstituted monarchies (and their toadies) and his ironic comprehension of almost every passion (and its end) buoy-up every Canto. Then scenes like Don Juan hiding in Julia's bed while she berates her jealous husband (Canto I), or refusing to eat his Pastor (Canto II), or bursting into tears when the Sultana of Constantinople offers herself on a couch (Canto V) are comic drama of the first order.
Surprisingly, Nigeria is a little less dense than the United Kingdom and a little more dense than Germany; it just happens to be far larger than either. If you combined the UK with France and Germany you'd have an area roughly as large and as populous as Nigeria.
Nigeria's always been populous. It used to be the second most populous British dependency (behind India). It's got to do with fertile soil, good river access, some ports, etc. It's long been a center of city-states, various states, a few empires, etc. Kind of similar to Indonesia in that regard.
Their birthrate is decreasing, but from my uneducated look at the country it looks like they've reached a stage of civilization where the biggest reduction in mortality has been achieved (knowledge of germs and basic sanitation/healthcare) but stalled for a long enough time below first-world living standards and mitigated the anti-natal forces that come with it, eg demystification of the world (ie, maintenance of strong traditional/religious beliefs), gender equality, geographic mobility and urbanization, etc.
The Niger Delta has the most fertile soil in Africa, so great for agriculture. You'll notice that most of the other countries in Africa surround Nigeria because of the delta. Nigeria also has a lot of oil, which has probably been more detrimental than good for the population because the corrupt government takes all the profits, but the industry may have helped increase the population, I'm not sure.
All you need to do is take a minute to look at Reddit and past media coverage or even some posters here to see that many on the left really do see Trump as a fascist, literally Hitler, etc etc etc. If you genuinely believe such things, you should logically believe that killing him is not only warranted, but to be abetted or at the least encouraged. Yet not nearly as many people have come out in support of the assassination attempt. Is this just a simple case of people generally not being very consistent in their beliefs? Or are a lot of people hiding their applause?
For what it's worth, I think a lot of the pearl-clutching surrounding Trump's hilariously minor injury is just an expression of "America just didn't use to have those vibes guys !!!" indignation, rather than any actual concern about Trump, or any realistic concern for "Democracy" or "Rule of Law".
Imagine if a Billionaire saw a violent fight in his classy hotel suite, he would be very upset about the blood getting on the carpet, and about the general status of his reputation when the news gets out.
Judging from the 1960s and the 1970s, American institutional and political machinery seems more than capable of withstanding an assassination of a former president. In the 1960s the same machinery withstood an assassination of a current president, right after the most intense nuclear standoff of the entire Cold War, and right before an actual hot war that saw devastating casualties and massive loss of American international legitimacy. The USA is not a fragile beast, This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Fucking Crises Into Its Political Institutions https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/387/189/3bf.png.
For that matter, American institutional machinery can easily handle Trump too. Trump's alarmists make the consistent mistake of assuming he is remotely honest. He Is Not. He is quite adequately modeled as an advertisement machine, the truth value of his claims - that he will build massive Mexico-USA walls, or make the USA leave NATO, or turn the USA into a de facto monarchy/dictatorship - is in the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1" or "CONGRATULATION! you won an iPhone 69 Pro Max, click here for more details" or "This MAGIC cream will make your cock bigger and better, click here for more".
Trump is a non-general-purpose computer (an ASIC [1]) running a very simple (in principle) algorithm :
Until death {
let P be the set of people you want things from
foreach person in P {
tell person what they want to hear
}
}
Sometimes he does an optimization when P is very large: he partitions it into relatively homogenous smaller sets P_1, ..., P_n, and then tells each subset in bulk what the entire subset wants (so that he won't have to loop over every single person). Sometimes the subsets are still not homogenous enough, in that case he resorts to using relatively simple but ambiguous wishy-washy encodings of promises such that every person in the subset will interpret the same claim as the (different) things they want to hear all at the same time.
That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
Some misguided people look at Trump and think "He's an idiot, but I can fix him. With his Charisma and my smarts I will make him do what I want". Those people make the classic mistake of thinking Trump is programmable, Trump is not programmable, he can't be used to do anything except the above algorithm. He is a whore whose job is telling a customer his cock is good and big and tremendous and beautiful in exchange for the customer's green paper, or votes.
Trump assassinated or not, Trump 47th president or not, the USA will just keep zombie-walking through the inevitable entropy-driven decline that all states and all organization and all complex structure in the universe before, during, and after it have suffered through. Trump is just an amusing sideshow. Trump can't do 1/10 of the things people fear he would do, if his life depended on it.
It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
>That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
So Trump "Can be replaced by a very small shell script"? :-) [and thanks for the source code, further up in your comment!]
I really like your analogizing Trump to the
>the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1"
inbox and popup messages. Yeah, Trump is of comparable depth and plausibility.
I do suggest looking at him as comic relief, rather than as an irritant. Perhaps think of him as _misspelled_ spam messages?
edit: I expect to always remember Trump as the POTUS who recommended looking into "injecting disinfectant". AFAIK, _that_ was unique to Trump. Sigh. How many neurons does it take to grasp the concept that mainlining Clorox is not a good idea?
>>It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
>>So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Speaking as I guy who lives in the US, can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke? I know that's formalistic, and I get feeling like a politician (and Trump in particular) is annoying and brings IQs down every time he opens his mouth, and I agree that the US has strong institutions that can *slaps car* withstand a lot of crises, but we have people right now looking around for reinforcement for their pet theories:
(a) that Trump being shot would be an objective good for the USA and it's bad the shooter missed (toxic left); or, conversely,
(b) that lots of people on the other side believe (a) and people on the right need to view their left-leaning fellow Americans as violent, dangerous, and willing to kill or cheer for killers in the name of their politics (toxic right).
The US has strong institutions that can and have weathered a lot of partisan tensions in the past, but stuff like this is still the opposite of helpful, even if meant in jest - all the more so if some fringey-type mistakes it (whether willfully or earnestly) as having been serious.
This will probably be helpful: I don't live in the US and I don't have the US citizenship. I have never voted in a US election. My sentiments on Trump don't reflect anyone in the US, left, right, center, forwards, backwards, whatever.
I'm a pure-bred non-US noble savage who found Trump's dumbassery and the internet's constant obsession with his attention whoring attitude just 1 gram too much.
> can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke
I legitimately mean it 100%. I'm a vegetarian and I would never kill another soul unprovoked or condone killing souls unprovoked, I feel guilt when ants keep harassing my skin and force me to swat them away from my arm, but I would be very glad if somebody *else* were to pick up a weapon and give Trump's his sorely needed cup of lead.
Why no guilt? For one thing he's a former US president, which makes him a mass murderer, piece of shit, scum by default. For another thing he is quite literally a criminal, by the boring legal definition and not just the trivially true moral one. For a third thing he is an annoying 77 years old barely-alive blob of organic material who has repeatedly nodded and winked at the possibility that he could unleash violence if he pleases, so maybe he (and we) shouldn't cry too hard when somebody else unleashes violence on him before he does.
I get that the opinion is transgressive, but I actually think there is a very good argument to be made that **wishing** Trump death is not immoral, all things considered. The only reason not to do so is the pragmatic reason you mentioned, upholding the peace and civility of political shitflinging in the great US of A.
I agree that the US wouldn't have descended into madness if the attempt had succeeded nor will it if he wins the election. Not so sure about Trump not being at all malleable though. He's changed many of his opinions, though who's to say anyone else had anything to do with it.
>I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans? (And conversely, very very good for the Israeli right)
> Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans?
No one has 100% error-proof access to their own internal motivation, but I think no, that's not really relevant to my reasons for despising Trump. The 95%+ displaced Gazans has seen enough due to Biden in 9 months, and will see more in the next 6 months, that Trump will not contribute meaningfully to it if he enters the White House next January. The Gaza war is already unsustainable because of the South Lebanon front and the consequently abandoned Israeli North. By either a ceasefire that concludes the murderous rage or a declared war on Lebanon that forcibly pulls the IDF, the war on Gaza will probably end before the end of this year. Trump being a piece of shit, the most damage he could do is delaying and worsening the post-war reconstruction and/or the reconciliation, but that's insult next to the injury of the war.
As a matter of fact, Trump's antics could be very very bad for the Israeli right too. For one thing, expensive military aid is one of his favorite pet peeves. He supports Israel when it's a cheap thing like moving an embassy or using "Palestinian" as an insult. Actual money though? Not that much.
Tangentially, the USA has slightly more Jews than Israel, and every time they do something that isn't throwing themselves at Trump's feet, he launches into a rant about how they're ungrateful little shits and how he's the most Pro-Israel president in the history of the multiverse so how could they not give him their votes just HOW DARE they. This is just an illustration of how long the list of reasons people would want Trump out of office (preferably via being dead) for, and how the plight of Gazans is relatively at the bottom of that list next to others.
That's about the level of IQ I would expect, so do go for it my little buddy.
> the most annoying commenter on this site
The most shining compliment I ever get is your ilk being upset by me. Thank you. I live for this. More is coming.
> he's gonna tell Bibi to "Let 'er Rip"
I also heard he is gonna build you (like, you in particular) a castle in the sky with 72 angels giving you constant blowjobs. He is gonna tell Hamas to come crawling to DC with all hostages alive even the ones that have already died and they're gonna do it out of sheer TREMENDOUS respect for his big beautiful American balls. Trump is going to get you ponies and many many iron domes and big walls and Mexico is going to pay for it.
It will be the biggest and most beautiful presidencies ever. They have never done any presidency like this in the history of presidencies. Hamas will start screaming "God Bless 'Murica" in their bombings instead of Allah Akbar.
Utterly hilarious. Your type is such that every time one of you is upset and can find no words for a retort, you reach for a good ol' "Haha KHAMAS go boom and that must make you so MAD".
Oh Nooooo, not the heckin Hamaserenos. Please, killing Hamas neks makes me so maaad, pleeeeeaaaase stop taunting me with dead Hamas leadership, it plucks away at my heart strings.
But worry not, the mysterious dark arts of Anarchism is just one click away. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index. Read, so that one day you can retort with initelligent insults that won't embarrass you more than me.
> Deif
The IDF hasn't yet announced his death by the way, and the guy survived 7 assassination attempts before, since the late 1990s. The IDF are not angels, but you're definitely the Fool rushing in where everyone is having second thoughts about whether to tread.
It's a little late now to try to pretend that *he's* the one who's butthurt here when you've already told him that you think he's the "most annoying" person on the board, and that you're voting for Trump just to try to upset him.
If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law, then undermining democracy and the rule of law in an attempt to stop him defeats the entire purpose. This isn't exactly rocket science, and the trollish gotcha attempts are really tiresome.
>If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law
That's an understatement for how evil many people genuinely seem to think he is. I think even my literally Hitler hyperbole is more accurate than your characterization.
I don't know if I count as being someone who thinks Trump is "a fascist" or "literally Hitler," but I do think that given his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 there is an unacceptable chance that he refuses to yield it if it is given again. I'd put it low, somewhere between 4%~8%, but that's unacceptably high for a democracy, and a stark contrast with Biden, who despite his many flaws I am 100% confident will peacefully transition power if he loses an election.
I'd assume that doesn't make me one of the people you're talking about here, but I'd nevertheless offer my own thoughts as a barometer. I do think Trump is an unacceptable threat to American democracy and we'd be foolish to elect him given his past behavior. But killing him to thwart his election is basically an act of killing the republic to save the republic. It gets you nowhere. And that's before you get into the possibility of reprisals and reciprocal violence, which is very real in a heavily armed country. We already have nutcases doing school shootings - all they have to do is decide to shoot at leaders instead.
So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying, so I think the lack of applause (quiet or otherwise) for the attempt you are notng isn't a result of an inconsistency of beliefs but rather a sign that people so foolishly partisan as to be genuinely pro-assassinations are an extreme outlier and few in number.
>So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying
Maybe not, but I'm still far from convinced that most people have arrived at "political violence is bad, mkay" out of a well-reasoned weighing of the costs of political violence. Rather, it seems to me one of those social taboos that people hold instinctually more than rationally, and such taboos are usually held in the background without much thought to how they interact with their other beliefs.
I think assassinating Hitler in 1931 is something that's only warranted by what we know in retrospect. Assassinating Hitler in 1935 or 1939 is a completely different matter.
Also, Germany in 1931 was already a shitshow, with lots of street violence and attempted coups. So assassinating Hitler in 1931 would be a lot less destabilizing than assassinating someone today.
Why do people think that abortion doctors are literally participating in Holocaust condemn abortion doctor murderers? Why do people who think that government tyranny has to be fought violently if needed and that Waco was a prime example of government tyranny condemn Tim McVeigh for concretely fighting the government due to Waco? People in a stable country do not usually approve of direct action of this sort no matter what they say and can see that it will generally be vastly counterproductive.
It's possible to have both beliefs like "abortion is approximately infanticide" alongside other beliefs like "assassination and terrorism are very bad ways to enact political change." Or even "assassination and terrorism would be morally acceptable ways to end mass abortion if they would work, but they wouldn't accomplish the goal."
I mean, yes, lots of people engage in hyperbole so that every single Republican running for office is a racist, fascist, woman-hating monster and every Democrat running for office is a closet socialist who hates intact families and Christians, and they don't really believe any of that nonsense. But you can have real beliefs about some policies or ideas being evil or destructive, and still not want to assassinate or bomb anyone over it.
People absolutely think that. I'm not sure what you mean by "well-credentialed", but e.g. the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest official in the US government, has said that and almost certainly believes it. People with Ph.D.s, say and believe it.
It is frankly difficult to imagine someone opposed to abortion and *not* considering its practitioners to be engaged in a Holocaust, except by way of cognitive dissonance. Either a fetus is morally a person or it isn't. If it is, then we've killed way more than a holocaust's worth of innocent people, and in many cases we've basically done it for convenience.
Individual women and their doctors, with the OP focusing on the doctors as the supposed perpetrators of a holocaust-level atrocity. And enough of our society has stepped up to provide them with legal cover and logistical support that *if* there's anything to be guilty about, the guilt would be spread far and wide.
Blaming the doctors but not the women makes no moral sense, but it's obviously politically pragmatic for anyone who wants to actually stop abortion.
I can believe it. But the sleight of hand here is that the comparison is between one person doing a lot of harm over the term of a presidency and many thousands of people doing harm over several decades. I'm not sure the logic of "kill this person to prevent Hitler 2.0" applies to the latter, though I'm sure plenty of anti-abortion types do silently approve of such actions.
If you believe fetuses are babies, the abortion doctors have murdered like 65 million babies since Roe v. Wade. Every abortion doctor is a serial killer who the state has decided to pointedly ignore and will never face justice. Yet even pro-life people generally do not believe in lone gunman type solutions to it.
I don't think Trump is Hitler, but also, people calling their political opponents Nazis is super common. People repeatedly called Obama a Nazi, and Bush before him.
In fact people called Obama the antichrist, and I heard some people argue that the Book of Revelations is mistranslated and actually mentions Obama by name as the antichrist!
EDIT: Looked this up and it was actually Satan, and Luke 10:18. KJV says "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." - the argument was that the part recorded as "lightning fall from heaven" was really "Barack Obama".
“No ma’am. He’s a decent man, a family man that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
cf.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”
I'll never forget the day when my seemingly normal friend in highschool turned to me and asked me whether I thought Obama's lips looked blue, and then seeing my confusion, explained that the antichrist's lips are supposed to be blue, implying that he thought Obama was the antichrist.
"Does Barack Obama’s ring carry a sinister message? The idea that his ring carried an Islamic message was debunked when a photo revealed that was not the message on the ring. What that photo revealed was even more sinister than an Islamic message. It revealed a Satanic association of Biblical importance. Displayed on Obama’s ring are two coiled serpents. Many verses in the Bible refer to Satan as a serpent; starting in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and moving to the church at Pergamos, in Revelation."
Well, I guess this proves that Catholics and the Catholic Church are indeed servants of Satan and the Antichrist, because there's a Tolkien connection here! The ring of Barahir:
"The Ring of Barahir, originally the Ring of Felagund, was an Elven artifact that was originally given by Finrod Felagund to Barahir and was kept by the Edain as an heirloom in the later Ages.
The ring had the shape of two serpents with emerald eyes, one devouring and the other supporting a crown of golden flowers, the emblem of the House of Finarfin."
Wait - could Obama's ring possibly be... the ring of Barahir????
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
I think there may be a loophole here where Obama, being the rightful King of Gondor and Arnor, isn't *receiving* anything from a foreign sovereign because he *is* the sovereign. You'd need to consult a true expert on anarcho-monarchy, though.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? Well, one of the main purposes of modern democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. Trump did not allow for that. When he lost the election, he threw such a tantrum that power did not transfer peacefully. Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? No. He is someone who has already carried through with that threat.
Killing him would make you him, and that's what most people want to avoid.
"Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill"
What point are you making with this statement? A couple of people died of heart attacks because they were so excited, and another unarmed woman was murdered by police and no one cared because she was white. That about sums it up, right?
I mean, he did legit try to find some way to stay in power after losing an election, which is one of many reasons he won't be getting my vote in November.
Human beings are a poltroonish species. They are terrified of standing out from the herd and saying the wrong thing. As soon as they noticed that they're supposed to condemn the shooting the tripped over themselves to do so. Positively pathetic.
HL Mencken is no longer around so I reanimated him briefly for comment
Animals in general are poltroonish. I watched as some African tribesmen waltzed slowly up to a lion's kill, with the pride all around. As they got closer, the lions got nervous, and once one decided to flee, it wasn't long before the rest did. The tribesmen hacked off a large chunk of meat, and left.
The courageous examples in nature aren't necessarily great examples. Insects often are courageous: a mosquito risks its life to suck your blood, and if it gets swatted...there are millions more.
I do not doubt that all living organisms experience fear. Insects are pretty easy to demonstrate. If you attempt to kill one, it tries to avoid it. Or do you think insects are all like, "Whatever, if I die, so what?"
Yah, but humans like to imagine that they are members of an individualistic (rather than herdish) species of especially brave specimens.
We ain't.
Mencken has a nice little piece about trying to find that most defining trait of the species and he comes up with "cowardice".
While granting his motivational bias, it's worth reminding people how little their opinions are actually their own (see also his hilariously brilliant intro to "In Defense of Women").
I think people condemned the shooting because it was horribly wrong not because saying so was now expected of them. Why do you seem to have so little faith in basic human decency?
Why are you too cowardly to say the obvious truth? Or perhaps even to allow yourself to see it? The OP is correct, NUMEROUS people said they wished Trump were assassinated, so much so that no one even needs to explain (except perhaps to you) the now-common "time traveller" joke.
Your pseudo bravery is cowardice par excellence. Bravo!
Alice jokes about seeing her political opponents assassinated, but it's just a joke, she knows it would be horrible in practice.
Bob jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, but has never really thought about how horrible it would be in practice until he sees it almost happen.
Charlie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then he sees it almost happen and he changes his mind, that would be horrible.
Dave jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, so he goes along with them.
Eddie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, but Eddie still wants it to happen and he says so. He is retweeted by Libsoftiktok and loses his job.
I think there's more Alices than any other category.
Most expressed political views have social consequences for the person expressing them, but no consequences for the speaker if they're wrong or even disastrous. This is one more. Lots of people will say some dumb thing about wishing Trump or Biden would be shot, very few have thought through how much worse the country becomes when that sort of thing happens very often.
In person, I've heard a couple of friends say that they wish the assassin hadn't missed, and they're not evil or nuts, just fairly left, but not as left as the zeitgeist of my city. Even I, after a beer too many, said something kinda close, although in retrospect I think I was referencing Monty Python as much as anything, and I wish I hadn't said it. And you know I'm very ambivalent about Trump.
Naming them is likely to cause trouble, because that is considered doxxing. I've seen people on social media I frequent making comments about "pity the shooter missed", "I'm good with a gun, I wouldn't miss" and the likes. These weren't jokes, a lot of people do hate Trump and believe all the hysteria about literal Hitler, Fourth Reich, Project 2025, he'll round up gays and minorities, the Supreme Court made it legal for the president to kill political rivals and so forth.
Am I going to list off names and link to them? I'm crazy, not stupid!
As the famed Richard Hannania has said, you can think Trump is a fascist that is bad for democracy (not quoting him exactly at all here), and think political assassinations are even worse for democracy.
Imo America would be A LOT better off if Trump suddenly had a heart attack mid-debate, and probably worst off if he had been assassinated that day (political tension, civil war?, etc).
Most Republican before Trump were depicted by most media outlets as bad but not quite so bad that they needed to be assassinated. I think it's fair to say that the tenor of much of the ink spilled about Trump has been much worse than that. Not commenting on the merits of such beliefs. And I've noted at least a few people have been logically consistent in this, both on Xitter and Reddit.
"Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented."
"Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”
"Trans people have been a target of the Trump administration from the get-go.Almost immediately after Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. That July, Trump announced his decision to ban trans people from serving in the military. In May 2018, the administration went after trans prisoners, too,deciding that, in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex."
"Former President Donald Trump vowed in a video released Tuesday that, if he is re-elected, he will punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers” as part of a wide-ranging set of policies to use federal power to target transgender people."
"A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies.
...Project 2025 establishes a framework for guiding the federal government through a biblical lens. Across nearly 1,000 pages, the mandate pushes an unpopular interpretation of the Christian agenda that would target reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people and people of color by effectively erasing mention of all related terms, protections and troublesome historical accounts.
Though the mandate accuses the "woke" left of infringing on people's religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors' own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank's platform."
" Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect."
I could go on, but I think I'd hit Substack's comment limits, and I haven't even searched for "sexism" and "racism".
Simply saying "I strongly disagree worth what you've posted" would make you look a lot more online-savvy and a bit less emotional, and would havr the added value of being a true statement about the world.
He's not a troll. Not saying I agree with him but the media has portrayed him as some sort of inhuman monster. Jan 6 and so forth. It's a reasonable perspective to take.
When you say this ‘literally Hitler’ thing what do you mean? I’ve seen the actual phrase exactly 4 times. 1 from your post, 2 more from people on ACX saying this is what Democrats say, okay that makes 3. Number 4 is Donald Trump Jr saying that’s what Democrats say.
I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this.
Do you mean it in some figurative sense?
Like when they say “When Trump talks about migrants poisoning the blood of America he *sounds* like Hitler?
If that’s what you mean it’s not the same as saying he is ‘literally Hitler’. BTW that *does* sound like Hitler. But it does not mean Trump is ‘literally Hitler’.
"I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this."
And there's lots of things I've never, ever heard people in my circles say, but that does not mean real people don't say them. It's a weak argument, Gunflint, often derided as the Pauline Kael one:
“Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'”
Are "comparisons to Hitler" close enough to saying "Trump is Hitler?" That's a genuinely debatable question, but I don't think saying "Adolf Hitler did this, and now look, Donald Trump is doing the same thing" is innocuous:
"Two powerful House Democrats have invoked Adolf Hitler’s actions in Germany and the treatment of Jews during World War I and in the 1920s to warn against the direction the US is moving in, with both saying Donald Trump’s presidency presents an unprecedented threat to democracy."
I have to love the spin these guys put on it; 'if you say someone or something is like the Gestapo, you are using the language of Nazis! and so you must at the least like Nazis, if you're not a Nazi yourself!'
"Donald Trump told Republican donors at his Florida resort this weekend that President Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” the latest example of the former president employing the language of Nazi Germany in his campaign rhetoric."
"Facing criticism for repeatedly harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood “poisoning” Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust."
I see your feelings have been hurt. I’m guessing it’s because I called you out on your gloating and inflammatory factually false meme at the end of the last thread. Sorry about your feelings but even Trump, to his credit, has told his people to cut the incendiary post assassination attempt rhetoric.
You’ve responded to almost every comment I made in this thread except for the one where I told you that Vance is probably an earnest Catholic and an almost certain earnest Catholic - Ross Douthat - is praying for his friend Vance and the country.
anon123 cleared up the ‘literally Hitler’ thing is slangy hyperbole.
My fee-fees aren't hurt, apart from what you've said about not being on social media. I see instances of Z, you turn around and go "Well nobody *I* know says that!" with the strong implication that therefore, nobody is in fact saying Z and furthermore I must be lying.
Gee, thanks.
You're not on social media, so you probably *don't* hear/read people saying Z. I hang around various places, for different reasons, and I do hear/read people saying Z. It's rather tedious to get told "don't believe your lying eyes", but whatever.
I agree, Newsweek and Time have gone downhill since their glory days, but they're still not quite trash yet.
"A new poll has laid bare how many voters believe the conspiracy theories swirling around the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend.
One third of those who support Trump's Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden said they believe the attack may have been staged and had never been intended to kill the former president. That equates to a little over 33 percent. And even some of Trump's own supporters believe the same thing, with around 12 percent suspecting the event was planned, according to the poll conducted by Morning Consult, an American business intelligence company."
Sorry, "literally X" is internet slang that's meant to be hyperbolic. To translate in a more literal way, it's apparent to me that significant numbers of people really do believe Trump is a unique threat who will end democracy and usher in a dark period of Nazi-lite authoritarian rule.
I think the people who fear Trump is a danger to the Republic are thinking about Trump on January 6 saying “If Mike Pence does the right thing we will win”.
These people include Mike Pence himself, Trump’s VP,Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger and Chris Christie. All of these people are Republicans. These are only the ones who were among those willing to say this was absolutely wrong and completely un-American out loud.
None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
IDK if C-SPAN has archives but listening to an open comment session Monday morning the first caller opened with: "well, you know what I think would have been best for the country, would have been if the bullet had been just 2 inches over..." At that point he was cut off by the host saying nopenopenopenope we don't promote violence... :P
Is the republic not worth killing a single would-be tyrant to protect?
Honestly I view Trump and Biden as mostly indistinguishable, and both morally worthy of death for the killing they've signed off on abroad. The inconsistency galls.
I dislike both Trump and Biden, albeit for different reasons. In a nutshell: Trump because of the look-into "injecting disinfectant" (common sense, _please_ !). Biden because of pushing for more DEI (could we kindly treat people on their _individual_ merits???).
As it is, I'll hold my nose and vote for whichever better supports Israel, as well as I can tell just before the election. (better thought of as voting against the other one)
The problem with this idea is that tyrants don't act on their own. Tyrannical systems give the most power to a single dictator, but they require broad support to overthrow the existing government structure. Caesar, and many of the tin pot emperors in the later empire, had literal armies backing them up. You could go back in time and kill Hitler or Stalin, but what about Himmler and Goering and Yagoda and Beria? Killing one man doesn't stop the communist overthrow of the Tsardom, nor does it change the chaotic circumstances in Wiemar Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis.
Similarly, killing Trump wouldn't change the fact that a large number of Americans feel the elite ruling the country are completely disconnected from their interests.
Probably, but you're unlikely to end up killing a single man. The killing of Caesar, for example, started a second civil war which still ended up with a despot at the lead. Which may still be justified if the threat of tyranny is sufficiently probable and severe -- even a civil war and/or a more run-of-the-mill dictatorship would probably have been better for 1930 Germany than Nazism and the Second World War -- but you should be aware of the actual tradeoff before you make your choice.
>None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
I agree with the first sentence. I don't agree with the second. There are many who wanted it under a pseudonym and at least a few who lost their jobs after being stupid enough to say it using their real names. Google Cassandra Oleson.
I also said in my first post that most leftists, at least publicly, do not support assassinating Trump. I'm leaning to people just not being very logically consistent.
anon123 explained that literally Hitler is hyperbole on the internet, so if I'm shooting, metaphorically, to describe Trump accurately on this medium it seems I need to adjust for the cyber-distortion and say literally Hitler to accurately describe the wannabee tyrant that is Trump
I don't think Trump has the anger to be Hitler but sure he's Mussolini or would be if he could. So sure he's at least a wannabe fascist, but I'm optimistic that he can't get the military on his side and actually seize absolute power.
Some argue the recent SCOTUS ruling about immunity gives the POTUS dictatorial power but I'm not that pessimistic. If so, we're already fucked and it's too late.
That complaint about giving POTUS dictatorial power will be refined if Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, or whoever the Democrats nominate keeps them in power. "Dictatorial" will become Affirmative, and everyone will be quite pleased with their cleverness.
Agree - dangerous buffoon, Mussolini-style, seems far closer to the mark.
Trump won't make the U.S. into Nazi Germany, but he might make it into a Hungary, an illiberal democracy where only one election outcome is possible. SCOTUS will obviously support anything he wants to do at this point.
He's not smart enough and lacks the attention span, understanding of history, etc., to be a real fascist. He has certainly been popular among actual no-kidding unashamed fascists, however, what I've heard and read of their internal communications over the last nine years suggests to me that they know full well what he is and isn't, and they value him because he is viscerally appealing to the kinds of people who make up a fascist constituency--speaks their language, shares their grievances and what have you.
I've also heard Trump described as having the attention span of a butterfly... Though with Biden's debate performance, it might be grimly amusing to watch the two of them take a test of attention span, side by side...
>1. It is entirely consistent to prefer that ideas you disagree with be defeated democratically.
I was referring to the widespread sentiment that Trump is going to kill democracy, not to people who merely disagree with him. I really don't think I was exaggerating much when I noted significant numbers of people think Trump is "literally Hitler".
>2. It is consistent to realize extreme actions typically cause public sentiment to swing in the opposite direction. Whoever fires first loses.
If that's the case, how did the pre-Trump Republican party ever exist? His supporters didn't materialize out of nowhere in 2016. Why didn't they launch a coup against the Chamber of Commerce types all by themselves? I simply don't buy the "there's nothing special about Trump" argument.
The same way socialists don't take over the Democrat party. There are only two viable choices since going third party splits the vote and loses, so a milquetoast candidate from your party winning is better than the other party winning. The party apparatus tries to balance pleasing the radical constituency with broad electability in the public. It's not like the MAGA crowd and hardline conservatives appeared spontaneously after Trump ran for office; they had to already be there for his campaign to be viable. They were generally sidelined by the more moderate factions of the Republican party. See the Tea Party during Obama's first term.
> "anti-deepstate" is a red herring though, since that was something *generated* by Trump as an excuse for failing to get much done.
Have to disagree with this. The Deep State* was a core component of the MAGA platform during the 2016 election. Conservatives saw the entrenchment of their ideological rivals in the federal administrative agencies as a dire political threat. Thus the catchphrase "Drain the Swamp" that was ubiquitous during the 2016 campaign. Considering that Trump was illegally surveilled and falsely painted as a Russian agent for years by the FBI, I would have to say it's a pretty good excuse too.
*As an aside - I note the most conspiracy theory sounding term of the lexicon also became the most popular, compare to permanent bureaucracy or administrative state which describe the same thing as the deep state.
Although, granted, plenty of those points are non-specific to Fascism. "Cult of Tradition" and "Rejection of Modernism"? That's literally Middle Eastern Islamism to a T.
> Mussolini, never any consistent policy besides this street theatre.
Technically-speaking, that just proves that Fascism lies on an orthogonal dimension to Policy, call it "Style". Just like Democracy, in fact. You could have a Liberal Democracy, an Islamic Democracy, a racist Democracy, a war-like Democracy, a secular Democracy. "Democracy" just denotes a particular style of settling questions, but not any specific answer. Although in practice nobody ever uses "Fascist Communist", the term doesn't strike me as an oxymoron. I think the Khmer Rouge would qualify.
You might dismissively call Fascism's rituals "Theatre", but remember that Democracy sounds like a pretty big theatre from the POV of its opponents too, and for pretty valid reasons. The "Theatre" is the visible rituals of a social process for bestowing political legitimacy.
Man I'll be honest. The latest twitter cycle has just reminded me that I have absolutely no idea how people can say they support Trump and democracy at the same time (I have to beat this dead horse one more time bc I saw some rationalists on twitter talking about this).
I get some people here are monarchists, a few more are fine with illiberalism, and a few more are fully bought in to every single Biden conspiracy theory, but other than those, Trump supporters are becoming ever more baffling to me.
Arguments:
1) Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote, and since Republicans had more state delegates he could have won. This is not a secret, Trump mentioned this in his January 6th speech, and the Eastman memo outline *very clearly* the legal framework of how this could have worked.
2) Trump is now in essence a demi-god. He holds complete domination of the Republican party, and everyone is lock-and-step with him. If Agenda 47 or Project 2025 are to be taken at their word, this would include removing everyone not completely ideologically aligned with the President from the executive branch, and give the President significantly more power to influence the actions taken by different agencies. Hell, JD Vance said in February he would be willing to certify Trump's fake electors if it were up to him.
3) Republicans in the senate failed the country in 2020 by not impeaching Trump for the *only* stated reason that he was already out of office. Now, the Supreme Court has stated that the President has immunity for core actions. I do think it's possible I'm overreacting to this one in particular, but it is scary. Plausibly the only reason that his conversation with Pence pressuring him to certify fake electors possibly doesn't fall under a core power is because Pence was doing a role that was assigned to him by Congress. Otherwise, as a core power, you wouldn't be able to use that as EVIDENCE against Trump, in his TRIAL. I am afraid that they will somehow convince the court that enough actions from January 6th count as core duties that you can't use them as evidence, and as such the whole insurrection case doesn't go forward (of course, disregarding the possibility he wins beforehand and just pardons himself)
4) So you have the perfect storm of someone with a cult of personality, who doesn't care about institutions, who doesn't care about democracy, who was not impeached by Trump for flimsy reasons, who was plausibly protected by the Supreme Court in this ruling, who is filling the executive with his goons. Please feel free to criticize any of this if I'm missing anything.
5) For the record, I'd put the chance of America becoming an authoritarian hellhole with Trump winning at at most 4-5% (operationalized in the form of there not being free and fair elections in 2028) , but there's a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)
I am no fan of Trump and won't be voting for him. But to answer your question, there are a lot of Trump voters (and moderates, like myself) that see the democratic party as extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic. Whether it is worse than Trump is hard to gauge and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the election stuff and Jan 6th have a strong opinion.
Ways that democrats/progressives are authoritarian and anti-democratic:
1. COVID vaccine mandates: this is an issue many Trump voters are still extremely angry about, for good reason. And many of them turned down vaccines at great personal cost: I met an airline pilot recently who turned down millions in career earnings because he refused the vaccine and considered people who went along with it akin to Germans who went along with the Nazis. Incidentally also takes the wind out of the sails of pro-choice arguments.
2. Social media censorship: secretly forcing social media companies to deplatform users who say things that are against the state's perceived interest, like suggesting the possibility of covid lab leak. 20 years ago this would have been huge news, absolutely insane for this to happen in a democracy.
4. Generally criticizing freedom of speech as a value, and support for dishonesty if it furthers the democrat or progressive cause. (personally I think this is increasingly endemic not just in both parties but in general life, an increasingly cynical, low trust environment among everyone, but that's off topic)
5. Support for communism and hatred of capitalism. You don't see this from politicians much but it is very common on social media, and would be viewed as authoritarian by Trump voters, though I'm aware that social media communists don't see themselves as statist at all.
6. Second amendment issues. They want to take our guns. Big one for Trump voters.
7. Using courts to attack Trump. I'm not an expert here but I can tell you that Trump voters see these as politically motivated attacks.
8. And finally, liberals are no fun. Progressives and democrats have become culturally extremely intolerant: a party of sanctimonious, screeching, judgmental narcs and tattletales. Where 'read the room' is a common, unironic scold to conform. Where family relationships, or really any relationship other than pure atomized individualism is problematic. Where seeking power and domination over others by claiming mental illness or victimhood is pathological. Where everyone goes to therapy and obsesses about their trauma.
Maybe that last one is not about authoritarianism but it is still annoying.
The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.
>siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters
Yeah, this is weird. I looked at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and their website doesn't show any clear party affiliation, though they mostly seem to be bringing lawsuits against Trump people. Do you see a GOP affiliation somewhere on the site ( https://www.citizensforethics.org/ ) ?
Thank you for acknowledging the monarchists. It's nice to be seen from time to time.
It's gobsmacking that VP pick Vance is influenced by Curtis Yarvin *and apparently even personal friends with him*.
I thought we all agreed this (ACX, EY, Moldbug, grey tribe, etc) was just 300 people reading the same few blogs, and next thing I know a bunch of folks I've been reading for ten or fifteen years are the most influential people around.
Oddly, I am a people person. I am introverted, sure, and a mathematician by training, but I am empathetic and political and just generally interested in the well being of people around me.
Libertarianism appealed to me at an earlier stage of my life, but at some point I decided it was hyper focused on a narrow process instead of outcomes. I think this is true of all the political ideologies, by the way. So, even more oddly, libertarianism is the part of Yarvin's work that I left behind.
The reason I kept monarchy, loosely, is because I don't think... *points at everything*... I don't think people work this way. The totalizing nature of democratized politics is bad for human brains and bad for social fabric, and either it no longer produces added value, or maybe it never did (in the sense that maybe the industrial revolution would have happened anyway under more authoritarian government systems with more state capacity).
Cynically, I would say people don't want community so much as they want their beliefs shoved down everyone else's throats. Government is the perfect vehicle to do this. Then when the libertarians point out maybe having an omnipotent central government is a bad idea, it never seems to occur to these people that their ideological enemies are perfectly capable of using the same vehicle against them.
John, I would challenge you to provide an example of something specific in a Yarvin piece that you found half right, or interesting but wrong, as a sort of proof-of-work that you really engaged with his writing at some point. It seems to me to be the low bar for comments that add value to the thread.
For clarity for anyone abroad reading, the house did impeach Trump, and the Senate then voted to acquit him - so this isn’t an assertion that OP got the entire legislative body wrong when he said “the Senate failed,” it’s just making the semantic point that saying “not impeaching” is technically inaccurate and the correct phrasing is something like “not convicting of an impeachable offense.”
Each can decide for themselves the degree to which this “undermines credibility.”
"Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote"
Sending matters back for a vote is pretty weaksauce on the "coup" attempt. Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes, they seize power and make themselves the ultimate authority. If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
In the first place, "if I win, I win, but if I lose, we have a second vote" is not a proposition made more democratic by the presence of a second vote.
Besides that, the second "vote" Trump was seeking wasn't a recount or a do-over of elections in the states he narrowly lost. He was seeking to replace the results of the election with a party-lines vote in the house, where Republicans had a majority. "If I lose, we toss the election results and replace them with a vote of 435 elites, the majority of whom are on my team" - it's very much *not* the kind of thing we should mistake for democracy in action.
Frankly, it's a bit revealing, when comparing to actually disputed election results like Bush v. Gore in 2000, that Trump went this route through the House rather than pushing for a recount. If he genuinely thought he won, I'd expect him to pursue recounts, but if he made an effort in that direction it seems to have been pretty short-lived.
>Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes
AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
>If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
When a Presidential election is sent to the House, the question is not "who won?" It is "who do you choose as President?" And, when an election is sent to the House each state delegation gets one vote. Which means that Trump was guaranteed to win. So, trying to replace an election by voters with an election you are guaranteed to win, based on a voting system that ignores the principle of "one person, one vote," does not in fact sound very democratic.
> AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
*Technically speaking*, Hitler was never democratically elected. But there are certainly plenty of other examples of strongmen and dictators coming to power via the ballot box. Even Putin was elected and still pretends to hold elections even now.
Well, he THOUGHT he was guaranteed to win. It was 27 R states, one of them was represented by Liz Cheney, and I can imagine 5-10% of Republicans crossover voting, which would probably be enough. So he might still have lost.
Democratic institutions in Ukraine have already been damaged horribly(is it permanent? Who knows if the dictatorship survives without the war as an excuse, but it's certainly gone at the moment) and there are Ukrainians sitting in prison right now for their opposition to the country's foreign policy.
If you really want an answer then I'll say that Trump's reaction to his 2020 loss was certainly not his best moment. It's a mark against him, in my book.
But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire? If you hate dumb lawsuits and you hate dumb protests then you're going to hate the other guys too.
In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
>In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
> But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire?
No, that's not what the end result was. The end result was a coup attempt. The "mostly peaceful protest" ended in people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and getting shot, because the point of that "mostly peaceful protest" was to coerce Mike Pence to unilaterally throw out the electoral votes of seven states. Outline of the plot here: https://2cradle2grave.substack.com/p/january-6-was-a-coup-attempt
Morbid curiosity: Is this the lowest point relations of a USA president and vice-president have reached, or is there a historical example of an _even lower_ point?
It's the only time in US history a President has tried to use his powers like that. Possibly back before the VP and P were from the same party, they were really angy at each other, but I don't think Jefferson and Adams tried to kill each other or anything.
Consider the possibility that your perspective on Trump has been colored by the same media agencies that have been misleading you about Biden's cognitive state for the past few months at least, and reasonably likely the last five years.
He's not a particularly good man, but he's not nearly as interesting as you seem to think he is, and his rising string of victories over the past four years have arisen solely because of the hatred people have for him, time and time again. You profess to despise him, but what you're incapable of doing, the one thing that would have killed his chances over and over and over again - is just ignoring him. And so here he is again. You can thank your favorite media channels for that; the daily hour of hatred for Trump results in fantastic ratings for them, of course they didn't want him to go away.
He's a reality star, and you've let him play by reality TV rules.
Not sure about that, but I'm pretty sure the Republicans have immediately fumbled the ball with the Home Depot lady. I'm fascinated to see what happens next. Christ the hits just keep rolling this election season.
That video is silly, based on the title. Leaving aside that the administrative state existed long before Chevron was decided, lets try a hypothetical: Congress tells the FDA to regulate the negative health effects of smoking. The FDA determines that secondhand smoke contributes to X percent of cancer. So it promulgates a regulation to address that.
Cigarette companies sue, arguing 1) the statute only permits regulation of health effects to smokers themselves, not second parties, so it does not permit the FDA to address secondhand smoke; 2) the FDA erred in determining that secondhand smoke causes cancer; 3) the specific regulation does not properly address the problem
Under Chevron, courts would 1) defer to the FDA’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was not unreasonable; 2) defer to the FDA’s finding re cancer as long as it was not arbitrary and capricious; 3) defer to the FDA’s determination that the regulation properly addresses the problem as long as it is not arbitrary and capricious.
Now that Chevron is gone, the only thing different is #1: Courts do not have to defer to agency interpretations of statutes, but instead do so themselves
If it wouldn't have, then what's the concern? Some law professor wrote an incorrect opinion?
If it *would* have worked, and we were saved on the day only by Mike Pence's personal restraint, then shouldn't *that* be the big issue? If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
The rules need to be clear, and clearly followed. Doing this sort of thing is bad, for that reason alone.
> If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
One would certain-fucking-ly have hoped so. Having rules that are clear and clearly valid and easy to follow is a good in itself.
Pretty effectively actually, at least in terms of the Eastman scheme.
The Electoral Count Act of 2022:
-- Affirmatively states that the constitutional role of the Vice President, as the presiding officer of the joint meeting of Congress, is solely ministerial and that he or she does not have any power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors.
-- Raises the threshold to lodge an objection to electors to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (Previously it took only one member of each chamber to formally object and bring the process to a halt.)
-- Identifies each state’s Governor, unless otherwise specified in the laws or constitution of a state in effect on Election Day, as responsible for submitting the certificate of ascertainment identifying that state’s electors.
-- Requires Congress to defer to slates of electors submitted by a state’s executive pursuant to the judgments of state or federal courts.
I think you overestimate the danger of permanent damage. To answer your question I think you have a post-algorithm “personalized facts” ecosystem. Trump supporters don’t see it as ushering in fascism, leaving the climate accords, and leaving Ukraine to the wolves. They see it as sticking it to the deep state and the woke elites, securing the border, and making peace with powerful nations instead of pearl clutching. Most don’t know any facts about January 6th. To the question “but we’ve been yelling facts at them for 8 years”, the woke globalists in the deep state and the media have been trying to gaslight them, telling them the economy is good, there’s no problem at the border, their kids can declare themselves another gender, they have to take a vaccine or they’ll lose their jobs…
In other words, a post-truth environment. They don’t even have directly contradictory facts. It’s a completely different reality.
I mean sure, for those people it makes sense, but ig I was imagining asking this to people that frequent this blog, who I'd hope would be better-informed but that still support Trump.
Of course, I'm noticing now that this probably comes from the bias that everybody has in that I think I'm right and if only people had the facts that I had they'd side with me. Still worth commenting though, I think.
Yeah, you only have to go over to DSL to get a peak into the right-wing media ecosystem. It's basically an alternate reality with few shared facts from this side of the aisle.
"a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)"
"Democratic institutions" seems to mean "the policy goals of the Democratic Party." You're quite right that there are few people who support this version of "democratic institutions" and Trump at the same time.
Specifically regarding the last point: do you not think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments or do you think democracies and illiberalism aren't mutually exclusive?
The American overloading of the world "Liberal" bugs me. Can y'all just agree either to dump the use of the word "liberal" to mean "center-left" or to dump the use of the word "liberal" as in "liberal democracy"?
Anyway no I don't think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments overall. In particular I think he'll take a harder line against China, the biggest and almost-most illiberal of them all.
Is the legal transfer of power a goal solely of the Democratic Party? You’ve put me in the uncomfortable position of defending that other guy’s cringe comment.
My personal impression was that the hysterics bring to mind someone who's terminally online and has purple hair with pronouns in their internet profiles and work email signature.
I did ask the question, but I feel compelled to say this feels like a bad reason. If you are only saying that's the image that comes to mind sure, but seems very much like a real life issue (i.e. not terminally online) that he wanted to disregard the results of the election.
This time around will be different. The Chevron doctrine no longer stands and the Federal Bureaucracy is much more vulnerable. Trump will not be surrounded by “old school “ Republicans who constrain him, and they (he and his crew) learned a lot from the last time.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. Chevron takes power away from the bureaucracy, which Trump at least nominally controls, and gives it to the judiciary, which he doesn't. Chevron makes Trump's hand strictly weaker.
And it wasn't so much "old school Republicans" that constrained Trump last time around, but recalcitrant bureaucrats and the judiciary. Trump nominally controls the bureaucracy, but he can't really fire recalcitrant bureaucrats because Pendleton, and Chevron doesn't change that. The judiciary will enforce Pendleton, and through Chevron it will bind the bureaucracy closer to Congress's will than Trump's, and Trump doesn't even have a theoretical cause of action for firing judges.
There are things Trump can do with the bureaucracy and the judiciary against him, but in terms of "things are different", you're describing differences that will make it harder for Trump.
Ok. There were quite a few old school Republicans in his cabinet (Barr and Bolton come to mind, and I forget the name of sec of defense among others) who seemed to deflect some of his inclinations. The end of Chevron will certainly make it easier to challenge rules and regulations of the bureaucracy but you’re right that it doesn’t directly give him more clout. I certainly don’t think it hurts him. I don’t see it binding things more closely to Congress’ intent because it looks like one of the results of ex- Chevron is Congress is going to have to be more specific in their intentions if they don’t like what the court’s decide, so who knows how that goes. Depends on how Trump friendly Congress is I suppose.
Trump tried to fire a lot of people the last time he was president and I think he will have more luck this time.
I don’t see how any of this makes it harder for Trump, especially because the SC has shifted its center. I don’t really see the judiciary being against him in general. Some circuits lean liberal and some lean conservative.
I think Trump and his inner circle learned a lot from their last innings about how they can do things they would like to do and he has much more support in the GOP party than he did then. Anyone who was luke warm on him is gone or come around. That’s how I see it anyway. I am willing to be wrong.
>Elected politicians still having power is a conservative fantasy.
You may be right. If you are, though, that implies that the voters have essentially zero control. A government of the executive branch employees, by the executive branch employees, and for the executive branch employees may be many things, but a democratic reflection of the voters isn't one of them...
Ouch! Many Thanks! And since the individual rights are whatever the legal experts say they are, it simplifies down to purely an expertocracy. It derives its legitimacy from the credentials of its experts?
>Rather people pick a number of individual rights that matter to them and hold them sacred. They can be very different ones (abortion vs. guns etc.)
I'm not following just how the connection to your previous
>Democracy stopped meaning majority power long ago and now it means a combination of individual rights and expertocracy.
works.
Are you saying that
- "Democracy" means widely differing things to different people, depending on which individual rights those people are concerned about
or
- "Democracy" is generally accepted as strongly dependent on the protection of individual rights, albeit with wide disagreement over which rights are included
or
- You consider "democracy" to be strongly dependent on the recognition of individual rights, but view both the practice of government as not honoring these rights (but it should) and also, there are strong (popular? judicial?) disagreements about which rights are included.
I'm not following which are the views that you hold, which are ones you view the government as following in practice, and which are the ones you see as popularly supported. Clarification, please?
Why do so many people in the rationality community choose to work for startups, despite being highly intellectual and talented? If you aren't the founder you'll never make more money in a startup compared to FAANGs. Startups are almost always poorly organized, chaotic and subject to random fluctuations in the mood of the investors, founders and first customers. Everybody remembers the founder, some people remember the investor, almost nobody remembers employee #1 (let alone #10) unless the company grows to be the next Apple or Microsoft.
I can understand why someone would want to be a founder. I can understand wanting to work for FAANG. I can understand working for an American startup if you live in Spain or perhaps even a low-cost location in Nebraska or something. I can understand working for a startup if FAANGs reject you. But how did so many super talented people get convinced to work for a startup while living in Silicon Valley, SF or New York? Do people just not care about money all that much?
Working for large companies can be undesirable for the usual reasons (bureaucracy, lack of obvious impact). Trading lower pay for more interesting/enjoyable work is a good deal for some - effectively, you are "paying" to better enjoy the significant fraction of your life that you spend working. Working at a startup is less extreme in this regard than pursuing a PhD, which many rationalist types also do.
That said, you can also avoid the large company downsides by working for a small established company, which will probably be less chaotic than a startup. My impression is that software jobs of this type are rare; I feel fairly lucky in having found one.
I'm not in the rat community nor in Silicon Valley, SF or New York, but I wound up working at 5 startups over my software career. The first 4 were because that was the only job I could get - 1st was my first job out of college, employee #5, successful for 2 years. Next 3 were after being laid off because of downturn in the economy and jobs hard to find - 2nd employee #2, dead within a month. 3rd employee #4 dead within 2 months. 4th employee #5 the hero who made a key contribution, successful company, got laid off when the success meant they didn't need developers any more. 5th I failed retirement by working for a friend's startup, employee #3, dead after a year. If I had had a choice I likely would not have taken so many startup jobs, but I did have mixed success with them.
I do not yet work for a startup, but I worked for FAANGs, and I echo pozorvlak: they have brain melting bureaucracy and sometimes you find yourself filling out seventeen forms to do an almost empty job, and thirty six forms to try doing it a different and maybe better way. Very depressing.
I can only speak for myself, but: I currently work for a startup, having previously worked for two more (possibly three, depending on what you consider a startup). I've never worked for a FAANG, but I have worked for other large tech companies. My brain just *cannot handle* the work environment at large orgs, and I don't think that's because I worked for especially dysfunctional large companies or especially functional startups. I can handle "if you have a problem with X, talk to Jane"; I can't handle "if you have a problem with X, you could try filing a ticket with the team that maintains X but it will probably be ignored, so spider the org chart until you can work out who manages the X team (bear in mind that it's probably out of date!), then get your manager to hassle them". I like being able to take a wide-ranging view of the system and business instead of becoming hyper-specialised in one component. At large companies I reliably become depressed and burnt-out. I'm my household's sole breadwinner; I can't *afford* to become unable to work. Startups may pay less than FAANGs, but for me at least it's a much more sustainable work environment.
>Do people just not care about money all that much?
Leaving aside that none of those people are starving, there are other things that people value other than money. If you don't understand that people are not purely instrumentality rational, you won't be able to understand more important phenomena. https://www.ashutoshvarshney.net/s/Nationalism-Ethnic-Conflict-and-Rationality.pdf
a) I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
b) Being part of a fast-moving, rapidly-growing company can be useful experience, especially if you think you might want to do the same sort of thing later.
c) At a good startup, the people around you will be good, too. And pressure can bring out good things in people. Becoming known in professional circles as a good or even just solid performer can help you find jobs later on.
d) To challenge yourself. Be all that you can be, etc.
> I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
That stopped being true around 2010 once people figured out how to rig the cap table. Nowadays, only the execs and VCs make any meaningful money on an exit.
In 1990 David Foster Wallace wrote a famous essay ostensibly about television addiction and writers of American fiction. The premise is that fiction writers are both natural voyeurs and introverts and therefore end up watching too much TV because that allows them to watch others without being watched themselves. This behavior then influences what the fiction writers write, deleteriously. Notably, it makes them too ironic. Too much TV watching makes the writers cynical because what happens on TV is lame and ripe for ridicule, something the writers become skillful at and employ luxuriously.
According to Wallace, the problem with irony is that it is only useful critically, its only possible message is to say: isn't this dumb?
He doesn't quite spell it out, but he sure seems to associate irony with liberals and sincerity with conservatives. He goes so far as to suggest that truly gutsy fiction might be written by those unafraid to seem too conservative.
I had heard of this essay but only recently read it. Many consider it prescient, but I'm not so sure. As far as recent fiction goes, at least worldwide (have no idea what is going on with American fiction. Is it sexist to call it all chick-lit?) novelists such as Knausgaard and Ferrante are very sincere and unironic yet also are perceived as "on the left" politically to the extent one perceives them politically.
So is irony a liberal thing? If so, why? Is that truer in America than elsewhere?
I hadn't run across this before, but I agree with his general point that irony is unproductive and sterile.
I wouldn't associate it with the left or with liberals, though. Maybe they got a head start, just like China got a head start on covid-19. But by now it's infected all ideologies. I suspect that it has something to do with people who live their life removed from hands-on work, and that's more and more of us, including most of everyone's time spent on the Internet. But the left-leaning tilt of academia and the arts probably explains why irony is more associated with the left. Which of course isn't to say "all academia" or "all arts", as you point out.
Man, 1990 sure was a long, long time ago. We all see liberal sincerity constantly. As for conservatives, there aren't very many of those left, but the burn-it-all-down right wingers who replaced them / who they turned into don't appear to hesitate to use irony in their critiques of what they see as the pieties of the liberal establishment.
I think as liberal rituals become more and more a part of the "establishment" (Pride etc), you'll see more and more examples of public liberal sincerity without irony.
So I'm calling bullshit on the care trolls playing up the Biden cognitive decline story. I just watched his July 12th Detroit speech. Seems like he's got all his marbles, and he's a damn good orator. Better than anything I've seen from Trump (sharks and batteries and sinking boats, oh my!).
Biden was already way behind in the polls even before the debate. The debate was just the final nail in the coffin. And what has been seen can't be unseen.
I mean, I would be elated if Biden somehow got elected, but realistically, he has 0 chance of winning, and the best thing he can do for the country is drop out yesterday.
The impression I get is that people are referring to instances where he needs to interact with an interlocutor rather than reading off a teleprompter or giving a prepared speech.
Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
Obviously you didn't bother to listen to his speech. These were quotes from the crowd shouting. I added my own wow at the end because he got his audience going. And if you watch him, he's not spending his time reading from a teleprompter. He's continually scanning the audience as he speaks. There may be one or more teleprompters in his field of vision, but if he's reading from them he's quite a speed reader.
Then of course, you had to add an hominem attack on me by calling me a shill. (Scott, where's my pay check?)
"Okay, this week we need someone to get Barack Obama back on the radar, really remind the base that Barack Obama is dangerous. Also, can we find someone to pump the new Lord of the Rings show? Engagement metrics are down."
"Sir, I've found someone who can do *both* with a *single comment*."
> Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
I doubt that beowulf888 is actually getting paid to post here, I just think he's wandered in here from a different and worse section, one where they fancy they're being active mooks in the political battle rather than above-it-all commentators.
I'm not the comment police, people can comment however they want, but it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
>it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
I think you're right; it's the contrast with the high-and-mighty smartypants type of comments these parts. It also contrasts with the more absurdist flavour of above-it-all commenting on the seedier parts of the internet.
I have no problem with seeing Stewart slowly realising he's outdated, because the guy annoyed the hell out of me with his "here's my trenchant political commentary that you should take seriously - ha ha come on, this is a comedy show, don't take it seriously - okay, back to telling you why conservatives are monsters" act. You do current affairs or you do satire, you can't do both. You can mock the politics of the day for all sides, but you can't then be some kind of guru about What The Nation Needs, In All Sincerity.
Now time has moved on, and he's struggling with catching up to what is the Currently Approved Narrative? Good!
Yes, he's very good at reading a teleprompter. He's been doing that for 50 years and will probably still be good at it for a few hours after his heart stops beating. It's a highly-conditioned reflex activity for him. Watch him try to think on his feet. Watch the debate. He's clearly not there.
I think it's generally acknowledged that he does relatively well giving prepared speeches in rally mode, which involves speaking in a different sort of register and does not involve adversarial questions or quick thinking (and usually takes place in the daytime). So this isn't new, and its usefulness as to the question of his cognitive capacity for running the country.
I can't seem to find a wikipedia article on "rules vs principles". Is this because the distinction between them is considered vague enough to not merit an entry?
I would like to know how the distinction arose historically; google gemini (free version) that I asked only says it was indirectly there even in ancient Greece, and in modern times Ronald Dworkin "significantly developed" the distinction between them. But there are pre-Dworkin people like John Dewey who have made that distinction.
So how did that distinction evolve? Was that nuance forced by challenges that some aspect of modernization threw up?
Since I don't know the major names involved, let me summarize/adapt from what the free version of google gemini provides, listing some differences between rules and principles:
(i) Rules are specific and concrete (don't lie, select the candidate with the highest score), while principles are broad and general, typically vague (honesty, meritocracy).
(ii) Rules are tailored to desired outcomes in specific contexts, principles to underlying values/ethics in an abstract/universal setting.
(iii) Specificity means you either break the rule or don't, but principles may be realized in multiple ways; and you can tweak mechanisms realizing them to prevent Goodharting.
(iv) Usually someone else punishes you for breaking rules, for principles the drive is mostly internal.
[Edit: For instance, it bothers me much that when I set exams, students with the best combination of talent+diligence etc. are not the ones that score the highest. I am following established rules, still failing the principle. It thus seems important to me to make this distinction. My impression is that historically people didn't distinguish these consciously, since it is easier and lazier to conflate rules with principles -- perhaps the smarter section of the populace had a sense of the distinction but did not articulate it -- but at some point the distinction articulated itself. I would like to know the how and why of this process.]
Close: principals are the rules you choose to follow, and assign to yourself, in order to protect what you value. For example, I value honesty so I follow a principle of never telling a lie. Or I value honor, so I follow a principle of never breaking a promise.
I would say that principles are a kind of rule, much like a square is a kind of quadrilateral. It's a specific kind of rule, imposed by yourself on yourself for the purpose of preventing yourself from violating your own values.
Canada is once again a laggard in defence, spending only 1.38% of its GDP on defence, in defiance of a NATO guideline to spend at least 2%, a standard most NATO members meet. What should the rest of the alliance to get the slacker Canucks in line?
The main source of maple syrup are the sugar maple forests split between the United States and Canada. For every year Canada doesn't meet its defense obligation the US gets an equivalent percentage of the total forest until the Canadians are forced to buy it from an American state monopoly.
Us Canadians know that Americans are practically forced to keep us in their sphere of influence for the sake of their own prestige/superpower status, and that means they'll defend us if need be. I admit it's kind of manipulative to take advantage of a friend like this. Sorry, eh.
Realistically if Canada gets kicked out of NATO then Canada doesn't care. It's many orders of magnitude more likely that NATO will oblige Canadian troops to defend Europe than that it will oblige European troops to defend Canada. Geographically, Canada is the only thing that makes NATO a North Atlantic treaty rather than a US-Europe treaty. And it's also the only thing apart from a few polar bears that separates most of the US from most of Russia.
It's not often in international relations that Canada holds all the cards, but this is one of those situations.
So if war threatens the King of Canada, who happens to be staying at one of his many residences in the UK, would Canadian commandos swoop in to extract his majesty to Fortress Canada?
No. Canada has been capable of a separate foreign policy since 1917. When Britain declared war in 1914, Canada was automatically also at war, but Canada was a separate signatory to the treaty of Versailles. Canada entered war in 1939 one day after Britain, seemingly to make the point that it was Canada's decision.
The US should threaten to seize all the untapped water power in upper Ontario that the Canucks won't because they are too sensitive about First Nationers "rights", build the world's largest power station on the site and use it to accelerate AI.
But only if the power station has a little sign put up saying that acknowledges that it has been built on the unceded ancestral land of the Canadian people. It's only fair.
Question for those with deep math smarts. I”ll give the short version first, then some background. Companies doing high-frequency trading develop predictive algorithms that let them profit from their correct predictions. They develop the algorithms using the data from recent trades, which can be expressed as formulas, in which the variables are things like how fast something sold, in milliseconds, how fast it sold at a recent price that was x% higher or lower, how fast some related thing sold, how fast the prices of various things are rising or falling, etc. But there are a huge number of possible variables that might be predictors of whatever one wants to predict, and even if you were told which variables are predictors there are a huge number of equations that can describe how they predict: do you square the time or the price, or cube it, or use the ratio of it to something else, etc.
Formulas that predict changes in the market are then fed into a non-neural net form of machine learning called NES, Natural Evolution Strategy, and the result if the golden algorithm (but only if you fed it good formulas). So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
This question comes out of a talk I just had with someone who has been working in finance doing programming, but is interested in the intellectual challenge and possible financial rewards of the question I asked. The person and I were brainstorming about how to find formulas that predict trading in the near future. (I have no math beyond calculus one, and very lttle knowledge of the financial industry, but I like brainstorming).
So my questions are:
-First, do any of you math people have a view about this?
-My suggestion was that the person talk to a statistician who specializes in working with very messy data — maybe something involving biology or turbulent flow. Seemed to me like they would know techniques for extracting from it the variables with predictive power, and formulas that capture what they predict. Is that a useful suggestion?
-If not, what kind of statistician should the look for?
-If not a statistician, who the hell should they talk to?
I know someone who works for a high frequency trading company. Their profit comes from two things:
1) Super-fast connections to the stock exchange computer. They built their computers next to it so that they are a few milliseconds faster than everyone else. So, they pick up the signals that just everyone else also knows, but their cable is so short that their signal arrives faster.
2) They get paid by the stock exchange company for it. High-frequency trading also serves a purpose for the stock market: it provides liquidity and acts as counterpart for the bids/offers that other people take. That provides value, and the stock exchange company pays for it.
I don't know the exact formulas for 1), but I think they are very, very simple. Like: if there are many people who want to sell, probably the stock price goes down. I don't think it's much more fancy than that. I don't think they try to come up with sophisticated models that predict the market for more than a few milliseconds.
I don't know whether all high-frequency trading companies work like that, though.
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
I think allot of this is bullshit, but if I had to pick a "signal" outside the shitposting of wsb, id look at arbitrage between exchanges as a signal; i.e. when america is awake, an english speaking market is a stronger "signal" then an asian one, and you'd take the a weighted sum of the "order book" from exchanges based on the hour of day.
What people talk about using as signals is literally any- and every-thing "ais reading twitter","gme up, use as a signal to buy gold", and its very important to remember novice day traders lose money at rates worse then most casinos. Its a worthless term, its *good* to be confused what it means.
This is high frequency trading, though. Time of events is measured in milliseconds, and signals have to be things happening within a few milliseconds of a trade. I think that automatically precludes using wsj bullshit, stuff in the news, etc.
There are people stupid enough to auto download elon musk tweets that scan for cyptro currencies trickers and "sentiment analysis" ai's; thats "high frequency" and using "signals"
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
That is indeed the tricky part. You use a combination of mathematics and intuition. The mathematics is the easy part. Mathematics on its own only get you so far, because the whole field of quant finance is rife with multiple testing problems -- if you test enough arbitrarily-constructed signals then you'll surely find stuff that appears to work but doesn't. On the other hand, if you stick to the most intuitively obvious and sensible signals then you won't get anywhere because everyone uses those.
About finding things that appear to work but don’t —that comes up in social science research too, so I know a bit about it. If you do multiple t-tests, for instance, and a bunch of them make it at just about the .05 level of significance, then you can expect approx 5% of them to be false positives. There’s a stat you use in that situation to correct for the problem of multiple tests. It might be called Cohen’s D, and then again it may not, but anyhow there’s a way to correct for for that. Is that the math you had in mind? Or some other math?
I’d rephrase your question as, “How do you do blackbox machine learning on high dimensional inputs?” I think the term your friend is looking for is “Auto ML” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_machine_learning]. AutoML is about abstracting the standard approach ML devs take when modeling a problem. I don’t think your friend wants a statistician for advice, but a AutoML expert. I don't know anyone who actually uses NES in practice. Here are a few standard approaches:
The classic approach: Let’s assume you’re working with a simple linear model and thousands of inputs. So many you won’t ever actually mentally visualize them all. You then (as Jeffrey Soreff suggested) take the polynomial of them, I typically go to the 5th power, and also the inputs multiplied by each other. Then you get so many input variables that you can’t really work easily with it. So you can use a L1 weight regularization, which will force many of the weights to zero and any input with a zero you discard and only use the inputs with non-zero weights. You’ll have to tune the hyper-parameter for the L1 weight penalty because it’s easy to end up over-pruning. This is the standard advice, but I don’t really do it in practice. It works okay, but the following two options are better in practice. [https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/linear_model/plot_logistic_l1_l2_sparsity.html]
A neural network: A NN can model a very large number of functions (if it’s infinitely wide it’s a universal approximator and if it’s infinitely deep it’s Turing Complete). In practice, it won’t be infinitely wide or deep, but still models a very large number of functions. The main challenge of working with neural nets in practice isn’t that it can’t model what you want it to model, rather the challenge is that it too easily overfits and models it in ways that don’t generalize. But a neural net is doing what your friend wants: take in a large number of blackbox inputs and then “test” a large number of functions with those inputs. Unlike the “classic approach” you don’t usually square/cube the inputs to a NN because you don’t have to. It’ll learn to do that if it needs to.
A non-neural net approach: I’d suggest a fun project is that your friend goes to sklearn and then makes a little tool where they take various preprocessing modules (Normalizer, StandardScaler, MinMaxScaler) and then make a Pipeline that treat the preprocessing step itself as a hyperparameter. Then have a series of sklearn models (eg, RandomForest, RidgeRegression, NaiveBayes) and treat the model itself as a hyper parameter. Alternatively, just assume that you’re going to use all of them, and what you’re learning is the ensemble. This might sound strange, but remember that AutoML is just automating the overall approach. This is more or less what DataRobot and a lot of other AutoML tools do. What’s fun and challenging about this approach is that your friend would build it to work with a couple datasets when developing it and then test it out on a completely different dataset that’s it’s never seen before.
Yep, I second this response. The data is too high dimensional, and too time-dependent, for a single person with regular computing resources to really do much. There's whole architectures of synthetic variables, hyperparameter tuning, variable selection, a suite of different modeling algorithms, and model drift monitoring and retuning going on at blazing fast speeds to actually do real algorithmic HFT these days.
What you want to actually do it right is a team of ML experts and mathematicians with financial domain expertise, and some serious (and geographically local to the HFT exchange) computing clusters.
For a _linear_ model, there are efficient multiple linear regression techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression which can efficiently minimize the error in the model, even with many potentially important independent variables, going all the way back to
>the least squares method, which was published by Legendre in 1805, and by Gauss in 1809
For nonlinear models, the problem gets arbitrarily complicated :-(
For mildly nonlinear cases, one can extend multiple linear regression by adding powers and cross-products of the independent variables to the regression. E.g. if you have X, Y, and Z as your independent variables, you can add X^2, Y^2, Z^2, X*Y, Y*Z, X*Z to the regression as if they were independent variables - but if you start with N independent variables, you have N(N+1)/2 second order terms, O(N^3) third order terms and so on, so this becomes unreasonable very quickly.
Yes, I suggested linear regression, which I'm familiar with from social science statistics. The person said some of the relationships in the crucial formulas are non-linear -- they're u-shaped or s-shaped -- and then they added that non-linear stats get out of control fast. I think that was a less clear way of saying what you just said. My next thought was, maybe linear regression is still adequate if there aren't all that many non-linear relationships among the variables in the mass. I mean, it seems like your identification of the set of variable behaviors that have predictive power doesn't have to be perfect to get enough prediction out of the result to have an advantage. You can have some bad variables in your set, and be missing some good ones, and still have a set that works. Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Also, I don't understand why neural net type machine learning does not work. Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data? You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
“ Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data?”
Excellent question. The reason is that once you discover a signal in the past data it stops being useful. Because your / others using it arbitrages away the inefficiency that was the potentially profitable signal.
You see how it’s different from cancerous moles. Our discovery of their patterns doesn’t affect the moles, unlike trading patterns that get immediately affected by our attempts to trade them.
You mean all then high frequency trading firms are constantly tweaking their algorithms by analyzing the most recent trading data and using the info in it to get a predictive edge -- but all the firms are finding the same stuff, so doing that analysis doesn't get you an edge -- it just keeps them from having an edge over you? Yikes. The picture in my mind was manic and mechanistic enough without that. Just the idea of a bunch of computers competing for a one-millisecond edge and millions of tiny meaningless trades was creepy enough. So I have some questions:
-Do you know for a fact that you can't just feed the last month's data to a neural net and then use it to make a predictive algorithm today because everybody else is doing the same? Or is that just something you've reasoned out -- seems to you like it must be true? The reason I ask is that is not what the person that started me asking this question described. That person had been programming at a financial firm, not working on the predictive algorithm, but they told me that the algorithm was something their firm had acquired or built, and they talked about it as something that stayed the same for -- I dunno, months? And it was jealously guarded, like the formula for coke. And it was made up of hundreds of formulas, each about a tiny little matter: If sales of this stock does that, then the chance of some certain other thing happening rises by 10% -- lots of that shit.
-Also, if you're right, how the hell DO the high frequency traders keep pulling in money? Is it that they all pull in about the same amount, because they're all staying on top of the predictors equally well, so the firms that know how to use ML to mine the data for predictors just sort of split the money equally? Or are some firms better than others, and if so how DO they get a predictive advantage?
So I thought about an interesting kink to this situation. Everything in my previous comment is kind of regurgitating relatively straightforward knowledge about how markets operate. But these relatively new ML tools may create an interesting opportunity that may work well for people like your friend.
- The tools are new, and vary in their approaches
- The tools are expensive and nearly not as ubiquitous as "previous generation" tools are
- Therefore they may be able to find really complex inefficiencies that will not be quickly arbitraged out of existence, so they indeed may be able to profit from "last months' patterns" for awhile
Everybody else, not having these tools, will find their trading profits shrink further - the excess profits of the new kids on the block have to come from someone.
To your last question first because it's easy: commenter demost_ described how high-freq traders make money. The durable edge comes from location and execution speed, and most money is made in market-making activities, selling to buyers and buying from sellers and making "1/100 of a penny" on each transaction, but in insane volumes.
The manic and mechanistic picture in your mind is mostly correct - vast majority of trading is done by computer algos, this is really different from the markets, say, 20 years ago. Now, again, I wouldn't call it entirely meaningless, providing liquidity and price discovery is a useful service.
The most interesting question is indeed about the predictive algorithm:
- I do know that patterns get arbitraged out, this is a well-understood phenomenon in market analysis.
- Having said that, there still are patterns that persist because they are driven by factors that cannot be arbitraged; the most famous one that still looks to be going strong is the Presidential cycle (year 2 bad, year 3 good). You don't need a fancy algo for this one, but the time horizon is decades, not days, and it still is better to just cost-average into your 401k.
- The markets are so vast and chaotic, it is not surprising that someone may find a pattern that others haven't yet. But the space is ruthless, everyone is constantly looking for an edge, so outperformance may stop/reverse at any moment. You kind of never know if you're smart or lucky; moreover, since all traders combined are "the market", there must be those who's returns are above average.
Thank you for taking so much time to thoughtfuylly answer my questions. I think I have just one more.
Let’s say there’s a park marked off into squares by letters going E-W and numbers going N-S, and there’s a contest for who can most accurately predict how many people are in each Square (A 1, A2 ….N-17) on a given day. And there are macro things every body knows: More people are in the park in good weather, and during daylight. If there’s a well-publicized crime in the park attendance drops. Etc. And then there smaller-scale things it’s not hard to figure out: More people on the tennis court squares on weekends. Few on the little kid play equipment 1-3 pm, because they’s when little kids nap. If you observed closely you could find some more. Maybe few parents with young kids hang out near the basketball court because the guys playing always swear. So I think of those big, easy-to-find things as the things that can be taken advantage of by everybody, i.e. arbitraged out. If that’s all the contestants had to go on, then on contest day, everybody’s estimate of how many are in each square fill take into account the big obvious rules, so everybody will tie.
But surely there also exist tiny little regularities you’d never think of, and that occur for who knows what reason, and the only way to find them would be to systematically go through the populations of all the squares at all times on all days of the week in, let’s say, summer. So you could say, what else happens on average when the population of A1 goes up at 3 pm? And maybe you’d find that the populations of B3 and K7 go down 80% of the time when A1 goes up. Or that the ratio of B3 population to K7 population stays between 2:1 and 2: 1.6 70% of time. ETc ETc. Obviously the number of relationships like that you could check for is huge. And of those you found, some would be hust coincidence, and would not hold in any other time span, but others would be valid. All that make sense?
OK, so those little tiny regularities are the ones I have in mind, mainly because the person I talked with made clear that that was what his firm’s algorithm consisted of: hundreds of little regularities like my example, except about trades of course, that allowed them to make 1/100 of a cent a million times per day. So maybe something like (and I’m just making this up): On days when the avg price of a certain class of stock is 20% or more above average, then the biggest price discrepancies from which the firm can make money will be in *other* classes of stock, and 85% of them will be in the lowest-priced of those stocks. So it does seem to me that rules like this are in an entirely different class from the 0dd/even good/bad year rule you talked about, or other big obvious trends everybody knows. It seems like one company could come up with a good batch of little predictive formulas, and if the percent that were not true predictors wasn’t too high, the algorithm made out of the hundreds of little mostly right tiny rules would give them a substantial advantage, so long as other company’s batches of formulas were less good. Does that seem plausible to you?
And it does seem like training an AI to recognize whatever the magic configuration of tiny predictors is is the only way to come at it. So yeah your comment about the new ML tools seems right. Also, when I roam around reading this and that about ML, it seems like there are many varieties of it, and also many techniques for tweaking the AI the optimize its efficiency in a certain domain. And new tweaks are being invented all the time. So there’s lots of room for variation even off all companies are using ML.. The person who chooses the best variety of ML and tweaks it in the optimal way will get the best result. Also it seems like people who have done a lot of work with ML get sort like horse people are about horses: they just know lots of little stuff about how to get a result, lots of little tweaks and remedies. . “Oh, he shies when you pass that part of the trail. OK, he’s probably doing it because X, Here are 3 things to try.” I mean that people get good at AI-wrangling.
For those reasons, I feel hopeful about how my friend”s going to do. Just so you know, they’re not doing this on their own, with their own money. They talked their way into a job where that is what they will be working on — tweaking the algorithm. They’ve got a couple mos. before they start, and are studying and experimenting like mad so they will be up to the work. (I don’t want say anything much about this person because I am talking about them online, but suffice it to say there is very persuasive evidence that their ability to master this kind of material, and solve novel problems is extraordinarily high.)
>Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Yup (if a linear model is reasonable). Basically, it comes down to what fraction of the variance of the predicted variable is accounted for by any specified one of the independent variables but this gets complicated (and beyond what I know!) when the independent variables are correlated. If they were all uncorrelated, I think it comes down to just the variance of the independent variable times the β, the coefficient of the independent variable. But if the independent variables are correlated (in the extreme case, collinear, linearly dependent, like temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius (as the web page mentioned)) then the solution for the linear model can basically pick either of them or any combination and it carries the same information.
[This is close to, but not quite the same as, the ANOVA package that you've probably encountered. I haven't used it myself. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance describes some of this, but phrased in terms of distinguishing two or more discrete groups rather than ascribing variance in a data set to (sets of) independent variables.]
>You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
Yes, but note that these models have been hammered at with all the expertise the finance industry can buy, so they've probably tweaked every knob that can be tweaked on them - e.g. for the neural nets, numbers of layers, convergence rates, numbers or repetitions of the data set, tradeoffs between how many barely-plausible independent variables to add vs how intensively to fit to a smaller set of independent variables etc.
Actually the person I was talking with said they do not use neural nets. They *first* identify the signals,(how they do it my friend does not know), then they feed them into some sort of machine learning system that is NOT a neural set, and do a
process calle d the Natural
Evolution Strategy . Does that make any sense to you? They said it was described in Wikipedia but I did not look it up because I don’t have the background to understand it.
Many Thanks! This gets beyond my knowledge too. I see the Wikipedia page on Natural Evolution Strategy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_evolution_strategy . At a _very_ abstract level it is again a version of trying to optimize the parameters of a model in order to maximize "fitness" (presumably equivalent to minimizing some measure of error).
> From the samples, NES estimates a search gradient on the parameters towards higher expected fitness. NES then performs a gradient ascent step along the natural gradient, a second order method which, unlike the plain gradient, renormalizes the update with respect to uncertainty. This step is crucial, since it prevents oscillations, premature convergence, and undesired effects stemming from a given parameterization. The entire process reiterates until a stopping criterion is met.
I can see why the more robust gradient is desirable, but I'm not following what is the exact difference fro the regular gradient and why it prevents the problems they describe with the regular gradient.
They use the derivative of the _log_ of the probability distribution with respect to the model parameters, rather than the derivative of the raw probability distribution. I can see that this would make the gradient descent e.g. insensitive to a scaling of the probability distribution. They say that it also gives
>the gradient direction is independent of the parameterization of the search distribution
which I can see is desirable, and I assume that they are correct about it, but I'm not following how that is derived.
I'm not an expert but I think looking for variables with predictive power is what every research scientist does, and it is hard. It's about formulating hypotheses based on hunches and testing them.
It's one of those: Where do ideas come from? questions. I don't think anyone knows the answer.
Sort of. There are, e.g., feature selection & dimensionality reduction algorithms that can be used to identify what signals (or combinations thereof) are useful inputs to actual predictive models, but they operate only on the dataset available (however large & noisy that may be); finding new data sources to feed the pipeline bottoms out with some manual decision eventually.
Ugh, no offense but honestly Philosophy of Consciousness is nothing but a honeypot for blowhards. There is no basis to speculate about it and what basis there is points obviously to it being the emergent result of some neural-computational process. Everything else is 100% woo. Who the hell reads these pretentious blowhards other than other blowhards who want to get in on the scam?
There's something to what you say about blowhards and the philosophy/science of consciousness. But if it's a solely a neural computational process why can't we explain how we get from a neuron firing to a model of consciousness that is testable?
It's a hard problem! We didn't know about atoms until a couple centuries ago but that didn't mean that matter was made of angels or whatever. God of the gaps type of arguments rarely age well.
But we're working on it. Eventually we'll get there.
And I've been wading through Curt Jaimungal's interview with Bernardo Kastrup —who argues for idealism. I'm definitely not a materialist. And I find some (but not all) of Kastrup's arguments convincing, but I'm not quite an idealist either. I guess I'm a Kantian Phenomenalist...
Why aren't you a materialist? Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation. This includes many things that used to have non-materialist explanations. Doesn't that trend make you skeptical of non-materialism?
> Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation.
I had a friend (now deceased) who was a High Energy Physicist (and who was not a materialist BTW). Somehow it came up in conversation that sometimes he'd get wacky results, and he would rerun the experiment to make sure they went away. If the wacky results disappeared, he was happy. I asked him why he didn't try to figure out why he got a wacky result. He laughed and said, "If it's not reproducible, it's not real." I said, "It doesn't necessarily follow that if it's not reproducible, it's not real." He replied that his grants and team members determined what was real. And chasing down why an experiment misfired was a waste of his accelerator time. Even so, I got the impression that he bought into the quantum idealism of Bohr and his crew, but he was practical about his research agenda. I would tease him about the Nobel Prizes he was missing out on because he accidentally detected some rare intermittent phenomenon. Half seriously, he replied that he wanted to retire without getting laughed at by his peers. Sensible fellow.
Like I said, I'm closest to a Kantian Phenomenalist. I don't deny there's a real reality out there, but we're not perceiving it. We perceive only a highly edited and redacted version of it. For instance, I hold a rose in my hand, I look at it and sniff it. I see color and sense a scent. Is the color that I perceive "real"? The petals are reflecting certain wavelengths of light, but the visual color we assign to wavelengths is determined by the rods and cones of our retinas. If our rods and cones vary from the norm for our species, we're color blind. And according to one of Scott's posts, there are some who claim to see more colors than normal because they have a mutation to their rods and cones. So quality of color isn't real outside our biological framework. Likewise, for scent. We assign the quality of sweetness to the rose's scent molecules, but that's meaningless in a materialist sense. Likewise, the scale of our perception is fine-tuned to our environment, but we are unable to perceive that the rose in reality is mostly composed of atoms arranged in a matrix around empty space. So I agree with Kastrup in that our consciousness is like a pilot flying a plane by IFR. The instruments on the console should not be mistaken for the world outside the plane.
Ok, all of what you just said is consistent with consciousness being a neural-computational process with noisy sensors connecting it to the world. Subjective experience is simply some complicated computational feedback loop: sweetness is when this neuron fires in this way and we associate it with nice things because the memory associations release dopamine. Or some such. Subjective experience is just some weird outgrowth of the way the brain monitors its own internal processes, and the only reason it's mysterious is because we haven't mapped it out yet. We will.
One of the problems is that for pretty much the entire history of science scientists have taken things that can't be quantified or measured and placed them in the domain of the mind. For example, beauty. You can't measure beauty, you can't weigh it, you can't quantify it ("This painting has 1.25 gigagoghs worth of beauty"), so it get's labeled as a subjective experience that is "in your mind" as opposed to "in the world." See also morality, qualia, and consciousness. It drew a bright line between the objective and material world and the subjective mental world. That worked really well: if you want to know how gravity works, or a chemical reaction, you focus on the objective aspects of it, as the subjective questions of whether gravity is "good" or "beautiful" don't help you learn how it works. You can just relegate those aspects of reality to the mind.
This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind. It's a bit like cleaning the room by sweeping things under the rug, and then trying to clean under the rug by sweeping things under the rug. It doesn't work anymore.
The current materialist answer to this problem is to deny that things like morality, consciousness, beauty, etc, even exist at all. We may experience such things, but they are only illusions. We think we make choices, and are concious, and experience qualia, but that's a mistake. Which is not a satisfying answer (as C. S. Lewis once wrote, "I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets"). What's worse is that everything we experience is experienced through the lens of the mind, so if the mind is an illusion, or is just the experience of a physical algorithm playing out, then how can I trust any of the scientific observations I have made that convinced me of materialism in the first place? Thoughts are not like physical events; they are "about" things, and they can be true or false. Yet if my thoughts are just physical events occurring in my brain, then how can they be about anything, or be true or false? Electrons moving across cells can't be "true" or "false" they just are, and one atom colliding with another isn't "about" anything, it just is.
So it's a bit of a bait and switch to say "Everything we understand has a materialist explanation, so the mind must have one too" when you only found a purely materialist explanation for everything else by taking all the aspects of the thing in question that can't be explained by materialism and filing it away under "the mind".
That doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s no violation in materialism in believing that we are conscious, or perceive qualia or make choices, or that even free will exists. Materialists just argue that’s happening in the brain, not in some other unexplained phenomenon.
Definitely not in the foot. Hence why most people, materialist or not, would prefer to be shot in the foot, not the brain.
How can an atom experience qualia? How can a process make a choice? How can the movement of an electron be beautiful, or true, or valid? Materialists have faith that even if it seems completely illogical, somehow all these things reduce to movements in the brain. Yet I don't see how it is logically possible. If all our beliefs are epiphenomenons produced by material processes, then they can't be true or false or valid or invalid. They just are, the way all physical processes are. Yet, materialism is one of those self same epiphenomenal beliefs with no truth value, so why should I believe it?
Aren't you just reducing so far you can't *see* any emergent forest for the trees, though? Even uncontroversial, fully materially measurable things?
The subatomic level isn't the right level to consider most attributes, and saying that you can't measure truth or beauty at the electron level doesn't say anything meaningful.
How can the movement of a photon of a certain wavelength be "red?"
How can the coordinated movements of a big enough collection of subatomic particles be "playing catch with your son?"
Yet the epiphenomenons of "red" and "playing catch with your son" are still useful and describe measurable, material things in the world.
How can a process make a choice? A flowchart or algorithm written by an expert can make a better choice than most, and literally billions of dollars of choices and real-world impacts are made this way every day.
If things like "processes making choices" impact real world decisions, outcomes, and actions every day, they are indeed real, and measurable. And if there are such things as "better" or "worse" decisions, it's because the better decisions are closer to "truth" and "intended outcomes" and things like that.
It's just a short jump from there to "justice" and "fame" and "beauty," and whatever else you want.
These are things that require a collection of minds perceiving and cooperating, but they are nonetheless real. Fame is measurable enough, and so is beauty, and so is justice. The right level to measure them isn't with a discrete instrument, but by polling or aggregating across many minds in a given group. Just like the right level to measure "playing catch with your son" isn't by detecting the subatomic particles involved, or the molecules or cells or organs involved, for that matter.
And actually, we probably CAN build an instrument for measuring those more abstract "collective opinion" things now. You don't think that GPT 5 or 6 will be able to give a 1-10 ranking in line with a "random sample of 10k people were given this media / scenario, and ranked the fame / beauty / justice as X on a 1-10 scale?" on any of those or other attributes? I'd definitely bet on this. So we can even build an impartial, objective detection instrument.
And materialism has no truth value?? The whole reason most people here adhere to it, is precisely because it makes more and better predictions than any other explanatory framework. "Making better predictions" is as close to "being closer to the truth" as you can *get*.
>This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind.
I don't understand how that's a problem at all. Things like beauty and morality _aren't_ objectively definable. They're emergent processes. When the brain is perfectly modeled and understood we'll be able to point to neural processes that encode things like "beauty" but it won't be a unitary thing because everyone has a different internal representation of abstract concepts. It's like some primitive looking at porn on a laptop and then demanding to know where precisely inside the laptop the woman was. It's not a coherent question.
That's a statement taken on faith. You are a materialist, you don't yet know a materialist explanation for something, you have faith an explanation will be found. Others do not share your faith. Many of them don't see how a materalist explanation is possible.
Take, for example, truth or falsehood. Thoughts can be true or false, just as logic can be valid or invalid. Yet if our thoughts are reducible to the movement of electrons, how can they be true or false? The movement of electrons is not true or false, and atoms are not valid or invalid. Look at anything material, you won't find any veracity or validity within it. You can say "well the thought itself is an emergent process" but processes also are not true or false, or valid or invalid. Those subjective qualities do not exist in matter; yet they exist in our thoughts. That wasn't a problem when the thing we were studying was outside our mind, such as rocks or rockets, but when we study the mind itself we find a lot of elements that don't seem to be reducible to physical processes. For example, you might believe I am mistaken about materialism; yet how can a process be mistaken about anything?
You're conflating a physical process with the semantic content of that process. "True or false" is an abstraction that doesn't exist outside of a semantic system. The fact that semantic systems (like computers, like brains) have physical substrates which operate by rules which are independent of the semantic rules they produce is irrelevant. You're just failing to understand emergence.
In a sense this is true. However unlike a thermostat you're a nonlinear system which can operate on itself. You can also respond to complex external stimuli such as internet comments and respond to social incentives like praise or punishment. As such it is practical to model you as having free will, though in a strict physical sense you don't. But the people who punish or criticize you for doing things they disapprove of don't have free will either so it all balances out in the end.
That wasn't a straw man. It was a joke that cleverly gets to the heart of the issue. If materialism is false then why should you care about your brain.
If materialism is true, then how can you care about anything? Atoms do not care. Electrons do not care. Processes do not care. They are all that exists, therefore caring is an illusionary epiphenomenon that emerges from the processes in our neurons.
I don't care. I simply have the illusion that I do. I care because the atoms in my brain have been carefully designed by millennia of evolution in order to direct my limited cognitive resources towards things which have maximum salience to my survival. This gives me the subjective experience of negotiating a complex internal landscape of competing drives. None of this changes the fact that I'm nothing but a complicated deterministic computing machine that has zero freedom to choose its behaviors. But my programming makes me act like I think I can.
All of your arguments are word salad that equivocate between different levels of abstraction in a way that allows you to draw meaningless conclusions. Sparring with you is mildly entertaining but I'm going to stop responding to you pretty soon.
Well a literal straw man wouldn’t have a brain, despite what you see in the movies, so no?
I’m not sure why you think my argument is a straw man but that’s possibly because I don’t fully understand the immaterialist version of consciousness you believe in, so that’s one me. Perhaps.
The same question was asked of Sam "The Mind is an Illusion" Harris some years back. It's as much a strawmanly argument used against the materialists as it is against the idealists—because it ignores the fact that both idealists and materials can feel pain and fear the dissolution of consciousness. Furthermore, it doesn't get us any further down the road to answering what's going on with consciousness.
any good statistical election models you guys are keeping track? The 538 one seems hopelessly broken/useless. The one from the economist seems interesting and I'm not in a position to purchase a Nate Silver's subscription right now
Even if you don't have a subscription, Nate will often mention his current forecast numbers in his free posts. The last time he did was July 9th, where he mentioned that according to his forecast Biden had a 29% chance of winning.
I submit that it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that the media is now aware that Biden has significantly declined cognitively
I thought it was just Matt Yglesias memeing but it turns out there were several major outlets that ran "cheapfake" stories to prime interpretations as the debate approached
I am cynical about the media's capability and motivation to report facts accurately but this seriously updated me. It is quite possible to not have really noticed Biden's gaffes, to let them slide off your existing perception and go on. But to watch the G7 video where Biden literally wanders off from the group photoshoot until a few of the other leaders actually corralled him, and then to run cover stories about cheapfake editing is shocking. You're not glancing off a potential reality here, you're driving into it perpendicularly with essentially no regard to the possibility of it being true
What epistemology could possibly have this effect? I think it's a simple algorithm:
Apologies to actual coders. How could you see Biden wrangling by fellow G7 leaders and write "cheapfake narrative"? Because the likelihood of truth was totally irrelevant compared to the factor of usefulness for Biden to be fine. This isn't a lie, this is an algorithm where truth is a marginal factor
Therefore, the media does not now know that Biden has declined. They know that it is now useful to liberal goals to observe that. The weighting of the likelihood of something being true will be adjusted - according to its usefulness
It's now useful because he can still be replaced. Rather than observing that Biden has declined, they are observing that Biden has declined to the point where it would improve the D's odds to replace him
If he remains the candidate they may advance to observing that it would be useful to redirect campaign efforts into Congressional races
I think you misunderstand what drives liberals. Liberals are continual worriers. Unlike Republicans, who will circle their wagons and defend their members to the end, Dems will throw their candidates to the wolves at any sign of scandal or disgrace. But no one on the Dem side has the chops to replace Biden as a candidate. Unfortunately, the Biden administration hasn't given Kamala Harris a higher-profile portfolio to put her in the public eye. Despite the cognitive tempests in the media teapots, Biden's post-debate numbers have recovered to where they were.
And the media, who are like five-year-old kids chasing a soccer ball, will be obsessing about the Trump assassination attempt for the next week or two. Trump may earn some sympathy points in the polls. But I expect this will fade as people listen to him blather on. And really there's no comparison between the two. Take a look at these excerpts from the speeches that Trump and Biden gave the same week. Other than Biden's speech impediment, he holds it together quite well.
In this one you can tell he’s giving a thumbs up to a different group of paratroopers. He still looks slow-moving, and I’d agree there’s something somewhat patronizing about how he’s treated by the others, but he clearly isn’t wandering off because he forgot where he was. I hadn’t seen that before and found the second perspective with a quick Google.
Does that change your thoughts on that particular example, or is that what you mean by cheapfake editing claims?
I got page not found but found a fantastic example on YouTube by France 24 doing a fact check on the video. I think it's representative without an additional angle as France 24 does not have that angle
In their version of the uncropped video you can additionally see one sky diver who is packing up his parachute and never looks up as Biden gives a thumbs up. Likely Biden had found a larger group there, some of whom did see him approach and interacted. It's not in the video, and they might have been all packing their parachutes - not a normal photoshoot item
Meanwhile the entire G7 group moves and shuffles towards Biden as Meloni brings him back into the location and orientation they were all in
France 24, with perfect confidence and aplomb, reports this as a clear debunking of an informationless cheapfake. This cannot be based on the facts they were in possession of, all they have is a diver who isn't looking! They didn't interact with the unedited video deeply enough to notice that. All they noticed is that they had enough information (there was an edit) to make a claim that would be plausible enough to others, and themselves, that would be useful
It can simultaneously be true that Biden has declined, and that people posted misleadingly clipped/cropped videos to try and show it.
As for the media, when there's a huge explosion of stories on a single subject in response to a public event, I think there's a dynamic going on where a lot of journos wanted to report on something but couldn't quite "get there". Then there's a public "hook" and the floodgates open everyone rushes to dump their story out.
Reminds me of when Trump Jr tweeted out copies of emails showing their attempts to collude with the Russian government in 2016, and a reporter said something like "I've been working on this story for a year, I could never quite get enough verification to run it, after all that work I can't believe he just tweeted it out".
Not that there hasn't been public reporting on this, especially from the WSJ and also around the time of Robert Hur's report.
This isn't unique to the left, let alone the American left. It's what happens when people prioritize "loyalty to the cause" and "winning" over "truth".
Yes, Biden's obvious senility is a huge indictment of the national news media. They were obviously being aggressively partisan in their coverage which has done direct damage to the country - at least to the extent that you consider having an openly senile incumbent as the Democratic Nominee to be damaging, which I do.
Another explanation: What is "obvious" to you not actually true. I am hardly a partisan, but it is impossible to have watched the NATO press conference and infer that he is "obviously senile." Which of course is different than the question of whether he is likely to be able to serve as President until January of 2029.
Sure, anything's possible. I'll happily take that bet. Maybe Biden is only pretending to be senile! Maybe all of the rumors and clips of him acting senile over the past 2 years was just Republican disinformation that only coincidentally happened to be right. Maybe the special prosecutor who declined to charge Biden over secret documents because he isn't mentally competent to defend himself was lying. I'm going with the parsimonious conclusion.
I think it's even more simple to say that sometimes he's senile and sometimes he's not, and even his closest associates can make mistakes about what he's going to be like over the next few hours. This explains the good performances, and the bad, and why all of his public appearances are so heavily scripted that even he (in his lucid moments) makes fun of it.
I don't actually think he's "senile", but minimally, his brain runs out of energy fast, and he needs more naps than he's getting. Probably he should have retired a few years back, and would have if he were in any other line of work.
Can we just say that he has some degree of senility, but he's not yet a central example of senility?
If your father/grandfather was performing like Biden then you wouldn't say he was senile, you'd say "Oh, he's still doing pretty well for his age". And Biden _is_ doing well for his age, most people his age have been dead for several years.
(Obviously he's not doing well enough to be President, and he certainly won't be by the time 2028 rolls around.)
As someone who thinks all politics is turd, I don't have a dog in this fight. But regarding gdannings complaint that you are not arguing in good faith, I'd just like to say I agree. You come across so angry and combative that one instantly feels like you are someone who is incapable of thinking or saying "you know I hadn't thought of that" or "that's a good point" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that."
Oh I'm definitely combative. That doesn't mean I'm either not arguing in good faith or am unwilling to make concessions when someone else makes a good point. For example, conceding that I'm combative.
Do you think it's even plausible that Biden isn't seriously mentally impaired? Didn't George Clooney recently tweet that he spent a whole day at a fundraiser with him and felt that his debate performance was representative? Haven't several people said similar things post-debate? Weren't there similar rumors circulating for months? It just doesn't strike me as plausible that all of those things are false.
I think it's unlikely that he's not mentally impaired, but not certain that he's not. But to me most politicians look impaired morally and in their intellectual capacity to grasp the issues they must master, so throwing in a little dementia is coals to Newcastle
One would hope that this would be a place where people could have good faith discussions. But if you are going to:
1. Construct strawman like "maybe he is pretending to be senile";
2. Completely ignore my reference to the NATO press conference; and
3. Perhaps most egregiously, use quotation marks around a phrase which a) does not appear in the special prosecutors report; and b) is not an accurate paraphrase of what the report did say (being incompetent to defend oneself is a very specific legal claim with specific criteria, and not remotely the same as what the prosecutor did say, which was that it would be hard to convince a jury that he acted willfully),
then perhaps I am mistaken. I hope not; I hope that most people here are not here to wage the culture war, but instead are interested in objectively discussing important questions lincluding those related to candidates' fitness for office, and how citizens an accurately assess said fitness.
1. That wasn't a strawman, it was hyperbolically illustrating the absurdity of non-parsimonious thinking.
2. Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
3. That wasn't intended to be a verbatim quote, apologies if you took it that way. It was just a stylistic choice to make it read more naturally. That sentence is directionally true and does not represent any substantive deception: the special prosecutor declined to prosecute because Biden is senile. "Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase. He also recounted that Biden had to be reminded of dates like his son's birthday. Hur found evidence of criminal wrongdoing but declined to prosecute solely because of Biden's mental capacity. I submit that this is qualitatively consistent with my original framing.
I admire your distaste for culture war and can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
>Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
Yes, it is.
"Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase.
Right. And if that was honestly what you meant by "senile," then your initial claim is vastly weaker than you think it is.
>can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
As it happens, I recently left a job with a non-profit organization whose mission I strongly support because of their propensity to make the same sort of claim that you made in your post.
The continuing degradation of trust in our society as a result is much worse than the fact that he's the nominee. The cover-up is worse than the crime.
Agreed, but this sort of partisan hackery has been going on for decades. At least now it's so out in the open that people can't pretend it isn't happening. NARRATOR VOICE: People will still pretend it isn't happening.
Yes, this is why I felt making this comment is quite useful. Previously I have been able to understand media bias in relation to myself, as I am often quite biased. But I cannot imagine myself seeing a video like the G7 wanderer and not just not incorporating it into my concept of Biden but actually running widespread cover stories leading up to the election about how such videos are meaningless cheapfakes
This is not "failing to adhere to the Platonic ideal of observing reality, just like me but perhaps moreso". This is "succeeding in achieving near perpendicularity to the Platonic ideal of observing reality"
I rarely discuss the morality of my own actions with in depth. That happened in a former Open Thread, on sperm donation. Since part of it was long after the thread's normal active dates, I think I might as well give it some visibility: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58888967 and parent comments.
Trump just announced JD Vance as his running mate on Truth Social. Interesting for a couple of reasons. He 39 years old and a freshman senator. Also announcing that on social media rather than at the convention may be a first.
> "If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there," he continued. "That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done."
To be clear, the "legitimate way" to deal with Pennsylvania sending you a slate of electors for Biden, and no slate of electors for Trump, is to certify their electoral vote is for Biden. Not to demand that they send you another slate and then having Congress "fight" over which one is proper.
I'm wondering how to take this - how religious is he? And more importantly, can we now get some good conspiracy theories going about the Horrid Popish Plot? All those Catholics on the Supreme Court, now a convert Papist as VP - is the Vatican puppeteering the White House????
I think he’s probably a pretty sincere Catholic. He was friends with Ross Douthat before he got into to politics and Ross is definitely a sincere adult convert Catholic.
I was just reading a round table analysis of the VP pick in the NYTs and Ross said he would be praying for his friend and the country.
As a 65-year-old, I'm taking the appointment of a 39-year-old as an _anti-gerontocratic_ plot! ( Not having any aspirations to public office myself, I support it. )
He married her before he converted, though. So how serious he is does remain a question. And I don't know how much his wife practices her faith, she could be "culturally Hindu".
Doubt. He was raised as an Evangelical and if it was for political points, he could have maintained that he is an Evangelical and the right would have been perfectly happy. I don’t think anyone on the right cares as long as you profess some form of Christianity. Converting to Catholicism doesn’t have any added political benefits compared to being an Evangelical. So I think it was a genuine conversion like that of Sohrab Armani.
To be fair, not really a downside, if you are a pro-natalist like Vance and can easily afford to raise multiple children. "Be fruitful and multiply" our God literally commands us.
On the other hand, I have always wondered why all the billionaires are happy with just 1-2 children. Having a hundred children(like some Arab sheikhs) means a tangible genetic legacy, that may even keep multiplying down the generations. Donating billions to charities doesn't even earn you any feel good brownie points anymore like in days of Carnegie and Rockefeller.
The Vatican, trying to cover up its own child sex abuse scandals, infiltrates the US government, using as leverage Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein.
Clearly puppetmaster Bergoglio needs to hedge his bets. If Biden wins, he’s got a papist behind the big desk. If Trump wins, he has a voice in the big guy’s ear. And since no one expects either of them to listen to Francis, no one will suspect a thing.
On a more serious note, I think it’s interesting that as American evangelicals lose political influence, observant Roman Catholics seem to be holding on, at least at the level of officeholding. But perhaps the reverse is true of voting blocs? The whole thing is unclear to me.
I think it's more that Catholics are a single bloc (even if there are large internal differences) due to the hierarchical nature of the church. Protestants may be a larger share of the population, but they are divided up amongst different denominations.
Figures from 2015 which are badly outdated by now, but give a general indication of the religious make-up of the USA:
In 2015, Protestants (of all traditions) were 46.5% of the population and Catholics were 20.8%. The largest non-Christian faith was Judaism, at 1.9%. Atheist/agnostic/nothing in particular were 22.8%.
Within Protestantism, the single largest denomination is Baptist at 15.4%, with the Southern Baptists the largest in that cluster at 5.3%
If we want to look at that bogeyman of the liberals, the "Evangelicals" or "Religious Right", or the Christofascists as I see the current term seems to be, they make up 25.4%. Historic Black churches, which trend doctrinally conservative but vote Democratic, are 6.5%, and the mainline Protestants are 14.7%.
So Protestantism is numerically superior but divided amongst different denominations, hence "chaotic", while we Papists are all marching in lockstep to the dictates of the Vatican, hence "lawful" and thus, despite our smaller share of the population, more effective at implementing the Global Conspiracy 😁
Wait, which side is law and which is chaos? I figured that we evangelicals would be chaos, but that implies that the U.S. government is trending lawful over time, which feels… wrong.
I was mostly going by internal organization, so evangelicals would be chaos and Roman Catholics would be law?
Maybe for the government over time, some of the more organized American Protestant denominations would also count as lawful on net, and their shrinkage would counteract the Catholic rise? Episcopalians, Methodists, etc.
One June 4th, Biden issued a proclamation banning asylum claims from illegal immigrants at the southern border. However, I can't seem to find any information about what actually happened. Did it get blocked in court? Have border encounters gone down?
- Illegals claiming asylum were turned away if the 7 day rolling average exceeded 2500 per day, and the "ban" was rescinded if that average dropped below 1500 per day.
- The ACLU sued the Biden admin for this, but didn't seek an injunction, so it should still be in effect.
I see the data here only goes up to June. https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/stats/southwest-land-border-encounters Is this a case where there's just a long lag in the data and we can't actually see the results?
I assume they don't bother updating until after the end of the month. I couldn't find anything separating the type of encounter either; asylum seekers just get lumped into the total.
Something really weird is going on on Twitter. When I go to https://twitter.com/patio11 (Patrick McKenzie's twitter), I can view the most recent few tweets normally, but as soon as I scroll down to a certain tweet (the one which I think is about turning society off and then on again though it always refreshes too fast for me to actually read it), the page immediately refreshes (with the same url) before I can read anything, and the new page (despite having the same url) only shows older tweets starting July 19th, with no way to see the most recent tweets again. The only way to go back is to close the tab and open a new tab with the same url (which has the same behavior as before).
I tested this in both Chrome and Firefox, and tried disabling ad blocker too, but it still happens. Additionally, it still happens if I use the "x.com" url instead of "twitter.com". I've never seen this behavior before, and when I check other people on Twitter, it's all normal with no weird refresh and tweet hiding.
WTF is going on?
Are you logged into X?
Yes. I tried it in an incognito window, but when you aren't logged in, it won't even display recent tweets at all. Logged out users only get a random selection of unordered tweets from years ago, rendering it completely unusable.
Somehow news of the upcoming Netflix series "Terminator Zero" eluded me until today. It's an anime series of eight episodes. Available August 29.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_Zero
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HvXbAQOpocQ
TIL that a theory very similar to Scott’s thrive/survive theory of the political spectrum seems to be quite popular in anthropology: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regality_theory
Big deal developments in the War on Gaza:
(1) The Yemen-based Houthis strike central Israel - in particular Tel Aviv, near the US embassy - for the first time since they entered the war in November. This is both a political first - no other non-Gazan armed group struck Tel Aviv before -, and a technological first for the Houthis pointing at improving capabilities. The Houthis have previously focused only on harassing civilian Red Sea and Indian Ocean shipping, the drones and missiles they fired at Israel targeted Eilat and tended to be shot by US navy, the IDF, and the occasional Egyptian fighter jets over Sinai.
(2) The ICJ ruled that the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is unlawful. This is already the consensus, but the ICJ's ruling is the latest confirmation in a long string. This case is separate from the genocide case opened by South Africa in late December of 2023, it was opened in January of 2023 by the Palestinian Authority. It has since garnered the attention of many states and representatives from Luxemburg to Namibia. The ICJ's ruling is advisory and non-binding, but it's valuable because it bolsters the anti-settlement camp and serves as legal grounding for more Boycott, Divestment, and Sanction behavior from increasingly more European trading and defense partners of Israel.
From https://icj-cij.org/sites/default/files/case-related/186/186-20240719-adv-01-00-en.pdf, page 81:
> (3) By eleven votes to four,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel’s continued presence in the Occupied Palestinian
Territory is unlawful
---
> (4) By eleven votes to four,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to bring to an end its unlawful
presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territory as rapidly as possible
---
> (5) By fourteen votes to one,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel is under an obligation to cease immediately all new
settlement activities, and to evacuate all settlers from the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (6) By fourteen votes to one,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the State of Israel has the obligation to make reparation for the damage
caused to all the natural or legal persons concerned in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (7) By twelve votes to three,
[The court] Is of the opinion that all States are under an obligation not to recognize as legal the situation
arising from the unlawful presence of the State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and
not to render aid or assistance in maintaining the situation created by the continued presence of the
State of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (8) By twelve votes to three,
[The court] Is of the opinion that international organizations, including the United Nations, are under an
obligation not to recognize as legal the situation arising from the unlawful presence of the State of
Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
---
> (9) By twelve votes to three,
[The court] Is of the opinion that the United Nations, and especially the General Assembly, which
requested this opinion, and the Security Council, should consider the precise modalities and further
action required to bring to an end as rapidly as possible the unlawful presence of the State of Israel
in the Occupied Palestinian Territories
Thanks! While I may not be as sympathetic to the Hamas cause as you are, I appreciate your opinions. Unfortunately, as long as Israeli hostages are being held by Hamas, I don't think the Netanyahu governement will have the motivation to cease hostilities in Gaza. And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ. Oh well.
Very appreciated, but "Sympathetic to the Hamas cause" doesn't sound like an accurate way to describe my beliefs, unless you're using it as a shorthand for "wants Palestinians to not die and have nice things", in which case... yes, it's technically true, in the same sense that Netanyahu's cause is "wants Jews to not die and have nice things", which would lead us to conclude that anyone who doesn't hate Jews is automatically sympathetic to Netanyahu's cause, i.e. that a sizable portion of Jewish Israelis hate Jews and don't want them to have nice things.
Different definitions for the same word. Jihadis "love" Muslims and so they want them to be an Übermensch group that rules the world, I "love" Muslims and so I want them to wake up to the fact that Islam is bad fanfic plagiarized and translated into Arabic from slightly better Hebrew stories.
> And they'll continue to ignore the ICJ
As expected. The hope is that *other* states won't ignore the ICJ, or at any rate the European ones (who seem to assign a lot of legitimacy and respect to international institutions). Those states will then **force** Israel to care about the ICJ, because they will withhold weapons, trade deals, academic partnership, travel, cultural participation (e.g. sports), and so on.
This is roughly similar to how if a normal court judges you to be guilty of something, you may very well lift your feet and say "Ohh I don't care about this court, I'm nonchalant", but guess who cares about the court? The police, your (future) employer(s), your bank(s), your university, your landlord, etc... All of them would force you to care about the court.
Yes, I apologize for mischaracterizing your position. I'm of the plague-on-both-their-houses school of thought. Yes, it would be good thing if the Palestinians could have a chunk of land and a nation-state to call their own. And I acknowledge that Israel has the right to exist. And I wish that Jewish fundies weren't actively grabbing Palestinian land on the west bank, and I wish that Hamas and Hezbollah weren't actively engaged in asymmetric warfare against Israel. Considering that Hamas can't bring itself to hand back the remaining hostages — and thus remove Netanyahu's figleaf of an excuse for attacking Gaza — I don't think Hamas really gives a shit about the people of Gaza except as human shields and as recruits for long-term future struggle against Israel. And Israel is helping them with that latter goal. It took almost two hundred years for the Crusader Kingdoms to be pushed out that area. I suspect Hamas is playing a long game. But unlike Saladin, they don't have the support of most of the key players in the Arab world. I predict a stalemate of violence for at least the next century.
In honor of the immortal Bob Newhart, here's a Bob Newhart Show script I wrote:
https://themanchegancandidate.substack.com/p/terror-at-14-12-feet
The guy was a gem. A comedian that made people laugh without being mean spirited.
The New York Times has an interesting video analysis of the minutes leading up to the Trump shooting.
https://www.nytimes.com/video/us/politics/100000009576871/trump-shooting-assassination-attempt.html
Apparently members of the public had noticed the shooter on the roof a couple of minutes before he actually fired. They notified the police, but somehow the cops weren't able to act on the warning quickly enough.
The organization responsible for security in the area where the gunman fired from was the local police. Maybe small-town police just aren't that competent, at least when they have to deal with threats beyond speeders and the local drunks.
Looks like there is more to this story than I realized.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/20/us/politics/trump-rally-police-secret-service-shooting.html
Nobody is competent outside their area of competence.
Preventing assassinations isn't within the local police's area of competence, which is why the US has the US Secret Service, which gets to sit around all day and think about possible assassination scenarios and how to prevent them.
If the local police had a role to play here, it should have been getting told by the Secret Service to stand on the top of the roof. Or heck, at the bottom of the ladder leading up to the roof.
The organization responsible for security is the secret service.
I'm worried that I might have prediabetes, but going to a doctor is inconvenient. Is there an easy way to track your glucose levels at home? I seem to recall someone talking about this in a previous open thread.
Walgreen's has an inexpensive glucose meter and fairly inexpensive test strips. Of course, you'll need to stick your finger and draw a drop of blood. I suggest that instead of using the tip of your finger, you use the side of your finger and squeezing out a drop of blood, because bruises on the tips of your fingers hurt when you use a keyboard. As a Type I diabetic let me give you some insights into blood glucose behavior...
1. If you're not producing enough insulin, you'll notice that after eating carbs you're blood glucose levels will start to rise about fifteen minutes after eating them, and they'll rise over the subsequent hour. AFAICT, from my experience, there's not all that much difference between low glycemic carbs and high glycemic carbs. Low glycemic carbs may stretch out your blood glucose rise over another extra half hour or so.
2. Also check your blood glucose levels beginning after 4 hours after eating, and finish up around 7 hours. I've noticed that the proteins and fats start to increase my blood glucose levels about five hours after eating them.
3. Alchohol has another six-hour blood glucose effect. If you're drinking wine or booze, check your BG starting about 5 hours after consuming them.
https://www.walgreens.com/store/c/walgreens-premium-true-metrix-self-monitoring-blood-glucose-meter/ID=prod6234625-product
Just go to a pharmacist and buy a blood glucose meter.
Last year, I am in person at my doctor's surgery, talking to the reception...
Me: Well, I'm not diagniosed with diabetes but I occasionally check with a blood glucose meter to se if dsub-clinical hypoglycaemia is getting any worse, but this time the meter is givin me some stupid error message I don;t understand and I was wondering if you could book me in with the nurse to test it properly.
Receptionist: I don;t think we've got a slot for months.
My doctor (overhearing, from across the room): Test them right now.
(I'm not sure if that was a warning sign or not, but shortly after my thyroid failed ... and one of the many knock on effects I have from the thyroid condition is anemia, which will probably show up even on a blood glucose meter)
My blood glucose was in fact ok .. but then a couple of months later I had rapid weight loss and heat intolerance ->more extensive blood tests get done -> grave's disease diagnosis
There definitely is, and I don't think any of the supplies you need for doing it are prescription only. Not sure though. Just thought I'd tell you some info I just ran across: There's a supplement called I think Berberine that reduces blood sugar. People talk about it as a natural alternative to metformin. The person who told me about it is well-educated, skeptical of "alternative medicine" and not one to just believe hype, so the stuff may actually be pretty good. I recommend you look into it to see if it's safe and effective.
I recently graduated from my undergrad with a degree in philosophy, and through my time studying, I had a strange repeated experience which I'm wondering if anybody else can relate to or knows what it is called. Multiple times during my undergrad, I would have an idea I believed was clever and worth writing about and I would find a way to work it into whatever writing asignments I had going. Then after submitting the paper writing a term paper, I would encounter the same idea somewhere else, albeit much better articulated and with layers of depth I had not anticipated.
The first time I noticed this, was in an Ethics course with a professor who mainly specialized in Ancients, and I remember thinking that there was something seriously epistemically wrong with his positions. I wrote a term paper, which he hated, on moral relativism, which he called sophistry, but I was convinced was more nuanced and complex than he was willing to admit. The paper itself wasn't good, but I thought the idea was at least interesting. Lo and behold, the next semester, I encountered Foucault, who had essentially anticipated and expressed exactly what I was trying to get at, although he would have gotten a better grade on his term paper. I have since abandoned Foucault, but the experience of independently arriving at a preexisting theory or idea remained.
Over time, as I read more, I found that the ideas I hoped were mine were more and more recent, sometimes even published this century, though this might just be a byproduct of reading newer material. It really is rewarding finding yourself naturally drawn along the intellectual path previously tried by great thinkers. I find this encouraging, maybe one day I will catch-up with the Zeitgeist and actually manage to have an original thought I'm not holding my breath. Is there a word for this? (other than naivete)
In most disciplines, the big historical discoveries or developments are 'deterministic': if you re-did the entire history of that field of study with different researchers, in different institutions, the same principles would be discovered in roughly the same order. See https://measureformeasure.co/blog/multiple-discoveries/.
This means that, if you have learned the precursor ideas, and are helped along by the fact that the later concepts are so to speak "in the water supply", you may semi-independently rediscover later thinkers' ideas. I had this experience when I took a class on history of economics and noticed that my way of thinking about the principles of economics was *very* close to that of the early neoclassical economists.
I'll reply with an experience that I had yesterday.
I was at a meeting, and attempting through my ADD, my wonderful current excuse, to pay attention. A guy was talking about something that had nothing to do with me and my gaze drifted over to a fully maxed-out whiteboard full of boxes and erasable lines with acronyms that all have something or other to do with my job but I couldn't tell you what. (Well you might wonder how he keeps a job through this kind of haze. You wouldn't be the only one.)
To get back to my story, my gaze for no apparent reason lit on one of the hundreds of boxed acronyms. it was OTTI, I remember. I don't know what it means any more than you do. It's amazing how much work you can do in the computer field without knowing anything at all. Anyway. A second later--so it seemed to me--the person said that same acronym, OTTI. I was amazed, and now the meeting was gone (for me if not for them), and phenomenology was now paramount.
Is it possible, like one of my pet hypotheses points out, that a certain part of consciousness travels backward in time, priming me to look at potentially useful things just before they are to become useful? Or is it a simpler idea, instead of breaking all the laws of physics, that my verbal processing is slower than my visual processing, but some of that verbal processing is still taking place, such that my eyes were directed to the OTTI box before I consciously understood that I was hearing those same letters? Thanks to the style of thinking I've absorbed from reading this blog I would have to give the weight of evidence to the latter hypothesis. But one thing true of either one is this: your brain processing has some curious and subtle ways about it that are past understanding. And I love that. Too bad about the meeting.
I got a bonus at work that same day. I think I'm way better at paying attention than I used to be, mainly as a function of how often I notice and correct my attention this year. But how did this ever work for my previous 30 year career? Somewhere up here I have a brain, and it's quite a gift, and I cherish it, broken as it is.
I absolutely agree that there is more going on in your brain than you are aware of consciously. I suppose that is why we spend so much of our lives trying to understand ourselves.
I don't have a word for this, but I think that it's a reasonably common occurrence - certainly as an undergrad I had the same experience of anticipating in homework assignments the topic of a future lecture or course. Something you notice as you study an area more deeply (at least in subjects like maths, philosophy, physics) is that there really aren't that many fundamental ideas in any particular topic of study. The basic principles occur again and again, developed and elaborated in different ways.
When you are being trained in critical thinking it's natural to look for flaws in a theory, and to anticipate how to respond to those flaws. It's certainly satisfying to find that someone published the same idea that you had, and that it became part of the history of the subject. If your lecturers were good, they likely were scaffolding you toward the next developments in your subject without making an overt deal about it. You also have the benefit of hindsight - you probably don't cherish so fondly the ideas you had that turned out to be wrong!
As an arts major, I love being mentioned in the same sentence as math and physics. I would not give any credit to this lecturer, in particular, given the fact that there were obvious decades-old flaws in the arguments he put forward. I would have liked to have been pointed in the right direction; it would have saved me a terrible essay, and I would have figured out what was wrong with my idea earlier. Instead, I remember him saying something to the effect of: "This is why we shouldn't teach young men Nitzsche."
Philosophy, maths and physics are to a large part based on axiomatic systems and deductions from those axioms. Newton's Laws allow you to predict (non-relativistic) motion, for example, and Maxwell's Laws allow you to work out how electricity flows in a circuit. Admittedly, some parts of philosophy (Plato, Aquinas, Descartes, Russell, Heidegger, etc.) fit better into this type of framework than others (Nietzsche, Weil, etc.)
Your lecturer provoked a reaction in you, which is something. One of the most effective lecturers I had as an hummed and mumbled under his breath and pushed an acetate with a triangle on it around on an overhead projector for 12 weeks (he must have done other things, but this is what I remember, it happened in every class ), but at the end of the semester I somehow had a solid grasp of basic group theory. Another told horrible jokes, deliberately miswrote formulae on the board and then inspected everyone's notes to see who was 'writing down shite', but at the end I knew basic statistics. I have a lot of respect for both of these lecturers (now long retired) but that was in the era before teaching evaluations. It couldn't be done today.
If I have a point, maybe it's that your evaluation of the lecturer is too harsh. I'm a lecturer now, for what it's worth, and expectations have changed since I was an undergraduate. I think it's that I expected to have to go to the library and read and think. We were told explicitly that the notes we took in lectures were not sufficient to pass the exam at the end of the semester (there was minimal continuous assessment back then). I wouldn't get away with that policy now... this is not to say that things were better then than they are now, only different.
Recently graduated? Just a heads up, expect to have an occasional dream in the next couple years where you are still an undergrad and realize you have a final exam for a class you forgot to attend class for the entire term.
https://sigforum.com/eve/forums/a/tpc/f/320601935/m/5500055054/p/1
Mine is that I technically didn't graduate because I forgot or didn't see the message to show up in a particular place at a particular time, or didn't fill out the right form, or something like that.
Oh no. It’s broken quite differently here in the US. In fact each state, and within each state, each district…
Perhaps Tolstoy said it best, “All functional schools are alike; each broken school is broken in its own way.”
haha I've had this one before during summer break.
Just remember to wear pants!
I suspect it’s part Baader Meinhoff ( wouldn’t have named it without the earlier reply) and partly it’s just learning.
I had several experiences much like that when studying electronics. Having learned something new, I’d think a new to me idea for a circuit and excitedly show it to an instructor, to inevitably get the feedback “that’s the right idea, and here is why we don’t do it that way, here is how it’s really done”.
I think it’s inevitable and desirable that when learning we are thinking similar thoughts to those who tread the path before us.
In follow up to that, it probably also depends on how your learning flows. I learned electronics in a well structured post secondary environment. So one week I’d be introduced to power amps and feedback, and then rush ahead to ideas of how to apply them. And not surprisingly I was headed in the right direction but simplistic in my approaches.
I learned most of computer programming independently, and was often reading material far ahead of my abilities. I can’t really recall the same experiences of learning a new thing and then jumping ahead to previously unknown to me applications of those ideas. I generally already knew where things were going before I knew how they got there.
That sounds right. I especially like someone else's response that it is likely baked into the lesson planning if it is any good. Your thoughts on learning in general are well put.
I like the water-supply analogy and, indeed, your other alternative explanations. I've heard authors, philosophers, and especially artists (Rick Ruban) express the feeling that the ideas they express aren't necessarily their own; they simply happen to be the ones that get there first. In reality, new ideas are being pulled from the collective unconscious or cultural superstructure. However, you want to think about it.
Two big pieces of news related to Biden being pushed to drop out as Dem nominee, and then I'll add a third new fact which could add to that momentum.
(1) Rep. Adam Schiff just called for Biden to step down as the POTUS nominee. That is big because Schiff is viewed as one of the party's rising stars and is now the presumptive new U.S. Senator from the largest blue state.
(2) "Nearly two-thirds of Democrats say President Joe Biden should withdraw from the presidential race and let his party nominate a different candidate, according to a new poll, sharply undercutting his post-debate claim that “average Democrats” are still with him even if some “big names” are turning on him." Ooooof
https://apnews.com/article/biden-trump-poll-drop-out-debate-democrats-59eebaca6989985c2bfbf4f72bdfa112
(3) Check out the free-subscriber portion of this new Substack post from Jesse Singal:
https://substack.com/inbox/post/146718184
He's describing having watched the recording of Biden's speech yesterday to the NAACP's national convention, i.e. a large room full of key Dem supporters/influencers. I plan to watch some of that myself this evening. For now I'll just predict that if Singal's description proves accurate it will become pretty devastating to Biden at this juncture. Many of the people in that room have the ears of lots of top Dem officeholders and/or party officials. Also the link is right there for anybody to watch the recording themselves, and/or for easy sharing by people who were in the room, etc.
And now Covid. C’mon man!
I have to wonder if this is a face saving way to step aside. Not very charitable but that’s where my thoughts take me.
I doubt it. Too easy for the truth to leak out. My rule of thumb is WYSIWYG as a starting point unless I have strong indications to the contrary. Has been working well so far.
Garrison Keillor on Midwestern sanctimonious bullies and cheap piety:
“It’s the Midwest, a culture that places a high value on modesty and self-deprecation, avoids irony, follows the rules and gives rule-breakers a sidelong look, keeps complaint to a minimum, prizes loyalty, and is well-practiced at ignoring flamboyance and foolishness and pretense.
But sanctimonious bullies thrive here, too. At the Tchaikovsky ballet, a woman comes onstage to remind us to turn our phones off and she says, “We wish to acknowledge that the land we are on was taken from the Dakotah people,” and we all bow our heads at this cheap piety.
There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from reading a line off an index card. She might as well say, “We acknowledge that the nondegradable plastics that come with our concession products are causing damage to the planet that our children will inherit.”
https://garrisonkeillor.substack.com/p/a-trip-back-home-to-get-my-bearings
Huh. I'm not Midwestern, but I have a dim sense of the type of "Midwestern sanctimonious bully" that he mentions. Although I'm not sure how much of that is due to listening to Prairie Home Companion in my childhood, so it's possible my entire concept sprang from his mind. ;-) If they hold true to bully-type, some of them will adapt to changing social norms, and get their kicks from manipulation of whatever system is present. Maybe some have adapted to wokeness?
In this piece, he seems to have a sense of bitterness and alienation, which I don't recall being in his oeuvre previously. But I suppose that's to be expected given his cancellation back in 2017-2018? (Regardless of the truth of the allegations.)
Maybe you or someone else here can explain the appeal of Prairie Home Companion for me? I'm not in the NPR target demographic so I never tuned in, but a couple of times I was at the home of people who obviously listened to it religiously. What I heard was vaguely mildly amusing but never actually funny enough to generate a laugh - I just didn't get it.
I remember (decades ago) Homer Simpson listening to him and growling at the radio: "Be funny!"
The only joke they did that made me laugh out loud:
Where do you think interest rates are headed?
If you want an answer to that question you’ll have to ask Yellen.
I SAID WHERE DO YOU THINK…
Some people regarded it as bohemian/hippie chic.
Don’t ask me. I never got it either but it was a thing.
I only got little bits of it when I was a kid, and I think a lot of the humor was fairly subtle. It's like pointing out a quirk of human behavior, and exaggerating it slightly, and raising an eyebrow at the audience.
> It's like pointing out a quirk of human behavior, and exaggerating it slightly, and raising an eyebrow at the audience.
Yeah, gentle, satirical exaggeration.
A college pal performed on PHC once. His brother and cousins were musically inclined and all third generation Finns.
They performed Finnish folk music on the show.
It helps if you've had enough exposure to Midwestern culture to recognize that those were the stereotypical quirks of real people; my parents grew up in Milwaukee and Might As Well Have Been Lake Wobegon, so I got that.
And I definitely appreciated that they didn't feel the need to hammer home every joke, though I can see how if you don't have the cultural referents to catch most of the jokes en passant it would be rather underwhelming.
You betcha.
He got caught in the frenzy that forced Al Franken out of the senate for an alleged kiss during a skit rehearsal. Keillor was angry for a while but seems to have put that behind him.
In a recent post Keillor said he truly believes that Donald Trump can become a humble and kind man.
For Garrison it’s not dark yet but it’s getting there and he is just saying what he feels needs saying.
And the author is a simpleton who gets a little glow from castigating the woke.
Simpletons all the way down, it seems.
I disagree.
Keillor is just saying the obvious, of course, but this public shaming over land ownership that's so fashionable is sadly petulant -- like so much of regressive-progressive dogma.
The problem I have with this quote is that after
>There are people devoting their lives to education, health care, justice, among impoverished people, and this simpleton enjoys a little glow from<
You can put almost anything. Such as >performing in a Tchaikovsky ballet<, or >writing an article for the Internet<.
If you perform in a ballet, your intent is presumably to entertain the audience, and presuming the ballet is performed well and for an appropriate audience, they will probably be entertained. Entertainment is a good thing, even if less so than e.g. education, and it is good that people feel a "little glow" from doing a good thing - particularly when it took commitment, effort, and skill to do so.
If you perform a land acknowledgement, what is the intent? If it's to help the Dakotah people, well, helping the Dakotah people would be a very good thing, and something you should normally feel very good about, but in this case you are absolutely going to fail at that objective. How good should you feel about a half-assed zero-effort failure?
If the intent of your land acknowledgement is to make your audience feel good about themselves in spite of their not having helped the Dakotah people or whatnot, then that's not really a good thing and you probably shouldn't feel any sort of glow for that either.
Hmm, don't get that logic at all. He's referring to a particular sanctimonious or self-righteous type of "glow".
And he's entirely correct, except that there is nothing particular or specific to the Midwest about it.
Assuming that's the case, which is not required by the wording, then why are we talking about people devoting their lives to activities? How many of those can you fit into the window of time where you're waiting for people to turn off their cell phones before a Tchaikovski ballet starts? Is the implication that she shouldn't be there at all? If so, then should ANYBODY be there? Shouldn't the ballerinas be out devoting their lives to justice? Shouldn't the audience?
But the main problem is, this section is the thing it complains about. The article is about the nostalgia of visiting Home Town Minnesota and remembering his roots; this section is an anomaly, there for the primary purpose of complaining about a land acknowledgement. (I'm not sure why Gunflint quoted it on its own). But complaining about land acknowledgements is the conservative equivalent of land acknowledgements. There are people dedicating themselves to education, healthcare, justice, but I get the impression Garrison Keller felt a little "glow" from this addition.
I think Keillor was being sincere in pointing out that the acknowledgment was merely performative and was tipping his hat to people who are doing the hard and often thankless work of helping descendants of displaced Natives.
The guy is 81 with an implanted defibrillator. I'll be surprised if he lives to see 2025. He's got little to prove at this point. I've been following him for years - decades really - and he's definitely not a conservative crank.
In the case of the venue in question – Northrop Auditorium, University of Minnesota campus in Minneapolis, acknowledgment down to tribal level, besides not really being helpful, is historically difficult. Native possession of that location was going back and forth between Ojibwas and Dakotas right up to Minnesota statehood.
https://www.minnpost.com/mnopedia/2014/05/last-dakota-ojibwe-battle-shakopee-1858/
Edit:
Bonus puzzle: How were lightbulbs changed in the Northrup Auditorium’s 29’ tall 19’ wide Close Encounter UFO descending on Devil’s Tower shaped chandelier changed?
https://www.archantiques.com/chandeliers/enormous-29-foot-tall-theater-chandelier
Guerr Fghqrag Hgvyvgl Jbexref jbhyq tb vagb gur nggvp nobir vg naq ybjre vg gb jvguva rnfl ernpu jvgu n unaq penaxrq jvaqynff. Nsgre gur ohyof jrer ercynprq gurl jbhyq penax vg onpx gb vgf bevtvany cbfvgvba.
In particular, it's the sort of glow you get from kidding yourself that you're doing anything at all for the Dakotah people with your empty words-- an error which performing in a ballet is a lot less likely to lead you into.
I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence. I took a keen interest in the 2020 primaries, and Biden’s age was very much a part of the media discussion during the primary season, at least in the New York Times. Cognitive decline isn't mentioned explicitly, but in my opinion our fear of old age is inherently a fear of cognitive decline amongst other things. So I’ve gone back over some articles from around that time, and present them here. I do believe the media is sometimes (perhaps often) manipulative. Therein lies the danger of counter-manipulation. “You are being Lied To; Listen to me instead”.
1.In early 2020, the New York Times ran a series of interviews with the candidates. In Joe Biden's interview, age is raised as an issue several times.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/17/opinion/joe-biden-nytimes-interview.html
JW: Do you think it’s legitimate for voters to be concerned about people in their later 70s running for the highest office in the world?
[Biden:] Sure, just like it’s legitimate for people to ask about whether you’re mature enough when you’re 35. I’m not joking. I mean, I went through the same thing when I was 29 years old. Well, wait a minute, are you old enough? And so, it’s totally legitimate.
Binyamin Appelbaum: So we have a 35-year-old limit. Should we have one at the top end too?The Times Debatable newsletter recently considered a range of perspectives on whether the presidency should have an age limit.
No.
BA: Should there be a top? Why not?
Because why would you? Show me where it’s been a problem.
BA: Why 35 then?
Thirty-five ——
JW: Well, President Reagan ——
Well, look, guys. I think you guys are engaging in ageism here. Now look, all kidding aside, I don’t think they’re — the voters will be able to make a judgment. You’ll make a judgment whether or not you think I have all my cognitive capability, I’m physically capable, and I have the energy to do the job. And so.
(…)
KK: Since you just called yourself the old guy — Jimmy Carter has said that he wouldn’t be up for the job of the presidency at age 80. He’s obviously experienced the job, and lived the job. How do you respond to comments like that? Are you too old to be running for president?
Watch me. Watch me. All this stuff about lack of energy. Come get in the bus with me, 16 hours a day, 10 days in a row. Come see me.
(…)
BA: Would you pick a running mate over the age of 70?
Yeah, sure I would. No, what I’m going to have to do is to balance just like anybody balances. I’m going to make sure that whoever is picked as vice president, where I’m the nominee, everyone thinks is able to, if I drop dead tomorrow, would be able to take over. Look, the idea that somebody who is 60 can’t be diagnosed with stage-four glioblastoma is no different than the idea someone at 77 won’t be diagnosed with a terminal disease.
BA: But you mentioned your adherence to science before. You surely know that the odds increase with age.
Yeah, they do. They do. But they don’t increase like they did. We’re in a situation where things are fundamentally different than they were 20 years ago.
2. As a result of these interviews, Elizabeth Warren & Amy Klobuchar were endorsed. Age was explicitly mentioned as a reason not to endorse either Biden or Sanders.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/01/19/opinion/amy-klobuchar-elizabeth-warren-nytimes-endorsement.html
Mr. Sanders would be 79 when he assumed office, and after an October heart attack, his health is a serious concern.
What’s more, Mr. Biden is 77. It is time for him to pass the torch to a new generation of political leaders.
3. Despite the NYT non-endorsement, Biden wins the nomination and the NYT goes on to damage control mode, endorsing Biden as the only alternative to Trump. Even so, it finds room for feint praise.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/10/06/opinion/joe-biden-2020-nytimes-endorsement.html
Mr. Biden is aware that he no longer qualifies as a fresh face and has said that he considers himself a bridge to the party’s next generation of leaders.
Mr. Biden isn’t a perfect candidate and he wouldn’t be a perfect president. But politics is not about perfection.
4. Alongside the Endorsement, NYT also run a series of opinion columns making the case for the various primary candidates. So popular is Biden among the Liberal elite on NYT that the only columnist willing to write on his behalf is Ross Douthat. Even so he can't avoid the elephant in the room.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/opinion/sunday/joe-biden-2020.html
This combination — plus, let’s be frank, Biden’s fumbling, wavering, I’m-too-old-for-this persona — explains why it’s so hard to find passionate supporters of the former vice president among pundits and commentators, real-world activists and Twitter agitators. To choose Biden over the more interesting options, over Bernie Sanders and Mike Bloomberg and Elizabeth Warren and Pete Buttigieg, is to choose the past over the future(.)
5. One phrase that sticks in my mind from the time of the NYT endorsement is some serious feint praise for Biden from the NYT editorial board. These people really didn't want him to be the nominee. The quote is hard to find, this is second hand from Michael Brendan Dougherty:
https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/01/new-york-times-presidential-endorsements-arrogance-philosopher-kings/
I also have to give credit to the makers of The Weekly for taking the mickey out of the panel of philosopher kings. By the end, the editorial board had talked about how, though they were reassured by Joe Biden’s apparent vigor and health, they found that the case for him was essentially that he’s “a warm body” that can beat Trump.
> I have heard it said on here that the mainstream media has consistently lied to us about Biden’s age-related competence.
I have a slightly different claim: I feel lied to, and the mainstream media also feels lied to, about cognitive decline that has happened to Joe Biden since 2021 (and seems most likely to have happened in 2023-24). Gatekeepers in the administration assured the media, primary voters, and potential primary candidates that Joe Biden was fine when he was (and is) very much not fine. Media members assured the public, were made to look like fools or liars, and since the debate have been doubling down on cognitive decline coverage out of embarrassment and anger.
Fair. Political journalists are basically dependent on politicians for information and if you don't print what they want they can make life hard for you. I've no sympathy, journalists could have spent their career working in homeless shelters, but I think it's worth taking into account when apportioning trust.
Question: Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate, when his age was frequently cited as a concern (not because of his health, oh no, but because of the perception of voters, while amply criticizing everybody bringing up the issue for ageism - my wife is pissed about that, incidentally, the political exploitation of the idea of ageism has seriously undermined the case against ageism more generally), but the possibility of cognitive decline was consistently dismissed as right-wing propaganda?
Look back at 2020 with fresh eyes. Don't just look for what the media said (as, just like a month ago, what is important is not so much what it was saying as what it -wasn't- saying), look at Biden's campaign, how it engaged - using the excuse of COVID - in careful control over Biden's public/media exposure. This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
If Biden's cognitive state is a relatively new problem, you should be able to find some delineating line, some point at which his staffers started secluding him from the public. Instead, you'll find that they've been doing that all along. You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
"There's no way we could have known" is just absurd when other people *did* know. "Well, they were wrong then, they just accidentally became right in the intervening time" is just plain absurd. The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
Thanks for the reply.
>Does this coverage differ significantly from the coverage from a month ago, before the debate?
I believe so, because it's more unvarnished - I assume Biden benefitted from some partisan bias as soon as he became the nominee, and more so as president. But he most definitely didn't enjoy the same bias prior to nomination - NYT clearly thought he was a bumbling old fool.
>what is important is not so much what [the media] was saying as what it -wasn't- saying
I agree, but I fear we're doomed to interpret that silence differently - I believe fear of cognitive decline is present implicitly in any discussion about a person's age.
>This is the stuff that concerned people about Biden's mental capacity, and the playbook never changed, only tightened up, right up until his debate performance.
The 2020 primary season was conducted normally up to mid-March, so people had a pretty good chance to take a look at Biden up to that point. If there had been evidence of cognitive decline it would have been in the interest of his rival candidates and less-than-sympathetic media to present it. As it is all they could do was present him as a bumbling old fool, and that wasn't enough. People like a bit of bumbling in a politician sometimes - Boris Johnson, Bush jnr.
As for the election campaign proper, the Dems were the lockdown party, so any Dem candidate would have had less exposure than normal during the 2020 election. So really I'm not sure what we can conclude from that.
>You'll find cases in speeches when Biden complains in public about his handlers controlling what he says. Biden reading out loud the instructions he's supposed to be following. Biden getting notes about what he should be doing, and then getting confused and doing something else.
These things are compatible with Biden being a capable but cantankerous politician who doesn't like campaigning. Like it or not a lot of special advisers treat politicians as children to boss around. Biden was mocked on SNL for telling long, rambling, politically incorrect stories. So they will have had to rein him in for reasons besides old age and I'm sure he hated it.
>"There's no way we could have known" is The evidence "they" used to arrived at this conclusion didn't just start appearing six months ago, it has been steadily building up over the last five-ish years; the type of evidence didn't change, either. The only thing that changed is that he had a single performance that was so obviously and publicly bad that it stopped being viable to pretend everything is fine.
I agree it couldn't just have happened before the debate. The issue has been building for a while, I just think it's a foggy business and the public evidence is patchy and open to interpretation. Is that because some people in the media are pulling the wool over our eyes? Probably, and those individuals deserve to lose their jobs, I just think a full spectrum distrust of the media is a cure worse than the disease.
In 2020, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term in office, but he's almost certainly not going to even run. But can we get the guy to commit to that?"
In 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly not be fit for a second term, and OMG it looks like he's going to be the nominee by default. Shouldn't we have a backup plan?"
In early 2022, the coverage was "Biden will almost certainly be our(*) nominee and there's no backup plan. There's nothing we can do about this, so I don't want to think about this. Can we just not talk about this?"
Now, the coverage is in flux but shifting towards "Biden is almost certainly not fit for a second term, and we can't not talk about this because it's right out their on national television for everyone to see. What are we going to *do* about this?"
I don't think there's any great mystery as to why these shifts occurred, nor any nefarious hidden motive at work.
* We're talking about the MSM here, so yes, he's their nominee
I broadly agree. The motives I have in mind are some mixture of partisanship, personal loyalty to the Dems, preserving ongoing access to the White House, and in this case Stop Trump.
I do remember a lot of trial balloons being floated last year, arguing for an open primary. But Biden was just really insistent on running again and at the time it wasn't obvious he would lose (he only fell behind in the polls this spring).
I think we probably mostly disagree about the last sentence.
And that probably comes down to frequency; my distrust has been building for a long time, over a lot of different issues, so "full spectrum distrust of the media" is well-warranted. Objectively considering it, if this is your first exposure to this kind of thing, yeah, complete distrust in the media probably seems like an overreaction.
If you're in the boat, I guess just keep in mind this incident going forward, minding that the media is probably going to be on their best behavior for the next few months, and see if they deserve the trust.
"Complete distrust of the media" is indeed an overreaction. Skepticism is a great defense, and not just with the media. It's a lot more trustworthy to hear something from someone they would rather not say that to hear something they want to say.
I consume liberal media sources, and listen to, though usually dismiss, things that align with liberal interests. But sometimes they report things that do not reflect well in a liberal light, and those I am much more confident in being accurately reported.
This strategy works right up until it is widely adopted, at which point you're going to get misled again.
I don't quite get it. You're saying the media will say stuff they DON'T want to get out, to mislead me? I don't see how that would further their goals. Surely they would lose the audience they currently pander to in that case?
I guess I'm thinking back to the Iraq war in the noughties. Although there was some political opposition in the UK, Labour and the Tories were united for the war, and the MSM (not the right-wing press!) pushed back, came under a lot of pressure and were proved right. The BBC can still be woke and so on but it's important to compartmentalise. Like do we not trust the weather forecast? "A thing is in truth as it is in being" - reporting on who's in or out in Washington is a more nebulous thing than other topics, it should be taken with a pinch of salt. Other journalists writing about other more stable topics for the same outlet can still be believed.
Yes, I'd say if you're trusting the weather forecast, in a significant sense you're still not paying attention. You can probably trust that what they report is accurate, mind, but that doesn't mean the reporting itself is trustworthy.
The problem is that it isn't just what they report on, it is what they choose -not- to report on, something which is as nebulous as nebulous gets. If 99% of the facts say X, and 1% of the facts say Y, well, the truthfulness of the reporting becomes more questionable.
I cannot help but think that "noughties" should be "naughties" as "nought" means "naught" but I don't know it was a licentious enough decade to be worthy of that term.
Somebody please tell me this is all fake rumours and not something the Democratic machine is really planning to do, because I cannot believe they would be this stupid.
It didn't work out for them when it was Hillary's turn, and right now? After the questions raised about Biden's capability to be president and who is really holding the reins of power? The party that is so big on "democracy" just ripping up their own rulebook and imposing their anointed leader? If this is a plan by Dr. Jill or Hunter, who are the ones alleged to be gatekeeping access to Biden and advising him to cling on like a barnacle, it's damn foolish.
https://www.axios.com/2024/07/16/biden-dnc-vote-nomination-states-2024-election
"The Democratic National Committee is quietly steaming ahead with plans to technically nominate President Biden weeks before the party's convention next month, Axios has learned.
Why it matters: It's the latest effort by Biden's team to stamp out the Democratic rebellion that's been pushing for the president to step aside since his bad performance in the June 27 debate.
- Once Biden receives votes from a majority of the nearly 4,000 delegates, it will become exceedingly difficult to remove him from atop the Democratic presidential ticket.
- The DNC's current plan is to train state party chairs next week on how to conduct the electronic voting in a secure way. The window for voting is likely to open on July 29 and conclude by Aug. 5, according to people familiar with the matter.
- If the working plan for a "virtual roll call" holds, Biden just has to outlast his party's critics for about two more weeks.
- For the 81-year-old Biden, time finally may be on his side.
What they're saying: "We look forward to nominating Joe Biden through a virtual roll call and celebrating with fanfare together in Chicago in August alongside the 99 percent of delegates who are supporting the Biden-Harris ticket," Jamie Harrison, the chairman of the DNC, told Axios is a statement.
"We have not announced or finalized any schedules yet," a DNC spokesperson said."
Vote rigging? Us? No, no! We're just "training" people on how to conduct the voting in a "secure way" so that Joe gets the nod unopposed, and any other result is not acceptable.
At this point I think they're cutting their losses; putting somebody else up to lose against Trump doesn't really gain them anything.
If Biden loses, they can just pin the blame on Biden for refusing to step down, but if they replace Biden with one of their rising stars, and that rising star loses (which given everything seems fairly likely, not least because none of their "rising stars" are actually ready for the big game) - then that star is tarnished for failing to beat one of the least popular presidents in history, AND a large number of Democrats will blame the party for throwing away the chance at victory by kicking Biden to the curb.
They might have slightly better odds of winning if they replace Biden, but it's a very risky maneuver with very little upside to the specific individuals who would be making that choice. I doubt any of his potential replacements want to run in this particular race, either.
Thing is, for the "blame Biden" strategy to work, they have to go along with "what could we do, our hands were tied, Joe Wouldn't Go".
That isn't possible to do when the party machine is pulling strokes like this to make it a done deal *before* the convention that We're Still Ridin' With Biden.
I can see the problem where "Joe is the scapegoat and fall guy, so that means we need him to still be the nominee, but there are now rumblings of discontent within the party so we have to lock it down that it's him and nobody else" is the plan, but then they both have to (1) make sure to be standing around wringing their hands on the night when (fingers crossed, they hope) he loses with the line "what could we do, Joe Wouldn't Go" *and* (2) do their damnedest to make sure nobody rocks the boat over nominating him. They don't want to waste one of the prospective stars, but what's wrong with throwing Kamala under the bus to get her to take the fall? Unless, of course, she realises she's being set up and refuses to play along.
If this report is true, I don't know how they expect to get away with "we could do nothing" when anyone can say "but didn't you set it up so that the convention was presented with a fait accompli?"
I was under the impression that there were enough primaries favoring Biden that the primary results can plausibly be pointed to as more-or-less constraining.
From the way the prediction markets are running, it looks like Trump has about 70-75% chance of winning. Biden and Harris split most of the remainder. My guess is that whoever is picked as the Democratic nominee will pick up the sum of those chances, for something like a 75:25 Trump:Democrat odds or so.
( In fairness, a good chunk of what the Democrats are facing is probably from the 8%-9% inflation spike, which the POTUS had only very limited control over. )
As a USAian, given how the first debate went, perhaps I should be agitating for Tiger Woods to moderate the next one... :-)
I thought they were forced into doing this because Ohio set a very early deadline for getting on their ballot or something?
A: No, Ohio changed that rule and everybody understood they were going to change the rule.
B: So what? Ohio is now a thoroughly red state; Kamala Harris's odds of victory are not meaningfully reduced if her name is not on the Ohio ballot. The Democratic party is better off with a candidate whose name is on the ballot in 49 states and can win 30 of them, than one whose name is on the ballot in 50 states and can win only 20 of them.
The only thing that matters is whether Kamala Harris (or whoever) has a better chance of winning the states which can plausibly be won by a Democratic candidate, which does not include Ohio. That's not a no-brainer: Kamala is a weak candidate and anyone else would be starting from zero. But Ohio's got nothing to do with it.
Seemingly that was the reasoning, but Ohio has now set a later date:
"Zoom out: In late May, the Democratic National Committee announced plans to nominate its ticket via a virtual roll call weeks before the party's convention in Chicago, which starts Aug. 19. But they didn't provide a firm date.
- The DNC's stated reason for front-running the nomination — Ohio's Aug. 7 deadline for ballot access — is no longer relevant because Ohio changed its law. The state's new deadline is Sept. 1.
- Internally, DNC officials rarely mention Ohio as the reason to push forward with an earlier date, according a Democratic official who's been briefed on the planning.
- "This election comes down to nothing less than saving our democracy from a man who has said he wants to be a dictator on 'day one,' " Harrison said in his statement.
- "So we certainly are not going to leave the fate of this election in the hands of MAGA Republicans in Ohio that have tried to keep President Biden off of the general election ballot."
Yeah, now they're going to democratically take everybody else off the ballot 🙄 Which I really hope is not the case, because "the fix is in" doesn't look good any time and especially not when this is in the case of a guy about whose election there were allegations of mysterious boxes of ballots turning up out of thin air in places where it looked like he was behind.
Before anyone can go "Election denial!", no, I'm not claiming that really happened. I'm saying there were *allegations* of the results being 'helped along' by partisan vote-counting centres.
Never mind the admitted "shadow campaign". Okay, that may sound slightly sinister, but don't worry - we only did it to protect democracy! Yeah, we may describe it as a "conspiracy" but conspiracies are only bad when the other lot do them!
https://time.com/5936036/secret-2020-election-campaign/
"The handshake between business and labor was just one component of a vast, cross-partisan campaign to protect the election–an extraordinary shadow effort dedicated not to winning the vote but to ensuring it would be free and fair, credible and uncorrupted. For more than a year, a loosely organized coalition of operatives scrambled to shore up America’s institutions as they came under simultaneous attack from a remorseless pandemic and an autocratically inclined President. Though much of this activity took place on the left, it was separate from the Biden campaign and crossed ideological lines, with crucial contributions by nonpartisan and conservative actors. The scenario the shadow campaigners were desperate to stop was not a Trump victory. It was an election so calamitous that no result could be discerned at all, a failure of the central act of democratic self-governance that has been a hallmark of America since its founding.
Their work touched every aspect of the election. They got states to change voting systems and laws and helped secure hundreds of millions in public and private funding. They fended off voter-suppression lawsuits, recruited armies of poll workers and got millions of people to vote by mail for the first time. They successfully pressured social media companies to take a harder line against disinformation and used data-driven strategies to fight viral smears. They executed national public-awareness campaigns that helped Americans understand how the vote count would unfold over days or weeks, preventing Trump’s conspiracy theories and false claims of victory from getting more traction. After Election Day, they monitored every pressure point to ensure that Trump could not overturn the result. “The untold story of the election is the thousands of people of both parties who accomplished the triumph of American democracy at its very foundation,” says Norm Eisen, a prominent lawyer and former Obama Administration official who recruited Republicans and Democrats to the board of the Voter Protection Program."
What's that saying - if voting changed anything, they'd abolish it?
All I ask is that they list the nominee's closest dozen "advisors", "aides", "speechwriters", etc.
With President Bush #2 we got to know Mr. Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc. and their contributions daily. Since the regressive Left is keen on transparency, they should at least tell us about Ron Klain, Anita Dunn, Jeffrey D. Zients, Steve Ricchetti, Mike Donilon, Jen O'Malley Dillon, and Bruce Reed, for starters.
I prefer this strategy from a 2016 Hillary campaign staffer:
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/opinion-joe-biden-campaign-ai_n_668482b9e4b038babc7d56f2
Just use AI fakes to convince the public that Joe is still fit for office. After all, the stakes are too high, we could lose democracy!
>in the currently under-regulated electoral landscape
...what does that even mean?
It goes down so smoothly, doesn't it?
"AI augmentations and video renderings could serve to smooth out these bumps while allowing the Biden campaign to effectively disseminate true information about the state of our democracy and the Biden administration’s accomplishments."
Let's just fake up the candidate's appearance, voice, and speech-making. Trust us, we only have your best interests at heart. Why do you even need to see a physical guy in the flesh, anyway? This is the modern way of doing things. We're just.... smoothing out the bumps.
Um, isn't the whole idea of choosing a VP to "balance the ticket" pretty much the most ridiculous of all the ridiculous things that make up modern politics? The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
But instead, they always give it someone very different to the President. They give a reward to an out-of-power faction *not* by giving that faction an actual concrete share of power, but by giving them a lottery ticket for "complete power, in the unlikely event of a catastrophe". They thereby *deliberately* make fundamental policy directions dependent on the most primitive, meaningless and undemocratic basis possible: random fluctuations in one person's phiysical health. Oh, and they thereby *directly incentivise* assasinating the President, by anyone in said faction or who prefers said faction to the dominant one.
This doesn't apply to the likes of Cheney and possibly Palin who may have acted as effective co-President (the Diocletianic Tetrarchy suggests this might actually be a good system, rival factions included). But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.
>But for everyone else, I can barely think of how you could design a worse system.<
You didn't see the pre-12th Amendment VPs then. It used to be whoever got the second-most votes became Vice President. So imagine if Biden won the presidency and Trump became Vice President. That's what President John Adams and Vice President Thomas Jefferson was. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Thomas_Jefferson
Well the VP can also be seen as a countering force to extremist actions by the president. Just look at the last election where Trump tried to use fake electors [1] to stay in power, but was stopped by Mike Pence (which is why he has to pick a different VP now). The VP can also force the president to step down using the 25th amendment. If I thought there was a risk that Trump would do crazy things again, I would appreciate it if he "balanced the ticket" with someone who would stop him if he did crazy things.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trump_fake_electors_plot
Principal agent problem. The main point of a VP is inheritance, but he's picked by the president, who would be dead or retired by the time the VP inherited, so the presidential candidate picks one based on (perceived) electoral effects on his own campaign.
I think it's signalling, so in that sense it's not supposed to have a practical justification.
In a way, it's old-fashioned identity politics. The candidate is one type of person, and so to raise enthusiasm from a different segment of the electorate, the veep needs to be from that segment too. Different regions of the country, different backgrounds, races, sexes, whatever. It's a limited one-time signal, so it has value. It says, "I consider *your* votes important, so I'm putting one of *you* right up here on the stage with me." In cases like W. Bush and Obama, part of the idea was to signal, "I may be inexperienced, but I know I'm inexperienced, and I'm taking steps to remedy that."
I think it's hard to go from a state of pure signalling, back to ground reality. And I agree that, given the actual function of the VP, using it for signaling purposes is like taking some scissors and cutting your seat belts into pretty shapes.
A lot of the time, when people think they're craving power, they're just craving status.
The VP usually doesn't have a lot of power, but he does have quite a lot of status.
>The *entire point* of a Vice President is continuity in case of unforseen disaster. The only logical form of that is someone as similar as possible to the President.
That might be the entire point* of a VP, but it is not the entire point of a candidate for VP. The point of a candidate for VP is to help the ticket win.
*It isn't the entire point, of course. Depending on the administration, a VP can play an important role negotiating with Congress, or re foreign policy (Biden is an obvious example when he was VP)
Given a close election, you want somebody who will bring in that extra .5% of the vote.
9 out of 45 presidents have been promoted to the office from VP. With this succession happening 20% of the time, the VP becoming president should be taken seriously as a scenario. Lincoln (Republican) appointed Johnson (Democrat) as VP to balance his ticket, and that was such a disaster no one has done it since.
Possibly, candidates only evaluate the VP pick as something to help them win the election in the first place. The succession isn't going to ever matter if you don't get elected president in the first place. In a close election, picking a VP that so much as locks in a single contested state is probably more valuable than picking one who would be a competent successor. After all, politicians aren't known for their long term thinking tendencies.
Vance has five letters, much like Trump, and Pence. Which got me thinking, Obama and Biden also have five letters. Bush has four letters. Kaine, Kemp, Gore, Kerry, Nixon, Ford, they're all short names. The longest names of recent Presidents and Vice Presidents are in the six to seven letter range like Clinton and Reagan and Kennedy.
What happened to all the long names? Eisenhower, Roosevelt, Cleveland, Buchanan, van Buren, Jefferson, Washington? My theory: bumper stickers.
Douglas Adams' Long Dark Teatime of the Soul (sequel to Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, both remarkable works, not least for their tendency to give you the punchline of a joke in chapter 2 and the setup of the joke in the last chapter, such that you can read the books ten times and continue to find new jokes you had never noticed before) has some commentary suggesting that the ideal PR name is a long first name and a short last name. In the book, it has a Stephen King analogue, with a very similar name.
So Douglas Adams seems like he would have agreed with your bumper sticker theory, at least if a throwaway line in an oft-forgotten book is taken as representative.
Thelonius Monk, Phineas Gage, Sissela Bok, and Diziet Sma are good examples.
I once ran across the name Venkataramana Bhat. Is that better?
Well half of those long names are non-Anglo names, so the answer to your question is probably the same as the answer to "why are there less obviously-foreign-heritage presidents as in the past?" Excepting Obama for whom that was a central part of his whole image and whose last name helpfully doesn't sound too foreign or weird.
If you meant 'Anglo' as in the common adjective 'Anglo-Saxon,' then they're actually all Anglo names since the term encompasses a certain amount of Celtic/Germanic/Dutch ancestry.
Conspiracy theories seem to be flying on social media, after the recent shooting at Trump. Some people are emotionally vulnerable to conspiracy theories anyway. After the seemingly reality-distorting pandemic, even more so. A talented con artist would know how to take advantage of this situation.
It has previously been said that conspiracy theorists like to assume that the conspiracy is competent, so we have conspiracy theories about assasins that succeed, but not ones that failed.
We seem to be seeing a counterexample here, in that Trump survived but we still have conspiracy theories.
Presumably, the conspiracy theorist needs to explain explain why the conspirators missed on purpose. (Alternatives, such as and really existing conspiracy would fail occasionally, are less attractive to the conspiratorial imagination)
The bullet hit his ear.
The conspiracy theorist doesn't need to explain why they "missed on purpose" just that there was a plot to kill him (which was a wind's breath from succeeding)
Depends what kind of conspiracy theorist you are. Anti-Trump conspiracy theorists want to believe that Trump is liable for whatever happened, which means they need to explain how he managed to fake himself getting shot. (Blood bag in the pocket, easy, duck down and apply it to the face).
Pro-Trump conspiracy theorists have an easier time, they can point to the ridiculously easy access that the shooter had to the nearest rooftop and the fact that the Secret Service supposedly had eyes on the guy for half an hour but waited until he took a shot before they did anything. The least-crazy version of the theory would allege that while they didn't actively work with Crooks in any way, they did deliberately decide to take it slowly with the whole protection thing, and perhaps they'd been deliberately leaving weak spots in their security for savvy potential assassins to discover.
Almost like the conveniently botched shooting is arranged.
It wasn't "botched." It came very close to killing Trump.
A weirdly ambiguous event doesn't help.
Not to mention the absurd levels of incompetence, such that even some libertarians who think the government can't do anything right are like "That's a little too incompetent to be believable".
Reminds me of the questions about why there was no security at the capitol on Jan 6th.
Should this be shouted from (flat and appropriately positioned) rooftops? :-)
More seriously, even _really, really_ extreme incompetence is all too believable. And there have been allegations of incompetence in the Secret Service going back years.
Oh, sure. Unless SS agents start dying, I'm going with "incompetence". If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
Yup.
>If SS agents start shooting themselves in the head with full-length shotguns, however, I'm revising my opinion there.
True! IIRC, the traditional example was someone who was so depressed about losing a Mafia Don's money that he shot himself. In the back of the head. Three times. At _some_ point, one does become suspicious... Many Thanks!
On the other hand, truth is stranger than fiction, and there really have been people who committed suicide by shooting themselves with large guns and/or multiple times.
One guy shot himself in the chest with a shotgun and still lived.
How did "situational awareness" become a codeword for AI doomerism? Was it all just due to that one paper people were talking about recently?
Yes - it's just the latest AI Singularity fanfic.
Unfairly dismissive. Situational Awareness is alarmist but it's not "doomerist". There is a difference, an alarmist thinks there is something wrong and that it's fixable, a doomerist thinks that all hope is lost, you would be extraordinarily lucky to be able to narrowly get away with your skin. A nuclear alarmist in 1944 will correctly anticipate the Cold War and call for early sanctions and non-proliferation treaties against Russia, a nuclear doomerist will start imagining Post-Nuclear-Armageddon and/or argue that space colonies are all what will remain of humanity.
Situational Awareness is wrong but it's wrong in a very detailed, carefully reasoned, and interesting way. You can certainly do worse than reading it to know in intimate detail why the people you disagree with think in a way that makes them disagree with you. "Doomerism" is very inaccurate for a document that literally handwaves away alignment as "We will muddle through, fingers crossed" and "Hopefully we manage to enlist the AGIs to help us align the superintelligences because we would be so fucked if we couldn't hahaha". The author has a sidenote where he waves a disparaging tweet from Eliezer Yudkowsky as pedigree that he is not a doomerist.
Perhaps one of the most obvious way that Situational is wrong is how it handwaves away the Data Wall, that is, why LLMs are so hilariously sample-inefficient and how we would probably run out of Internet before they reach honest-to-god AGI. He handwaves this away mainly in 2 ways:
1- By saying that we're "Hobbling" current LLMs, we impose many unrealistic standards that not even the most genius human academic or intellectual is expected to pass: You have to answer correctly on the first try, your answer must take no longer than a few seconds or minutes at most and it must fit within roughly 1000 word or so, you're not allowed to use tools, etc... It's an interesting thought, but I don't think it can explain the full breadth of LLM performance and I don't think it's a safe foundation to build an argument that calls for unprecedented USA's mass-industrialization upon.
2- By saying that Reinforcement Learning is going to save the day. I love and adore RL but saying "This technique from the literal 1950s is going to solve the most salient obstacle in the path of Neural Networks achieving AGI" without satisfactory details is just prime handwaving. The most detailed he ever gets is that LLM researchers will figure out the equivalent of "Self-Play", the trick that enables game AIs to utterly demolish humans. LLMs will "dream", or "fantasize internally", about tasks they were never given, and this will improve their problem-solving capacity.
Overall, Situational strikes me as one of those 1950s and 1960s ultra-detailed works that envisions how we will conquer Mars and have nuclear energy too cheap to meter. They were very right technically, the few places they were wrong on are not fatal to the entire plan. You could take one of those works **today** and pass it through a committee of experts to adapt it for modern tech (e.g. Massively better computers and communication) then immediately adopt it as a plan of action and it would work. You could have a colonized Mars in 50 years and energy too cheap to meter in 30 if you wanted them hard enough.
But that's not what happened, and that's what Situational ultimately fails to grasp. For all the repeated invocations of the "People in SF are so insiders with much situational awareness and oh did you know what the rumors say and the internal labs bro", Situational doesn't have situational awareness. He repeatedly compares AI to nuclear bombs, but Physicists went from "Lol what even is an atom" to a self-sustaining nuclear explosion in about 45 to 50 years, 60 max, with visible incremental progress in the same direction every year. AI experts have been ringing the "ANYTIME NOW" bell far too often since they started working in the 1950s, it's already 70+ years now, they already exceeded the time budget Nuclear Physics was achieved on.
I guess a counterexample to the above is Flight. Flight is an extremely old dream, and many people claimed to be on the cusp of achieving it before the final Jackpot (which was kinda pathetic and very non-promising when it came in the 1900s). I don't know, if I was an investor or policy maker, Situational won't quite convince me to invest a USA-worth of money and infrastructure yet. But it's very well-researched and not obviously wrong at all, and it made me view both AI alarmists and doomerists with a bit more seriousness than before.
I have no idea at all what is going on here, but my gosh. This election campaigning is the bounty of gifts 😁
https://x.com/stillgray/status/1812977575335239830
I'm not a Trump supporter, but I wanted to say I like J.D. Vance for VP. "Why?", you might ask. IDK, mostly he seems still fresh and uncorrupted by the politics of it all.
I would sincerely like more to hear about this. I have heard friends say (and generally share the opinion) that Vance is completely amoral and corrupt.
In this view, Vance will say or do anything to gain power. He'll praise Donald Trump, who he knows is bad. His past statements about Donald Trump were true and it's hard for liberals like me to imagine that he would become a true convert (since, to us, there's nothing to convert to). Vance is completely bought by Peter Thiel, his benefactor. He used to advocate for understanding (Hillbilly Elegy) but since he started running for Senate, he uses rhetoric as divisive and as anyone in politics.
What's the argument that Vance has taken any stance, since running for Senate, that isn't maximally partisan? Any evidence that he has a moral compass? I'd sincerely love to believe that he's not just a smart, amoral opportunist. The best case here is he can be Harry Truman, another politician with a corrupt origin story who ended up being a good president.
People here might find his AI policy refreshing https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/technology/vance-ai-regulation.html
Not necessarily for what it says, but at least for the fact that he seems to understand the field well enough to come up with a meaningful policy on his own, in comparison to other politicians who struggle even to remember the talking points on the subject that they've been briefed with.
It's plausible he's uncorrupted. My hope is that he's a "rational self interest" sociopath; much harder to corrupt, more likely to try to follow through with his promises.
Edit: Also, more likely to pivot / "change his mind".
Yeah, well, appearing fresh and uncorrupted is a good look. Ingenues, you know? I'm sure the handlers recommend it to all who haven't spent so much time in the public eye that nobody's going to believe for a second that they have an intact hymen on any part of their body or mind.
I'm reminded of a bit from the biography of James Tiptree, Jr.:
> It didn't help that her first great love ended in disaster. In "Dead Birds," ... she wrote that "Adele," the daughter of family friends, had been "a thin, magically gawky girl with a Hepburn-Garbo face of extraordinary sensuality and a quiet, secret voice." Adele was a year older than Alice and had a "reputation," though Alice refused to believe it.
> "I saw her in groups, slouching on a hassock with her tan arms around her long legs, her hair falling down on one side, listening quietly. [. . . ] When I talked to her I said the wrong thing; my clothes were different from the boys she laughed with. I spent hours thinking of what I would say to her. I wanted to marry her. [. . . ] I wanted to spend all my life looking at her, listening to her chuckle."
> Finally Alice got to be alone with Adele, on the couch in a ladies' restroom at a party. They sat close together; Alice felt Adele's hair brush her cheek and was "paralysed with love." But when Adele spoke, it was to ask her if she'd ever been with two men at once. Adele had, and it was wonderful. She would never make love to just one again.
> Alice had profoundly wanted to believe that the girl she admired was also a virgin, that within her beauty she, too, sheltered a shy, solitary intensity. Now Alice's own crush felt tainted and perverse. Then, as Alice was still trying to take in her friend's words, Adele became violently sick to her stomach. The vomiting went on and on, while Alice held her friend's head, until "there were phone calls to people I didn't know, and she went away, or was taken. A very short while later she was dead of septic abortion."
I read his book when it came out. I was moved by it. I think now that he was simply writing that memoir to enter politics. All wannabe-politicians do that. His becoming a Trump sycophant makes him rather suspect to me now.
I almost wonder whether the book was partly him probing to see if the Democratic Party had space for someone like him, and when the late 2010s showed that there wasn't, he decided to become whatever it would take to gain power with the Republicans.
He spent five years being strongly and publicly critical of Trump personally as well as of key MAGA policy preferences, to in a matter of months publicly embracing Trump and becoming an across the board MAGA policy cheerleader, so as to win a GOP primary and then election to the Senate. "Uncorrupted" is an odd choice of descriptor for such a politician....for me "weathervane" is the kindest word that comes to mind.
Yeah, I've been trying to spend zero time looking at the news. I read his book several years ago. And I agree with most of what he says. So two thumbs up in my book, and if there was ever a year where I could claim I was voting for the VP. This is it! (the big question is will my daughter buy this argument ?, "I voted for the VP and not the P.") Also a veteran.
And I should finally add, that here I am X years later, thinking I might vote for Trump. We are all allowed to change our minds.
If he was criticizing the Republican candidate to get ahead among Republicans, that's a very non-obvious way to achieve that goal. If he's a sycophant then he's a sycophant with incredible foresight.
So I observed Tisha B'Av yesterday. Your calendar may have said it was the 9th of Tammuz, but, after careful observance of the moon, I have determined that the observence of ''Adar Bet'' this year by some Jews was in error.
I was hoping for some clarity on relevant points of my life from the fast, but all I got was "Biden must resign".
Perhaps I need to do a two-day fast.
Even if you were wrong and it was in fact the 9th of Tammuz, that's still a good date on which to observe a fast marking the fall of Jerusalem. See Jeremiah 52:6.
Yup, after all that "we will listen* shtick they "set their faces towards Mitzrayim (in fairness I am currently in the Sinai Desert https://youtu.be/zGx_nFV8MxM ).
Ditto for the people who came to Zachariah for magical answers to their 'halacha" question and we're therefore unable to accept his simple instruction that they listen to the prophets of old.
P.S. If my videos resonate with you please get in touch. Most Orthodox Jews are blind lemmings but the language for a utopian world is best expressed in their/our language. I'm trying to make a radically positive change in the world היום* הם בקולי תשמעו".
If you're above to hear it I desperately need your passion and partnership.
Rabbi Moshe Rudner
I'm not Jewish, nor do I fast for religious reasons, but my personal experience with fasts is that the clarity kicks in around day 3, along with the ketosis.
Originally the fast may have been from the 7th to the 10th.
In any case, presuming you're serious, would you regard that as a Karaite take?
(See my short video from the final Karaite Yom Kippur service in Istanbul here https://ydydy.substack.com/p/jonah-and-the-whale-an-astonishing )
Careful observance of the moon varies from one location to the next. Before they started calculating the calendar ahead of time, different Jewish communities found that their calendars fell in and out of sync with each other every month.
https://www.wpxi.com/news/local/alleged-trump-shooter-spotted-by-law-enforcement-nearly-30-minutes-before-shots-fired-sources-say/Q6GIK5RP6RBY5PHIMYBNXRTEBI/
Crooks was spotted 30 minutes before the shooting, on a roof, and considered a suspicious person even before then.
Trump was speaking for about 10 minutes before the shooting started.
I totally why the snipers didn't just kill him on sight, you need to verify you're not shooting one of your own and them returning fire. But simply holding off on letting Trump go up there would give you time to figure this out.
This is feeling like the Challenger explosion where people had bad feelings but no one wanted to call it off, for reasons.
Or, no one could imagine someone *actually* shooting at the former President. That would be insane.
These discussions add to the environment of conspiracy theories we find ourselves in.
Interesting. Wonder why they didn't dispatch someone to go check him out. Or just give one of the snipers a heads-up to keep the guy in their sights (literally) and shoot him if he pulls out a gun.
They did dispatch someone. A cop hoisted another cop over the edge of the roof to see what was going on, the would-be assasin pointed his rifle at that cop, who let go of the roof, and fell off. Immediately thereafter, the would-be assasin fired at Trump. Also, I think the snipers were likely given a heads up, as I think the southern team (behind Trump to his left) rotated north towards the would-be assasin minutes before the shooting.
The building he was on top of, seems to have been the building the local police department was using for their command center at the time. I am not making this up.
Very likely the initial USSS response to seeing a sniper on top of that particular building was "someone go tell Barney Fife to stop playing Rambo before he gets hurt", and they weren't going to shoot anyone until they had confirmation that it wasn't just an idiot local cop.
Why the local cops didn't bother to secure the roof of their own command center, is another question for which there are not enough facepalms in the world to form a proper response.
According to the Secret Service Director Cheatle, there were no security forces on that roof because they thought the slope was too severe. You can't make this stuff up.
Grrr. One of the components of the security system of my _house_ is a bunch of motion sensors. If I, as a retiree, can afford them, I think they should be cheap enough for both the Secret Service and the local cops to sprinkle them around.
Turning away from politics, "Tasting History" and a Tudor-era strawberry tart and the history of strawberries:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJQaPvExfto
Just a thought on the LessWrong meetup- I'd avoid hosting a conference in Wannsee if it were me. Google 'Wannsee conference' if you don't know why.
But it is the European branch of the conspiracy, where else would they have it? Neutral Switzerland?
Is it just me, or does the profile for the would-be Trump assassin look *exactly* like what you would expect in a school shooter? A loner with an excessive interest in guns and explosives, a bit of a loser, came to school in camo pants, bullied, little obvious motivation beyond this...
At this point, I would not be surprised if his motivation was merely "I will show them all!"
(Which would be a relief - out of all the shooters one might imagine, he's got to be the one of the least polarizing possible. Imagine if it had been a Muslim or a leftist activist!)
Almost all assassins who aren't certifiably insane fit the profile of school shooters: losers. Lee Harvey Oswald was thrice court martialed while in the Marines (once for shooting himself in the elbow) and was constantly moving from job to job, accomplishing nothing. Czolgosz was an unmarried and unemployed recluse living with his parents.
John Wilkes Booth was very far from being a loser. Gavrilo Princip and Sirhan Sirhan don't strike me as losers.
I did say “almost”! Booth is the obvious exception. I’m not familiar with Sirhan Sirhan, but Princip was definitely a loser. Rejected by the military for being too weak, no girlfriend, and living off money from his peasant father while failing his classes.
Not exactly. Said one co-worker about him:
"A colleague who worked with Crooks at the nursing home and who asked not to be named described him in an interview as “the sweetest guy.” Just this week, the colleague said, the two of them worked together to find an easier way for nursing home residents to open ranch dressing packets, an act the colleague said was indicative of how caring Crooks was.
“These stupid ranch packets in the kitchen — no one can ever open them,” said the colleague, who also went to high school with Crooks. “Earlier this week he was helping me with a bunch of sick old ladies (to) put ranch on their salads.”
Crooks, the colleague said, never expressed political views at work and wasn’t “a radical.” They added: “It’s hard seeing everything that’s going on online because he was a really, really good person that did a really bad thing, and I just wish I knew why.”
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/us/trump-rally-gunman-thomas-crooks-invs/index.html
There's still some polarization there. He has ties to both parties (registered to vote as a Republican, but had donated to a Democratic organization), so both sides can claim he was working for the other.
Both claims are weak, though. One small donation as a 17 year old. Registered and voted once. This isn't exactly a dedicated partisan!
I have "rebelling against Trump-loving parents" as my current theory, but I've hopped through a lot of theories in the past 3 days.
Isn't he about the right age for the onset of schizophrenia?
Phonics thread!
I have decided, after a bit of research, that phonics is bullshit and I don't like it. I think the root of this dislike comes from the fact that phonics teaches an essentially false model of the domain. Downstream from that are all the concrete complaints I've heard from actual parents (their kids still make weird mistakes at far too late an age, their kids have basic gaps in knowledge) and teachers (there are more exceptions to the rules than examples of them, you're confusing children who already know a bit of reading but haven't learned your rules.)
So I got to thinking, what would a version of phonics look like that pushed a true and accurate model of linguistics?
My first thought is that we don't try to hide the irregularity of the English language, and instead we make a feature of it. If English is in truth a collection of disparate sub-systems that all got merged and fused together as they also changed over time, then that's the story we tell our kids.
So to take for example the phrase "highly illogical", which is the first phrase any rationalist kid needs to be able to read and write:
I would say the prefixes and suffixes "-ly", "-il" and "-al" are three atoms ("phonemes"?) a child should be taught, because then he can break the words down into modifiers + the roots "high" and "logic".
Then would it make sense for "igh" to be an atom? On the grounds that this construction is used in Old Saxon (I'm making that up because I don't know) where it's always pronounced the same way, and is entirely distinct from "i"+"gh", where the "gh" atom might have come from eg Norse and is (predictably) pronounced an entirely different way.
So the child recognises "h"+"igh" and knows how to say "high", and then does something similar for "logic" which is also made up of atoms written in a third colour/style/whatever, because they hail from Ancient Greek this time.
I saw a Biblaridion vid a while ago explaining that irregular verbs got that way because they started out as constructions of regular aux verbs, which then got contracted and fused together, then the language changed around them but, no longer fitting the pattern, they stayed the same shape.
This is kind of what I want to do with the whole English language: extract out the true "rules of the game", then use them to build back the complete picture.
One could argue that this kind of backstory is completely irrelevant to the goal of just memorising a big vocabulary and will only add to the stack of shit to memorise.
I completely disagree because for me and anyone who thinks like me, seeing these glimpses of logic and backstory make the subject more interesting, more satisfying, and easier to get to grips with. I would argue it's easier to remember big coherent bundles of information than a smaller number of separate, context-free facts.
Anyway, does anyone have thoughts on how you could break English down in this way? I'm relaxing the requirement that it be "easy for kids" because it can only cut off interesting areas of discussion.
Montessori has a very different approach. Firstly, it uses letters made of sandpaper so kids get a feel for the shapes. That's step 1. And they teach writing before reading. They also use something called bobbooks. And start with cursive.
In case you want to learn deeply about this, I recommend Angeline Lillard's book. She's a cognitive science professor in Virginia.
Interesting, cheers for that.
>I think the root of this dislike comes from the fact that phonics teaches an essentially false model of the domain.<
What other domains are you applying this to? Do we have to teach children about electron clouds instead of giving them the 2-8 orbits?
You're currently solving a solved problem, everyone here has successfully learned to read English.
(All English language discussions invoke The Chaos. https://ncf.idallen.com/english.html)
> Do we have to teach children about electron clouds instead of giving them the 2-8 orbits?
No, stop going easy on the little fuckers, they should be learning about harmonic representations of spherical functions first.
Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
It would have given some background to the (otherwise completely irregular and bonkers) 2-8-8-18 sequence and just knowing it was there would have made the subject feel deeper and more coherent to me.
Dull and incurious kids would have been under no obligation to pay attention to it.
>Quite genuinely, this is a good example. It would have done me no harm as a child to be shown a bunch of funny little shapes and told how electrons were allowed to live in the lobes.
Right up until they watch an isolated atom get put in a magnetic field and m-sub-l becomes a good quantum number... :-)
Well, in that case I'll throw in the Great Vowel Shift. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift
But I don't think you're going to find any tool that will let a child intuit their way through The Chaos. Learning English is a mess because English is a mess.
Cheers for that.
While some people evidently disagree, I still say that knowing why there's Chaos, and having a general feeling for the way Chaos behaves, goes a long way towards making me more comfortable when I have to learn all its proceeds.
Just going to make sure you followed the first link and saw the poem.
"Wholly, holly, signal, signing,
Same, examining, but mining,
Scholar, vicar, and cigar,
Solar, mica, war and far."
I did indeed.
Isn't your approach the wrong one, just trying to think really hard about the concept?
While actual studies of actual students suggest that it *does* work better? Aren't such empirical studies the far stronger approach?
> for me and anyone who thinks like me, seeing these glimpses of logic and backstory make the subject more interesting
> I'm relaxing the requirement that it be "easy for kids" because it can only cut off interesting areas of discussion.
Which is it? Phonics is bullshit? Or for you personally there would have been better methods?
This thread reads like you believe you are way smarter than everyone else, and therefor we should teach reading differently for everyone.
I can't really see any value in engaging you in this direction.
I learned to read from phonics. I still believe it's a good start, and I didn't have trouble with transitioning to English having weird spelling.
How did you learn to read?
It's possible that pushing phonics too hard is a mistake, but whole-word was such a disaster for me that I don't think I could have learned to read at all from it.
What proportion of English text is phonetic?
I agree that knowing the historical structure behind spelling is good, but I don't have a feeling for when or how it should be introduced.
"How did you learn to read?"
I honestly don't remember, I think I could read at age three, but definitely I could read by four and a half. I think it was probably whole-word, if that's what it's called, because it would have been my grandmother and my father teaching me.
I imagine it was that because I did have trouble with words I'd never heard pronounced, where I could pick up the meaning from context but had no idea how to say them. And splitting them into parts didn't help, for years I thought "awry" was pronounced "awe-ree" not "ah-rye" because I split the word into the halves of "aw" and "ry".
From an internet wit:
“If tomb is pronounced toom and womb is pronounced woom, shouldn’t bomb be pronounced boom?”
Can’t argue with the logic!
49 years old, I started with phonics, English is my first language. TIL how to pronounce awry.
I did always think that was a strange word.
I will pronounce "banal" like "anal" until I die.
No, no. There is a ‘B’ sound at the beginning.
Yes. a joke.
> What proportion of English text is phonetic?
I'm going to make the completely unsubstantiated claim that all of English is phonetic, it just doesn't look that way because there are multiple different phonetic languages all sitting next to each other, sharing the same symbols.
I'd rather like to know if this is true. I'm getting quite invested in it as a model right now.
If true, then you could pull out every constituent language and place them all side by side, then give every single phoneme a unique symbol, you'd end up with a single phonetic language.
Then there's a mapping between the assigned unique symbol and the token we use to write it down (made of one or more alphabet characters).
This feels very similar to what phonics is trying to do - except phonics gives you a small, efficient set phonemes to learn (and lies about the model) and what I'm talking about leads to a hugely redundant set of phonemes where there's multiple ways to make the same sound and multiple matches for the same token. Which is how English really works.
> How did you learn to read?
It would have been whole-word, but I don't remember the early days. I just read and read and read.
Are you fluent in any other language? The reason I asked is that once you learn a "truly" phonetic language (e.g., German), you'd know English is definitely not phonetic (at least, not anymore) if the word is to have any useful meaning, where pronunciation is closely mapped to the alphabet (there are always exceptions, but English is a one giant exception pile).
I remember both learning to read and my child learning to read. Both never used phonics, I guess it just was "whole words".
I think you're not seeing what I'm seeing.
Obviously English as it stands is not phonetic. My contention was that English could be thought of as a collection of languages that *are* phonetic.
For this you would need to let go of the idea that one letter/diphong = one sound, which I think is a fair thing to do. If you allow your "phonemes" to be "eau", "ette", etc then French almost becomes phonetic. All "phonetic" means in this sense is a predictable one-to-one mapping between n-letter tokens and spoken sounds.
If you have a word for that you prefer more than "phonetic" then feel free to sub it in.
If English can indeed be thought of in this way, I might learn something interesting by following that line of thought. For example, we might find a rule that any word which contains old English-isms like "igh" never also contains Greek or Latin -isms in the same root. But they're probably fair game to add on in modifiers (like "isms"). I don't know if this rule is accurate but it feels like it could be to me.
Exceptions aren't the enemy, they lead to new rules and better models. I am more interested in thinking about why there are exceptions and how they come about, than simply going, "there's always exceptions" and stopping there.
I see. What you're doing is quite interesting, but probably calls for a different word because "phonetic" will keep confusing people. One thing I'd like to point out that there are variations in "mapping" of English spelling to pronunciation that don't seem to relate to the word's origins? Like "read" ("ee" or "eh" depending on the tense) or "bow" ("ou" or "au" depending on the meaning; etc. The screwy thing about English is that you never quite know from looking at a word how to pronounce it; "quay" being a perfect example of such.
At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist, and somebody who actually has some relevant background may provide better feedback.
I can visualise an app that displayed text and showed you the "tokens" that made up a word, possibly also with a little timeline of how that word and/or its tokens have changed over history.
My belief is that they'll be very few "pure" exception words, and most things will follow from a set of rules that make sense once you can see them laid out. (There might be more rules than you think, and the "rule" might look like "1700s vowel shift: 'o' becomes 'e' after this point" rather than a nice simple Theory of Everything; but still a damn sight more structured than the "English just has exceptions" free-for-all that everyone else likes to allege.)
That's an article of faith though, since I don't know the rules myself.
> At this point I must admit that I'm not a linguist
No, nor am I, which is why I'm talking about it not making it myself. I had hoped that one might show interest in this post and chime in, but what can you do.
German has a much better phonetic system than English, but English is still phonetic. English has rules with exceptions; it's not just random letters thrown together. Knowing the rules alone will have you pronouncing most words more or less right.
> Knowing the rules alone will have you pronouncing most words more or less right.
This is what I'm after. Care to list the rules?
I allege that most exceptions are actually the result of deeper/older rules, which it would interest me to know.
Ok I agree it's not an either/or, and following basic rules gets you in the ballpark in English, but I still insist that the exceptions pile in English is huge. And sometimes it does feel like "random letters thrown together"! I give you the town of Worcestershire, MA, as a perfect example :-)
Not to mention the County in England that pre-dates it.
How is that an exception?
"Wuss-ster". Say it like it is spelled out. Easy-peasy, lemon squeezy!
A lot of the weird spelling in English comes from English pronunciation changing. For example, the k in knight used to be voiced, and the gh represented a sound we don't have anymore. All those silent Es at the end of words used to be voiced. Moon, blood, and good used to all have the same vowel sound.
As you said, the main other source of weird spelling is words borrowed from other languages and using spelling that made sense in that language. But we often don't pronounce those words as the other language does, so we're not really using their systems. For example, the French pronunciation of lieutenant isn't like any English speaker says it.
I don't see any value in teaching this stuff to small children just learning to read; it would just be added confusion. "Here is what the letters sound like, and here are the exceptions" is the tried and true method. Other methods never end up working as well.
This site is still unusable on mobile. I'm typing this at two characters per second due to lag.
It seems to depend on time of day.
I’m a biologist working for a small cryopreservation startup in the UK. We use advanced cryoprotectants to produce pre-made frozen cell plates with the goal of increasing the efficiency of in vitro research. The idea is that instead of scientists using their valuable time to do routine cell culture maintenance tasks, we make the cells and ship them to where they’re needed, increasing the productivity of scientists through the division of labour.
We also use these cryoprotectants for blood banking. We can currently produce units of thawed red blood cells with a higher haemoglobin content than traditional methods allow. Alternatively, the properties of these cryoprotectants allow us to make these units available much faster than traditional methods, with comparable haemoglobin content.
But our start-up is very small and we’re in need of extra funding to develop and promote the adoption of this technology. I’m wondering how I could get in touch with people who might be interested in funding this work? It seems like the sort of thing that might have been good for an ACX grant but there won’t be another one of those for a while.
https://www.cryologyx.com/
As far as I can tell, the venture capital industry operates mostly by contacts chains, so the best way to get a hearing before anyone who can do anything is to consider whether any of you know anyone (friends, relatives, college buddies, whatever...) who deals with anything financial. If you do, approach them, and ask them for introductions to people they know who are closer to the VC industry than they are.
If you really truly know no one like that and are still a very small operation, you might try applying to a startup accellerator like Y Combinator. If they accept you, they will introduce you to all sorts of VCs who might be interested in investing with you.
https://www.ycombinator.com/
If YC is out for some reason, there are other similar outfits.
Finally, it is quite common for the early stages of small companies to be funded literally by investments from friends and family, with professional investors stepping up later when the company is more mature and can show some results. Do you have any friends or older relatives who are flush?
So savagery vs. innocence. In a modern setting, savagery might best be symbolized by internet commenters. A deep need to dominate others, a reflexive - almost mindless, except it's embodied in (to the best of our knowledge) creatures that have free will - desire to dominate and subjugate another poster, despite (or because of) the meaningless of the "fight". Many such cases.
Innocence, though, is harder to find. I always imagine kelp as innocent. But arguments that a plant, same as a lion, still ruthlessly causes needless pain abound. Rocks, maybe? Gravity might be a better choice. Any physical force. Perhaps a concrete example of those forces for symbolic reasons. Ocean waves.
What else? What might you choose to symbolize the two extremes?
Savagery is the commenters, innocence is the web page.
What’s an AI agent?
I'd say, something artificial that proactively attempts to acheive a goal, trying intelligently in different ways to hustle to reach that goal.
There aren't any that work yet.
A marketing term
I have a background in research and want to test "woo"-tech devices that claim to use mystical electrical fields or magical glass to improve your life / sleep quality. But I've gotten no responses from emailing them through their respective websites and have not found any employee emails on the usual sites. Has anyone had experience with this?
I also don't really understand why they don't respond — if it works, I post that and they get buyers. Are the companies not interested in the publicity, or they don't believe it actually works, or what?
Since these don't work and are utter scams (and the companies pushing them know it), why on *Earth* would they want to have them tested?
>I don't really understand why they don't respond
My first thought was if they have an image of scientists as sneering, closed minded know-it-alls, and you approach wearing the tribal colours of a scientist, they could be turned off before they even give it time to engage.
That's without getting into any self-defense mechanisms built into the theories themselves - eg for stuff like reiki, "it doesn't work if you don't believe in it". In situations like that I can imagine your questions and tests are like an antimeme that could destroy their own ability to benefit from whatever it is.
I can't say for sure, but I expect these companies know they are doing a scam.
As such, they have no interest in having their devices tested. Neither have they an interest in being reachable for any reason, by customer or non- alike, except for I want to give you money but can't".
Have you just tried buying the devices?
#2. Looking forward to this: whatever it is. I'm a Don Juan enthusiast. Alas, particular targets of its satire are now sometimes difficult to identify. But themes like Byron's scorn for Europe's reconstituted monarchies (and their toadies) and his ironic comprehension of almost every passion (and its end) buoy-up every Canto. Then scenes like Don Juan hiding in Julia's bed while she berates her jealous husband (Canto I), or refusing to eat his Pastor (Canto II), or bursting into tears when the Sultana of Constantinople offers herself on a couch (Canto V) are comic drama of the first order.
Random question: why is Nigeria so populous?
Because it's quite big, and quite densely populated.
It's not as densely populated as you might think though, it's 58th on this list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population_density -- obviously many of the denser places are geographically tiny, but others (like, notably, India) are big.
Surprisingly, Nigeria is a little less dense than the United Kingdom and a little more dense than Germany; it just happens to be far larger than either. If you combined the UK with France and Germany you'd have an area roughly as large and as populous as Nigeria.
Nigeria's always been populous. It used to be the second most populous British dependency (behind India). It's got to do with fertile soil, good river access, some ports, etc. It's long been a center of city-states, various states, a few empires, etc. Kind of similar to Indonesia in that regard.
Their birthrate is decreasing, but from my uneducated look at the country it looks like they've reached a stage of civilization where the biggest reduction in mortality has been achieved (knowledge of germs and basic sanitation/healthcare) but stalled for a long enough time below first-world living standards and mitigated the anti-natal forces that come with it, eg demystification of the world (ie, maintenance of strong traditional/religious beliefs), gender equality, geographic mobility and urbanization, etc.
River and soil.
say more?
The Niger Delta has the most fertile soil in Africa, so great for agriculture. You'll notice that most of the other countries in Africa surround Nigeria because of the delta. Nigeria also has a lot of oil, which has probably been more detrimental than good for the population because the corrupt government takes all the profits, but the industry may have helped increase the population, I'm not sure.
All you need to do is take a minute to look at Reddit and past media coverage or even some posters here to see that many on the left really do see Trump as a fascist, literally Hitler, etc etc etc. If you genuinely believe such things, you should logically believe that killing him is not only warranted, but to be abetted or at the least encouraged. Yet not nearly as many people have come out in support of the assassination attempt. Is this just a simple case of people generally not being very consistent in their beliefs? Or are a lot of people hiding their applause?
For what it's worth, I think a lot of the pearl-clutching surrounding Trump's hilariously minor injury is just an expression of "America just didn't use to have those vibes guys !!!" indignation, rather than any actual concern about Trump, or any realistic concern for "Democracy" or "Rule of Law".
Imagine if a Billionaire saw a violent fight in his classy hotel suite, he would be very upset about the blood getting on the carpet, and about the general status of his reputation when the news gets out.
Judging from the 1960s and the 1970s, American institutional and political machinery seems more than capable of withstanding an assassination of a former president. In the 1960s the same machinery withstood an assassination of a current president, right after the most intense nuclear standoff of the entire Cold War, and right before an actual hot war that saw devastating casualties and massive loss of American international legitimacy. The USA is not a fragile beast, This Bad Boy Can Fit So Many Fucking Crises Into Its Political Institutions https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/newsfeed/001/387/189/3bf.png.
For that matter, American institutional machinery can easily handle Trump too. Trump's alarmists make the consistent mistake of assuming he is remotely honest. He Is Not. He is quite adequately modeled as an advertisement machine, the truth value of his claims - that he will build massive Mexico-USA walls, or make the USA leave NATO, or turn the USA into a de facto monarchy/dictatorship - is in the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1" or "CONGRATULATION! you won an iPhone 69 Pro Max, click here for more details" or "This MAGIC cream will make your cock bigger and better, click here for more".
Trump is a non-general-purpose computer (an ASIC [1]) running a very simple (in principle) algorithm :
Until death {
let P be the set of people you want things from
foreach person in P {
tell person what they want to hear
}
}
Sometimes he does an optimization when P is very large: he partitions it into relatively homogenous smaller sets P_1, ..., P_n, and then tells each subset in bulk what the entire subset wants (so that he won't have to loop over every single person). Sometimes the subsets are still not homogenous enough, in that case he resorts to using relatively simple but ambiguous wishy-washy encodings of promises such that every person in the subset will interpret the same claim as the (different) things they want to hear all at the same time.
That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
Some misguided people look at Trump and think "He's an idiot, but I can fix him. With his Charisma and my smarts I will make him do what I want". Those people make the classic mistake of thinking Trump is programmable, Trump is not programmable, he can't be used to do anything except the above algorithm. He is a whore whose job is telling a customer his cock is good and big and tremendous and beautiful in exchange for the customer's green paper, or votes.
Trump assassinated or not, Trump 47th president or not, the USA will just keep zombie-walking through the inevitable entropy-driven decline that all states and all organization and all complex structure in the universe before, during, and after it have suffered through. Trump is just an amusing sideshow. Trump can't do 1/10 of the things people fear he would do, if his life depended on it.
It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Application-specific_integrated_circuit
>That's it. Trump is entirely compressible to the 3 bytes representing RGB Orange + the above algorithm + a simplistic sampling distribution over an English dictionary favoring words like "Tremendous" and "Beautiful" disproportionally. Give or take a few creepy sexual comments about his daughter. Trump is at most a few megabytes, maybe 10 if we're generous. He is not programmable, for good or for ill.
So Trump "Can be replaced by a very small shell script"? :-) [and thanks for the source code, further up in your comment!]
I really like your analogizing Trump to the
>the same general vicinity as "There are hot single milfs in your area, click here to smash !1!1!1"
inbox and popup messages. Yeah, Trump is of comparable depth and plausibility.
I do suggest looking at him as comic relief, rather than as an irritant. Perhaps think of him as _misspelled_ spam messages?
edit: I expect to always remember Trump as the POTUS who recommended looking into "injecting disinfectant". AFAIK, _that_ was unique to Trump. Sigh. How many neurons does it take to grasp the concept that mainlining Clorox is not a good idea?
>>It would be a good thing if he's assassinated, because I feel like I'm losing IQ points unsustainably rapidly every time I hear or see him. I can't understand why American media has such a rock-hard erection for what's - realistically - just an old and not a very good-looking male whore. But all things considered, he is just a slightly dumber and more obnoxious (in the teenage sense) American politician, he objectively didn't make America behave much differently than it usually does during 2016-2020.
>>So meh, I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Speaking as I guy who lives in the US, can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke? I know that's formalistic, and I get feeling like a politician (and Trump in particular) is annoying and brings IQs down every time he opens his mouth, and I agree that the US has strong institutions that can *slaps car* withstand a lot of crises, but we have people right now looking around for reinforcement for their pet theories:
(a) that Trump being shot would be an objective good for the USA and it's bad the shooter missed (toxic left); or, conversely,
(b) that lots of people on the other side believe (a) and people on the right need to view their left-leaning fellow Americans as violent, dangerous, and willing to kill or cheer for killers in the name of their politics (toxic right).
The US has strong institutions that can and have weathered a lot of partisan tensions in the past, but stuff like this is still the opposite of helpful, even if meant in jest - all the more so if some fringey-type mistakes it (whether willfully or earnestly) as having been serious.
This will probably be helpful: I don't live in the US and I don't have the US citizenship. I have never voted in a US election. My sentiments on Trump don't reflect anyone in the US, left, right, center, forwards, backwards, whatever.
I'm a pure-bred non-US noble savage who found Trump's dumbassery and the internet's constant obsession with his attention whoring attitude just 1 gram too much.
> can I get some confirmation that this was meant as a joke
I legitimately mean it 100%. I'm a vegetarian and I would never kill another soul unprovoked or condone killing souls unprovoked, I feel guilt when ants keep harassing my skin and force me to swat them away from my arm, but I would be very glad if somebody *else* were to pick up a weapon and give Trump's his sorely needed cup of lead.
Why no guilt? For one thing he's a former US president, which makes him a mass murderer, piece of shit, scum by default. For another thing he is quite literally a criminal, by the boring legal definition and not just the trivially true moral one. For a third thing he is an annoying 77 years old barely-alive blob of organic material who has repeatedly nodded and winked at the possibility that he could unleash violence if he pleases, so maybe he (and we) shouldn't cry too hard when somebody else unleashes violence on him before he does.
I get that the opinion is transgressive, but I actually think there is a very good argument to be made that **wishing** Trump death is not immoral, all things considered. The only reason not to do so is the pragmatic reason you mentioned, upholding the peace and civility of political shitflinging in the great US of A.
I agree that the US wouldn't have descended into madness if the attempt had succeeded nor will it if he wins the election. Not so sure about Trump not being at all malleable though. He's changed many of his opinions, though who's to say anyone else had anything to do with it.
>I very much wish the next assassination attempt would be more competent, but that's because he annoys the fuck out of me.
Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans? (And conversely, very very good for the Israeli right)
> Are you sure it isn't because Trump would be very very bad for Gazans?
No one has 100% error-proof access to their own internal motivation, but I think no, that's not really relevant to my reasons for despising Trump. The 95%+ displaced Gazans has seen enough due to Biden in 9 months, and will see more in the next 6 months, that Trump will not contribute meaningfully to it if he enters the White House next January. The Gaza war is already unsustainable because of the South Lebanon front and the consequently abandoned Israeli North. By either a ceasefire that concludes the murderous rage or a declared war on Lebanon that forcibly pulls the IDF, the war on Gaza will probably end before the end of this year. Trump being a piece of shit, the most damage he could do is delaying and worsening the post-war reconstruction and/or the reconciliation, but that's insult next to the injury of the war.
As a matter of fact, Trump's antics could be very very bad for the Israeli right too. For one thing, expensive military aid is one of his favorite pet peeves. He supports Israel when it's a cheap thing like moving an embassy or using "Palestinian" as an insult. Actual money though? Not that much.
Tangentially, the USA has slightly more Jews than Israel, and every time they do something that isn't throwing themselves at Trump's feet, he launches into a rant about how they're ungrateful little shits and how he's the most Pro-Israel president in the history of the multiverse so how could they not give him their votes just HOW DARE they. This is just an illustration of how long the list of reasons people would want Trump out of office (preferably via being dead) for, and how the plight of Gazans is relatively at the bottom of that list next to others.
I'm voting Trump because you're the most annoying commenter on this site and Trump said he's gonna tell Bibi to "Let 'er Rip"
Maybe he's just telling me what I want to hear though ;)
That's about the level of IQ I would expect, so do go for it my little buddy.
> the most annoying commenter on this site
The most shining compliment I ever get is your ilk being upset by me. Thank you. I live for this. More is coming.
> he's gonna tell Bibi to "Let 'er Rip"
I also heard he is gonna build you (like, you in particular) a castle in the sky with 72 angels giving you constant blowjobs. He is gonna tell Hamas to come crawling to DC with all hostages alive even the ones that have already died and they're gonna do it out of sheer TREMENDOUS respect for his big beautiful American balls. Trump is going to get you ponies and many many iron domes and big walls and Mexico is going to pay for it.
It will be the biggest and most beautiful presidencies ever. They have never done any presidency like this in the history of presidencies. Hamas will start screaming "God Bless 'Murica" in their bombings instead of Allah Akbar.
I'm sorry you're so upset, I know Deif was a big loss for you guys. To cheer you up, you're invited to my aerial blowjob castle! We're serving latkes.
Utterly hilarious. Your type is such that every time one of you is upset and can find no words for a retort, you reach for a good ol' "Haha KHAMAS go boom and that must make you so MAD".
Oh Nooooo, not the heckin Hamaserenos. Please, killing Hamas neks makes me so maaad, pleeeeeaaaase stop taunting me with dead Hamas leadership, it plucks away at my heart strings.
But worry not, the mysterious dark arts of Anarchism is just one click away. https://theanarchistlibrary.org/special/index. Read, so that one day you can retort with initelligent insults that won't embarrass you more than me.
> Deif
The IDF hasn't yet announced his death by the way, and the guy survived 7 assassination attempts before, since the late 1990s. The IDF are not angels, but you're definitely the Fool rushing in where everyone is having second thoughts about whether to tread.
Word count in this thread so far
SamR71: 64
LearnsHebrewHatesJews: 1074
Incredible - can we get to 1500?
It's a little late now to try to pretend that *he's* the one who's butthurt here when you've already told him that you think he's the "most annoying" person on the board, and that you're voting for Trump just to try to upset him.
bro no one asked
If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law, then undermining democracy and the rule of law in an attempt to stop him defeats the entire purpose. This isn't exactly rocket science, and the trollish gotcha attempts are really tiresome.
>If you oppose Trump because he is undermining democracy and the rule of law
That's an understatement for how evil many people genuinely seem to think he is. I think even my literally Hitler hyperbole is more accurate than your characterization.
I don't know if I count as being someone who thinks Trump is "a fascist" or "literally Hitler," but I do think that given his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power in 2020 there is an unacceptable chance that he refuses to yield it if it is given again. I'd put it low, somewhere between 4%~8%, but that's unacceptably high for a democracy, and a stark contrast with Biden, who despite his many flaws I am 100% confident will peacefully transition power if he loses an election.
I'd assume that doesn't make me one of the people you're talking about here, but I'd nevertheless offer my own thoughts as a barometer. I do think Trump is an unacceptable threat to American democracy and we'd be foolish to elect him given his past behavior. But killing him to thwart his election is basically an act of killing the republic to save the republic. It gets you nowhere. And that's before you get into the possibility of reprisals and reciprocal violence, which is very real in a heavily armed country. We already have nutcases doing school shootings - all they have to do is decide to shoot at leaders instead.
So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying, so I think the lack of applause (quiet or otherwise) for the attempt you are notng isn't a result of an inconsistency of beliefs but rather a sign that people so foolishly partisan as to be genuinely pro-assassinations are an extreme outlier and few in number.
>So while I'm sure there are a small number of people "hiding their applause," I don't think it's a natural jump from "Trump is a fascist" to "Trump should be assassinated" the way you seem to be implying
Maybe not, but I'm still far from convinced that most people have arrived at "political violence is bad, mkay" out of a well-reasoned weighing of the costs of political violence. Rather, it seems to me one of those social taboos that people hold instinctually more than rationally, and such taboos are usually held in the background without much thought to how they interact with their other beliefs.
I think assassinating Hitler in 1931 is something that's only warranted by what we know in retrospect. Assassinating Hitler in 1935 or 1939 is a completely different matter.
Also, Germany in 1931 was already a shitshow, with lots of street violence and attempted coups. So assassinating Hitler in 1931 would be a lot less destabilizing than assassinating someone today.
Why do people think that abortion doctors are literally participating in Holocaust condemn abortion doctor murderers? Why do people who think that government tyranny has to be fought violently if needed and that Waco was a prime example of government tyranny condemn Tim McVeigh for concretely fighting the government due to Waco? People in a stable country do not usually approve of direct action of this sort no matter what they say and can see that it will generally be vastly counterproductive.
It's possible to have both beliefs like "abortion is approximately infanticide" alongside other beliefs like "assassination and terrorism are very bad ways to enact political change." Or even "assassination and terrorism would be morally acceptable ways to end mass abortion if they would work, but they wouldn't accomplish the goal."
I mean, yes, lots of people engage in hyperbole so that every single Republican running for office is a racist, fascist, woman-hating monster and every Democrat running for office is a closet socialist who hates intact families and Christians, and they don't really believe any of that nonsense. But you can have real beliefs about some policies or ideas being evil or destructive, and still not want to assassinate or bomb anyone over it.
>Why do people think that abortion doctors are literally participating in Holocaust
Do people think that? Have well-credentialed people who think that been wheeled out by news outlets ad nauseum to send out such messages? etc etc
I don't think the comparison works. Maybe it's because I don't consume Finnish media.
People absolutely think that. I'm not sure what you mean by "well-credentialed", but e.g. the current Speaker of the House of Representatives, the third-highest official in the US government, has said that and almost certainly believes it. People with Ph.D.s, say and believe it.
It is frankly difficult to imagine someone opposed to abortion and *not* considering its practitioners to be engaged in a Holocaust, except by way of cognitive dissonance. Either a fetus is morally a person or it isn't. If it is, then we've killed way more than a holocaust's worth of innocent people, and in many cases we've basically done it for convenience.
I really would like to point out that “we” haven’t done it. Individual women have done it, and they have done it for their own reasons.
Individual women and their doctors, with the OP focusing on the doctors as the supposed perpetrators of a holocaust-level atrocity. And enough of our society has stepped up to provide them with legal cover and logistical support that *if* there's anything to be guilty about, the guilt would be spread far and wide.
Blaming the doctors but not the women makes no moral sense, but it's obviously politically pragmatic for anyone who wants to actually stop abortion.
I can believe it. But the sleight of hand here is that the comparison is between one person doing a lot of harm over the term of a presidency and many thousands of people doing harm over several decades. I'm not sure the logic of "kill this person to prevent Hitler 2.0" applies to the latter, though I'm sure plenty of anti-abortion types do silently approve of such actions.
@Chastity as well
> Do people think that?
? ??
If you believe fetuses are babies, the abortion doctors have murdered like 65 million babies since Roe v. Wade. Every abortion doctor is a serial killer who the state has decided to pointedly ignore and will never face justice. Yet even pro-life people generally do not believe in lone gunman type solutions to it.
I don't think Trump is Hitler, but also, people calling their political opponents Nazis is super common. People repeatedly called Obama a Nazi, and Bush before him.
In fact people called Obama the antichrist, and I heard some people argue that the Book of Revelations is mistranslated and actually mentions Obama by name as the antichrist!
EDIT: Looked this up and it was actually Satan, and Luke 10:18. KJV says "And he said unto them, I beheld Satan as lightning fall from heaven." - the argument was that the part recorded as "lightning fall from heaven" was really "Barack Obama".
The last Republican Profile in Courage
2008
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=JIjenjANqAk
“He’s an Arab”
“No ma’am. He’s a decent man, a family man that I just happen to have disagreements with.”
cf.
“He doesn’t have a birth certificate. He may have one, but there’s something on that, maybe religion, maybe it says he is a Muslim,” Trump told Fox News in 2011. “I don’t know. Maybe he doesn’t want that.”
I'll never forget the day when my seemingly normal friend in highschool turned to me and asked me whether I thought Obama's lips looked blue, and then seeing my confusion, explained that the antichrist's lips are supposed to be blue, implying that he thought Obama was the antichrist.
"the argument was that the part recorded as "lightning fall from heaven" was really "Barack Obama".
This is so insane that it must be a spoof, though I should be cautious because there is a lot of craziness out there.
Okay, looked that up and yes, it's genuine. My jaw remains dropped because I can't believe my lying eyes, but someone really did write that.
https://www.everand.com/book/386724786/Satan-as-Barack-Obama
Even better, somebody wrote a book about the sinister symbolism of a ring Obama wore?
https://www.amazon.com/Obamas-Ring-Satan-Will-Clark/dp/1483946355
"Does Barack Obama’s ring carry a sinister message? The idea that his ring carried an Islamic message was debunked when a photo revealed that was not the message on the ring. What that photo revealed was even more sinister than an Islamic message. It revealed a Satanic association of Biblical importance. Displayed on Obama’s ring are two coiled serpents. Many verses in the Bible refer to Satan as a serpent; starting in the Garden of Eden in Genesis, and moving to the church at Pergamos, in Revelation."
Well, I guess this proves that Catholics and the Catholic Church are indeed servants of Satan and the Antichrist, because there's a Tolkien connection here! The ring of Barahir:
"The Ring of Barahir, originally the Ring of Felagund, was an Elven artifact that was originally given by Finrod Felagund to Barahir and was kept by the Edain as an heirloom in the later Ages.
The ring had the shape of two serpents with emerald eyes, one devouring and the other supporting a crown of golden flowers, the emblem of the House of Finarfin."
Wait - could Obama's ring possibly be... the ring of Barahir????
Obama being an elf would explain a lot. Especially the delay in producing a birth certificate, and his prowess at basketball.
Can't be an elf because the ring was handed down through the mortal line of the kings of Arnor.
So he's possibly a descendant of Aragorn!
OK, part elf. :-)
Hope (estel) and change, uniting his elven and mortal natures.
So does that mean his ears are half-pointy? :-)
( And can that be distinguished from Vulcan heritage? :-) )
>Displayed on Obama’s ring are two coiled serpents.
I have no idea if he has a ring with any such symbol, but, if he did, my guess would be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caduceus
Come to think of it - could it be an ancient and malign symbol ... of the affordable care act? :-)
"No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State."
I think there may be a loophole here where Obama, being the rightful King of Gondor and Arnor, isn't *receiving* anything from a foreign sovereign because he *is* the sovereign. You'd need to consult a true expert on anarcho-monarchy, though.
Truth the SAME as fiction: https://unsongbook.com/interlude-%D7%A9-obama/
Is Trump a threat to democracy? Well, one of the main purposes of modern democracy is the peaceful transfer of power. Trump did not allow for that. When he lost the election, he threw such a tantrum that power did not transfer peacefully. Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill.
Is Trump a threat to democracy? No. He is someone who has already carried through with that threat.
Killing him would make you him, and that's what most people want to avoid.
"Americans literally -- and not just in the internet sense of literally -- died on Capitol Hill"
What point are you making with this statement? A couple of people died of heart attacks because they were so excited, and another unarmed woman was murdered by police and no one cared because she was white. That about sums it up, right?
I mean, he did legit try to find some way to stay in power after losing an election, which is one of many reasons he won't be getting my vote in November.
Human beings are a poltroonish species. They are terrified of standing out from the herd and saying the wrong thing. As soon as they noticed that they're supposed to condemn the shooting the tripped over themselves to do so. Positively pathetic.
HL Mencken is no longer around so I reanimated him briefly for comment
https://ydydy.substack.com/p/some-thoughts-are-better-left-unsaid
Animals in general are poltroonish. I watched as some African tribesmen waltzed slowly up to a lion's kill, with the pride all around. As they got closer, the lions got nervous, and once one decided to flee, it wasn't long before the rest did. The tribesmen hacked off a large chunk of meat, and left.
The courageous examples in nature aren't necessarily great examples. Insects often are courageous: a mosquito risks its life to suck your blood, and if it gets swatted...there are millions more.
Courage requires the capacity to experience fear, which I very much doubt that insects have.
I do not doubt that all living organisms experience fear. Insects are pretty easy to demonstrate. If you attempt to kill one, it tries to avoid it. Or do you think insects are all like, "Whatever, if I die, so what?"
Yah, but humans like to imagine that they are members of an individualistic (rather than herdish) species of especially brave specimens.
We ain't.
Mencken has a nice little piece about trying to find that most defining trait of the species and he comes up with "cowardice".
While granting his motivational bias, it's worth reminding people how little their opinions are actually their own (see also his hilariously brilliant intro to "In Defense of Women").
I think people condemned the shooting because it was horribly wrong not because saying so was now expected of them. Why do you seem to have so little faith in basic human decency?
Why are you too cowardly to say the obvious truth? Or perhaps even to allow yourself to see it? The OP is correct, NUMEROUS people said they wished Trump were assassinated, so much so that no one even needs to explain (except perhaps to you) the now-common "time traveller" joke.
Your pseudo bravery is cowardice par excellence. Bravo!
"I hate her! I wish she were dead!"
Said multiple times, in "Throw Momma From The Train". SOMEONE in the movie thought he meant it.
What does bravery or cowardice even have to with this? I honestly can’t make any sense of what you are saying.
Assassinating a lawful candidate for office or calling for their assassination is simply and obviously wrong.
There's a few different positions here.
Alice jokes about seeing her political opponents assassinated, but it's just a joke, she knows it would be horrible in practice.
Bob jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, but has never really thought about how horrible it would be in practice until he sees it almost happen.
Charlie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then he sees it almost happen and he changes his mind, that would be horrible.
Dave jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, so he goes along with them.
Eddie jokes about seeing his political opponents assassinated, and he really wants it to happen. But then it nearly happens, and everyone around him is saying how horrible it is, but Eddie still wants it to happen and he says so. He is retweeted by Libsoftiktok and loses his job.
I think there's more Alices than any other category.
I agree, but with you had substituted Eve for Eddie, as you already have Alice and Bob as characters, and Eve is more traditional for this role.
At least, in discussions about computer security.
+1
Most expressed political views have social consequences for the person expressing them, but no consequences for the speaker if they're wrong or even disastrous. This is one more. Lots of people will say some dumb thing about wishing Trump or Biden would be shot, very few have thought through how much worse the country becomes when that sort of thing happens very often.
I agree, and also, there are a lot more people who want Trump dead than want him assassiniated.
> NUMEROUS people said they wished Trump were assassinated
Name some.
In person, I've heard a couple of friends say that they wish the assassin hadn't missed, and they're not evil or nuts, just fairly left, but not as left as the zeitgeist of my city. Even I, after a beer too many, said something kinda close, although in retrospect I think I was referencing Monty Python as much as anything, and I wish I hadn't said it. And you know I'm very ambivalent about Trump.
How did we get to this point? Rhetorical question
Naming them is likely to cause trouble, because that is considered doxxing. I've seen people on social media I frequent making comments about "pity the shooter missed", "I'm good with a gun, I wouldn't miss" and the likes. These weren't jokes, a lot of people do hate Trump and believe all the hysteria about literal Hitler, Fourth Reich, Project 2025, he'll round up gays and minorities, the Supreme Court made it legal for the president to kill political rivals and so forth.
Am I going to list off names and link to them? I'm crazy, not stupid!
I’m not on social media. People making comments like that need a visit from law enforcement.
As the famed Richard Hannania has said, you can think Trump is a fascist that is bad for democracy (not quoting him exactly at all here), and think political assassinations are even worse for democracy.
Imo America would be A LOT better off if Trump suddenly had a heart attack mid-debate, and probably worst off if he had been assassinated that day (political tension, civil war?, etc).
+1
Most Republican before Trump were depicted by most media outlets as bad but not quite so bad that they needed to be assassinated. I think it's fair to say that the tenor of much of the ink spilled about Trump has been much worse than that. Not commenting on the merits of such beliefs. And I've noted at least a few people have been logically consistent in this, both on Xitter and Reddit.
You're playing a bullshit game. The media wasn't calling for him to be assassinated.
You're right. He's a threat to democracy, authoritarian, racist, hates women, hates Muslims, hates gays, hates trans people.. did I forget anything?
Yeah, but what are his *bad* points?
That you're a troll. Do you think you aren't? Do you believe what you just wrote? If not, you are the definition of a troll.
Are you denying that such opinions have been published in the media?
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/20/trump-threat-democracy-precedents
"Donald Trump’s threats to democracy – including his promise to govern as a dictator on “day one” and his refusal to abide by the norm of a peaceful transition of power – are often called unprecedented."
https://theintercept.com/2024/05/25/media-trump-danger-democracy/
"Trump is planning a second term that is nothing more than a revenge tour: Deploy the Insurrection Act to crush dissent, turn the Justice Department into a personal weapon to imprison government officials who previously investigated or prosecuted him, persecute former aides who turned against him, pardon himself and his lieutenants, and loot the government to enrich himself and his flailing businesses.
In case anybody has missed his autocratic plans, Trump promoted a video this week about “the creation of a unified Reich” if he is elected.
Even this social media callout to Hitler generated a generally tepid response from the press, like one from an ABC reporter who only dared to say that it was “not normal” for presidential candidates to share “references to Nazi Germany and Adolf Hitler.”
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2020/8/26/21374948/trump-second-term-lgbtq-people
"Trans people have been a target of the Trump administration from the get-go.Almost immediately after Trump took office in 2017, the administration rolled back an Obama-era memo directing schools to protect trans students from discrimination. That July, Trump announced his decision to ban trans people from serving in the military. In May 2018, the administration went after trans prisoners, too,deciding that, in most cases, trans people should be housed according to their assigned sex at birth. This summer, the Department of Housing and Urban Development proposed a rule that would allow homeless shelters that receive federal funding to house trans people according to their birth-assigned sex."
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/trump-vows-stop-gender-affirming-care-minors-re-elected-president-rcna68461
"Former President Donald Trump vowed in a video released Tuesday that, if he is re-elected, he will punish doctors who provide gender-affirming care to minors and push schools to “promote positive education about the nuclear family” and “the roles of mothers and fathers” as part of a wide-ranging set of policies to use federal power to target transgender people."
https://people.com/what-is-project-2025-inside-far-right-plan-trump-presidency-8622964
"A sweeping proposal for how Donald Trump should handle a second term in office has sparked concern for its implications on the role of federal government and its calls to eliminate a number of basic human rights.
The 2025 Presidential Transition Project, more commonly known as Project 2025, released a 900-page manifesto last year titled "Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise." The policy guidebook — compiled by the conservative think tank Heritage Foundation in partnership with more than 100 other conservative organizations — lays out a far-right, Christian nationalist vision for America that would corrode the separation of church and state, replace nonpartisan government employees with Trump loyalists and bolster the president's authority over independent agencies.
...Project 2025 establishes a framework for guiding the federal government through a biblical lens. Across nearly 1,000 pages, the mandate pushes an unpopular interpretation of the Christian agenda that would target reproductive rights, LGBTQ+ people and people of color by effectively erasing mention of all related terms, protections and troublesome historical accounts.
Though the mandate accuses the "woke" left of infringing on people's religious freedoms, its policies are rooted in a singular, extremist view of how society should function based on its authors' own Christian nationalist values. It repeatedly calls for the punishment, even imprisonment, of people who do not conform to the think tank's platform."
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-lgbtq-transgender-community-protections/676139/
" Donald Trump is promising to nationalize such efforts. He doesn’t just want to surveil, miseducate, and repress children who are exploring their emerging identities. He wants to interfere in the private lives of millions of adults, revoking freedoms that any pluralistic society should protect."
I could go on, but I think I'd hit Substack's comment limits, and I haven't even searched for "sexism" and "racism".
>you're a troll
Simply saying "I strongly disagree worth what you've posted" would make you look a lot more online-savvy and a bit less emotional, and would havr the added value of being a true statement about the world.
He's not a troll. Not saying I agree with him but the media has portrayed him as some sort of inhuman monster. Jan 6 and so forth. It's a reasonable perspective to take.
When you say this ‘literally Hitler’ thing what do you mean? I’ve seen the actual phrase exactly 4 times. 1 from your post, 2 more from people on ACX saying this is what Democrats say, okay that makes 3. Number 4 is Donald Trump Jr saying that’s what Democrats say.
I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this.
Do you mean it in some figurative sense?
Like when they say “When Trump talks about migrants poisoning the blood of America he *sounds* like Hitler?
If that’s what you mean it’s not the same as saying he is ‘literally Hitler’. BTW that *does* sound like Hitler. But it does not mean Trump is ‘literally Hitler’.
"I have never, ever heard an actual Democrat say this."
And there's lots of things I've never, ever heard people in my circles say, but that does not mean real people don't say them. It's a weak argument, Gunflint, often derided as the Pauline Kael one:
https://www.commentary.org/john-podhoretz/the-actual-pauline-kael-quote%E2%80%94not-as-bad-and-worse/
“Pauline Kael famously commented, after the 1972 Presidential election, ‘I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken. But sometimes when I’m in a theater I can feel them.'”
Are "comparisons to Hitler" close enough to saying "Trump is Hitler?" That's a genuinely debatable question, but I don't think saying "Adolf Hitler did this, and now look, Donald Trump is doing the same thing" is innocuous:
https://edition.cnn.com/2019/03/20/politics/james-clyburn-trump-hitler-comparison/index.html
"Two powerful House Democrats have invoked Adolf Hitler’s actions in Germany and the treatment of Jews during World War I and in the 1920s to warn against the direction the US is moving in, with both saying Donald Trump’s presidency presents an unprecedented threat to democracy."
I have to love the spin these guys put on it; 'if you say someone or something is like the Gestapo, you are using the language of Nazis! and so you must at the least like Nazis, if you're not a Nazi yourself!'
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/with-gestapo-comment-trump-adds-to-numerous-past-nazi-germany-references
"Donald Trump told Republican donors at his Florida resort this weekend that President Joe Biden is running a “Gestapo administration,” the latest example of the former president employing the language of Nazi Germany in his campaign rhetoric."
Here's "Trump is copying Hitler's speeches":
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-says-he-didnt-know-his-immigration-rhetoric-echoes-hitler-thats-part-of-a-broader-pattern
"Facing criticism for repeatedly harnessing rhetoric once used by Adolf Hitler to argue that immigrants entering the U.S. illegally are “poisoning the blood of our country,” Trump insisted he had no idea that one of the world’s most reviled and infamous figures once used similar words. The Nazi dictator spoke of impure Jewish blood “poisoning” Aryan German blood to dehumanize Jews and justify the systemic murder of millions during the Holocaust."
I see your feelings have been hurt. I’m guessing it’s because I called you out on your gloating and inflammatory factually false meme at the end of the last thread. Sorry about your feelings but even Trump, to his credit, has told his people to cut the incendiary post assassination attempt rhetoric.
You’ve responded to almost every comment I made in this thread except for the one where I told you that Vance is probably an earnest Catholic and an almost certain earnest Catholic - Ross Douthat - is praying for his friend Vance and the country.
anon123 cleared up the ‘literally Hitler’ thing is slangy hyperbole.
Okay, want me to respond to this?
My fee-fees aren't hurt, apart from what you've said about not being on social media. I see instances of Z, you turn around and go "Well nobody *I* know says that!" with the strong implication that therefore, nobody is in fact saying Z and furthermore I must be lying.
Gee, thanks.
You're not on social media, so you probably *don't* hear/read people saying Z. I hang around various places, for different reasons, and I do hear/read people saying Z. It's rather tedious to get told "don't believe your lying eyes", but whatever.
Take it away, the Eagles:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2PTEqZURh4o
EDIT: Here's some more of that "Nobody *I* know ever said that!" for ya, Gunflint:
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-shooting-assassination-conspiracy-theory-staged-biden-poll-1925723
I agree, Newsweek and Time have gone downhill since their glory days, but they're still not quite trash yet.
"A new poll has laid bare how many voters believe the conspiracy theories swirling around the attempted assassination of Donald Trump over the weekend.
One third of those who support Trump's Democratic presidential rival Joe Biden said they believe the attack may have been staged and had never been intended to kill the former president. That equates to a little over 33 percent. And even some of Trump's own supporters believe the same thing, with around 12 percent suspecting the event was planned, according to the poll conducted by Morning Consult, an American business intelligence company."
Don’t read anything into this beyond I thought you would be interested. Douthat again.
Donald Trump, Man of Destiny
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opinion/donald-trump-assassination-destiny.html?unlocked_article_code=1.7k0.JUyx.g_7dwyAZSLhn&smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare&sgrp=c-cb
> Well nobody *I* know says that!" with the strong implication that therefore, nobody is in fact saying Z and furthermore I must be lying.
I’m as certain as I can be of just about anything that you weren’t lying.
I didn’t say it, think it, or mean to imply it.
No, I understand, thanks. It just made me feel like "this guy denies everything I'm saying, does he think I'm making it up or lying?"
We're good, though, in this period of Peace and Unity post-assassination 😁
Sorry, "literally X" is internet slang that's meant to be hyperbolic. To translate in a more literal way, it's apparent to me that significant numbers of people really do believe Trump is a unique threat who will end democracy and usher in a dark period of Nazi-lite authoritarian rule.
Thanks. That had me confused for a while.
I think the people who fear Trump is a danger to the Republic are thinking about Trump on January 6 saying “If Mike Pence does the right thing we will win”.
These people include Mike Pence himself, Trump’s VP,Liz Cheney, Mitt Romney, Adam Kinzinger and Chris Christie. All of these people are Republicans. These are only the ones who were among those willing to say this was absolutely wrong and completely un-American out loud.
None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
IDK if C-SPAN has archives but listening to an open comment session Monday morning the first caller opened with: "well, you know what I think would have been best for the country, would have been if the bullet had been just 2 inches over..." At that point he was cut off by the host saying nopenopenopenope we don't promote violence... :P
Good for the host. Really bad for the caller. How did we get here?
Is the republic not worth killing a single would-be tyrant to protect?
Honestly I view Trump and Biden as mostly indistinguishable, and both morally worthy of death for the killing they've signed off on abroad. The inconsistency galls.
I dislike both Trump and Biden, albeit for different reasons. In a nutshell: Trump because of the look-into "injecting disinfectant" (common sense, _please_ !). Biden because of pushing for more DEI (could we kindly treat people on their _individual_ merits???).
As it is, I'll hold my nose and vote for whichever better supports Israel, as well as I can tell just before the election. (better thought of as voting against the other one)
The problem with this idea is that tyrants don't act on their own. Tyrannical systems give the most power to a single dictator, but they require broad support to overthrow the existing government structure. Caesar, and many of the tin pot emperors in the later empire, had literal armies backing them up. You could go back in time and kill Hitler or Stalin, but what about Himmler and Goering and Yagoda and Beria? Killing one man doesn't stop the communist overthrow of the Tsardom, nor does it change the chaotic circumstances in Wiemar Germany that led to the rise of the Nazis.
Similarly, killing Trump wouldn't change the fact that a large number of Americans feel the elite ruling the country are completely disconnected from their interests.
Probably, but you're unlikely to end up killing a single man. The killing of Caesar, for example, started a second civil war which still ended up with a despot at the lead. Which may still be justified if the threat of tyranny is sufficiently probable and severe -- even a civil war and/or a more run-of-the-mill dictatorship would probably have been better for 1930 Germany than Nazism and the Second World War -- but you should be aware of the actual tradeoff before you make your choice.
> Is the republic not worth killing a single would-be tyrant to protect?
No.
If that is important to you, they are certainly distinguishable.
https://airwars.org/research/us-airstrikes-fell-to-historic-low-in-2022-despite-fresh-operations/
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/01/us/biden-drone-strikes.html
>None of them want Trump assassinated. The only person we know for sure who wanted this is a 20 year old Pennsylvanian.
I agree with the first sentence. I don't agree with the second. There are many who wanted it under a pseudonym and at least a few who lost their jobs after being stupid enough to say it using their real names. Google Cassandra Oleson.
I also said in my first post that most leftists, at least publicly, do not support assassinating Trump. I'm leaning to people just not being very logically consistent.
I’m not on social media beyond ACX and Slow Boring comments. I’m glad Cassandra lost her job.
I think he would if he could. He's literally Hitler.
anon123 explained that literally Hitler is hyperbole on the internet, so if I'm shooting, metaphorically, to describe Trump accurately on this medium it seems I need to adjust for the cyber-distortion and say literally Hitler to accurately describe the wannabee tyrant that is Trump
I don't think Trump has the anger to be Hitler but sure he's Mussolini or would be if he could. So sure he's at least a wannabe fascist, but I'm optimistic that he can't get the military on his side and actually seize absolute power.
Some argue the recent SCOTUS ruling about immunity gives the POTUS dictatorial power but I'm not that pessimistic. If so, we're already fucked and it's too late.
That complaint about giving POTUS dictatorial power will be refined if Mr. Biden, Ms. Harris, or whoever the Democrats nominate keeps them in power. "Dictatorial" will become Affirmative, and everyone will be quite pleased with their cleverness.
Agree - dangerous buffoon, Mussolini-style, seems far closer to the mark.
Trump won't make the U.S. into Nazi Germany, but he might make it into a Hungary, an illiberal democracy where only one election outcome is possible. SCOTUS will obviously support anything he wants to do at this point.
He's not smart enough and lacks the attention span, understanding of history, etc., to be a real fascist. He has certainly been popular among actual no-kidding unashamed fascists, however, what I've heard and read of their internal communications over the last nine years suggests to me that they know full well what he is and isn't, and they value him because he is viscerally appealing to the kinds of people who make up a fascist constituency--speaks their language, shares their grievances and what have you.
It's a good thing Trump is so lazy and unimaginative.
I've also heard Trump described as having the attention span of a butterfly... Though with Biden's debate performance, it might be grimly amusing to watch the two of them take a test of attention span, side by side...
I'm disappointed that "Cadorna was an idiot" didn't like to https://acoup.blog/2021/10/08/collections-luigi-cadorna-was-the-worst/
Sure, everyone is inconsistent in their beliefs... or maybe they are just smart enough to know when to be inconsistent. but also
1. It is entirely consistent to prefer that ideas you disagree with be defeated democratically.
and
2. It is consistent to realize extreme actions typically cause public sentiment to swing in the opposite direction. Whoever fires first loses.
>1. It is entirely consistent to prefer that ideas you disagree with be defeated democratically.
I was referring to the widespread sentiment that Trump is going to kill democracy, not to people who merely disagree with him. I really don't think I was exaggerating much when I noted significant numbers of people think Trump is "literally Hitler".
>2. It is consistent to realize extreme actions typically cause public sentiment to swing in the opposite direction. Whoever fires first loses.
That would be hiding their applause.
<quote>I really don't think I was exaggerating much</quote>
That doesn't really change the sentiment that it is better to defeat it democratically than with extremism.
<quote>That would be hiding their applause.</quote>
No, the opposite. It would be them realizing there is nothing to applaud, since such a move weakens support for them.
If that's the case, how did the pre-Trump Republican party ever exist? His supporters didn't materialize out of nowhere in 2016. Why didn't they launch a coup against the Chamber of Commerce types all by themselves? I simply don't buy the "there's nothing special about Trump" argument.
The same way socialists don't take over the Democrat party. There are only two viable choices since going third party splits the vote and loses, so a milquetoast candidate from your party winning is better than the other party winning. The party apparatus tries to balance pleasing the radical constituency with broad electability in the public. It's not like the MAGA crowd and hardline conservatives appeared spontaneously after Trump ran for office; they had to already be there for his campaign to be viable. They were generally sidelined by the more moderate factions of the Republican party. See the Tea Party during Obama's first term.
> That said, I don't fully understand the nature of the demand Trump might be meeting (aside from anti-woke and anti-deepstate ideas?)
I'm not a good person to ask, not exactly being a Trumpist myself, but I think a big part of Trump's appeal was anti-elitism as well.
"anti-deepstate" is a red herring though, since that was something *generated* by Trump as an excuse for failing to get much done.
> "anti-deepstate" is a red herring though, since that was something *generated* by Trump as an excuse for failing to get much done.
Have to disagree with this. The Deep State* was a core component of the MAGA platform during the 2016 election. Conservatives saw the entrenchment of their ideological rivals in the federal administrative agencies as a dire political threat. Thus the catchphrase "Drain the Swamp" that was ubiquitous during the 2016 campaign. Considering that Trump was illegally surveilled and falsely painted as a Russian agent for years by the FBI, I would have to say it's a pretty good excuse too.
*As an aside - I note the most conspiracy theory sounding term of the lexicon also became the most popular, compare to permanent bureaucracy or administrative state which describe the same thing as the deep state.
My impression from Primo Levi's experiences, was that surviving Mussolini was far easier than surviving Hitler.
I don't see you mentioning Umberto Eco's famous 14 points https://www.openculture.com/2016/11/umberto-eco-makes-a-list-of-the-14-common-features-of-fascism.html.
Although, granted, plenty of those points are non-specific to Fascism. "Cult of Tradition" and "Rejection of Modernism"? That's literally Middle Eastern Islamism to a T.
> Mussolini, never any consistent policy besides this street theatre.
Technically-speaking, that just proves that Fascism lies on an orthogonal dimension to Policy, call it "Style". Just like Democracy, in fact. You could have a Liberal Democracy, an Islamic Democracy, a racist Democracy, a war-like Democracy, a secular Democracy. "Democracy" just denotes a particular style of settling questions, but not any specific answer. Although in practice nobody ever uses "Fascist Communist", the term doesn't strike me as an oxymoron. I think the Khmer Rouge would qualify.
You might dismissively call Fascism's rituals "Theatre", but remember that Democracy sounds like a pretty big theatre from the POV of its opponents too, and for pretty valid reasons. The "Theatre" is the visible rituals of a social process for bestowing political legitimacy.
Man I'll be honest. The latest twitter cycle has just reminded me that I have absolutely no idea how people can say they support Trump and democracy at the same time (I have to beat this dead horse one more time bc I saw some rationalists on twitter talking about this).
I get some people here are monarchists, a few more are fine with illiberalism, and a few more are fully bought in to every single Biden conspiracy theory, but other than those, Trump supporters are becoming ever more baffling to me.
Arguments:
1) Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote, and since Republicans had more state delegates he could have won. This is not a secret, Trump mentioned this in his January 6th speech, and the Eastman memo outline *very clearly* the legal framework of how this could have worked.
2) Trump is now in essence a demi-god. He holds complete domination of the Republican party, and everyone is lock-and-step with him. If Agenda 47 or Project 2025 are to be taken at their word, this would include removing everyone not completely ideologically aligned with the President from the executive branch, and give the President significantly more power to influence the actions taken by different agencies. Hell, JD Vance said in February he would be willing to certify Trump's fake electors if it were up to him.
3) Republicans in the senate failed the country in 2020 by not impeaching Trump for the *only* stated reason that he was already out of office. Now, the Supreme Court has stated that the President has immunity for core actions. I do think it's possible I'm overreacting to this one in particular, but it is scary. Plausibly the only reason that his conversation with Pence pressuring him to certify fake electors possibly doesn't fall under a core power is because Pence was doing a role that was assigned to him by Congress. Otherwise, as a core power, you wouldn't be able to use that as EVIDENCE against Trump, in his TRIAL. I am afraid that they will somehow convince the court that enough actions from January 6th count as core duties that you can't use them as evidence, and as such the whole insurrection case doesn't go forward (of course, disregarding the possibility he wins beforehand and just pardons himself)
4) So you have the perfect storm of someone with a cult of personality, who doesn't care about institutions, who doesn't care about democracy, who was not impeached by Trump for flimsy reasons, who was plausibly protected by the Supreme Court in this ruling, who is filling the executive with his goons. Please feel free to criticize any of this if I'm missing anything.
5) For the record, I'd put the chance of America becoming an authoritarian hellhole with Trump winning at at most 4-5% (operationalized in the form of there not being free and fair elections in 2028) , but there's a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)
I am no fan of Trump and won't be voting for him. But to answer your question, there are a lot of Trump voters (and moderates, like myself) that see the democratic party as extremely authoritarian and anti-democratic. Whether it is worse than Trump is hard to gauge and I'm not knowledgeable enough about the election stuff and Jan 6th have a strong opinion.
Ways that democrats/progressives are authoritarian and anti-democratic:
1. COVID vaccine mandates: this is an issue many Trump voters are still extremely angry about, for good reason. And many of them turned down vaccines at great personal cost: I met an airline pilot recently who turned down millions in career earnings because he refused the vaccine and considered people who went along with it akin to Germans who went along with the Nazis. Incidentally also takes the wind out of the sails of pro-choice arguments.
2. Social media censorship: secretly forcing social media companies to deplatform users who say things that are against the state's perceived interest, like suggesting the possibility of covid lab leak. 20 years ago this would have been huge news, absolutely insane for this to happen in a democracy.
3. Universities requiring progressive loyalty oaths for job applicants: 100% authoritarian.
4. Generally criticizing freedom of speech as a value, and support for dishonesty if it furthers the democrat or progressive cause. (personally I think this is increasingly endemic not just in both parties but in general life, an increasingly cynical, low trust environment among everyone, but that's off topic)
5. Support for communism and hatred of capitalism. You don't see this from politicians much but it is very common on social media, and would be viewed as authoritarian by Trump voters, though I'm aware that social media communists don't see themselves as statist at all.
6. Second amendment issues. They want to take our guns. Big one for Trump voters.
7. Using courts to attack Trump. I'm not an expert here but I can tell you that Trump voters see these as politically motivated attacks.
8. And finally, liberals are no fun. Progressives and democrats have become culturally extremely intolerant: a party of sanctimonious, screeching, judgmental narcs and tattletales. Where 'read the room' is a common, unironic scold to conform. Where family relationships, or really any relationship other than pure atomized individualism is problematic. Where seeking power and domination over others by claiming mental illness or victimhood is pathological. Where everyone goes to therapy and obsesses about their trauma.
Maybe that last one is not about authoritarianism but it is still annoying.
9. Trying to take Trump (whatever one thinks of him, he's a major candidate) off the primary ballots in two states.
[This was a leftist action, but not a Democratic Party action. As Level 50 Lapras pointed out in https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/prediction-markets-suggest-replacing/comment/60895959 Gavin Newsom opposed this, to his credit]
In any event, the attempt was an attempt to thwart the voters, an anti-democratic action by the left.
The case in Colorado was brought by some Republicans, not Democrats.
Many Thanks! I'm confused.
One article describing one phase of the attempt to remove Trump from the ballot, https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2# described the group bringing the suit:
>The left-leaning group that brought the Colorado case, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, hailed the ruling.
and, indeed, they are separate from the Democratic Party, though I would expect a left-leaning group to be generally aligned with Democrats.
From the article you linked to:
The state’s highest court didn’t agree, siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters who argued that it was nonsensical to imagine that the framers of the amendment, fearful of former confederates returning to power, would bar them from low-level offices but not the highest one in the land.
Many Thanks!
>siding with attorneys for six Colorado Republican and unaffiliated voters
Yeah, this is weird. I looked at Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, and their website doesn't show any clear party affiliation, though they mostly seem to be bringing lawsuits against Trump people. Do you see a GOP affiliation somewhere on the site ( https://www.citizensforethics.org/ ) ?
Thank you for acknowledging the monarchists. It's nice to be seen from time to time.
It's gobsmacking that VP pick Vance is influenced by Curtis Yarvin *and apparently even personal friends with him*.
I thought we all agreed this (ACX, EY, Moldbug, grey tribe, etc) was just 300 people reading the same few blogs, and next thing I know a bunch of folks I've been reading for ten or fifteen years are the most influential people around.
Oddly, I am a people person. I am introverted, sure, and a mathematician by training, but I am empathetic and political and just generally interested in the well being of people around me.
Libertarianism appealed to me at an earlier stage of my life, but at some point I decided it was hyper focused on a narrow process instead of outcomes. I think this is true of all the political ideologies, by the way. So, even more oddly, libertarianism is the part of Yarvin's work that I left behind.
The reason I kept monarchy, loosely, is because I don't think... *points at everything*... I don't think people work this way. The totalizing nature of democratized politics is bad for human brains and bad for social fabric, and either it no longer produces added value, or maybe it never did (in the sense that maybe the industrial revolution would have happened anyway under more authoritarian government systems with more state capacity).
Cynically, I would say people don't want community so much as they want their beliefs shoved down everyone else's throats. Government is the perfect vehicle to do this. Then when the libertarians point out maybe having an omnipotent central government is a bad idea, it never seems to occur to these people that their ideological enemies are perfectly capable of using the same vehicle against them.
This is very well put, thanks.
It just proves that Curtis Yarvin is short on good ideas; says almost nothing about libertarianism.
John, I would challenge you to provide an example of something specific in a Yarvin piece that you found half right, or interesting but wrong, as a sort of proof-of-work that you really engaged with his writing at some point. It seems to me to be the low bar for comments that add value to the thread.
>"Republicans in the senate failed the country in 2020 by not impeaching Trump for the *only* stated reason that he was already out of office."
Only the House can impeach; the Senate decides whether to convict. Getting such details wrong undermines credibility.
For clarity for anyone abroad reading, the house did impeach Trump, and the Senate then voted to acquit him - so this isn’t an assertion that OP got the entire legislative body wrong when he said “the Senate failed,” it’s just making the semantic point that saying “not impeaching” is technically inaccurate and the correct phrasing is something like “not convicting of an impeachable offense.”
Each can decide for themselves the degree to which this “undermines credibility.”
"Trump tried to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power, by getting Pence to certify the fake electors, and sent people to the Capitol to put pressure on them so that the issue could be sent back to house so they could vote"
Sending matters back for a vote is pretty weaksauce on the "coup" attempt. Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes, they seize power and make themselves the ultimate authority. If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
In the first place, "if I win, I win, but if I lose, we have a second vote" is not a proposition made more democratic by the presence of a second vote.
Besides that, the second "vote" Trump was seeking wasn't a recount or a do-over of elections in the states he narrowly lost. He was seeking to replace the results of the election with a party-lines vote in the house, where Republicans had a majority. "If I lose, we toss the election results and replace them with a vote of 435 elites, the majority of whom are on my team" - it's very much *not* the kind of thing we should mistake for democracy in action.
Frankly, it's a bit revealing, when comparing to actually disputed election results like Bush v. Gore in 2000, that Trump went this route through the House rather than pushing for a recount. If he genuinely thought he won, I'd expect him to pursue recounts, but if he made an effort in that direction it seems to have been pretty short-lived.
>Real dictators and generalissimos don't bother with votes
AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
>If you're telling me Trump wanted a vote on did he win the election, that sounds rather democratic to my ears.
When a Presidential election is sent to the House, the question is not "who won?" It is "who do you choose as President?" And, when an election is sent to the House each state delegation gets one vote. Which means that Trump was guaranteed to win. So, trying to replace an election by voters with an election you are guaranteed to win, based on a voting system that ignores the principle of "one person, one vote," does not in fact sound very democratic.
> AFTER they gain power. But they often gain power democratically. Hitler is an obvious example.
*Technically speaking*, Hitler was never democratically elected. But there are certainly plenty of other examples of strongmen and dictators coming to power via the ballot box. Even Putin was elected and still pretends to hold elections even now.
Well, he was no less democratically elected than any other leader of a plurality party in a parliamentary system who is named Prime Minister.
> Which means that Trump was guaranteed to win.
Well, he THOUGHT he was guaranteed to win. It was 27 R states, one of them was represented by Liz Cheney, and I can imagine 5-10% of Republicans crossover voting, which would probably be enough. So he might still have lost.
Democratic institutions in Ukraine have already been damaged horribly(is it permanent? Who knows if the dictatorship survives without the war as an excuse, but it's certainly gone at the moment) and there are Ukrainians sitting in prison right now for their opposition to the country's foreign policy.
If you really want an answer then I'll say that Trump's reaction to his 2020 loss was certainly not his best moment. It's a mark against him, in my book.
But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire? If you hate dumb lawsuits and you hate dumb protests then you're going to hate the other guys too.
In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
>In the end, Trump's strengths outweigh his weaknesses, at least in the universe of possible candidates for the President of the United States right now.
Aren’t you an Australian national?
> But what was the end result? Some frivolous lawsuits and a mostly-peaceful protest where nothing even caught fire?
No, that's not what the end result was. The end result was a coup attempt. The "mostly peaceful protest" ended in people chanting "Hang Mike Pence" and getting shot, because the point of that "mostly peaceful protest" was to coerce Mike Pence to unilaterally throw out the electoral votes of seven states. Outline of the plot here: https://2cradle2grave.substack.com/p/january-6-was-a-coup-attempt
>people chanting "Hang Mike Pence"
Morbid curiosity: Is this the lowest point relations of a USA president and vice-president have reached, or is there a historical example of an _even lower_ point?
It's the only time in US history a President has tried to use his powers like that. Possibly back before the VP and P were from the same party, they were really angy at each other, but I don't think Jefferson and Adams tried to kill each other or anything.
Good point! I hadn't even thought about the times before P & VP were from the same party. Many Thanks!
Consider the possibility that your perspective on Trump has been colored by the same media agencies that have been misleading you about Biden's cognitive state for the past few months at least, and reasonably likely the last five years.
He's not a particularly good man, but he's not nearly as interesting as you seem to think he is, and his rising string of victories over the past four years have arisen solely because of the hatred people have for him, time and time again. You profess to despise him, but what you're incapable of doing, the one thing that would have killed his chances over and over and over again - is just ignoring him. And so here he is again. You can thank your favorite media channels for that; the daily hour of hatred for Trump results in fantastic ratings for them, of course they didn't want him to go away.
He's a reality star, and you've let him play by reality TV rules.
Real Trumpism has never been tried!
Not sure about that, but I'm pretty sure the Republicans have immediately fumbled the ball with the Home Depot lady. I'm fascinated to see what happens next. Christ the hits just keep rolling this election season.
The same court that gave presidents immunity also neutered most of the Executive Branch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoJZu_EaDeM
That video is silly, based on the title. Leaving aside that the administrative state existed long before Chevron was decided, lets try a hypothetical: Congress tells the FDA to regulate the negative health effects of smoking. The FDA determines that secondhand smoke contributes to X percent of cancer. So it promulgates a regulation to address that.
Cigarette companies sue, arguing 1) the statute only permits regulation of health effects to smokers themselves, not second parties, so it does not permit the FDA to address secondhand smoke; 2) the FDA erred in determining that secondhand smoke causes cancer; 3) the specific regulation does not properly address the problem
Under Chevron, courts would 1) defer to the FDA’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was not unreasonable; 2) defer to the FDA’s finding re cancer as long as it was not arbitrary and capricious; 3) defer to the FDA’s determination that the regulation properly addresses the problem as long as it is not arbitrary and capricious.
Now that Chevron is gone, the only thing different is #1: Courts do not have to defer to agency interpretations of statutes, but instead do so themselves
In your view was the Eastman memo (full text here https://cdn.cnn.com/cnn/2021/images/09/20/eastman.memo.pdf) legally sound? If the VP had pulled off that particular set of jiggery-pokery would it have legally worked?
If it wouldn't have, then what's the concern? Some law professor wrote an incorrect opinion?
If it *would* have worked, and we were saved on the day only by Mike Pence's personal restraint, then shouldn't *that* be the big issue? If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
> would it have legally worked?
The rules need to be clear, and clearly followed. Doing this sort of thing is bad, for that reason alone.
> If there's any possibility that this might work, shouldn't closing that legal loophole (by alternations to the Electoral Count Act, or the Constitution if necessary) have been the top legislative priority for the last four years?
One would certain-fucking-ly have hoped so. Having rules that are clear and clearly valid and easy to follow is a good in itself.
The Electoral Count Act was, in fact, changed. How effectively, in the circumstances of 2021, I can't be sure.
That's great! I'm glad to finally be hearing about it. :-)
Pretty effectively actually, at least in terms of the Eastman scheme.
The Electoral Count Act of 2022:
-- Affirmatively states that the constitutional role of the Vice President, as the presiding officer of the joint meeting of Congress, is solely ministerial and that he or she does not have any power to solely determine, accept, reject, or otherwise adjudicate disputes over electors.
-- Raises the threshold to lodge an objection to electors to at least one-fifth of the duly chosen and sworn members of both the House of Representatives and the Senate. (Previously it took only one member of each chamber to formally object and bring the process to a halt.)
-- Identifies each state’s Governor, unless otherwise specified in the laws or constitution of a state in effect on Election Day, as responsible for submitting the certificate of ascertainment identifying that state’s electors.
-- Requires Congress to defer to slates of electors submitted by a state’s executive pursuant to the judgments of state or federal courts.
Thanks!
I think you overestimate the danger of permanent damage. To answer your question I think you have a post-algorithm “personalized facts” ecosystem. Trump supporters don’t see it as ushering in fascism, leaving the climate accords, and leaving Ukraine to the wolves. They see it as sticking it to the deep state and the woke elites, securing the border, and making peace with powerful nations instead of pearl clutching. Most don’t know any facts about January 6th. To the question “but we’ve been yelling facts at them for 8 years”, the woke globalists in the deep state and the media have been trying to gaslight them, telling them the economy is good, there’s no problem at the border, their kids can declare themselves another gender, they have to take a vaccine or they’ll lose their jobs…
In other words, a post-truth environment. They don’t even have directly contradictory facts. It’s a completely different reality.
"I think you overestimate the danger of permanent damage. To answer your question I think you have a post-algorithm “personalized facts” ecosystem. "
I think the biggest lie we all hold is that its the other side that is the problem.
I mean sure, for those people it makes sense, but ig I was imagining asking this to people that frequent this blog, who I'd hope would be better-informed but that still support Trump.
Of course, I'm noticing now that this probably comes from the bias that everybody has in that I think I'm right and if only people had the facts that I had they'd side with me. Still worth commenting though, I think.
Yeah, you only have to go over to DSL to get a peak into the right-wing media ecosystem. It's basically an alternate reality with few shared facts from this side of the aisle.
"a much higher chance of democratic institutions being damaged permanently, in America and in the world (above 60% chance for all of reversing progress in climate change, ending legal protections for trans people, ending aid to Ukraine, more illiberal governments around the world, etc)"
"Democratic institutions" seems to mean "the policy goals of the Democratic Party." You're quite right that there are few people who support this version of "democratic institutions" and Trump at the same time.
Specifically regarding the last point: do you not think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments or do you think democracies and illiberalism aren't mutually exclusive?
The American overloading of the world "Liberal" bugs me. Can y'all just agree either to dump the use of the word "liberal" to mean "center-left" or to dump the use of the word "liberal" as in "liberal democracy"?
Anyway no I don't think Trump is more likely to support illiberal governments overall. In particular I think he'll take a harder line against China, the biggest and almost-most illiberal of them all.
I was using it here to mean liberal democracy. He could take a stricter line against China, but it seem to be at the cost of appeasing Russia.
Also Hungary and Israel.
Is the legal transfer of power a goal solely of the Democratic Party? You’ve put me in the uncomfortable position of defending that other guy’s cringe comment.
I certainly don't endorse Trump's election denial goon marches.
Do you know about the Easton memo and the electors’ scheme?
why do you think it's cringe 😆😆 i want honest feedback seriously
My personal impression was that the hysterics bring to mind someone who's terminally online and has purple hair with pronouns in their internet profiles and work email signature.
I did ask the question, but I feel compelled to say this feels like a bad reason. If you are only saying that's the image that comes to mind sure, but seems very much like a real life issue (i.e. not terminally online) that he wanted to disregard the results of the election.
This time around will be different. The Chevron doctrine no longer stands and the Federal Bureaucracy is much more vulnerable. Trump will not be surrounded by “old school “ Republicans who constrain him, and they (he and his crew) learned a lot from the last time.
I'm not sure what you're trying to argue here. Chevron takes power away from the bureaucracy, which Trump at least nominally controls, and gives it to the judiciary, which he doesn't. Chevron makes Trump's hand strictly weaker.
And it wasn't so much "old school Republicans" that constrained Trump last time around, but recalcitrant bureaucrats and the judiciary. Trump nominally controls the bureaucracy, but he can't really fire recalcitrant bureaucrats because Pendleton, and Chevron doesn't change that. The judiciary will enforce Pendleton, and through Chevron it will bind the bureaucracy closer to Congress's will than Trump's, and Trump doesn't even have a theoretical cause of action for firing judges.
There are things Trump can do with the bureaucracy and the judiciary against him, but in terms of "things are different", you're describing differences that will make it harder for Trump.
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-hasnt-changed-but-the-gop-has-14ba7c49?st=8fbb4l9cku4cytp&reflink=share_mobilewebshare
This captures the spirit of my argument.
Ok. There were quite a few old school Republicans in his cabinet (Barr and Bolton come to mind, and I forget the name of sec of defense among others) who seemed to deflect some of his inclinations. The end of Chevron will certainly make it easier to challenge rules and regulations of the bureaucracy but you’re right that it doesn’t directly give him more clout. I certainly don’t think it hurts him. I don’t see it binding things more closely to Congress’ intent because it looks like one of the results of ex- Chevron is Congress is going to have to be more specific in their intentions if they don’t like what the court’s decide, so who knows how that goes. Depends on how Trump friendly Congress is I suppose.
Trump tried to fire a lot of people the last time he was president and I think he will have more luck this time.
I don’t see how any of this makes it harder for Trump, especially because the SC has shifted its center. I don’t really see the judiciary being against him in general. Some circuits lean liberal and some lean conservative.
I think Trump and his inner circle learned a lot from their last innings about how they can do things they would like to do and he has much more support in the GOP party than he did then. Anyone who was luke warm on him is gone or come around. That’s how I see it anyway. I am willing to be wrong.
>Elected politicians still having power is a conservative fantasy.
You may be right. If you are, though, that implies that the voters have essentially zero control. A government of the executive branch employees, by the executive branch employees, and for the executive branch employees may be many things, but a democratic reflection of the voters isn't one of them...
Ouch! Many Thanks! And since the individual rights are whatever the legal experts say they are, it simplifies down to purely an expertocracy. It derives its legitimacy from the credentials of its experts?
Many Thanks! I'm confused. When you write
>Rather people pick a number of individual rights that matter to them and hold them sacred. They can be very different ones (abortion vs. guns etc.)
I'm not following just how the connection to your previous
>Democracy stopped meaning majority power long ago and now it means a combination of individual rights and expertocracy.
works.
Are you saying that
- "Democracy" means widely differing things to different people, depending on which individual rights those people are concerned about
or
- "Democracy" is generally accepted as strongly dependent on the protection of individual rights, albeit with wide disagreement over which rights are included
or
- You consider "democracy" to be strongly dependent on the recognition of individual rights, but view both the practice of government as not honoring these rights (but it should) and also, there are strong (popular? judicial?) disagreements about which rights are included.
I'm not following which are the views that you hold, which are ones you view the government as following in practice, and which are the ones you see as popularly supported. Clarification, please?
Why do so many people in the rationality community choose to work for startups, despite being highly intellectual and talented? If you aren't the founder you'll never make more money in a startup compared to FAANGs. Startups are almost always poorly organized, chaotic and subject to random fluctuations in the mood of the investors, founders and first customers. Everybody remembers the founder, some people remember the investor, almost nobody remembers employee #1 (let alone #10) unless the company grows to be the next Apple or Microsoft.
I can understand why someone would want to be a founder. I can understand wanting to work for FAANG. I can understand working for an American startup if you live in Spain or perhaps even a low-cost location in Nebraska or something. I can understand working for a startup if FAANGs reject you. But how did so many super talented people get convinced to work for a startup while living in Silicon Valley, SF or New York? Do people just not care about money all that much?
Working for large companies can be undesirable for the usual reasons (bureaucracy, lack of obvious impact). Trading lower pay for more interesting/enjoyable work is a good deal for some - effectively, you are "paying" to better enjoy the significant fraction of your life that you spend working. Working at a startup is less extreme in this regard than pursuing a PhD, which many rationalist types also do.
That said, you can also avoid the large company downsides by working for a small established company, which will probably be less chaotic than a startup. My impression is that software jobs of this type are rare; I feel fairly lucky in having found one.
I'm not in the rat community nor in Silicon Valley, SF or New York, but I wound up working at 5 startups over my software career. The first 4 were because that was the only job I could get - 1st was my first job out of college, employee #5, successful for 2 years. Next 3 were after being laid off because of downturn in the economy and jobs hard to find - 2nd employee #2, dead within a month. 3rd employee #4 dead within 2 months. 4th employee #5 the hero who made a key contribution, successful company, got laid off when the success meant they didn't need developers any more. 5th I failed retirement by working for a friend's startup, employee #3, dead after a year. If I had had a choice I likely would not have taken so many startup jobs, but I did have mixed success with them.
I do not yet work for a startup, but I worked for FAANGs, and I echo pozorvlak: they have brain melting bureaucracy and sometimes you find yourself filling out seventeen forms to do an almost empty job, and thirty six forms to try doing it a different and maybe better way. Very depressing.
I can only speak for myself, but: I currently work for a startup, having previously worked for two more (possibly three, depending on what you consider a startup). I've never worked for a FAANG, but I have worked for other large tech companies. My brain just *cannot handle* the work environment at large orgs, and I don't think that's because I worked for especially dysfunctional large companies or especially functional startups. I can handle "if you have a problem with X, talk to Jane"; I can't handle "if you have a problem with X, you could try filing a ticket with the team that maintains X but it will probably be ignored, so spider the org chart until you can work out who manages the X team (bear in mind that it's probably out of date!), then get your manager to hassle them". I like being able to take a wide-ranging view of the system and business instead of becoming hyper-specialised in one component. At large companies I reliably become depressed and burnt-out. I'm my household's sole breadwinner; I can't *afford* to become unable to work. Startups may pay less than FAANGs, but for me at least it's a much more sustainable work environment.
The 2 most dysfunctional companies I ever worked for were also the 2 largest.
Thank you, this explains it perfectly for me.
>Do people just not care about money all that much?
Leaving aside that none of those people are starving, there are other things that people value other than money. If you don't understand that people are not purely instrumentality rational, you won't be able to understand more important phenomena. https://www.ashutoshvarshney.net/s/Nationalism-Ethnic-Conflict-and-Rationality.pdf
a) I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
b) Being part of a fast-moving, rapidly-growing company can be useful experience, especially if you think you might want to do the same sort of thing later.
c) At a good startup, the people around you will be good, too. And pressure can bring out good things in people. Becoming known in professional circles as a good or even just solid performer can help you find jobs later on.
d) To challenge yourself. Be all that you can be, etc.
> I don't know how people do equity these days, but way back when, you could still make a bundle as an early employee.
That stopped being true around 2010 once people figured out how to rig the cap table. Nowadays, only the execs and VCs make any meaningful money on an exit.
> Being part of a fast-moving, rapidly-growing company can be useful experience
It can also be *fun*. And satisfying - you can have a much greater effect on the trajectory of the product and business at a small company.
In 1990 David Foster Wallace wrote a famous essay ostensibly about television addiction and writers of American fiction. The premise is that fiction writers are both natural voyeurs and introverts and therefore end up watching too much TV because that allows them to watch others without being watched themselves. This behavior then influences what the fiction writers write, deleteriously. Notably, it makes them too ironic. Too much TV watching makes the writers cynical because what happens on TV is lame and ripe for ridicule, something the writers become skillful at and employ luxuriously.
According to Wallace, the problem with irony is that it is only useful critically, its only possible message is to say: isn't this dumb?
He doesn't quite spell it out, but he sure seems to associate irony with liberals and sincerity with conservatives. He goes so far as to suggest that truly gutsy fiction might be written by those unafraid to seem too conservative.
I had heard of this essay but only recently read it. Many consider it prescient, but I'm not so sure. As far as recent fiction goes, at least worldwide (have no idea what is going on with American fiction. Is it sexist to call it all chick-lit?) novelists such as Knausgaard and Ferrante are very sincere and unironic yet also are perceived as "on the left" politically to the extent one perceives them politically.
So is irony a liberal thing? If so, why? Is that truer in America than elsewhere?
I hadn't run across this before, but I agree with his general point that irony is unproductive and sterile.
I wouldn't associate it with the left or with liberals, though. Maybe they got a head start, just like China got a head start on covid-19. But by now it's infected all ideologies. I suspect that it has something to do with people who live their life removed from hands-on work, and that's more and more of us, including most of everyone's time spent on the Internet. But the left-leaning tilt of academia and the arts probably explains why irony is more associated with the left. Which of course isn't to say "all academia" or "all arts", as you point out.
Man, 1990 sure was a long, long time ago. We all see liberal sincerity constantly. As for conservatives, there aren't very many of those left, but the burn-it-all-down right wingers who replaced them / who they turned into don't appear to hesitate to use irony in their critiques of what they see as the pieties of the liberal establishment.
I think as liberal rituals become more and more a part of the "establishment" (Pride etc), you'll see more and more examples of public liberal sincerity without irony.
So I'm calling bullshit on the care trolls playing up the Biden cognitive decline story. I just watched his July 12th Detroit speech. Seems like he's got all his marbles, and he's a damn good orator. Better than anything I've seen from Trump (sharks and batteries and sinking boats, oh my!).
https://youtu.be/uE7mDPX_jmk
He had the crowd in the palm of his hand. They started chanting _Don't You Quit!_ and _We Got Your Back!_ Wow!
https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1988/06/19
Go ahead and call it out as loudly as you want while messy reality runs right past you and into a second Trump administration.
Biden was already way behind in the polls even before the debate. The debate was just the final nail in the coffin. And what has been seen can't be unseen.
I mean, I would be elated if Biden somehow got elected, but realistically, he has 0 chance of winning, and the best thing he can do for the country is drop out yesterday.
The impression I get is that people are referring to instances where he needs to interact with an interlocutor rather than reading off a teleprompter or giving a prepared speech.
Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
So, I haven't heard an apology from you for implying I'm a shill and that my opinions can be purchased by Scott.
I get it, you do it for free. I apologize for not recognizing you as a bona fide ridin' with Biden enthusiast.
Thanks! I appreciate that. I wish I *could* make money from being a lefty curmudgeon, though.
Obviously you didn't bother to listen to his speech. These were quotes from the crowd shouting. I added my own wow at the end because he got his audience going. And if you watch him, he's not spending his time reading from a teleprompter. He's continually scanning the audience as he speaks. There may be one or more teleprompters in his field of vision, but if he's reading from them he's quite a speed reader.
Then of course, you had to add an hominem attack on me by calling me a shill. (Scott, where's my pay check?)
beowulf888 is being sarcastic, I recognise the impulse because I indulge in it myself 😀
If someone is paying people to write in Scott's comment sections, hook me up with them because I have no objection to getting money out of my ranting!
"Okay, this week we need someone to get Barack Obama back on the radar, really remind the base that Barack Obama is dangerous. Also, can we find someone to pump the new Lord of the Rings show? Engagement metrics are down."
"Sir, I've found someone who can do *both* with a *single comment*."
/s
> Off topic, am I the only one who gets a strong sense that someone is being paid to post on comments sections when they write things like "damn good", "oh my!" and "Wow!" unironically?
I doubt that beowulf888 is actually getting paid to post here, I just think he's wandered in here from a different and worse section, one where they fancy they're being active mooks in the political battle rather than above-it-all commentators.
I'm not the comment police, people can comment however they want, but it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
>it's a weird contrast with the rest of the comments around here to see someone unironically cheerleading.
I think you're right; it's the contrast with the high-and-mighty smartypants type of comments these parts. It also contrasts with the more absurdist flavour of above-it-all commenting on the seedier parts of the internet.
I'll let the Daily Show talk about Biden. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9LZXheHddI
Jon Stewart is beginning to resemble Awkward Smiling Old Guy in all those memes.
https://www.pinatafarm.com/memegenerator/3c8625ec-4bfe-427a-84a3-00e74e7b9122
I have no problem with seeing Stewart slowly realising he's outdated, because the guy annoyed the hell out of me with his "here's my trenchant political commentary that you should take seriously - ha ha come on, this is a comedy show, don't take it seriously - okay, back to telling you why conservatives are monsters" act. You do current affairs or you do satire, you can't do both. You can mock the politics of the day for all sides, but you can't then be some kind of guru about What The Nation Needs, In All Sincerity.
Now time has moved on, and he's struggling with catching up to what is the Currently Approved Narrative? Good!
> I have no problem with seeing Stewart slowly realising he's outdated, because the guy annoyed the hell out of me
I know. You were recently complaining about a joke he did over 15 years ago.
Maybe it took me 15 years to process the joke, did you ever consider that?
You should be nicer to us old codgers whose brains ain't working too good no more, after all you'll be voting for one in November!
Yes, he's very good at reading a teleprompter. He's been doing that for 50 years and will probably still be good at it for a few hours after his heart stops beating. It's a highly-conditioned reflex activity for him. Watch him try to think on his feet. Watch the debate. He's clearly not there.
>and will probably still be good at it for a few hours after his heart stops beating
LOL! Many Thanks!
I think it's generally acknowledged that he does relatively well giving prepared speeches in rally mode, which involves speaking in a different sort of register and does not involve adversarial questions or quick thinking (and usually takes place in the daytime). So this isn't new, and its usefulness as to the question of his cognitive capacity for running the country.
(I'm senile and forgot to end my sentence)
...is therefore limited.
I can't seem to find a wikipedia article on "rules vs principles". Is this because the distinction between them is considered vague enough to not merit an entry?
I would like to know how the distinction arose historically; google gemini (free version) that I asked only says it was indirectly there even in ancient Greece, and in modern times Ronald Dworkin "significantly developed" the distinction between them. But there are pre-Dworkin people like John Dewey who have made that distinction.
So how did that distinction evolve? Was that nuance forced by challenges that some aspect of modernization threw up?
Rules are about what you DO; principles are about what you VALUE?
Since I don't know the major names involved, let me summarize/adapt from what the free version of google gemini provides, listing some differences between rules and principles:
(i) Rules are specific and concrete (don't lie, select the candidate with the highest score), while principles are broad and general, typically vague (honesty, meritocracy).
(ii) Rules are tailored to desired outcomes in specific contexts, principles to underlying values/ethics in an abstract/universal setting.
(iii) Specificity means you either break the rule or don't, but principles may be realized in multiple ways; and you can tweak mechanisms realizing them to prevent Goodharting.
(iv) Usually someone else punishes you for breaking rules, for principles the drive is mostly internal.
[Edit: For instance, it bothers me much that when I set exams, students with the best combination of talent+diligence etc. are not the ones that score the highest. I am following established rules, still failing the principle. It thus seems important to me to make this distinction. My impression is that historically people didn't distinguish these consciously, since it is easier and lazier to conflate rules with principles -- perhaps the smarter section of the populace had a sense of the distinction but did not articulate it -- but at some point the distinction articulated itself. I would like to know the how and why of this process.]
Close: principals are the rules you choose to follow, and assign to yourself, in order to protect what you value. For example, I value honesty so I follow a principle of never telling a lie. Or I value honor, so I follow a principle of never breaking a promise.
I would say that principles are a kind of rule, much like a square is a kind of quadrilateral. It's a specific kind of rule, imposed by yourself on yourself for the purpose of preventing yourself from violating your own values.
Good definition, thank you!
Canada is once again a laggard in defence, spending only 1.38% of its GDP on defence, in defiance of a NATO guideline to spend at least 2%, a standard most NATO members meet. What should the rest of the alliance to get the slacker Canucks in line?
Relentlessly mock the Canadian Forces as small timers. Play on their insecurity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Canadian_Navy#/media/File:HMCS_St._John's_(FFH_340)_off_Charleston,_South_Carolina_(USA),_on_23_August_2010.jpg
Have you SEEN these doofy things?! And they only have TWELVE? Little leagues.
And they named their nuclear reactors "CANDU". CAN. DU. It's just completely unserious up there. America's hat, man, America's hat.
Can Canada make up the missing 0.62% by supplying NATO poutine MRE rations? :-)
Trump would obviously invite Russia to invade them, like he already has with Europe.
I don't think this is a good idea.
On the contrary, Canadian "Independence" is a fable better left in the 20th C.
The main source of maple syrup are the sugar maple forests split between the United States and Canada. For every year Canada doesn't meet its defense obligation the US gets an equivalent percentage of the total forest until the Canadians are forced to buy it from an American state monopoly.
Us Canadians know that Americans are practically forced to keep us in their sphere of influence for the sake of their own prestige/superpower status, and that means they'll defend us if need be. I admit it's kind of manipulative to take advantage of a friend like this. Sorry, eh.
Realistically if Canada gets kicked out of NATO then Canada doesn't care. It's many orders of magnitude more likely that NATO will oblige Canadian troops to defend Europe than that it will oblige European troops to defend Canada. Geographically, Canada is the only thing that makes NATO a North Atlantic treaty rather than a US-Europe treaty. And it's also the only thing apart from a few polar bears that separates most of the US from most of Russia.
It's not often in international relations that Canada holds all the cards, but this is one of those situations.
Is Canada obliged to defend The King should the UK get in a shooting war?
It is obliged to defend the King of Canada, who is a separate legal entity from the King of the United Kingdom. See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo-Pakistani_war_of_1947%E2%80%931948 (note who reigned in each Dominion at the time).
So if war threatens the King of Canada, who happens to be staying at one of his many residences in the UK, would Canadian commandos swoop in to extract his majesty to Fortress Canada?
No. Canada has been capable of a separate foreign policy since 1917. When Britain declared war in 1914, Canada was automatically also at war, but Canada was a separate signatory to the treaty of Versailles. Canada entered war in 1939 one day after Britain, seemingly to make the point that it was Canada's decision.
It was a week later. Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939. Canada did so on September 10, 1939.
Good question!
The US should threaten to seize all the untapped water power in upper Ontario that the Canucks won't because they are too sensitive about First Nationers "rights", build the world's largest power station on the site and use it to accelerate AI.
Are you going to invade *both* Canada and Mexico all at once now? This will end well...
But only if the power station has a little sign put up saying that acknowledges that it has been built on the unceded ancestral land of the Canadian people. It's only fair.
Offer to trade parts of Canada to Russia in exchange for Ukraine? 31% sounds about right...
Question for those with deep math smarts. I”ll give the short version first, then some background. Companies doing high-frequency trading develop predictive algorithms that let them profit from their correct predictions. They develop the algorithms using the data from recent trades, which can be expressed as formulas, in which the variables are things like how fast something sold, in milliseconds, how fast it sold at a recent price that was x% higher or lower, how fast some related thing sold, how fast the prices of various things are rising or falling, etc. But there are a huge number of possible variables that might be predictors of whatever one wants to predict, and even if you were told which variables are predictors there are a huge number of equations that can describe how they predict: do you square the time or the price, or cube it, or use the ratio of it to something else, etc.
Formulas that predict changes in the market are then fed into a non-neural net form of machine learning called NES, Natural Evolution Strategy, and the result if the golden algorithm (but only if you fed it good formulas). So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
This question comes out of a talk I just had with someone who has been working in finance doing programming, but is interested in the intellectual challenge and possible financial rewards of the question I asked. The person and I were brainstorming about how to find formulas that predict trading in the near future. (I have no math beyond calculus one, and very lttle knowledge of the financial industry, but I like brainstorming).
So my questions are:
-First, do any of you math people have a view about this?
-My suggestion was that the person talk to a statistician who specializes in working with very messy data — maybe something involving biology or turbulent flow. Seemed to me like they would know techniques for extracting from it the variables with predictive power, and formulas that capture what they predict. Is that a useful suggestion?
-If not, what kind of statistician should the look for?
-If not a statistician, who the hell should they talk to?
I know someone who works for a high frequency trading company. Their profit comes from two things:
1) Super-fast connections to the stock exchange computer. They built their computers next to it so that they are a few milliseconds faster than everyone else. So, they pick up the signals that just everyone else also knows, but their cable is so short that their signal arrives faster.
2) They get paid by the stock exchange company for it. High-frequency trading also serves a purpose for the stock market: it provides liquidity and acts as counterpart for the bids/offers that other people take. That provides value, and the stock exchange company pays for it.
I don't know the exact formulas for 1), but I think they are very, very simple. Like: if there are many people who want to sell, probably the stock price goes down. I don't think it's much more fancy than that. I don't think they try to come up with sophisticated models that predict the market for more than a few milliseconds.
I don't know whether all high-frequency trading companies work like that, though.
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
I think allot of this is bullshit, but if I had to pick a "signal" outside the shitposting of wsb, id look at arbitrage between exchanges as a signal; i.e. when america is awake, an english speaking market is a stronger "signal" then an asian one, and you'd take the a weighted sum of the "order book" from exchanges based on the hour of day.
What people talk about using as signals is literally any- and every-thing "ais reading twitter","gme up, use as a signal to buy gold", and its very important to remember novice day traders lose money at rates worse then most casinos. Its a worthless term, its *good* to be confused what it means.
This is high frequency trading, though. Time of events is measured in milliseconds, and signals have to be things happening within a few milliseconds of a trade. I think that automatically precludes using wsj bullshit, stuff in the news, etc.
There are people stupid enough to auto download elon musk tweets that scan for cyptro currencies trickers and "sentiment analysis" ai's; thats "high frequency" and using "signals"
> So the question is, how does one search for what’s called the “signals,” the variables that have predictive power?
That is indeed the tricky part. You use a combination of mathematics and intuition. The mathematics is the easy part. Mathematics on its own only get you so far, because the whole field of quant finance is rife with multiple testing problems -- if you test enough arbitrarily-constructed signals then you'll surely find stuff that appears to work but doesn't. On the other hand, if you stick to the most intuitively obvious and sensible signals then you won't get anywhere because everyone uses those.
About finding things that appear to work but don’t —that comes up in social science research too, so I know a bit about it. If you do multiple t-tests, for instance, and a bunch of them make it at just about the .05 level of significance, then you can expect approx 5% of them to be false positives. There’s a stat you use in that situation to correct for the problem of multiple tests. It might be called Cohen’s D, and then again it may not, but anyhow there’s a way to correct for for that. Is that the math you had in mind? Or some other math?
I’d rephrase your question as, “How do you do blackbox machine learning on high dimensional inputs?” I think the term your friend is looking for is “Auto ML” [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automated_machine_learning]. AutoML is about abstracting the standard approach ML devs take when modeling a problem. I don’t think your friend wants a statistician for advice, but a AutoML expert. I don't know anyone who actually uses NES in practice. Here are a few standard approaches:
The classic approach: Let’s assume you’re working with a simple linear model and thousands of inputs. So many you won’t ever actually mentally visualize them all. You then (as Jeffrey Soreff suggested) take the polynomial of them, I typically go to the 5th power, and also the inputs multiplied by each other. Then you get so many input variables that you can’t really work easily with it. So you can use a L1 weight regularization, which will force many of the weights to zero and any input with a zero you discard and only use the inputs with non-zero weights. You’ll have to tune the hyper-parameter for the L1 weight penalty because it’s easy to end up over-pruning. This is the standard advice, but I don’t really do it in practice. It works okay, but the following two options are better in practice. [https://scikit-learn.org/stable/auto_examples/linear_model/plot_logistic_l1_l2_sparsity.html]
A neural network: A NN can model a very large number of functions (if it’s infinitely wide it’s a universal approximator and if it’s infinitely deep it’s Turing Complete). In practice, it won’t be infinitely wide or deep, but still models a very large number of functions. The main challenge of working with neural nets in practice isn’t that it can’t model what you want it to model, rather the challenge is that it too easily overfits and models it in ways that don’t generalize. But a neural net is doing what your friend wants: take in a large number of blackbox inputs and then “test” a large number of functions with those inputs. Unlike the “classic approach” you don’t usually square/cube the inputs to a NN because you don’t have to. It’ll learn to do that if it needs to.
A non-neural net approach: I’d suggest a fun project is that your friend goes to sklearn and then makes a little tool where they take various preprocessing modules (Normalizer, StandardScaler, MinMaxScaler) and then make a Pipeline that treat the preprocessing step itself as a hyperparameter. Then have a series of sklearn models (eg, RandomForest, RidgeRegression, NaiveBayes) and treat the model itself as a hyper parameter. Alternatively, just assume that you’re going to use all of them, and what you’re learning is the ensemble. This might sound strange, but remember that AutoML is just automating the overall approach. This is more or less what DataRobot and a lot of other AutoML tools do. What’s fun and challenging about this approach is that your friend would build it to work with a couple datasets when developing it and then test it out on a completely different dataset that’s it’s never seen before.
Yep, I second this response. The data is too high dimensional, and too time-dependent, for a single person with regular computing resources to really do much. There's whole architectures of synthetic variables, hyperparameter tuning, variable selection, a suite of different modeling algorithms, and model drift monitoring and retuning going on at blazing fast speeds to actually do real algorithmic HFT these days.
What you want to actually do it right is a team of ML experts and mathematicians with financial domain expertise, and some serious (and geographically local to the HFT exchange) computing clusters.
I understand all this only in a limited kind of way, but am pretty sure it’s an awesome answer. Thank you!
Yes, you want a statistician.
For a _linear_ model, there are efficient multiple linear regression techniques https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linear_regression which can efficiently minimize the error in the model, even with many potentially important independent variables, going all the way back to
>the least squares method, which was published by Legendre in 1805, and by Gauss in 1809
For nonlinear models, the problem gets arbitrarily complicated :-(
For mildly nonlinear cases, one can extend multiple linear regression by adding powers and cross-products of the independent variables to the regression. E.g. if you have X, Y, and Z as your independent variables, you can add X^2, Y^2, Z^2, X*Y, Y*Z, X*Z to the regression as if they were independent variables - but if you start with N independent variables, you have N(N+1)/2 second order terms, O(N^3) third order terms and so on, so this becomes unreasonable very quickly.
Thank you.!
Yes, I suggested linear regression, which I'm familiar with from social science statistics. The person said some of the relationships in the crucial formulas are non-linear -- they're u-shaped or s-shaped -- and then they added that non-linear stats get out of control fast. I think that was a less clear way of saying what you just said. My next thought was, maybe linear regression is still adequate if there aren't all that many non-linear relationships among the variables in the mass. I mean, it seems like your identification of the set of variable behaviors that have predictive power doesn't have to be perfect to get enough prediction out of the result to have an advantage. You can have some bad variables in your set, and be missing some good ones, and still have a set that works. Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Also, I don't understand why neural net type machine learning does not work. Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data? You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
“ Why can't you just train the machine on the last month's data?”
Excellent question. The reason is that once you discover a signal in the past data it stops being useful. Because your / others using it arbitrages away the inefficiency that was the potentially profitable signal.
You see how it’s different from cancerous moles. Our discovery of their patterns doesn’t affect the moles, unlike trading patterns that get immediately affected by our attempts to trade them.
You mean all then high frequency trading firms are constantly tweaking their algorithms by analyzing the most recent trading data and using the info in it to get a predictive edge -- but all the firms are finding the same stuff, so doing that analysis doesn't get you an edge -- it just keeps them from having an edge over you? Yikes. The picture in my mind was manic and mechanistic enough without that. Just the idea of a bunch of computers competing for a one-millisecond edge and millions of tiny meaningless trades was creepy enough. So I have some questions:
-Do you know for a fact that you can't just feed the last month's data to a neural net and then use it to make a predictive algorithm today because everybody else is doing the same? Or is that just something you've reasoned out -- seems to you like it must be true? The reason I ask is that is not what the person that started me asking this question described. That person had been programming at a financial firm, not working on the predictive algorithm, but they told me that the algorithm was something their firm had acquired or built, and they talked about it as something that stayed the same for -- I dunno, months? And it was jealously guarded, like the formula for coke. And it was made up of hundreds of formulas, each about a tiny little matter: If sales of this stock does that, then the chance of some certain other thing happening rises by 10% -- lots of that shit.
-Also, if you're right, how the hell DO the high frequency traders keep pulling in money? Is it that they all pull in about the same amount, because they're all staying on top of the predictors equally well, so the firms that know how to use ML to mine the data for predictors just sort of split the money equally? Or are some firms better than others, and if so how DO they get a predictive advantage?
So I thought about an interesting kink to this situation. Everything in my previous comment is kind of regurgitating relatively straightforward knowledge about how markets operate. But these relatively new ML tools may create an interesting opportunity that may work well for people like your friend.
- The tools are new, and vary in their approaches
- The tools are expensive and nearly not as ubiquitous as "previous generation" tools are
- Therefore they may be able to find really complex inefficiencies that will not be quickly arbitraged out of existence, so they indeed may be able to profit from "last months' patterns" for awhile
Everybody else, not having these tools, will find their trading profits shrink further - the excess profits of the new kids on the block have to come from someone.
To your last question first because it's easy: commenter demost_ described how high-freq traders make money. The durable edge comes from location and execution speed, and most money is made in market-making activities, selling to buyers and buying from sellers and making "1/100 of a penny" on each transaction, but in insane volumes.
The manic and mechanistic picture in your mind is mostly correct - vast majority of trading is done by computer algos, this is really different from the markets, say, 20 years ago. Now, again, I wouldn't call it entirely meaningless, providing liquidity and price discovery is a useful service.
The most interesting question is indeed about the predictive algorithm:
- I do know that patterns get arbitraged out, this is a well-understood phenomenon in market analysis.
- Having said that, there still are patterns that persist because they are driven by factors that cannot be arbitraged; the most famous one that still looks to be going strong is the Presidential cycle (year 2 bad, year 3 good). You don't need a fancy algo for this one, but the time horizon is decades, not days, and it still is better to just cost-average into your 401k.
- The markets are so vast and chaotic, it is not surprising that someone may find a pattern that others haven't yet. But the space is ruthless, everyone is constantly looking for an edge, so outperformance may stop/reverse at any moment. You kind of never know if you're smart or lucky; moreover, since all traders combined are "the market", there must be those who's returns are above average.
Thank you for taking so much time to thoughtfuylly answer my questions. I think I have just one more.
Let’s say there’s a park marked off into squares by letters going E-W and numbers going N-S, and there’s a contest for who can most accurately predict how many people are in each Square (A 1, A2 ….N-17) on a given day. And there are macro things every body knows: More people are in the park in good weather, and during daylight. If there’s a well-publicized crime in the park attendance drops. Etc. And then there smaller-scale things it’s not hard to figure out: More people on the tennis court squares on weekends. Few on the little kid play equipment 1-3 pm, because they’s when little kids nap. If you observed closely you could find some more. Maybe few parents with young kids hang out near the basketball court because the guys playing always swear. So I think of those big, easy-to-find things as the things that can be taken advantage of by everybody, i.e. arbitraged out. If that’s all the contestants had to go on, then on contest day, everybody’s estimate of how many are in each square fill take into account the big obvious rules, so everybody will tie.
But surely there also exist tiny little regularities you’d never think of, and that occur for who knows what reason, and the only way to find them would be to systematically go through the populations of all the squares at all times on all days of the week in, let’s say, summer. So you could say, what else happens on average when the population of A1 goes up at 3 pm? And maybe you’d find that the populations of B3 and K7 go down 80% of the time when A1 goes up. Or that the ratio of B3 population to K7 population stays between 2:1 and 2: 1.6 70% of time. ETc ETc. Obviously the number of relationships like that you could check for is huge. And of those you found, some would be hust coincidence, and would not hold in any other time span, but others would be valid. All that make sense?
OK, so those little tiny regularities are the ones I have in mind, mainly because the person I talked with made clear that that was what his firm’s algorithm consisted of: hundreds of little regularities like my example, except about trades of course, that allowed them to make 1/100 of a cent a million times per day. So maybe something like (and I’m just making this up): On days when the avg price of a certain class of stock is 20% or more above average, then the biggest price discrepancies from which the firm can make money will be in *other* classes of stock, and 85% of them will be in the lowest-priced of those stocks. So it does seem to me that rules like this are in an entirely different class from the 0dd/even good/bad year rule you talked about, or other big obvious trends everybody knows. It seems like one company could come up with a good batch of little predictive formulas, and if the percent that were not true predictors wasn’t too high, the algorithm made out of the hundreds of little mostly right tiny rules would give them a substantial advantage, so long as other company’s batches of formulas were less good. Does that seem plausible to you?
And it does seem like training an AI to recognize whatever the magic configuration of tiny predictors is is the only way to come at it. So yeah your comment about the new ML tools seems right. Also, when I roam around reading this and that about ML, it seems like there are many varieties of it, and also many techniques for tweaking the AI the optimize its efficiency in a certain domain. And new tweaks are being invented all the time. So there’s lots of room for variation even off all companies are using ML.. The person who chooses the best variety of ML and tweaks it in the optimal way will get the best result. Also it seems like people who have done a lot of work with ML get sort like horse people are about horses: they just know lots of little stuff about how to get a result, lots of little tweaks and remedies. . “Oh, he shies when you pass that part of the trail. OK, he’s probably doing it because X, Here are 3 things to try.” I mean that people get good at AI-wrangling.
For those reasons, I feel hopeful about how my friend”s going to do. Just so you know, they’re not doing this on their own, with their own money. They talked their way into a job where that is what they will be working on — tweaking the algorithm. They’ve got a couple mos. before they start, and are studying and experimenting like mad so they will be up to the work. (I don’t want say anything much about this person because I am talking about them online, but suffice it to say there is very persuasive evidence that their ability to master this kind of material, and solve novel problems is extraordinarily high.)
Many Thanks!
>Then I wondered if there was some math that allowed you to estimate what fraction of the variables in a big messy phenomenom are signals.
Yup (if a linear model is reasonable). Basically, it comes down to what fraction of the variance of the predicted variable is accounted for by any specified one of the independent variables but this gets complicated (and beyond what I know!) when the independent variables are correlated. If they were all uncorrelated, I think it comes down to just the variance of the independent variable times the β, the coefficient of the independent variable. But if the independent variables are correlated (in the extreme case, collinear, linearly dependent, like temperature in both Fahrenheit and Celsius (as the web page mentioned)) then the solution for the linear model can basically pick either of them or any combination and it carries the same information.
[This is close to, but not quite the same as, the ANOVA package that you've probably encountered. I haven't used it myself. The https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Analysis_of_variance describes some of this, but phrased in terms of distinguishing two or more discrete groups rather than ascribing variance in a data set to (sets of) independent variables.]
>You can train a machine to recognise cancerous moles by just showing it a bunch of moles and telling it which are cancerous and which not, as I understand it. You don't have to tell it to look for certain characteristics, just keep having it look at moles and guess and the, find out if it's right or wrong, And at the end it will be very good at identifying the cancerous moles, but won't be able to tell you what its formula is. Isn't it sort of the same thing to show it a bunch of trades, some that made money and some that did not, and all the data around the trade, such as whether the price for the item went up or down -- and then after a while the machine can tell you, for any given possible trade, whether it will make money or not?
Yes, but note that these models have been hammered at with all the expertise the finance industry can buy, so they've probably tweaked every knob that can be tweaked on them - e.g. for the neural nets, numbers of layers, convergence rates, numbers or repetitions of the data set, tradeoffs between how many barely-plausible independent variables to add vs how intensively to fit to a smaller set of independent variables etc.
Sending all this on to my friend. Thanks so much.
Actually the person I was talking with said they do not use neural nets. They *first* identify the signals,(how they do it my friend does not know), then they feed them into some sort of machine learning system that is NOT a neural set, and do a
process calle d the Natural
Evolution Strategy . Does that make any sense to you? They said it was described in Wikipedia but I did not look it up because I don’t have the background to understand it.
Many Thanks! This gets beyond my knowledge too. I see the Wikipedia page on Natural Evolution Strategy, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_evolution_strategy . At a _very_ abstract level it is again a version of trying to optimize the parameters of a model in order to maximize "fitness" (presumably equivalent to minimizing some measure of error).
> From the samples, NES estimates a search gradient on the parameters towards higher expected fitness. NES then performs a gradient ascent step along the natural gradient, a second order method which, unlike the plain gradient, renormalizes the update with respect to uncertainty. This step is crucial, since it prevents oscillations, premature convergence, and undesired effects stemming from a given parameterization. The entire process reiterates until a stopping criterion is met.
I can see why the more robust gradient is desirable, but I'm not following what is the exact difference fro the regular gradient and why it prevents the problems they describe with the regular gradient.
They use the derivative of the _log_ of the probability distribution with respect to the model parameters, rather than the derivative of the raw probability distribution. I can see that this would make the gradient descent e.g. insensitive to a scaling of the probability distribution. They say that it also gives
>the gradient direction is independent of the parameterization of the search distribution
which I can see is desirable, and I assume that they are correct about it, but I'm not following how that is derived.
I'm not an expert but I think looking for variables with predictive power is what every research scientist does, and it is hard. It's about formulating hypotheses based on hunches and testing them.
It's one of those: Where do ideas come from? questions. I don't think anyone knows the answer.
Well I think high frequency traders have algorithms which automatically do that somehow. I think OP is asking about how those work.
Pretty sure algorithms do not do that.
Sort of. There are, e.g., feature selection & dimensionality reduction algorithms that can be used to identify what signals (or combinations thereof) are useful inputs to actual predictive models, but they operate only on the dataset available (however large & noisy that may be); finding new data sources to feed the pipeline bottoms out with some manual decision eventually.
"102. One can't proceed from the informal to the formal by formal means." (https://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html)
Here's a survey of theories of consciousness, all two hundred plus of them. I bet they're all wrong. ;-)
_A landscape of consciousness: Toward a taxonomy of explanations and implications_
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0079610723001128
Ugh, no offense but honestly Philosophy of Consciousness is nothing but a honeypot for blowhards. There is no basis to speculate about it and what basis there is points obviously to it being the emergent result of some neural-computational process. Everything else is 100% woo. Who the hell reads these pretentious blowhards other than other blowhards who want to get in on the scam?
Prescient comment. Check out the latest guest post and the comments going on about how it doesn't address 'the hard problem'
There's something to what you say about blowhards and the philosophy/science of consciousness. But if it's a solely a neural computational process why can't we explain how we get from a neuron firing to a model of consciousness that is testable?
It's a hard problem! We didn't know about atoms until a couple centuries ago but that didn't mean that matter was made of angels or whatever. God of the gaps type of arguments rarely age well.
But we're working on it. Eventually we'll get there.
And I've been wading through Curt Jaimungal's interview with Bernardo Kastrup —who argues for idealism. I'm definitely not a materialist. And I find some (but not all) of Kastrup's arguments convincing, but I'm not quite an idealist either. I guess I'm a Kantian Phenomenalist...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lAB21FAXCDE
Why aren't you a materialist? Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation. This includes many things that used to have non-materialist explanations. Doesn't that trend make you skeptical of non-materialism?
Also...
> Everything that we understand well enough to know how it works always, 100% of the time, has a materialist explanation.
I had a friend (now deceased) who was a High Energy Physicist (and who was not a materialist BTW). Somehow it came up in conversation that sometimes he'd get wacky results, and he would rerun the experiment to make sure they went away. If the wacky results disappeared, he was happy. I asked him why he didn't try to figure out why he got a wacky result. He laughed and said, "If it's not reproducible, it's not real." I said, "It doesn't necessarily follow that if it's not reproducible, it's not real." He replied that his grants and team members determined what was real. And chasing down why an experiment misfired was a waste of his accelerator time. Even so, I got the impression that he bought into the quantum idealism of Bohr and his crew, but he was practical about his research agenda. I would tease him about the Nobel Prizes he was missing out on because he accidentally detected some rare intermittent phenomenon. Half seriously, he replied that he wanted to retire without getting laughed at by his peers. Sensible fellow.
Like I said, I'm closest to a Kantian Phenomenalist. I don't deny there's a real reality out there, but we're not perceiving it. We perceive only a highly edited and redacted version of it. For instance, I hold a rose in my hand, I look at it and sniff it. I see color and sense a scent. Is the color that I perceive "real"? The petals are reflecting certain wavelengths of light, but the visual color we assign to wavelengths is determined by the rods and cones of our retinas. If our rods and cones vary from the norm for our species, we're color blind. And according to one of Scott's posts, there are some who claim to see more colors than normal because they have a mutation to their rods and cones. So quality of color isn't real outside our biological framework. Likewise, for scent. We assign the quality of sweetness to the rose's scent molecules, but that's meaningless in a materialist sense. Likewise, the scale of our perception is fine-tuned to our environment, but we are unable to perceive that the rose in reality is mostly composed of atoms arranged in a matrix around empty space. So I agree with Kastrup in that our consciousness is like a pilot flying a plane by IFR. The instruments on the console should not be mistaken for the world outside the plane.
Ok, all of what you just said is consistent with consciousness being a neural-computational process with noisy sensors connecting it to the world. Subjective experience is simply some complicated computational feedback loop: sweetness is when this neuron fires in this way and we associate it with nice things because the memory associations release dopamine. Or some such. Subjective experience is just some weird outgrowth of the way the brain monitors its own internal processes, and the only reason it's mysterious is because we haven't mapped it out yet. We will.
The last two sentences do concisely represent a very common faith.
Agreed. It's well-founded, but of course could be wrong. I'd bet heavily that it isn't.
One of the problems is that for pretty much the entire history of science scientists have taken things that can't be quantified or measured and placed them in the domain of the mind. For example, beauty. You can't measure beauty, you can't weigh it, you can't quantify it ("This painting has 1.25 gigagoghs worth of beauty"), so it get's labeled as a subjective experience that is "in your mind" as opposed to "in the world." See also morality, qualia, and consciousness. It drew a bright line between the objective and material world and the subjective mental world. That worked really well: if you want to know how gravity works, or a chemical reaction, you focus on the objective aspects of it, as the subjective questions of whether gravity is "good" or "beautiful" don't help you learn how it works. You can just relegate those aspects of reality to the mind.
This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind. It's a bit like cleaning the room by sweeping things under the rug, and then trying to clean under the rug by sweeping things under the rug. It doesn't work anymore.
The current materialist answer to this problem is to deny that things like morality, consciousness, beauty, etc, even exist at all. We may experience such things, but they are only illusions. We think we make choices, and are concious, and experience qualia, but that's a mistake. Which is not a satisfying answer (as C. S. Lewis once wrote, "I will never believe—more strictly I can’t believe—that one set of physical events could be, or make, a mistake about other sets"). What's worse is that everything we experience is experienced through the lens of the mind, so if the mind is an illusion, or is just the experience of a physical algorithm playing out, then how can I trust any of the scientific observations I have made that convinced me of materialism in the first place? Thoughts are not like physical events; they are "about" things, and they can be true or false. Yet if my thoughts are just physical events occurring in my brain, then how can they be about anything, or be true or false? Electrons moving across cells can't be "true" or "false" they just are, and one atom colliding with another isn't "about" anything, it just is.
So it's a bit of a bait and switch to say "Everything we understand has a materialist explanation, so the mind must have one too" when you only found a purely materialist explanation for everything else by taking all the aspects of the thing in question that can't be explained by materialism and filing it away under "the mind".
That doesn’t make much sense to me. There’s no violation in materialism in believing that we are conscious, or perceive qualia or make choices, or that even free will exists. Materialists just argue that’s happening in the brain, not in some other unexplained phenomenon.
Definitely not in the foot. Hence why most people, materialist or not, would prefer to be shot in the foot, not the brain.
How can an atom experience qualia? How can a process make a choice? How can the movement of an electron be beautiful, or true, or valid? Materialists have faith that even if it seems completely illogical, somehow all these things reduce to movements in the brain. Yet I don't see how it is logically possible. If all our beliefs are epiphenomenons produced by material processes, then they can't be true or false or valid or invalid. They just are, the way all physical processes are. Yet, materialism is one of those self same epiphenomenal beliefs with no truth value, so why should I believe it?
Aren't you just reducing so far you can't *see* any emergent forest for the trees, though? Even uncontroversial, fully materially measurable things?
The subatomic level isn't the right level to consider most attributes, and saying that you can't measure truth or beauty at the electron level doesn't say anything meaningful.
How can the movement of a photon of a certain wavelength be "red?"
How can the coordinated movements of a big enough collection of subatomic particles be "playing catch with your son?"
Yet the epiphenomenons of "red" and "playing catch with your son" are still useful and describe measurable, material things in the world.
How can a process make a choice? A flowchart or algorithm written by an expert can make a better choice than most, and literally billions of dollars of choices and real-world impacts are made this way every day.
If things like "processes making choices" impact real world decisions, outcomes, and actions every day, they are indeed real, and measurable. And if there are such things as "better" or "worse" decisions, it's because the better decisions are closer to "truth" and "intended outcomes" and things like that.
It's just a short jump from there to "justice" and "fame" and "beauty," and whatever else you want.
These are things that require a collection of minds perceiving and cooperating, but they are nonetheless real. Fame is measurable enough, and so is beauty, and so is justice. The right level to measure them isn't with a discrete instrument, but by polling or aggregating across many minds in a given group. Just like the right level to measure "playing catch with your son" isn't by detecting the subatomic particles involved, or the molecules or cells or organs involved, for that matter.
And actually, we probably CAN build an instrument for measuring those more abstract "collective opinion" things now. You don't think that GPT 5 or 6 will be able to give a 1-10 ranking in line with a "random sample of 10k people were given this media / scenario, and ranked the fame / beauty / justice as X on a 1-10 scale?" on any of those or other attributes? I'd definitely bet on this. So we can even build an impartial, objective detection instrument.
And materialism has no truth value?? The whole reason most people here adhere to it, is precisely because it makes more and better predictions than any other explanatory framework. "Making better predictions" is as close to "being closer to the truth" as you can *get*.
I don't often agree with you FLWAB, but I stand with you 100 percent on this.
>This works beautifully, until you suddenly try the same method on understanding the mind itself; now you have to deal with all those subjective aspects of reality that you relegated to the mind.
I don't understand how that's a problem at all. Things like beauty and morality _aren't_ objectively definable. They're emergent processes. When the brain is perfectly modeled and understood we'll be able to point to neural processes that encode things like "beauty" but it won't be a unitary thing because everyone has a different internal representation of abstract concepts. It's like some primitive looking at porn on a laptop and then demanding to know where precisely inside the laptop the woman was. It's not a coherent question.
Everything is materialist, even consciousness.
>Everything is materialist, even consciousness
That's a statement taken on faith. You are a materialist, you don't yet know a materialist explanation for something, you have faith an explanation will be found. Others do not share your faith. Many of them don't see how a materalist explanation is possible.
Take, for example, truth or falsehood. Thoughts can be true or false, just as logic can be valid or invalid. Yet if our thoughts are reducible to the movement of electrons, how can they be true or false? The movement of electrons is not true or false, and atoms are not valid or invalid. Look at anything material, you won't find any veracity or validity within it. You can say "well the thought itself is an emergent process" but processes also are not true or false, or valid or invalid. Those subjective qualities do not exist in matter; yet they exist in our thoughts. That wasn't a problem when the thing we were studying was outside our mind, such as rocks or rockets, but when we study the mind itself we find a lot of elements that don't seem to be reducible to physical processes. For example, you might believe I am mistaken about materialism; yet how can a process be mistaken about anything?
You're conflating a physical process with the semantic content of that process. "True or false" is an abstraction that doesn't exist outside of a semantic system. The fact that semantic systems (like computers, like brains) have physical substrates which operate by rules which are independent of the semantic rules they produce is irrelevant. You're just failing to understand emergence.
I tend to ask people who are not materialist on consciousness whether they would prefer to be shot in the head or the foot.
To which I would reply, "How can a physical process like myself make a choice?"
The same way a thermostat decides to turn the heat on: a complex deterministic process that is initiated by an environmental input.
It is as you say, I have as much choice in the matter as the thermostat does.
In a sense this is true. However unlike a thermostat you're a nonlinear system which can operate on itself. You can also respond to complex external stimuli such as internet comments and respond to social incentives like praise or punishment. As such it is practical to model you as having free will, though in a strict physical sense you don't. But the people who punish or criticize you for doing things they disapprove of don't have free will either so it all balances out in the end.
My response to you would be, does it take a straw man to make a straw man fallacy?
That wasn't a straw man. It was a joke that cleverly gets to the heart of the issue. If materialism is false then why should you care about your brain.
If materialism is true, then how can you care about anything? Atoms do not care. Electrons do not care. Processes do not care. They are all that exists, therefore caring is an illusionary epiphenomenon that emerges from the processes in our neurons.
I don't care. I simply have the illusion that I do. I care because the atoms in my brain have been carefully designed by millennia of evolution in order to direct my limited cognitive resources towards things which have maximum salience to my survival. This gives me the subjective experience of negotiating a complex internal landscape of competing drives. None of this changes the fact that I'm nothing but a complicated deterministic computing machine that has zero freedom to choose its behaviors. But my programming makes me act like I think I can.
All of your arguments are word salad that equivocate between different levels of abstraction in a way that allows you to draw meaningless conclusions. Sparring with you is mildly entertaining but I'm going to stop responding to you pretty soon.
Well a literal straw man wouldn’t have a brain, despite what you see in the movies, so no?
I’m not sure why you think my argument is a straw man but that’s possibly because I don’t fully understand the immaterialist version of consciousness you believe in, so that’s one me. Perhaps.
The same question was asked of Sam "The Mind is an Illusion" Harris some years back. It's as much a strawmanly argument used against the materialists as it is against the idealists—because it ignores the fact that both idealists and materials can feel pain and fear the dissolution of consciousness. Furthermore, it doesn't get us any further down the road to answering what's going on with consciousness.
Here's my COVID update for the past two epidemiological weeks (epi weeks 27 and 28). I'm wondering if this summer wave isn't losing steam...
https://x.com/beowulf888/status/1812919567888621924
any good statistical election models you guys are keeping track? The 538 one seems hopelessly broken/useless. The one from the economist seems interesting and I'm not in a position to purchase a Nate Silver's subscription right now
Nate has the paid one, the economist's model closely tracks his. lates numbers are around 75-25
Even if you don't have a subscription, Nate will often mention his current forecast numbers in his free posts. The last time he did was July 9th, where he mentioned that according to his forecast Biden had a 29% chance of winning.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/biden-has-a-weak-hand
I submit that it is somewhat of an exaggeration to say that the media is now aware that Biden has significantly declined cognitively
I thought it was just Matt Yglesias memeing but it turns out there were several major outlets that ran "cheapfake" stories to prime interpretations as the debate approached
I am cynical about the media's capability and motivation to report facts accurately but this seriously updated me. It is quite possible to not have really noticed Biden's gaffes, to let them slide off your existing perception and go on. But to watch the G7 video where Biden literally wanders off from the group photoshoot until a few of the other leaders actually corralled him, and then to run cover stories about cheapfake editing is shocking. You're not glancing off a potential reality here, you're driving into it perpendicularly with essentially no regard to the possibility of it being true
What epistemology could possibly have this effect? I think it's a simple algorithm:
FOR each FactRelevantToLiberalGoals
IsTrue = (LikelihoodofTruth * .1) * FactorofUsefulness
Apologies to actual coders. How could you see Biden wrangling by fellow G7 leaders and write "cheapfake narrative"? Because the likelihood of truth was totally irrelevant compared to the factor of usefulness for Biden to be fine. This isn't a lie, this is an algorithm where truth is a marginal factor
Therefore, the media does not now know that Biden has declined. They know that it is now useful to liberal goals to observe that. The weighting of the likelihood of something being true will be adjusted - according to its usefulness
But how could it be useful to liberal goals to have the public thinking Biden has declined?
It's now useful because he can still be replaced. Rather than observing that Biden has declined, they are observing that Biden has declined to the point where it would improve the D's odds to replace him
If he remains the candidate they may advance to observing that it would be useful to redirect campaign efforts into Congressional races
I think you misunderstand what drives liberals. Liberals are continual worriers. Unlike Republicans, who will circle their wagons and defend their members to the end, Dems will throw their candidates to the wolves at any sign of scandal or disgrace. But no one on the Dem side has the chops to replace Biden as a candidate. Unfortunately, the Biden administration hasn't given Kamala Harris a higher-profile portfolio to put her in the public eye. Despite the cognitive tempests in the media teapots, Biden's post-debate numbers have recovered to where they were.
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/12/nx-s1-5036518/biden-trump-poll
And the media, who are like five-year-old kids chasing a soccer ball, will be obsessing about the Trump assassination attempt for the next week or two. Trump may earn some sympathy points in the polls. But I expect this will fade as people listen to him blather on. And really there's no comparison between the two. Take a look at these excerpts from the speeches that Trump and Biden gave the same week. Other than Biden's speech impediment, he holds it together quite well.
https://www.tiktok.com/@meidastouch/video/7390410547264507179
Meanwhile, the Dems will find something else to worry about. And Republicans will concern troll their fears.
Sorry for the Facebook link but worth pointing out that media spin goes both ways. Here’s another angle on the G7 corralling:
https://www.facebook.com/NBCNews/videos/360608387044971
In this one you can tell he’s giving a thumbs up to a different group of paratroopers. He still looks slow-moving, and I’d agree there’s something somewhat patronizing about how he’s treated by the others, but he clearly isn’t wandering off because he forgot where he was. I hadn’t seen that before and found the second perspective with a quick Google.
Does that change your thoughts on that particular example, or is that what you mean by cheapfake editing claims?
I got page not found but found a fantastic example on YouTube by France 24 doing a fact check on the video. I think it's representative without an additional angle as France 24 does not have that angle
In their version of the uncropped video you can additionally see one sky diver who is packing up his parachute and never looks up as Biden gives a thumbs up. Likely Biden had found a larger group there, some of whom did see him approach and interacted. It's not in the video, and they might have been all packing their parachutes - not a normal photoshoot item
Meanwhile the entire G7 group moves and shuffles towards Biden as Meloni brings him back into the location and orientation they were all in
France 24, with perfect confidence and aplomb, reports this as a clear debunking of an informationless cheapfake. This cannot be based on the facts they were in possession of, all they have is a diver who isn't looking! They didn't interact with the unedited video deeply enough to notice that. All they noticed is that they had enough information (there was an edit) to make a claim that would be plausible enough to others, and themselves, that would be useful
https://youtu.be/O-0zT4VN-dw?si=OckpR9aIkm-k9WUs
If anything is more important to you than honesty, you’ll lie to advance that subgoal.
This includes honesty with yourself, about your motivations and reasons for acting.
I don’t think a person can avoid lying to themselves unless they are scrupulously careful about not lying to others.
It can simultaneously be true that Biden has declined, and that people posted misleadingly clipped/cropped videos to try and show it.
As for the media, when there's a huge explosion of stories on a single subject in response to a public event, I think there's a dynamic going on where a lot of journos wanted to report on something but couldn't quite "get there". Then there's a public "hook" and the floodgates open everyone rushes to dump their story out.
Reminds me of when Trump Jr tweeted out copies of emails showing their attempts to collude with the Russian government in 2016, and a reporter said something like "I've been working on this story for a year, I could never quite get enough verification to run it, after all that work I can't believe he just tweeted it out".
Not that there hasn't been public reporting on this, especially from the WSJ and also around the time of Robert Hur's report.
This isn't unique to the left, let alone the American left. It's what happens when people prioritize "loyalty to the cause" and "winning" over "truth".
Yes, Biden's obvious senility is a huge indictment of the national news media. They were obviously being aggressively partisan in their coverage which has done direct damage to the country - at least to the extent that you consider having an openly senile incumbent as the Democratic Nominee to be damaging, which I do.
Another explanation: What is "obvious" to you not actually true. I am hardly a partisan, but it is impossible to have watched the NATO press conference and infer that he is "obviously senile." Which of course is different than the question of whether he is likely to be able to serve as President until January of 2029.
Sure, anything's possible. I'll happily take that bet. Maybe Biden is only pretending to be senile! Maybe all of the rumors and clips of him acting senile over the past 2 years was just Republican disinformation that only coincidentally happened to be right. Maybe the special prosecutor who declined to charge Biden over secret documents because he isn't mentally competent to defend himself was lying. I'm going with the parsimonious conclusion.
I think it's even more simple to say that sometimes he's senile and sometimes he's not, and even his closest associates can make mistakes about what he's going to be like over the next few hours. This explains the good performances, and the bad, and why all of his public appearances are so heavily scripted that even he (in his lucid moments) makes fun of it.
I don't actually think he's "senile", but minimally, his brain runs out of energy fast, and he needs more naps than he's getting. Probably he should have retired a few years back, and would have if he were in any other line of work.
Can we just say that he has some degree of senility, but he's not yet a central example of senility?
If your father/grandfather was performing like Biden then you wouldn't say he was senile, you'd say "Oh, he's still doing pretty well for his age". And Biden _is_ doing well for his age, most people his age have been dead for several years.
(Obviously he's not doing well enough to be President, and he certainly won't be by the time 2028 rolls around.)
> Can we just say that he has some degree of senility, but he's not yet a central example of senility?
Yeah, I'd sign on to that, assuming a colloquial definition of "senility" as "age-related decline". He's not what he used to be.
As someone who thinks all politics is turd, I don't have a dog in this fight. But regarding gdannings complaint that you are not arguing in good faith, I'd just like to say I agree. You come across so angry and combative that one instantly feels like you are someone who is incapable of thinking or saying "you know I hadn't thought of that" or "that's a good point" or "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have said that."
Oh I'm definitely combative. That doesn't mean I'm either not arguing in good faith or am unwilling to make concessions when someone else makes a good point. For example, conceding that I'm combative.
Do you think it's even plausible that Biden isn't seriously mentally impaired? Didn't George Clooney recently tweet that he spent a whole day at a fundraiser with him and felt that his debate performance was representative? Haven't several people said similar things post-debate? Weren't there similar rumors circulating for months? It just doesn't strike me as plausible that all of those things are false.
I think it's unlikely that he's not mentally impaired, but not certain that he's not. But to me most politicians look impaired morally and in their intellectual capacity to grasp the issues they must master, so throwing in a little dementia is coals to Newcastle
One would hope that this would be a place where people could have good faith discussions. But if you are going to:
1. Construct strawman like "maybe he is pretending to be senile";
2. Completely ignore my reference to the NATO press conference; and
3. Perhaps most egregiously, use quotation marks around a phrase which a) does not appear in the special prosecutors report; and b) is not an accurate paraphrase of what the report did say (being incompetent to defend oneself is a very specific legal claim with specific criteria, and not remotely the same as what the prosecutor did say, which was that it would be hard to convince a jury that he acted willfully),
then perhaps I am mistaken. I hope not; I hope that most people here are not here to wage the culture war, but instead are interested in objectively discussing important questions lincluding those related to candidates' fitness for office, and how citizens an accurately assess said fitness.
1. That wasn't a strawman, it was hyperbolically illustrating the absurdity of non-parsimonious thinking.
2. Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
3. That wasn't intended to be a verbatim quote, apologies if you took it that way. It was just a stylistic choice to make it read more naturally. That sentence is directionally true and does not represent any substantive deception: the special prosecutor declined to prosecute because Biden is senile. "Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase. He also recounted that Biden had to be reminded of dates like his son's birthday. Hur found evidence of criminal wrongdoing but declined to prosecute solely because of Biden's mental capacity. I submit that this is qualitatively consistent with my original framing.
I admire your distaste for culture war and can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
>Evidence that he doesn't act senile all of the time is not strong evidence that he is not, in fact, senile.
Yes, it is.
"Elderly man with a poor memory" is the exact phrase.
Right. And if that was honestly what you meant by "senile," then your initial claim is vastly weaker than you think it is.
>can only hope that your reaction to my previous comment wasn't an Isolated Demand For Rigor that you selectively apply to people whom you perceive to be politically opposed to you.
As it happens, I recently left a job with a non-profit organization whose mission I strongly support because of their propensity to make the same sort of claim that you made in your post.
The continuing degradation of trust in our society as a result is much worse than the fact that he's the nominee. The cover-up is worse than the crime.
Agreed, but this sort of partisan hackery has been going on for decades. At least now it's so out in the open that people can't pretend it isn't happening. NARRATOR VOICE: People will still pretend it isn't happening.
Yes, this is why I felt making this comment is quite useful. Previously I have been able to understand media bias in relation to myself, as I am often quite biased. But I cannot imagine myself seeing a video like the G7 wanderer and not just not incorporating it into my concept of Biden but actually running widespread cover stories leading up to the election about how such videos are meaningless cheapfakes
This is not "failing to adhere to the Platonic ideal of observing reality, just like me but perhaps moreso". This is "succeeding in achieving near perpendicularity to the Platonic ideal of observing reality"
I rarely discuss the morality of my own actions with in depth. That happened in a former Open Thread, on sperm donation. Since part of it was long after the thread's normal active dates, I think I might as well give it some visibility: https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/open-thread-333/comment/58888967 and parent comments.
Trump just announced JD Vance as his running mate on Truth Social. Interesting for a couple of reasons. He 39 years old and a freshman senator. Also announcing that on social media rather than at the convention may be a first.
Another important fact about JD Vance is he says that if he was in Mike Pence's position, he would have supported the Jan 6 coup attempt.
Is he (a lawyer) one to say such unnecessary things that make him look bad to all sane people? Please provide a reference. What were his exact words?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/jd-vance-defends-trump-claims-invoking-jean-carroll/story?id=106925954
> "If I had been vice president, I would have told the states, like Pennsylvania, Georgia and so many others, that we needed to have multiple slates of electors and I think the U.S. Congress should have fought over it from there," he continued. "That is the legitimate way to deal with an election that a lot of folks, including me, think had a lot of problems in 2020. I think that's what we should have done."
To be clear, the "legitimate way" to deal with Pennsylvania sending you a slate of electors for Biden, and no slate of electors for Trump, is to certify their electoral vote is for Biden. Not to demand that they send you another slate and then having Congress "fight" over which one is proper.
an assassination attempt should probably move up the decision to name a successor
Seconded
I was reminded by reading it on another site that Vance is Catholic, seems he converted a while back.
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/j-d-vance-becomes-catholic/
I'm wondering how to take this - how religious is he? And more importantly, can we now get some good conspiracy theories going about the Horrid Popish Plot? All those Catholics on the Supreme Court, now a convert Papist as VP - is the Vatican puppeteering the White House????
https://www.churchpop.com/content/images/wordpress/2016/01/6-1.jpg
I think he’s probably a pretty sincere Catholic. He was friends with Ross Douthat before he got into to politics and Ross is definitely a sincere adult convert Catholic.
I was just reading a round table analysis of the VP pick in the NYTs and Ross said he would be praying for his friend and the country.
As a 65-year-old, I'm taking the appointment of a 39-year-old as an _anti-gerontocratic_ plot! ( Not having any aspirations to public office myself, I support it. )
His wife is a Hindu, which I take to be a hopeful sign the Catholic stuff is all for show.
He married her before he converted, though. So how serious he is does remain a question. And I don't know how much his wife practices her faith, she could be "culturally Hindu".
<mild snark>
Maybe there is some reasonable mapping (many to many???) between Hindu pantheon gods and Catholic saints? :-)
</mild snark>
Doubt. He was raised as an Evangelical and if it was for political points, he could have maintained that he is an Evangelical and the right would have been perfectly happy. I don’t think anyone on the right cares as long as you profess some form of Christianity. Converting to Catholicism doesn’t have any added political benefits compared to being an Evangelical. So I think it was a genuine conversion like that of Sohrab Armani.
Converting to Catholicism has some pretty big downsides too, like goodbye contraception.
To be fair, not really a downside, if you are a pro-natalist like Vance and can easily afford to raise multiple children. "Be fruitful and multiply" our God literally commands us.
On the other hand, I have always wondered why all the billionaires are happy with just 1-2 children. Having a hundred children(like some Arab sheikhs) means a tangible genetic legacy, that may even keep multiplying down the generations. Donating billions to charities doesn't even earn you any feel good brownie points anymore like in days of Carnegie and Rockefeller.
Pretty sure Musk has more than one or two children.
Oooh, let me try...
The Vatican, trying to cover up its own child sex abuse scandals, infiltrates the US government, using as leverage Trump's association with Jeffrey Epstein.
“…is the Vatican puppeteering the White House?”
Clearly puppetmaster Bergoglio needs to hedge his bets. If Biden wins, he’s got a papist behind the big desk. If Trump wins, he has a voice in the big guy’s ear. And since no one expects either of them to listen to Francis, no one will suspect a thing.
On a more serious note, I think it’s interesting that as American evangelicals lose political influence, observant Roman Catholics seem to be holding on, at least at the level of officeholding. But perhaps the reverse is true of voting blocs? The whole thing is unclear to me.
> I think it’s interesting that as American evangelicals lose political influence, observant Roman Catholics seem to be holding on
Sounds like standard D&D Law vs. Chaos?
I think it's more that Catholics are a single bloc (even if there are large internal differences) due to the hierarchical nature of the church. Protestants may be a larger share of the population, but they are divided up amongst different denominations.
Figures from 2015 which are badly outdated by now, but give a general indication of the religious make-up of the USA:
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/americas-changing-religious-landscape/
In 2015, Protestants (of all traditions) were 46.5% of the population and Catholics were 20.8%. The largest non-Christian faith was Judaism, at 1.9%. Atheist/agnostic/nothing in particular were 22.8%.
https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2015/05/12/appendix-b-classification-of-protestant-denominations/
Within Protestantism, the single largest denomination is Baptist at 15.4%, with the Southern Baptists the largest in that cluster at 5.3%
If we want to look at that bogeyman of the liberals, the "Evangelicals" or "Religious Right", or the Christofascists as I see the current term seems to be, they make up 25.4%. Historic Black churches, which trend doctrinally conservative but vote Democratic, are 6.5%, and the mainline Protestants are 14.7%.
So Protestantism is numerically superior but divided amongst different denominations, hence "chaotic", while we Papists are all marching in lockstep to the dictates of the Vatican, hence "lawful" and thus, despite our smaller share of the population, more effective at implementing the Global Conspiracy 😁
Joking aside, it's impressive.
I hope that’s in a two-axis alignment system!
Wait, which side is law and which is chaos? I figured that we evangelicals would be chaos, but that implies that the U.S. government is trending lawful over time, which feels… wrong.
I was mostly going by internal organization, so evangelicals would be chaos and Roman Catholics would be law?
Maybe for the government over time, some of the more organized American Protestant denominations would also count as lawful on net, and their shrinkage would counteract the Catholic rise? Episcopalians, Methodists, etc.
I think the fact that he called Trump "America's Hitler" and now supports him probably clinched it.