People have lots of justified complaints about the Substack UI. But one thing I really appreciate is that when you minimize a comment on the mobile or regular site, it snaps you to the next comment instead of keeping your scroll depth constant (and therefore ending up 25 comments down the page). Such an annoying feature of Reddit, for example.
Question for med-stats people: Can the sensitivity and/or specificity of diagnostic criteria be estimated based on its inter-rater reliability? If so, how? If not, why not?
What innovations have happened in poker strategy in the last 20 years? Are there strategies that are known to be the best now that go against the previous wisdom?
Speaking as somebody who played professionally for a while maybe 15-20 years ago, there have been *significant* changes at the "shark" or "can win several real tournaments a year" level.
Poker could be thought of as "solved" now, in the sense that computer / AI players are stronger than pretty much all human players and are carefully policed, and this has changed and informed things, but I'm actually unsure how much ongoing insight mining is going on there by human players. There's been significant evolution of thought at the top WSOP levels.
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Ossivado is a good intro to some of the new strategies.
I was reading those international IQ posts from January, and my position now is that on a population wide level, intelligence / IQ is kind of overrated.
It's useful for every society to have a handful of people who are amazing at abstract reasoning and logic and so forth, and it's generally useful for everyone to be smart enough to e.g manage their own personal budget. But the intelligence you'd need to balance a budget or figure out how to plan an intercity trip is a floor, which can be lowered with technology and design of user friendly systems. It's very much sufficient for the general population to meet the floor but not bother striving for the ceiling.
The truth is, most people who aren't necessarily super smart can live productive and functional lives by leaning on their social strengths, and by copying what successful people do. Not everyone has to be a revolutionary thinker - it's perfectly acceptable to ask someone else for ideas or simply observe what works and ask.
In fact, I'd argue that often, a method or a model passed through and improved by a hundred or so average intelligence people may outperform something derived from first principles by someone who's got high IQ, because outside of very abstract things - pure mathematics or logic - the former can capture lots more real-world edge cases and variations. Maintaining the kind of social relationships where you can comfortably share information and mutually refine methods is much more important than generating good ideas ex-nihilo.
IQ is good for winning chess games. A lot of things may look like chess games in abstract (business strategy! Building a railway!) but upon closer inspection, every single chessboard is unique.
The boards don't always have the same number of squares, sometimes it's not even square shaped overall, sometimes entire bits are missing which you don't realise until you try to move a piece, also you're blindfolded and can't tell what any of your pieces really are, and you think your opponent is eating your pieces when you're not looking but then they accuse you of doing the same thing and then you both realise that there had been a racoon that has been swiping pieces at random the whole time. But also sometimes a Monopoly token clatters onto the board. And someone else drops in and messes up all the pieces every now and again.
It's still better to know chess strategies than not, but by itself it's definitely not going to win the game. If I had a choice between studying chess (as played on normal boards) and talking to other Chaos Chess players, talking to other players will usually be much more fruitful, because there are game states that you cannot derive from first principles unless you literally know everything and even the highest IQ folk among us have to specialise.
I do consider myself to have slightly higher than average IQ. The main personal benefit this confers is that school was a bit easier and as an adult I occasionally game credit card reward programs for fun, redeemable for 1 - 2 interstate return flights each time, and I can guess how much I'll get paid after tax withholding. A lot of these things are trivially reproducible using websites, apps, or copying what my smarter friends do.
A high IQ farmer probably designs the farm based on best scientific principles to maximise yield, possibly experimenting a little. A cunning farmer goes around the place near harvest time and copies what the highest yield farm is doing. A sociable farmer is friends with everyone, and receives the best tips everyone else cares to divulge. It's actually not obvious to me that the high IQ farmer is necessarily going to do best - it kind of depends on the model they're using, whereas if Cunning successfully copies everything relevant (in places where that's possible), they'd probably do decent despite having zero understanding of the underlying principles. Similarly, Sociable receives a huge trove of data points to try, also without needing to understand underlying principles.
And as I get more professional experience, I'm finding that understanding underlying principles is a bit overrated - your model ends up needing so many inputs that the effort to measure / monitor / process becomes disproportionate. The black box approach makes a lot of sense most of the time, and black box approaches don't really need much IQ, you just need to figure out what to look at and who to talk to.
I think you're conceptualizing intelligence too narrowly, as something that's only helpful for solving abstract theoretical problems. My intuition is that meta-skills such as "iterate on your successes and learn from your failures", or "learn from the successes and failures of others", or "do things that are conducive to your goals" are all going to correlate with intelligence/IQ.
If people had higher IQ on average they would have a better understanding of economics and physics. Then rent control would not be a policy with any kind of backing. Energy policy would be a lot sharper.
Example: the airplane on a treadmill. If you bring that up in an average space, you end up with interminable arguments and squabbling. If you bring it up in a higher IQ space then it settles very quickly once the key arguments are presented and understood. Lots of policy discourse could be that way!
"If people had higher IQ on average they would have a better understanding of economics and physics."
From my life experience spent mostly in environments dominated by high-IQ individuals -- and since I'm old enough to remember rotary telephones this is shall we say a decent-sized sample -- that is a pretty hilarious prediction.
Also I literally LOLed at this: "If you bring it up in a higher IQ space then it settles very quickly once the key arguments are presented and understood."
Not trying to sound cynical here, I'm really not, but honestly -- how many actual very-smart people have you observed interacting with each other in real life?
They are human beings not robots; their IQs are just one variable in how they behave and not the dominant one; etc.
Just really here and on DSL. And not once have I seen someone argue that chemtrails are real, or vaccines cause autism, or that the earth is flat, or that you can cure aids by having unprotected sex with a virgin. All things that are believed and debated in lower IQ spaces. I don’t believe I have seen someone argue for rent control either.
I had a college roommate, literally the smartest individual I met in four years at one of the nation's most-selective colleges, who argued seriously and at length that vaccines were the reason Americans were dying of lung cancer and the warnings on cigarette packs were just governmental nonsense. (And he wasn't even a smoker!)
A former colleague of mine holding two PhDs in the hard sciences was calmly certain not only that Area 51 was real but that the film "Independence Day" (featuring a POTUS discovering that Area 51 was real) was in fact a slick deflection/coverup for the actual Area 51.
The single looniest individual I've ever been acquainted with is a former employee of a relative of mine in the tech sector, a brilliant programmer whose sheer brainpower awed experienced software engineers, and who had to be begged to remember to wear both pants and underwear to the company's offices. (He would remember one or the other, at random as far as anyone could tell, but not both.)
My sister attended the University of Chicago as a student and then joined the staff of a highly-prestigious publication headquartered on campus, and has ten stories similar to the three I just mentioned.
Etc etc. People, not robots. That's all of us regardless of IQs.
People don't have the faintest idea how much emotion and presupppositions and the need to portray themselves as a certain type of character and a huge variety of other factors color their ability to understand something intellectually. And I suspect for each mistake a high-IQ person would never make, there are higher-order mistakes they make instead. Not to mention the fact ant self-observant person makes over time which is that we are all often wrong, even on topics we are sure about.
High IQ people do better on Econ and physics tests. They understand Econ and physics better. Are you saying there is zero correlation between understanding economics/physics and having sensible opinions on economics/physics?
How do you reconcile your anecdotes with Mallards linked study?
I am suggesting, apropos of your newest response, that habits such as straw-manning others' statements are common among both high and low IQ persons. Unfortunately.
More broadly about this topic, two followup points:
(a) To what degree such poor habits are more/less common up or down the IQ scale, I have frankly no idea. And no serious study that I'm aware of has offered an answer to that critical question.
(b) IQ tests measure reasoning ability in the _abstract_, on the page of a test, i.e. separate from interacting with other people. That is a crucial real-world ability. Successful reasoning in the context of interacting with others is also a crucial real-world ability, one for which no good term yet exists ("emotional intelligence" for example is not at all what I'm speaking of here). It is my life observation that the two do not, among real-life human beings out in the actual world, strongly correlate.
The ACX/SSC community is largely formed of people with nontypical neurological traits which cause them to prize truthseeking even when it's socially maladaptive, inhibits personal profit, cognitively discomfiting, or otherwise deleterious to the individual, in a way that neurotypical people broadly do not.
I don't see anything patterns here that leap out. Does MA have a better policy environment than HI? TX and NY have about the same averages, and wildly different policy; same for CA and LA.
No, it couldn't. Once money, or personal gain more broadly, becomes involved, the intelligence resources are diverted to inventing new excuses for the policy that will benefit each given speaker, new contrived explanations for why the correct answer about the treadmill actually isn't true in spite of being observable. Otherwise, why do you think concretely totally discredited ideas like socialism are still given credit academically? Or to take an even clearer example, it's blatantly obvious that sex changes are physically impossible, but due to the nature of their mental illness, transsexuals still crave the counterfactual really strongly, so they bend all their ingenuity toward trying to deny the self-evident. The only distinction between the stupidest and the cleverest in this group is the quality and amount of their sophisms.
No offense, but you're making the classic mistake of naive utopianism here.
(EDIT – also, it's arguable that this is the original purpose of intelligence evolutionarily: not truth-seeking, but persuasion as a way to accrue more resources for oneself and one's offspring, at the expense of others.)
Similar to Jonathan Haidt noting something to the effect that college education doesn't make you have better positions, but just makes you better at inventing reasons to maintain the position you prefer. Broad paraphrase because I don't recall the actual quote.
Nearly all people engage in motivated reasoning, and possibly those who aren't aware of that possibility in themselves are most at risk of it.
How does your hypothesis hold up when tested against empirical data? For example, how strong is the correlation between a country's GDP or median income and the average IQ of its citizens?
Personally, I think you have a wrong mental image of people with high IQ, especially when you're saying things like
> […] a handful of people who are amazing at abstract reasoning and logic and so forth […]
> IQ is good for winning chess games.
> A high IQ farmer probably designs the farm based on best scientific principles to maximise yield […]
High IQ entails so much more than being good at games with simple, known rules. A better description would be "ability to solve problems". For example, you say:
> A cunning farmer goes around the place near harvest time and copies what the highest yield farm is doing. […] successfully copies everything relevant […]
How do you think this "cunning farmer" is able to decide which other farmer used better methods vs. who just got lucky due to circumstance? Or which methods of another farmer are worth copying vs which are ineffective?
> […] black box approaches don't really need much IQ, you just need to figure out what to look at and who to talk to.
Uh, yeah, "just figuring out what to look at and who to talk to" requires intelligence.
1) Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government
Primary Reading
Article (Kahan, Dawson, Peters, Slovic):
Motivated Numeracy & Enlightened Self-Government
Optional Video
TED Talk: on Cognitive Bias and Numeracy
Background & Extended Summary
(A) Context and Rival Hypotheses
The authors probe why we see persistent public controversies—on gun control, climate change, etc.—despite seemingly overwhelming scientific evidence. They pit two main ideas against each other:
Science Comprehension Thesis (SCT): Claims conflict stems from a public deficit in scientific literacy or logical reasoning. Better education in math/science should reduce polarization.
Identity-Protective Cognition Thesis (ICT): Argues that group identity can overshadow even robust analytical skills. People often interpret data to conform with their cultural or partisan affiliations—particularly on issues coded with “tribal” significance.
(B) The Experiment
Setup: Participants had to interpret the results of an (allegedly) data-driven experiment displayed in a 2x2 contingency table. In reality, the data were designed so that the correct interpretation could be easily masked by heuristics.
Conditions:
Skin-Rash (neutral scenario): Showed whether a new cream helped or hurt patients.
Gun-Control (politicized scenario): Showed whether a city’s ban was linked to increased or decreased crime.
By toggling the headings, they made the “correct answer” either more or less politically comfortable for different ideological groups.
(C) Key Findings
Skin-Rash Condition: Higher numeracy correlated with better performance in data interpretation. SCT supporters might say, “Yes, see? More math skill = less error.”
Gun-Control Condition: However, more numerate participants used their quantitative prowess selectively. They were most accurate only if the correct interpretation matched their existing political stance (e.g., “liberal” participants best interpreted data showing a gun ban reduces crime, “conservatives” best interpreted data showing it increases crime).
Numeracy didn’t help cross partisan lines; it often hardened them, as high-math individuals used logic to reinforce identity-aligned conclusions.
This deepens our sense that polarization can be exacerbated by sophisticated reasoning tools when issues become entangled with cultural or partisan identity.
(D) Broader Implications
Simply boosting STEM education or “critical thinking” may not guarantee cross-partisan consensus on contentious topics (climate, health measures, etc.).
De-polarizing an issue—removing its identity-based cues—might be the more critical step to unlock people’s willingness to process data impartially.
The phenomenon highlights “expressive rationality,” where it’s individually beneficial to remain group-aligned, even if collectively it impedes evidence-based policymaking.
Motivated Numeracy Discussion Questions
Math Skills vs. Bias
Have you seen debates in which the most “informed” or data-savvy voices seem the most entrenched? Why might greater expertise sharpen factional divides rather than foster agreement?
Identity and Cost
The authors suggest maintaining identity is crucial for social standing. How might we reduce the “social cost” of accepting facts that differ from your group’s position?
Role of Communicators
If objective evidence alone isn’t enough, how can science communicators, journalists, or educators frame data in ways that mitigate cultural triggers?
Applications Beyond Guns
Do you see parallels in other conflicts (e.g., vaccines, nuclear power, economic stimulus)? Where might the same dynamic appear?
Implications for Self-Government
The paper’s title references “enlightened self-government.” Under what conditions can democracy thrive if so many policy questions can become “identity-charged”?
2) Lynn Stout’s Critique of Shareholder Primacy
Reading Links (Evonomics)
All from Lynn Stout’s collection: Evonomics: Lynn Stout Articles
How the Dominant Business Paradigm Turns Nice People into Psychopaths
Why Wall Street Isn’t Useful for the Real Economy
How Economists Turned Us Blind to Our Own Goodness
The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
Background & Extended Summary
(A) Lynn Stout (1957–2018)
An influential figure in corporate law, governance, and business ethics, Stout questioned whether the mantra of “maximize shareholder value” is legally required or even beneficial. She believed:
Shareholders don’t “own” corporations (a corporation is an entity that owns itself); they own shares.
Corporate law seldom mandates boards to single-mindedly chase short-term share price—that’s more an ideology (Friedman/Jensen & Meckling) than a legal fact.
(B) Articles Overview
How the Dominant Business Paradigm Turns Nice People into Psychopaths
Argues we’re not “homo economicus” in everyday life, but the standard corporate message (“focus solely on profit”) can crowd out altruistic or ethical impulses in investing and board decisions.
Mentions “socially responsible funds” as evidence many shareholders care about ethics, yet too many structures and norms push managers and investors into maximizing short-term returns above all else.
Why Wall Street Isn’t Useful for the Real Economy
Critiques the assumption that hyperactive trading always aids “efficient resource allocation.”
Points out only a small fraction of financial activity goes to underwriting new securities (i.e., raising real capital for companies). The vast majority is secondary market trading, which often adds limited societal value but extracts large fees and fosters short-termism.
How Economists Turned Us Blind to Our Own Goodness
Explores how the “incentive” model of policy (assuming humans are rationally selfish) can overshadow moral suasion and conscience.
Cites experiments on social dilemmas showing how easily contexts can make us either more cooperative or more selfish.
Warns that focusing too heavily on extrinsic rewards can “crowd out” prosocial norms that hold organizations and societies together.
The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
Chronicles how the concept gained steam in the late 20th century, especially after Friedman’s and Jensen/Meckling’s essays.
Debunks the idea that corporate law requires maximizing share price, or that it’s always beneficial for all shareholders.
Suggests “satisficing” multi-goal governance—balancing stakeholder interests, growth, employee loyalty, R&D, etc.—can yield better long-term outcomes for both society and many shareholders (especially the diversified, patient, or ethically driven ones).
(C) Collective Takeaways
Stout sees “shareholder primacy” as oversimplifying business realities and ignoring humans’ capacity for moral concern, trust, and long-term relationships.
She dissects how the dominant economic paradigm can ironically degrade shareholder returns overall—akin to “fishing with dynamite,” short-term profit for some but harmful to the system’s health.
A broader perspective on corporate purpose might encourage “sustainable capitalism,” robust corporations, and ethical leadership—contrary to one-size-fits-all share price obsession.
Discussion Questions for Lynn Stout’s Critique
Psychopath vs. Prosocial
In daily life, we show empathy and fairness, yet in markets, we act purely self-interested. Why? Are laws and norms pushing different mindsets?
Wall Street’s Real Value
How can we reconcile the claim that modern finance is essential with the reality that speculation can overshadow real capital formation?
Conscience, Law, and Incentives
If overemphasizing extrinsic incentives crowds out altruistic instincts, how can policy or corporate governance harness pro-social motivations?
Satisficing vs. Maximizing
Stout endorses “satisficing” multiple goals (employee welfare, environment, stable relationships, etc.). Critics say that leads to “fuzzy accountability.” Are there ways to measure or structure multi-stakeholder success without devolving into chaos?
Policy Reform or Cultural Shift?
Should laws be changed to end illusions about “shareholder ownership,” or is the deeper fix about corporate culture, board norms, and investor expectations?
Walk & Talk
We will conclude our main discussion around 4 PM, then transition to an hour-long walk. Feel free to join in for an informal extension of the discussion or casual conversation. Everyone’s welcome, whether you prefer to debate economic paradigms or talk about local events.
Share a Surprise
As usual, if you’ve encountered any surprising articles, personal experiences, or side projects that spark intellectual curiosity, bring them along for our open-floor sharing.
Looking Ahead
Future Topics? We love suggestions—be they theoretical readings or real-world case studies.
Guest Contributors: If you’d like to co-facilitate or highlight a specific area of expertise, let Michael or any ACXLW regular know.
We Look Forward to Seeing You on February 8!
Should any questions arise, please contact Michael Michalchik at the email or number above. Both “motivated numeracy” and Lynn Stout’s insights on corporate ethics promise a lively, eye-opening meetup. Join us for an afternoon of deep and wide-ranging discussion. See you soon!
Forget all this "AI will destroy us" silliness: an actual sweet meteor of death is coming for us in 2032. In just the last 24 hrs the impact probability increased from 1% to 2.3%. This is... moving in a wrong direction... and fast.
This looks like a city killer more than a civilization ending meteorite. Still sucks if it ends up landing somewhere in India where the population density is high.
Most likely a pretty light show over the ocean. But we should know the approximate impact area far enough in advance to arrange for local population density to be zero on That Day.
It is the nature of impact-probability math that the impact probability increases at each reevaluation, until suddenly it drops to zero. There is a 2.3% chance that it will instead go to unity, but *only* a 2.3% chance. That the impact probability was ~1% last time we checked, only means that there was then a 50-50 chance that it would go to zero on the next evaluation, which didn't happen.
And if the asteroid does hit, it will be a sub-Tunguska event; the asteroid will not reach the surface, the damage will be localized, and we will have known the approximate impact area for weeks or months ahead of time. No one will die unless they are both massively unlucky and very stupid.
I’m partially jesting, but only partially. Of course it won’t kill us all, but I’m not sure why you think it won’t reach the surface. The bloody thing is 54 meters across! It will be a nuke without the radiation.
The threshold size for asteroids/whatever to survive passage through the Earth's atmosphere is generally given as 50-140 meters, depending mostly on the composition of the body. At fifty meters, it needs to be basically just a mass of nickel-iron metal, which a small fraction of asteroids are but this one doesn't appear to be.
If it "hits" the Earth, it will break apart in the upper atmosphere, the bigger pieces will break up further and ultimately vaporize, and you'll wind up with a big high-altitude explosion.
The altitude will not be high enough to completely eliminate damage at ground level, and it won't just be Chelyabinsk-style broken windows. But the surface damage will be localized, and there won't be a crater (or, from ocean impact and more worrisome, a tsunami).
I just looked up Chelyabinsk. 18m diameter, so let's assume 27 times as big. Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 30 Hiroshimas, so this would be around 900. Not great! OTOH, Chelyabinsk was est. 400-500 kilotons of TNT equivalent, so 30 times that is 12-15 megatons. Tunguska was est. 20-30 megatons as of 2019.
So, still sub-Tunguska (assuming about the same velocity; I don't know how safe that assumption is).
One could imagine the event being extremely destructive if that blast happens to be over a city, but I have it on good authority that cities are even harder to hit than the earth itself.
Tunguska was pretty nasty though, the only saving grave being it happened over the vast Siberian taiga. The earth is of course mostly covered in water so hopefully this thing blows up over the remote Pacific somewhere.
Yeah I don’t think I’ve ever seen the impact probability that high. I agree with J. S. that it’ll likely drop to more typical e-6 level, but… maybe not…
Some of them might actually be good, if you can compartmentalize and ignore the political messaging. Russian Cinema has been amazing since the very beginning, and despite claims to the contrary, Soviet cinema was incredible. You just have to be able to compartmentalize.
I wish I could find the propaganda videos about how all Europeans were freezing and starving during winter 2022.
I remember seeing a video that seemed like an ad, and it showed "European Winter 2022", "European Winter 2023", "European Winter 2024" with progressively less light on the Christmas tree, and I think in the third video the family ate their hamster.
But there was also a serious news report, naming various European countries and their capital cities (including e.g. Paris and Berlin), describing how people living in these cities have no electricity during Christmas, and how all women need to prostitute themselves to get some food.
Due to the brief fake Trump-Canada trade war I was inspired to learn about Canadian whiskey. Here's where I started and what I learned!
Where I started:
- I'm Canadian
- I don't really drink American whiskey anyway, I mostly like scotch (e.g. Glenfiddich for a popular one or Laphroaig for a peat-smoked one), so this was partly just academic, but still I was curious.
- Back in the day when I was 19 I started with e.g. Crown Royal and Canadian Club from the LCBO, but didn't actually like whiskey until I got into scotch.
- I knew that Canadian whiskey is often called rye. I knew that Canadian whiskey doesn't get the respect it once did. I knew that Canadian Club used to be seen as prestige, like it's the stuff Al Capone smuggled during prohibition and that people like Don Draper liked (he's fictional but it was accurate), but now it's the cheap second-shelf stuff in a plastic bottle at LCBO. So what gives?
What I learned (some details vague, double-check any specifics):
- Once upon a time, way back when, Canadians were drinking wheat whiskey (nobody drinks wheat whiskey anymore), but then Dutch and German immigrants started adding a bit of rye and people liked the little bit of a kick it gives. We called it "rye" even though rye was only a minor ingredient.
- Back in the day, I guess up to prohibition and maybe a bit past then(?), American whiskey would have been pretty rough, e.g. moonshine or young corn whiskey, and Canadian blended whiskey was aged longer and was seen as higher quality and smoother. And of course once prohibition started, smuggled Canadian whiskey was the best stuff Americans could get. Canadian whiskey is still seen as being "smooth."
- Canada legally allows you to call your whiskey "rye" as long as it still has the same general taste and character as this tradition, even though it was never mostly-rye, and even whether or not there's actually any rye in it at all. E.g. Don Draper's assistant calls Canadian Club "rye" even though it's actually mostly corn (canonically, I wonder if he knew?). In contrast, American "rye" legally has to be >51% rye.
- In modern times whiskey fans don't care as much about smooth anymore, they want complexity like you get from an old scotch. Also Americans later got good at making whiskey too like bourbon. These, plus the lack of as-strict standards about ingredients, both contributed to Canadian whiskey not getting the respect it used to.
- There are also some more recent high-rye Canadian whiskeys, though, like Lot No. 40 really is a 100% rye and is reputedly one of Canada's best whiskeys. I just bought a bottle and it's delicious.
- Even for the classic smooth style I guess there's variation, like maybe Wiser's or Forty Creek is better than Canadian Club Original (and also brands have different bottlings, like Canadian Club Classic 12 Year is probably better than Canadian Club Original). And even the cheap stuff is fine if you like that, and it's still good for mixing e.g. with soda or ginger ale.
- (Fun fact, what Canadians sometimes drink and call a "Rye & Ginger," New Zealanders love and call a "C. C. & Dry." I don't know why nobody's made it rhyme, calling it a "Rye & Dry"!)
In my 20s I would take a 16’ Lund from Nelson’s Resort on Crane Lake (Minnesota) through the Namakan Narrows to a weird little Canadian liquor store to buy Cutty Sark on the cheap. No US duties so it was a bargain compared to US prices. Probably saved 5 bucks
In my 30s I went through a Glenlivet phase. Occasionally when I’d order it neat in a bar they would try to pass Cutty Sark off as the pricier quaff. Yuk. Who were they trying to kid?
Present day they all taste pretty yucky.
Recently I went to a scotch tasting with work pals at a local joint calling itself Merlin’s Pub. They were going for a British Isles ambience, the sort of place where you could buy shepherds pie for dinner and see a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ sign on the wall.
The taste organizers were talking about things like ‘maritime notes’ but I was tasting ‘industrial paint thinner’.
I've been thinking about that issue about which prison criminal transpeople should be sent to. I think there probably isn't a single right answer to that question. You can't put a transwoman sexual offender in a woman's prison for example, but you also also can't put a very feminine post-op transwoman in a man's prison.
Seems like an instance where the decision should be left to the judge.
Also, there must be at least a few lesbian rapists, I wonder how the hell they handle that.
This is a no-brainer. Although I'm sure you are merely posting this to be an edgy bad boy, you actually got this one right. All you have to do is let physically separated inmates call each other on the phone and they won't go insane, the way such confined people otherwise tend to do.
Isn't that person at an especially high risk of getting raped? I think "people" here stands for a specific political faction that apparently now thinks they represent all America.
Liberals aren't particularly fond of trans people either. Something about them compromising women's rights, allegedly. They're not going to bend over backwards just to protect them. It's just the progressives that are a problem, and the new administration seems quite intent on purging them from every position of power in the country.
You're talking about a particular subset of liberals that is A: rather small and B: not particularly influential in liberal circles. And I suspect even most of them do not want to see transwomen being raped in men's prisons.
I don't take in much from news commentators. But I have been listening/ (some watching) to the senate confirmation hearings. OMG some great theater. I've lost most of my respect for Bernie. (I mean he's still Bernie, but he's also now a died in the wool Dem.) And John Kennedy from Louisiana is perhaps now my favorite senator. (He reminds me of J. Stewart from "Mr. Smith goes to Washington".) A few days ago, I sent in a request to my state to change my voter registration. I think I'll probably change it to Republican. (I want to send the biggest FU I can to my former Democratic party.) I know this is a mostly anti-Trump space. (And I think Trump is an asshole, (and when I tell my Trump loving friends this, they mostly agree... yeah he's an asshole.)) But I want to just ask you all to give him and team Trump a chance. (I think the first thing we should agree on when talking about politicians is that they all are doing what they see as the right thing for our country. Yes they may have bad ideas, and yes they will all make mistakes, but to first approximation, they are not evil.)
After some thought, I realized that making a serious attempt at talking about the disconnect I see here would be instructive for both of us.
"I think the first thing we should agree on when talking about politicians is that they all are doing what they see as the right thing for our country. "
This right here is part of it. I think that is true for the median politician. I think that might even be true for politicians in the 10th percentile of integrity and decency. I don't think it's true for Trump. Or rather, I don't think Donald Trump's brain maintains any sort of a conceptual separation between "what's good for the country" and "what flatters Trump's ego." In particular, I think the idea that he could EVER help the country by stepping down, stepping back, genuinely cooperating with those that oppose him or effacing himself in any manner is utterly alien to his thinking. And that's exactly what it would take for me to "give him a chance." A very rough, non-exhaustive list of the sort of necessary behavior that would be required for "giving him a chance" to be even a morally acceptable thing to do (in my judgement) might look like this:
--Immediately re-enter the U.S. into the Paris Climate agreement, publicly acknowledge the truth and seriousness of climate change and apologize for his error. Start working with congress on a modest-but-serious package of *additional* climate measure the U.S. will take above and beyond what the agreement calls for, as a mea culpa to the rest of the world and an attempt to make up for lost time[1].
--Publicly admit that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, and that his own repeated denials of this fact (long after his legal challenges were dead) were dishonest, self-serving and an unacceptable attack on the integrity of the nation's electoral process. Make monetary restitution (from his own personal funds) to the families of all those killed in the attack on the U.S., including the rioters and the police who later died by suicide. Make it clear that the restitution is intended as an apology for the major roll he played in creating and fueling that dangerous situation.
--Immediately divest himself of all his personal properties and investments, placing them in a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest while he was president. Apologize for not doing so in 2016 and work with congress to draft legislation plainly requiring future presidents to do the same.
--Publicly apologize to the people of Panama, Denmark, Canada and Mexico for his various insults and attacks on their sovereignty. Publicly reverse his position on the tariffs on those countries, and pledge not to repeat the error. Disavow his use of emergency powers to circumvent congress' power to levy taxes and duties.
--Make a real, good faith attempt to convince justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to step down from the Supreme Court, and work with BOTH parties in congress to select replacement justices who are highly qualified, have impeccable records of personal and professional conduct and are broadly agreed to be politically moderate.[2] Begin attempting to propose and study (but NOT enact) a solution to extreme the politicization of the Supreme Court, likely involving some sort of more bipartisan and less exploitable justice selection process. Have a recommendation ready before the start of the 2028 primary season so primary candidates can take positions on it and the American people can use it as part of their selection process.
--Work with congress (again, BOTH parties) to attempt to craft a bi-partisan compromise on immigration as should have been done 20 years ago. "Compromise" here meaning that it still includes immigration restrictions, provisions for enforcing them and reasonable border security, but doesn't try to militarize the border or use heavy-handed and inhumane tactics in doing so.
--Retract his proposed plan for ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, apologize to the people of Gaza for saying so, and make a real attempt to stay out of the conflict in Gaza, adopting a maximally neutral position anywhere that his presence is unavoidable.
--Apologize to the U.S. victims of COVID for his poor handling of the initial phases of the crisis, work with congress to improve the U.S. future pandemic preparedness and response and work more closely with health organizations elsewhere in the world. Donate a substantial portion of his personal wealth to some sort of charitable cause helping those harmed by COVID, by way of restitution for the lives his incompetence failed to save.
I'm guessing your reaction will run to something like "wow, that's completely unreasonable." But it really, really is not. There a great many things that I could have put on here but didn't. Everything here is chosen to be geared towards amending some specific harm he has personally done to the U.S. body politic, and I certainly wasn't exhaustive when considering all the harms. None of these involve giving wholly to Democrats in a major way (except the climate change one which is LONG overdue), but rather attempt to build the bipartisan cooperation that has largely disappeared in the past 20 years. And no, nothing less would be sufficient. Abusers are very, very good at convincing people to give them one more chance and ignore past behavior. People of real integrity own up to their mistakes, apologize for them and attempt to make them right. The BARE MINIMUM for Trump to be a morally acceptable president is to offer substantial proof that he can act like a person of integrity, and not an abuser.
[1] Alternately, I could be persuaded that anthropocentric climate change is not happening and that Trump's actions here were correct (though not justified at the time). This would, at a minimum, take something in the nature of a worldwide scientific revolution in which large amounts of new evidence and improved models reshape the field. Or it would take me acquiring a serious concussive injury or an RFK style brain worm.
[2] Note that this would still leave the Supreme court with a Republican advantage, but one in which at least one moderate was needed to agree with any ruling.
So... in order for you to believe that Trump is doing what he sees as the right thing for the country... he would basically have to abandon his politics and those of the people who voted for him, in favor of your politics? That's what credibility looks like to you, adherence to liberal dogma? Wow, way to fail the idological Turing test, there.
Or if not, explain what e.g. a Republican politician who does not countenance rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement but does have the best for America as he sees it foremost in his mind would look like to you?
If you think admitting Joe Biden won the 2020 election is "adherence to liberal dogma" then you are part of the problem.
It is popular with Republicans to claim there was fraud, but "saying what is popular with your base" is a very different thing from "doing what you think is right for the country."
" he would basically have to abandon his politics and those of the people who voted for him, in favor of your politics? "
People who are capable of basic reading comprehension will have noticed that this point was already explicitly address. This would not be him abandoning his politics in favor of mine. This would be him attempting to make genuine restitution for the harmful things he's done, and to make a real effort to arrest the bipartisan fissuring that is rapidly poisoning American political life. YES, that means making compromises. The fact that you cannot tell the difference between a compromise and a capitulation is exactly the problem.
"Or if not, explain what e.g. a Republican politician who does not countenance rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement but does have the best for America as he sees it foremost in his mind would look like to you?"
That Republican politician should
1. Actually educate himself on the realities of climate change in a way that I guarantee that neither Trump nor most of the Republicans in congress have done.
2. If, after educating themselves, they have actual, reality-based criticisms of the Paris Agreement that don't involve brazen denials of established scientific truth, they may present those to the world and try to hash out an alternative that's more acceptable.
Yes, doing a minimally adequate job of governing does indeed require accepting basic truths of reality that have been well-known for four decades. If you cannot do that much than asking ANYONE to "give you a chance" is nothing more than a con-job.
"The fact that you cannot tell the difference between a compromise and a capitulation is exactly the problem."
The problem with your suggestions, yes. I did indeed read your assertion that it isn't unreasonable and understand that you meant it, I'm trying to explain to you how extremely preposterous this looks from the other side of the aisle. Out of your suggestions, the *only ones* that could be legitimately called compromise positions are admitting that Biden won 2020 and putting his assets in trust for the duration of his presidency with an apology for not doing it sooner. The rest legitimately just look like demands for Democratic politics from a Republican because you're angry that he's too Republican, no matter how you try to lampshade it. In particular, the bit about trying to reverse the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – something which he wasn't even particularly responsible for and which would have happened regardless of which Republican had beaten Clinton – is wholly absurd and can seemingly only be motivated by blind rage at you/the left losing that contest, not least since Gorsuch especially is a conscientious upholder of the Constitution and its principles, a far better jurist than any one of the last three Democratic appointments to the court and less prone to vote as part of an ideological block. (Sotomayor in particular I can't recall voting against liberal orthodoxy on legal grounds one single time in her entire tenure, although I speak under correction here as I am not a staunch SC watcher.)
As to your other point, I think you grossly overestimate the importance of politicians educating themselves and having reality-based opinions, because approximately none of them on either side use that as a basis for decisionmaking – a rhetorical bludgeon at most. What matters to me is that I and many others with me prefer Trump's stance here because *we have reality-based criticisms* of the accords and he's willing to *act* on that which is what matters when push comes to shove. When you suggest that in order to be credible he would have to abandon acting on our preference in favor of not only acting on yours but prostrating himself, and that this would constitute compromise rather than a humiliating surrender, you're demonstrating a myopia which is exactly the problem.
Agreeing here but I have no upvote option for some reason, perhaps because I'm a new visitor. Don't understand, fir instance, why suddenly Kavanaugh and Gorsuch ought to step down because they aren't near enough to liberal opinion.
I do think Trump badly failed on Covid and, as far as I can determine, there isn't enough substance to the 2020 stolen election narrative. And his character is far from perfect. He does plenty I like and a fair amount I'm not crazy about. But he was a needed correction to the direction our country had taken IMHO.
"As to your other point, I think you grossly overestimate the importance of politicians educating themselves and having reality-based opinions, because approximately none of them on either side use that as a basis for decisionmaking – a rhetorical bludgeon at most."
This right here. This is the ENTIRE problem. ALL of it. 100%.
Not because what you said is true. But because it is false. It is extremely, extremely false and you believing it makes it *quite thoroughly impossible* to have any productive dialog.
YES, people DO have principled beliefs and reality based opinions and YES some of those people are politicians and YES some of them bloody well do use those as a basis for decisionmaking. When you say "none of them on either side" I think that is quite telling. I think you are seeing uncommonly clearly out of one eye. I think you are looking at the people on your side, going "wow, yeah, they're all scumbags who don't care what's true" and projecting that to the other side because if it's true of the people who are FOR you, then how much more true *must* it be of people who are AGAINST you.
Now, don't think for a second from what I said that I don't think many Democratic politicians are also scumbags. I've never been a Democrat. I've never liked the Democrats. When I lived in the U.S. I would grudgingly hold my nose and vote for Democrats fairly often--we'll get to why in a second--but I never thought for a minute they were great people. They were adequate. HOWEVER, they were scumbags in the way that all politicians are scumbags. They'd sometimes do shady deal, dirty tricks, lack spine just when you wanted them to have it, talk out of both sides of their mouths, and have scandals that proved that they lacked moral fiber. I could write quite a number of words on the failings of one Joseph Biden, for example, who I am proud to have never voted for.
But the difference when I looked across the aisle was night and day. Not the difference in run-of-the-mill scumbaggery, mind you. Count up the shady deals and dirty tricks and maybe you'd come out with advantage D and maybe you'd come out with advantage R. The difference was exactly what you say is true of all politicians. Only it isn't. There was an ALARMING lack of reality-based opinions on the right. Climate change denial is the largest, most alarming one of those: this is understanding-the-world on easy mode and you guys are FAILING IT SO BADLY. Fifty years, man. This has been known and studied for fifty years. But no shortage of other examples abound: COVID takes the gold star for the *fastest* retreat from reality that I've ever seen any group do, but things like well-understood facets of American history[1], basic contours of current events...the list goes on. Democratic politicians sometimes waffle or weasel or lack spine, but they tend to stick largely in the vicinity of the truth, and their policies reflect it. Republican politicians will shoot of into cuckooland if their base demands it--not all of them mind you, Mike Pence kept his spine and "his side" literally tried to kill him for it--but far too many. How many "2020 election truthers" are there among today's elected officials? How about sometime Qanon followers or Pizzagate belivers[2]? Fewer, for sure, but one would be too many. I'd have loved to live in a world where I could vote against the scummy Democrats, but the only alternative I was ever offered wasn't just unpalatable, it was downright loony.
And then I talk to the voters that put them in office, and I see why. Anyone with spine gets primaried out. Or, y'know, has an angry mob try to hang them. The thing that I started this with, the "there's no reality-based opinions, just rhetorical bludgeons thing?" That's not the politicians. That's the voters. That's the Trumpers. Literally yesterday there was someone in the comments of Scott's government-spending thread basically saying "well clearly I'm not going to believe it any time a liberal says something will cause a bunch of deaths." That's a damn GOVERNMENT PROGRAM. The records are meticulously kept and open to the public. You can CHECK. Any time of Facebook I see anything posted about climate change or COVID or the scientific process in general there's a *flood* of comments about how "scientists always find whatever they're paid to find." I don't have to ask what party those people are from. And that. View. Is. INSANE. It is nuts. I've spent much of my life around scientists: most of them won't shut up about the minutia of their fields unless you shout at them. Nearly all of them could be making better money elsewhere. And all the really important scientific conclusions are shared by the *worldwide* scientific community. And again, I could go on. A certain fraction of the U.S. right wing seems to have convinced itself that there is NO TRUTH, ONLY POLITICS. The the ONLY thing you need to know about someone to gauge their trustworthiness or evaluate ANY claim they make is their political affiliation. And so *of course* they discover that more and more of the scientists are against them: if you can't even *conceive* of there being objective truth, how can anyone from the community of people who devote their lives to figuring it out *ever* reach you?
"The rest legitimately just look like demands for Democratic politics from a Republican because you're angry that he's too Republican, no matter how you try to lampshade it."
Mate, the fact that you believe this is TERRIFYING. Do you know what I would have done if Hillary Clinton had tried to overturn the 2016 election? I'd have denounced her. As loudly and publicly as I could have. A great many people who opposed Trump would have joined me. Do you know what I felt when I heard someone had taken a shot at Trump? Horror and dismay. I hate Trump more than I've hated almost anyone I can think of, and I would have given *absolute hell* to any Democratic politician who did anything other than denounce the assassin. If I discovered Obama or Biden had used the privileges of their office to ply foreign leader for dirt on Trump? I'd have called for THEIR impeachment too. If the Democrats had tried to pack the Supreme court, I'd have been out there writing paragraphs about how "yes, I know they started it, but this is a flatly unacceptable escalation."
" In particular, the bit about trying to reverse the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – something which he wasn't even particularly responsible for..."
Right, remember where I started? About "wanting what's best for the nation." Sometimes leaders have to fix problems that are *not* their fault. Sometimes they have to take one for the team. Sometimes they have to make it not all about them. And yes, Gorsuch wasn't his fault and has been a decent jurist in many ways: McConnell was still in the wrong when he left that spot open, and hasn't even made a pretense of not being a hypocrite on that one. But Kavanaugh was a Trump pick and the issue isn't "Republicans got another supreme court justice," it was "Republicans decided they were going to ram the appointment through before the midterm, no matter how much basic decency they had to throw away." If Trump had made a different pick from day 1, or withdrawn Kavanaugh and picked someone with a modicum of integrity--who would have been confirmed after the midterm, Republicans kept the senate--he'd not be mentioned here. Again, the issue isn't "Republicans got to pick too many justices," it's "Republicans have been more and more open about manipulating the selection process for political power, and a body that was supposed to be considered somewhat impartial now appears flatly untrustworthy to many" And I'll grant that Republicans also had feeling about the court in the Obama years. Hence "finding some actual moderates to put on the court, while keeping the balance tilted towards Republicans." Hence "offering solutions to help the selection process produce a trustworthy court--trustworthy to *everyone.*" It is really, really BAD if a large portion of Americans (on either side) feel that the deepest root of their justice system is fundamentally unjust.
The things on my list were carefully chosen. The common denominator isn't "Democratic politics" and the fact that you think they were is, once again, terrifying. The point is that I'm watching the country I once called home *tear itself to pieces* and any time I try to COMMUNICATE THAT I get sneers and derision and an insistence that I'm trying to trick you. No, the things that you are calling "Republican politics" are not normal and usual, and OK. Bush was a crappy president in my eyes, but he'd have threatened his allies, denied a deadly pandemic, whipped up a mob to try to steal an election or call for fucking ETHNIC CLEANSING. I'd take eight guaranteed years of Romney or the ghost of McCain over one more year of Trump in a heartbeat. There are lots of issues near and dear to my hear that were nowhere to be seen: nothing about abortion, nothing about guns, nothing about taxes, nothing about the ordinary drop-some-bombs-on-backwater-countries-for-iffy-reasons sort of foreign policy. Republicans are going to do things I don't like in all of those areas, and they *should* if they win: that's what votes are for. But there are lines that should not be crossed, and Trump has spent eight years shitting on every one of those lines he could reach. Everything on that list, EVERYTHING was about one of three things: fundamental truth, basic human decency or bipartisan cooperation. The things that WILL destroy American if you keep treating them as conveniences to be discarded any time you think it will score you another win.
[2] I can already hear the retorts about wacky things Democrats believe. Please stop before you type them. Take a breath. Consider. Are they *really* on the same level as a literal troll story made up by 4chan?
Agreed about the COVID and stolen election, departures from reality on the Republican side. The again, Democrats have bought into the transgenderism narrative despite the ton of evidence against all its core assertions (evidence which is so assiduously kept out of the mainstream media that I grant you they simply aren't aware of it. But are willing to buy into the idea that those who are trans-skeptics are motivated by ignorance and bigotry rather than doing the logical thing and simply reading up on the trans-skeptic position. See the PITT substack for a very incomplete starter read).
And for some reason Democrats take positions on law and order that are not based in reality and permit tons of crime.
As to "ethnic cleansing", these are words, meaning nothing. It's not unreasonable or immoral to think that moving the Gazans elsewhere will be better both for them and Israel. Keeping them in Gaza just guarantees more unending strife for them and their children.
" But I want to just ask you all to give him and team Trump a chance."
The entire nation already did that. It ended with an attack on the nation's capital, attempting to end a two-century old democratic tradition. I'm generally pretty forgiving, but if you can't look at that and say "uh, maybe no more chances for that guy in particular," you've gone well past forgiving and well into quokka. It's not like there weren't dozens of other people the Republican Party could have tapped who *didn't* have a history of doing that, if that was something they actually found in any way upsetting.
Oh Bernie is right about a lot of things. (Take over by big corporations, which have taken over much of government.) He could easily get on the Trump train... but he's somehow infected with TDS from those around him. I'm perhaps a Bernie bro having watched him on Rogan.
I think it's completely logical for Bernie to hate Trump. Bernie hates people who have a lot of money, that has almost always been his position. He's very consistent that way.
Welcome to the ass end of Hollywood. You work for the least desirable developement company that gets any work at all, so you really can't afford to be choosy.
Your latest assignment is to come up with a film that includes the following bit of dialog.
"Have I served in combat? You should understand that I serve on an Ohio-class submarine. We don't get in gunfights with raghead militias. We're the gatekeepers of the apocalypse. We fire one missile, we wreck a country. We fire the full stack, we destroy the world. So no, I have not served in combat."
Small-town teen comedy featuring wacky neighbors. This line is coming from the absurd redneck stereotype who drunkenly uses his military experience to hog the karaoke machine.
An action movie where terrorists with a stolen nuclear warhead have taken over [insert thing with lots of civilians here], and the only available people who can Save the Day are the brand new Public Affairs lady for [thing with lots of civilians] and Civilian guy Attending [Thing] who happens to be a retired US Navy Chief Missile Technician and thus is the only person who can Disable the Nukes Before the Terrorists Can Use Them
(The MT would have had some weapons training as a member of the security force, so he can be at least somewhat credible threat to the terrorists).
Edited; Thing With Lots of Civilians should be a Entertainment Company That is Definitely Not Disney-like Cruise (good luck getting the Mouse to buy off on this), Attractive Female Lead (formerly Public Affairs Lady) should be one of the assistant producers for all the shows (so you can explain her knowledge of the ship and where to go) and Attractive Male Lead (formerly Civilian Guy) should be there as the Best Man for his Sister's Wedding, who has always loved Entertainment Company That is Definitely Not Disney's shows and wanted to get married on their cruise (so you can explain why he's there but also leave him single for the inevitable romance)
Adaptation of The Producers with a low-end barroom braggart substituted for Hitler. Opening number features corny, earnest Ohio workers on lunch break at the Ohio-sub factory. Nose of the sub sticking out of the building and daisies popping up everywhere. Lying barroom drunk staggers among the singing worker-dancers, and they're popping daisies in his pockets.
The guy who said that is only three ounces below the Navy's upper weight limit, has a neckbeard, and has paid thousands of dollars for Andrew Tate conferences and subscriptions.
A film about a grizzled, down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter who has been forced descent to working on a rewrite of an execrable submarine-themed action movie to make ends meet, who ends up drunk in a bar, quoting the worst lines of dialogue from the original script contemptuously to the bartender, prompting him to start trying to turn his life around with unexpected results.
The first thing that occurs to me is to file the serial numbers off of The Hunt for Red October. Some kind of spy thriller involving submarines and rogue captains, maybe reverse the plot and have an American boomer captain forge false orders and go rogue. Depending on where he's going with it, the heroes could be a CIA/Navy joint team trying to get ahead of the sub, sneak on board somehow when it puts into port, and retake control of it.
Failing that, make a romantic comedy or goofy buddy movie where two of the lead characters are an enthusiastic but naive young man who befriends a jaded submarine crewmember while he's on leave and they get into hijinks together.
"Chief Johnson Goes to Washington puts a bit of backspin on an old formula. Johnson (J.K. Simmons) retires from the Navy after a long career, and runs for office in an obscure congressional district. He wins and heads to DC determined to fix the mess with a bit of directness and common sense, which he has plenty of. Several misadventures later, Johnson has discovered that complicated problems defy simple solutions, and ugly compromises have powerful constituencies defending cherished entitlements on both sides.
"The resulting film is hard to recommend. Simmons does what he can and his younger costars put in the work, but the film is talky and the camera work is static. There are a lot of people monologuing in offices. The one bit that does shine is the fidelity to the underlying material. Both of the script writers are former congressional staffers, and it really shows when they dive deep into obscure details of housing policy and water rights, to name just two areas. This one seems destined to be a cult favorite of armchair policy wonks, but everyone else should go watch something else."
What projects are pushing forward "data structures + algorithms = programs" *with funding*; stl is kinda getting old and I doubt stepov will do a major rewrite, it seems like no one does computer science where the goal is to produce programs with less code gets paid. Its all ai, cryto, new languages with hype, etc.
I strongly suspect rust implements a subset of the stl that they can convince a compiler is memory safe; which truth be told is not a goal I think will be fruitful
"I spend months and wrote a research paper about how to convince a rust compiler to work on my doubly linked list" is less good *by allot* then "I spent an hour on a doubly linked list its over there, heres all my algorithms and data structures that are all in the same style"
It seems like the official death toll for the Bihar Famine was 2353 (maybe the real number is higher), and that seems to be the last famine that caused widespread death in India. The bengal famine caused around 4 million deaths, before that there was 1876 famine that has an 8.2 million deaths, again under the British raj (during which wheat was still being exported to London at regular rates). If you just want a history of all the grievances Indians have towards the British Raj, any school textbook in India will suffice. Countless Indian Historians and economists have written papers and books on this. I think it's more useful to analyze the incentive structure that leads to these extreme misgovernance.
The British people I do not think were uniquely evil, they still valued justice, kindness and all other good virtues that most populations valued. They were racist, that is true, but racism was the norm of that time, and racism alone cannot explain the bad governance of the British Raj. Maybe it can explains the average humiliation they made Indians endure, or the lopsided justice system every time a Brit was involved but there are bigger problems to look at.
The fundamental issue is that the colonial system hired administrators whose career was beholden to a fickle group in London far more than the population they ruled, and once they were done, they left and often went back to London to end their lives, without having to deal with any of the havoc they caused in their territory. If anything good resulted from their administration, it had to happen due to their sense of honor that regularly was at odds with directives from London, or it happened because of their fondness for the land, which while present was clearly not enough as none of them actually chose to live in the country they administered unlike every other king, in human history. If Lee Kuan Yew was administering Singapore for China and went back to China after his 5 year term, he might consider all these policies reasonable:
1. Singapore can best function as an agricultural exporter to China, since China is industrializing well and it doesn't make sense to compete with China that clearly has more resources.
2. He can play the Malays off against the Tamils, so that they are too distracted fighting each other and make his administration easy.
3. During wartimes or emergency, all resources in Singapore need to be diverted to protect the motherland, because that is what matters the most.
If you change the incentives and tell Lee that his faith is forever sealed with Singapore, you end up with the opposite conclusion in each of these policies.
Prior to 1920 or so, irrigation collapsed in British controlled india. The consequences were dire. This was an astonishing fact for me, because maintaining proper irrigation is kind of the main task of any government beyond basic military defense.
The British would build shiny new dams in nodes of their profitable trade network, and leave the rest of the country to rock
To summarize for those who don't like to click links:
Andreas Koureas on X argues that the Bihar Famine was not caused by Churchill's neglect or malice. He claims the famine was caused by a natural disaster, compounded by an inability to bring in food from Singapore, Burma, Malaya, or the Philippines because they were currently occupied by the Japanese. Japanese ships were a significant threat to shipping in the Bay of Bengal, capturing or destroying merchant vessels. The British Empire's shipping capacity was stretched to the limit at the time because of WWII. Despite this, as soon as Churchill heard about the famine he authorized 100,000 tons of grain to be shipped from Australia to India, despite the risk of Japanese raiding. Between August of '43 and the end of '44 1 million tons of grain were shipped to India. In April of '44 Churchill sent a telegram to Roosevelt asking for US assistance in shipping grain to India, which was refused because US shipping was at capacity due to the war. Andreas then argues that while Churchill said several racist things about Indians he did not have malice towards them.
This is a good analysis. Occasionally I see arguments for colonialism from right wing people as a solution to certain third world countries consistent underdevelopment, but it always ignores this (extremely important critique).
Even if extremely competent and just administrators are put in charge, there’s literally nothing stopping them from exploiting the colonial nation in ways that utterly disregard the colonized people. At least if your local warlord is ruling over and exploiting you, it’s *your* local warlord, who presumably can’t easily flee to luxury overseas if things go bad (although a lot of African dictators seem to do this with billions at the end of their rule).
"At least if your local warlord is ruling over and exploiting you, it’s *your* local warlord, who presumably can’t easily flee to luxury overseas if things go bad (although a lot of African dictators seem to do this with billions at the end of their rule)"
Will he be *your* warlord, though? The kind of place likely to have been colonized also was the kind of place lacking in national identify in the first place, so while their may have been someone who was from nearby, they may not have been of the same ethnicity. In the case of India, I am aware of a defense of the Raj from apparently very right-wing Indian elements that prior the Raj, the Indians suffered from the worst of *both world*: brutal, exploitative, colonial administrators who stayed for 1000 years (eg Muslims). At least the Raj left, after all-the Mughals are still there.
It isn’t that simple. Akbar was a tolerant Mughal Ruler, who decided to invent his own religion when ruling over the land. Mughals had times of relative peace between the religions. It’s just that when the Brits came, they were witnessing Aurangzeb who was probably the worst Mughal ruler in all of India, who decided to wage the most expensive war in Mughal History against South India, not win that war which eventually led to a dissolution of the Mughal empire into the Marathas and other small parts.
There was not an Indian Identity, but there was a civilizational identity. For example Hindus used to still gather for the “Kumbh Mela”, every 4-12 years like clockwork through all the different rulers they’ve had, they often had to cross kingdoms to do this pilgrimage.
The question is were the colonial rulers better/ worse than previous rulers India had. Of course the British view, and the dominant view of the 19th and 20th century is that they were the best rule India ever had. And yet when they left, India was one of the poorest countries in the world, not just Asia. There were few periods in history that had worse Hindu-Muslim Tensions than when British left, which led to the disastrous partition. They also created an Anglicized Socialist Ruling Class, that was determined to convert India into the next Russia or something similar, though to be fair, Russia and China beared the worst of that dynamic. It’s hard to look at the facts and think India was some well ruled country.
The only argument I see that might hold some water, was this was something that even happened to China that was never fully colonized by the west, so it was just something that happened even under capable rule. It’s a counterfactual we won’t know the answer to. I don’t fully buy it.
>Even if extremely competent and just administrators are put in charge, there’s literally nothing stopping them from exploiting the colonial nation in ways that utterly disregard the colonized people.
TBH that doesn't seem like a problem confined to colonialism, at least not any more. Plenty of senior politicians and civil servants in western democracies end up with lucrative positions in international corporations, more or less entirely insulated from conditions in the country they used to help run. When Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called the last British election, there were people suggesting he had a job lined up at some American firm and wanted to leave office quickly so he could take it up; I've no idea if this was true, but the fact it was considered credible tells you a lot.
I can't think of any examples of a prominent US politician who left office and then wound up living and working in a foreign country. I'm certain it has happened occasionally, but I am skeptical that it is common. Working for the US office of a large multinational corporation, yes, *that's* quite common, but that still leaves one pretty strongly coupled to the conditions in the US. As does having your extended family living in the United States.
Yes, it's mostly non-American politicians moving to America, for reasons others have said. But I do think that "conditions in the US" is too broad a brush. The sort of conditions that are good for, say, BlackRock or Goldman Sachs might not be good for your old constituents in Nowheresville, West Virginia.
My mind pretty quickly summoned the example of John C. Breckinridge. Admittedly, that was during a rather unusual time in US history, not at all common, just as you qualified.
As the richest country in the world, we don't need to go overseas to earn big bucks; they come to us and give us the big bucks. And there's no shortage of politicians and Formers that get paid by foreign entities for lobbying (John Allen getting paid by Qatar comes to mind immediately, as does Sue Mi Terry, although she was getting paid shockingly little for her services).
You can make both more money and gain influence in the US than any other Western country. You could work for some NGO in London and have a respectable amount of influence but you won't make a lot of money. You could work for some think tank in Dubai or Singapore and make tons of money but won't have any influence. America is the perfect place for both, so you will see some politicians from other Western countries move to the US but rarely the other way around.
Right, so the "exploiting the colonial nation in ways that utterly disregard the colonized people" dynamic being discussed, really doesn't work in the United States. And probably doesn't work terribly well in the rest of the industrialized world. Nobody with any sense is going to "utterly disregard" the people of the country they are going to finish out their career in, and that their grandchildren are probably going to grow up in. That doesn't make them benevolent altruistic civil servants, but it puts a cap on their villainy that isn't there for colonial administrations.
Perhaps there’s something of value when one has strong ethnic and cultural ties to the land. For the same reason a white leader of an African country would be accused of not representing the interests of the people, so is Sunak in the land of the Anglo-Saxons.
British elites loved their empire so much that when they lost the land they just invited in all their former subjects. Don't think they expected that within a generation their former subjects will become their rulers lol(Apparently Indians own more property in London than whites and the British finance sector in my experience nowadays is disproportionately Indian as well).
- my Personal Moral Responsibility for helping avert ASI dystopia
Hear me out.
I am seriously anxious with AGI/ASI. If we were all going to die and it was certain, I could theoretically accept that. But "NOT KNOWING WHETHER OR NOT I CAN use my mind and flesh to help avert catastrophe", that keeps me up at night. No really, it's torturing me. Imagine if you were living in Ukraine and the bombs were falling and you had computer skills... how could you look yourself in the mirror if you didn't work in some "technological warfare" operation?
Meanwhile, there is 1 thing in this world where I have some "unique planning and insight": A simulation game of the Middle Ages. I've been planning it for 4+ years.
How could these possibly be related?
With Alignment, doesn't at least SOME of the problem come down to "weights/opinions/value-judgements" as well as "how to most beneficially conceptualize reality" Doesn't AI Alignment require "keeping more of the AI agents weighted in a 'vaguely-defined beneficial way' than not"?
And won't it be an ongoing problem? And if so, couldn't "we all" contribute, in a way, by molding our concepts, discourse, and cultural-expression in a more pro-social way?
Enter the "game"....................................................................................
If you've ever played historical strategy games, you know they can be overly-focused on hard power: becoming the largest, richest, widest.
While this reflects a certain truth about civilization, it is VERY incomplete. Individuals-and-groups also seek beauty, stability, justice, moral good, truth, honor, reputation, comforts, etc. Not all dreams are so "imperial".
AND
People don't always seek them in the order of Maslow's Pyramid. People can and DO sometimes sacrifice things "at the bottom" for the sake of things "at the top". Sometimes temporarily. Sometimes permanently.
I have plans for a game that's more complex: one that doesn't hide the "brutishness", but is still life-affirming and pro-social. I want a game where it is just as fun and interesting to "build peace", "build justice" or "build culture" as it is to build empires.
It's not that the game would introduce any new views of history that don't already exist on the web... but if it successfully influences other developers and players... maybe it can magnify these particular views... like a sort of "Grand Suggestion" to our culture and AI. Maybe not enormous in impact, but large compared to what I could achieve by commenting on ACX :-P.
If one suffers from war in Ukraine, they might leave. It's not that one's support might allow Ukraine decisively win. Comparing ASI fears to the war is gloomy.
(and in case it's not clear, deep down I'm seeking answer to the following...)
IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I CAN DO TOWARDS HELPING AVERT ASI DYSTOPIA?
Is there anything REALISTIC that someone ELSE can do? (which I can contribute to?) (granted, I live with a disability and my days can be hell or at least very unproductive sometimes)
Not on that timescale. But I would say his administration's actions since inauguration are a much better support of the flight 93 election case made 9 years ago than his first term. You could reasonably assess what he is doing now as having lots of two way risk ( high rewards actually possible) without being MAGA.
None of that was plausible in his first term. It was more like choosing to masturbate as the plane went down (if you wanted to embrace the premise that the plane was in fact going down)
Yes, I'm actually beginning to like him now. I figured his second term would just be him running in circles giving outrage speeches for 4 years. Who knew a President could actually do things? Lord knows where it'll all end up but it sure is fun to watch for now.
I don't want the US responsible for Gaza, but his proposal is 100% the correct one and it's refreshing to see a President with the balls to actually say it. Palestine is a failed state and will never be viable. Put it in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
Yes, forced removal of an entire population is B-A-D. Not the least because it WILL involve murdering a large number of them. Guaranteed. If people with guns come to forcibly remove you and your families from their homes, fighting back is clearly, *obviously* an act of self defense.
If basic human decency is not a reason for you to oppose this, public opinion really ought to be. Much of the rest of the world does not share your cavalier attitude about forcing civilians from their homes at gunpoint and murdering those that resist. The international reputation of the U.S. WILL be badly damaged by such a move. There will be economic, diplomatic and military consequences for many, many years to come.
So is leaving Gazans there going to result in less suffering for them and more thriving than moving them to another location?
Jews moved a lot across the course of history and I for one am glad my ancestors chose (circa 1900) to leave both Russia and Germany and emigrate to the US.
I would posit that the Gazans would be extraordinary better off to move to the US than stay there, even if moved forcibly, though that's not going to be an option and they will be lucky if any decent country takes them.
Moving them to the US is, as you note, not on the table.
Moving them en masse to Egypt, Jordan, and similar countries, which don’t want them, to be housed and fed on those countries’ dime, is quite a different proposition.
A quick google says US per capita gdp is $82,769.40 and we have constant tension over every penny our government spends “helping foreigners” rather than the domestic population.
The per capita gdps of Egypt and Jordan are, respectively, $3,457.50 and $4,455.50
Even when refugees are few and a country is wealthy and accepting the with open arms, they don’t get the best that country has to offer. If we send these people en masse, to countries which lack wealth, over those countries’ objections, it is willfully naive to think they will be well taken care of.
That they will recieve anything remotely like “a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony” is staggeringly unlikely. “Barely resourced tents in the middle of the desert” is the far greater probability.
This is vanishingly unlikely to look anything like your ancestors moving to the US circa 1900. It is, however, uncomfortably likely to resemble my ancestors experience of being internally relocated within the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. “We aren’t *killing* you, just forcibly moving you to barely resourced tents in the middle of the desert, where we are sure you’ll figure things out somehow” is pretty much TLDR for the Armenian Genocide.
Moving them to another location will involve you fighting a bloody war with them, and them spending the next generation holding a grudge of the sort that inspires international terrorist movements and impedes local economic development. This will probably result in a great deal of suffering for them, and a fair bit for you as well.
The idea that, because you explain to them how you are trying to alleviate their suffering and how this will improve their lives in every way, and they then go along with it peacefully rather than picking up every weapon in sight and trying to kill you, is just another version of the hopelessly naive "they will greet us as liberators!" fantasy.
Even if what you are saying is true, it will not work and a great deal of harm will be caused.
If they don't have to die then ethnic cleansing isn't that bad. The only reason it gets a pearl-clutching response is because people view it as a synonym for genocide.
If that's your definition then the partitioning of India was ethnic cleansing.
I hope Gaza gets power-washed. It's a failed state and nothing can change that. Let it die. It's better for the Gazans and it's better for the world.
Ethnic cleansing is very widely regarded as being very very bad. Your saying "it isn't that bad", no matter how confident you are in your moral reasoning, isn't going to change you and it isn't going to isolate you from the real and substantial blowback that will ensue if you do such a thing.
And if you do such a thing while flying the American flag, it isn't going to isolate *me* from the blowback. So I'd very much prefer that you not do that.
The partition of India resulted in about 1 million deaths to displace between 12 and 20 million people, depending on who's counting. That doesn't strike me as an example of good solutions to ethnic tension!
(And also, let's not forget that the Nazis started off by saying "move the Jews somewhere else" and then moved to extermination once they discovered no other countries would take them. Where are you planning to send the Gazans, and what are you going to do to Gazans who don't want to leave or can't find anywhere to go?)
The partition of India was an ethnic cleansing. That isn’t a controversial take and also doesn’t overstate the reality or imply that it was some second Holocaust.
But the real question here is what happens next? Pushing everyone out of Gaza doesn’t remove its problems, just disperses them to other countries. If you think Palestinian terrorism from the Gaza Strip is bad, wait until you have to deal with Palestinian terrorism from all the countries they’re expelled to. It’s happened before and it would happen again.
what if someone said Israel should be in the dustbin of history where it belongs?
oh right, half the Middle East already believes this, and will continue to believe this, and will believe this more adamantly after the ethnic cleansing that's being proposed
better yet, why not leave "apartheid" in the dustbin of history?
>what if someone said Israel should be in the dustbin of history where it belongs?
Then that person would be so stupid they practically drooled and I would be worried about their ability to feed themselves. Israel has 52k of per capita GDP and produces more than terrorism. That's not even approaching a coherent argument.
No one cares about your delicate sensibilities. Be offended all you want, Palestine is still a failed state. All the sob stories in the world won't change the economic reality there. They can't govern, control, or sustain themselves. Just give it up already.
I believe Israel should exist, because there's human beings who live there and it's not their fault they live there. And those people have value.
But otherwise, what is Israel contributing to the World, on balance, other than one crisis after another? And Netanyahu actively funded Hamas as part of his 4-D Chess Realpolitik Superbraining:
> Despite limited natural resources, intensive development of the agricultural and industrial sectors over the past decades has made Israel largely self-sufficient in food production, apart from grains and beef. Imports, totaling $96.5 billion in 2020, include raw materials, military equipment, investment goods, rough diamonds, fuels, grain, and consumer goods. Leading exports include machinery, equipment, software, cut diamonds, agricultural products, chemicals, textiles, and apparel; in 2020, exports reached $114 billion.
Israel has the second-largest number of startup companies after the United States and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies. It is the world leader for number of start-ups per capita and has been dubbed the "Start-Up Nation". Intel and Microsoft built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel, and other high-tech multinational corporations have opened research and development centres in the country.
So they have an economy with imports and exports. And they're populated by transplants who could just as easily live in the Bay Area. How does this, on-balance, contribute to the world?
I just had a lot of fun asking chatgpt:
"how much of Israel's wealth is attributable to rich "first world" foreign immigrants with good education?" It was fun and made me feel very smug :-P.
If Israel were never founded but instead all this capital and brain investment stayed in Europe, wouldn't there have been a proportionate rise in "software and start-ups" in Europe by today?
Or, if the Jewish diaspora landed in............... the Island of Timor, and billions (trillions?) of dollars of foreign investment was poured in over decades, would that prove the original Timorese people were always culturally inferior and unfit to rule? (since they couldn't attract waves of brains and capital)
If the whole brainy population of San Francisco decided to relocate to Jamaica, should the inferior Jamaican people get pushed into a ghetto?
(yes, I know the danger of rhetorical questions. someone will answer them)
Israel is smart and wealthy because the smart and wealthy chose Palestine as the national equivalent of Pied-à-terre. But their actions and choices have also caused a lot of suffering and chaos.
Perhaps Israeli history has "subtracted" from the world.
No change, I remain impressed at his ability to actually solve problems instead of talking around them. The two state solution is not going to happen, and neither is the one state. While Trump's proposed plan has a lot of problems it has the benefit that it would actually solve the issue. I have not seen an alternative plan that would plausibly end the cycle of death and destruction in Gaza.
Agreed. Do these critics actually have a better plan? No, they just enjoy criticizing Trump and preening about how moral they are for "supporting" Palestinians. Why not try doing something that addresses the problem?
Ethnic cleansing won't work for the very obvious reason that Palestinians don't want to leave and are intent on destroying Israel, as demonstrated by their refusal to give up on the right to return during past peace negotiations. Those peace negotiations were primarily administered by the US and various peace deals were brokered between Israel and other Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan by the US. Trump's inflammatory remarks undermine decades of US foreign policy and contemporary relations between the US, Israel, and the Middle East countries. It's not just that what he's saying is retarded - it is obviously harmful to anybody not an accelerationist about war.
Calling for ethnic cleansing is an impressive, problem-solving, go-getter attitude now, apparently. Did we go back in time to the 1800s? I'm very glad that I'll never have to travel on an American passport again.
Trump's Gaza comments were so obviously stupid that even his fellow Republicans criticized them and tried to walk them back. Seeing the ACX comment section fawning over it was the last thing I ever expected.
I expected it. The local Trumpers are extremely vocal. I suspect a lack of gainful employment in that sector. Way too much free time. Anomie needs to get a job, especially. Although I'm not sure he's old enough to work.
It would not be about their ethnicity any more than sending members of the Italian Mafia to prison would be. If a people cannot live in peace with its neighbours, I don't see why it should be accorded special inalienable rights to the land it lives on, any more than a murderer has an inalienable right to stay in his home and not be sent off to prison.
Giving people rights that aren't paid for by responsibility is a terrible idea.
No, it’s my position that issues like sovereignty or “ethnic cleansing” rely on treating a body of people as a collective whole. On the individual level, of course not every resident of Gaza is a member of Hamas, but on the collective level, this is what giving a measure of autonomy to the people of Gaza has produced.
"It would not be about their ethnicity any more than sending members of the Italian Mafia to prison would be."
That is rank, stinking bullshit and I think you know it. Arrests are not made on the basis of "being part of the Italian mafia" and CERTAINLY not on the basis of "being Italian." Arrests are made for CRIMES. Against people suspected of committing CRIMES. Further proof is required of ACTUAL CRIMINAL CULPABILITY before decisive action is taken.
Arrests are NOT made against the families, friends and neighbors of people who commit crimes, the are made against ONLY against those who were suspected of actually being involved. They are most certainly not made on the basis of ethnicity and location alone and you are damn well aware of that. Capturing Hamas militants--people who have actually known to have picked up arms or directly aided in attacks--and imprisoning them is WORLDS apart from uprooting families at gunpoint and shipping them off to somewhere they will be less inconvenient.
Collective punishment is explicitly forbidden under the Geneva Convention. There is not the faintest legal question that anything like this would be allowable under international law. If you are genuinely too ignorant to have the faintest clue what you're talking about, better to stay silent.
All your ranting and raving only makes you look insecure. If you had good arguments, you could afford to be civil.
Now, my point was about the relevance of the word ETHNIC in your phrase "ethnic cleansing". If the region were cleansed of the Palestinian people, it would not be because of their ethnicity, but because they couldn't live in peace with their neighbours.
As for the point that has you foaming at the mouth now, you seem to want to have it both ways. When it comes to sovereignty, you want to treat the Palestinians as a single people, with a right to a land. Yet when it comes to responsibility, you want to treat each individual separately, a hopelessly impractical task. That's a double standard. Are they to be treated as one people, or as individuals with no collective identity? If you would have it both ways, any rogue nation could wreak havoc by waging guerilla warfare with fully armed—but unacknowledged—militaries that the "moral" "law-abiding" nations could not retaliate against.
"International law" is a rickety thing that nations abide by as it suits them. It's certainly nothing the Gazan government has ever used as a guide. Nor is it some fount of morality.
"If you had good arguments, you could afford to be civil." This is a common refrain that doesn't bear up under scrutiny. Edgar A. Poe was undeniably a genius and he was constitutionally allergic to civility. I can think of numerous other cases.
"All your ranting and raving only makes you look insecure. If you had good arguments, you could afford to be civil."
If you had good arguments, presenting them without the tone-policing would make me look far worse. Complaining about my tone is a distraction from the fact that your position is utterly morally and intellectually bankrupt and you know it. Like this:
"When it comes to sovereignty, you want to treat the Palestinians as a single people, with a right to a land. Yet when it comes to responsibility, you want to treat each individual separately, a hopelessly impractical task. That's a double standard."
Seriously? Perhaps it WOULD be a double standard in a universe where they DID have sovereignty. But they do not. They. Never. Have. A double standard is saying "this group of people who were forcibly denied statehood, self-determination, sovereignty, who have not even been allowed an ELECTION in 19 years are all considered culpable for the actions of some of them. But Israel, which DOES have all those things and has nevertheless ALSO conspicuously failed to live in peace with its neighbors for its entire existence, is exempt from such considerations."
This is the *fundamental* crux of the matter. Hamas has taken unacceptable and unconscionable actions. So has the IDF. But Hamas can only in the loosest and most tenuous sense be said to represent the Palistinian People, while the Israeli government (of which the IDF is a part) is selected by a prosperous, democratic, safe[1] polity in regular elections. A polity that proceeds to regularly vote for the bombing of hospitals and schools, the denial of Palestinian rights and sovereignty and the continual exercise of Israeli power on *everyone* in Gaza. Despite my distaste for everything Israel has done, I have never once called for the forcible removal of its people from their homes, nor have I had a single kind word for anyone who did. Where, again, is your double standard here?
[1] If you dare complain about that characterization again, please compare to the people you're demanding be ethnically cleansed.
"Arrests are not made on the basis of 'being part of the Italian mafia'"
They absolutely are. In Italy, being a member of a mafia organization is in itself a crime, worth a minimum of three years in prison if they can pin it on you.
This in not remotely what was under discussion, but I can see how you might be confused. "Being part of the Italian mafia" and "being part of a mafia organization, which is located in Italy" are two VERY different things for the purposes of this discussion, and ought not be compared.
Also "if they can pin it on you." makes this whole line doubly irrelevant, as I discussed above.
people tried to say "oh its 4-D chess and helps us" when i wrote below about tariffs, arguing they work in the sense of isolationism, but now Gaza. Yeah.
a funny little thing that got me is if you follow vtubers, fans like to buy merch to support them. Silly things like acrylic standups, keychains, etc.
thanks to trump they are now getting tariffed with processing fees on top of the tariff, lol. trump
is removing the de minimis exception for china. Considering how much storefronts like amazon rely on dropshipping going to be surprised they wont be raging against him.
Trump didn’t have the raw competence to get anything done in his first term, but Elon Musk does. They’re actually gutting the NGO blob this time. If this keeps up, I’ll regret not voting for him in the primaries!
I still don't know if he was. Was he? Is he? Was it a stunt to impress his base, knowing he would back down quickly? Might he still be serious in a month?
For a certain value of "hours." My opinion of Trump has actually gone down in the past few days, and folks, it wasn't high to begin with! I feel like I must have somehow absorbed, over the course of 2024, some of the sanguinity of some of his less rabid supporters--sure, he talks about revenge and retribution and dictatorship, but he won't do that much!
Oddly, my opinion about Musk hasn't changed at all. While I'm genuinely shocked by how many levers of power he was handed and how quickly, I am truly not surprised at all by what he is doing with them. In every case, it's "yeah, sounds like something he would do!" Examining this, I believe it's because my previous opinion of him hovered around "he would have to actually be Hitler for me to think less of him," and, well, so far he does clear that bar.
(I know what you're really asking here, and no, no change. Because I have eyes, I had already seen the ample signals Trump had sent lately suggesting that anyone who still somehow expected him to be some kind of principled isolationist, or to relieve the Gazans' suffering in some way Biden didn't, was likely to be deeply disappointed.)
The last few weeks have been like another Jan 6 moment. For a long time, I thought the left was just being alarmist about Trump, but they keep getting proved right again and again.
Plus, there are a lot of people in the Trump camp practicing Macbeth politics.
It's less painful to make just one more rationalization - take one more step into the bloody river - than it is to turn back and admit that "holy shit my outtribe was actually right and he *is* a uniquely bad leader, and I put him into power. We really were the baddies this time."
Indulging that reflex to self-justify is, of course, deeply human. It's also how you end *up* deep in the bloody river, frantically throwing excuses around about how the ethnic cleansing was never supposed to really happen it was supposed to be a bargaining chip and even when it did happen it was supposed to be done safely and carefully and it's really the fault of Egypt for not providing better housing when the people we forced across the border got there and anyways the blue tribe would have done something worse and Hamas was elected 20 years ago so these people are all culpable and probably deserved what they got I'm not bad I'm not bad I'm not bad.
Hopefully we don't get there, but as long as people have their own personal egos and self-image wrapped up in the equation and are rationalizing backwards from "I'm not bad and I voted for him so he can't be bad or at least the left has has has to be as bad or worse," there'll be no shortage of rationalizations out there.
I changed my mind about my position that he didn't really read Yarvin and the resemblances are coincidental. Trump's peace plan is basically https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-and-the-laws-of-war, and there's no way a second person independently came up with that idea.
They even used similar wording - "the LA of the Mediterranean" vs. "the Riviera of the Middle East" (Trump's version is better).
I highly doubt Trump himself reads Yarvin. Far more likely a staffer that we don’t know about, Musk, (who reads adjacent publications that would occasionally link to Yarvin) or Vance (who has read you, and what Republican reads ACX but not Gray Mirror?).
The toad has a vocabulary of about 500 English words. No way he could pass as anyone but himself.
Just watch for heavy use of anemic adverbs like ‘very’, ‘very very’ and Jeff Spicoli like usage of ‘totally’ plus variations on ‘such as the world has ever seen’.
It wouldn’t take Quantico level profiling skills to pick the semi literate buffoon out of this crowd.
He could be any one of us! He could be you, he could be me, he could even be... Oh gods, why didn't I see it sooner? Obviously no one in this country would be named "Scott Siskin", that's the name of a bird! Someone has a lot of explaining to do...
Many of us, not just Jeff, regard Trump as a (very, very) imperfect instrument of a very necessary change, and are simply determined not to let the perfect be a successful enemy of the good.
If someone in 2015 had asked you to set a floor on "good", would Donald Trump meet that standard today? Or are you the frog not noticing the water being boiled around you?
Frankly speaking, if someone in 2015 had asked me to set a floor on "good" I would probably just have said "as long as he kills some woke people he can do whatever he wants". Ten years ago I was much more sickened by the zeitgeist. I was seething so hard I would've boiled the water, not it me.
But taking your question in the spirit it was intended, I think he would, insofar as even his many catastrophic flaws (74 boxes of classified material, Donald?!) do not overshadow the extreme need for a reckoning with the status quo ante. The ideological capture of the entire managerial class and attendant big-government issues are *the* issue of our lifetime. It's increasingly obvious that no more gentle, rule-following, establishmentarian candidate could – or would even have wanted to – even try to act on this, and in some ways I think Trump is the better alternative to a later candidate with whom the Hitler comparisons would have been more accurate.
The one thing he's done that gives me genuine pause is equivocate on Ukraine. If he'd taken the maximalist Israel-style tack on that, suggested annexing Crimea to the US, and sent Zelensky a gigantic pile of guns, planes and to the point that liberals were worried that he was disarming our borders I would have been certain that he was in all ways the better candidate of the two we got to choose from, but his actual attitude is alarming.
Many Thanks! Well, not all authoritarians are interested in expanding territory. Some just seek to expand their power (and this is typical of most POTUSs, finding Congress pesky is not surprising for a POTUS from either major party).
EDIT: I don't know what fraction "liked" Trump. I view him as not-Kamala-Harris, censor-in-chief, doubler-of-illegal-immigration (as part of the Biden administration and sort-of kind-of, denied-in-retrospect border czar). Marginally lesser evil is still evil.
Yes remember the time the Biden admin forced everyone filing for federal grants to remove a defined list of words from their filings because these were deemed wrong-think?
Many Thanks! Yes, Trump is doing that, and it looks like a meataxe approach to digging the woke crap out of the government.
That said, you are making a _terrible_ argument here. The left is _infamous_ for language policing, including speech codes in academia. _How_ many times have they switched the "polite" term for blacks on us?? Remember "latinx"? That one even pissed off the group the left claimed was being served by it.
Even if i grant you that your imagined language policing is all happening just like you believe it has, how is that the same as scrubbing certain terms from government documents because they are wrong-think?
I mean, just think: if Kamala had been elected, who's to say that she mightn't have plunged the nation into a constitutional crisis by...I don't know, legalizing weed or something?
It astounds me how absolutely obtuse so many people can be. Trump lays out exactly what crimes he wants to do, why he wants to do them, acknowledges they are crime, tries to do them, and yet some people will still be like "oh well i am not sure he really means it and harris was bad too". Total brain rot
Many Thanks! Hey, remember that Kamala was part of the Biden administration, and Biden _DID_ try to unilaterally stick the ERA into the constitution, despite having blown by the time limits on it by decades. Kamala herself is on record as saying, of uncensored free speech on the internet "it has to stop", a direct attack on the First Amendment. She was also very much a piece of shit.
Note what the statement does not include: any language to direct the government to publish the amendment, any changes to policy as a result of his belief, nothing to make it part of the Constitution at all. Not even directing some novelty copies of the Constitution with the new amendment printed up. It was using the bully puppet of the Presidency to try to make the issue salient but there was zero attempt to stick the ERA into the Constitution, unilateral or otherwise.
Note also the date: 3 days before Trump's inauguration. Essentially as lame as that duck was going to get. If he wanted to actually force it through he would have done so when he had time to potentially accomplish something.
Oh, for sure, for sure. We should all be breathing a sigh of relief that we haven't put into power the kind of Presidential administration that would shut down websites just because they contain disfavored sociopolitical content!
The news this evening that Musk and his little gang of tech randos have managed to gain control of the FDIC's systems and shut the actual agency staffers out of it, certainly has me thinking about some new stuff. Such as taking my ID to where we bank and clearing out our household bank accounts.
On a less satirical note, here's the transcript if you want to compare what Trump actually said to any media reporting you're concerned may be inaccurate or alarmist.
"Being in its [referring to Gaza] presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck."
"The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It's right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.
They're living under fallen concrete that's very dangerous and very precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again. The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too."
"I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East."
Did you love the debates about January 6, but wish there were more dead bodies to look away from while you put forth your technical argument that “it’s only a coup if the military is involved?” Well congratulations! From the fine folks at TrumpCo, who brought you 'I Can't Believe It's Not Coup!'…
...now try, 'I Can't Believe It's Not Genocide!'
Its all the legalistic navel-gazing that you loved from arguments like “you can’t say he refused to transfer power, Biden *did* technically become President after the riots failed” or “well Biden bullied Facebook so I think that makes Kamala the bigger tyrant"... but now just *chock full* with those civilian casualties we all *love* to deny!
“Technically it was up to the *host countries* to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the Palestinians we pressured them into accepting!”
“The UN definition of ‘genocide’ requires acts be ‘committed with intent to destroy’ the victims, and you can clearly see from these statements that our intent was to relocate them to ‘a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony!’ It's a terrible tragedy and a mistake, but let's not debase ourselves with inflammatory language!”
“I’m sure whatever *Kamala Harris* would have done to fix the Middle East would have been even worse!”
Yes, now with 'I Can't Believe It's Not Genocide!' you can distract yourself and others from *both* the damage you’ve done to your republican institutions *and* staggering human suffering and loss of life *at the same time*!
Look for it in stores sometime in the next 4 years! But hopefully not! He's probably bluffing! Let's suspend judgment and alarmism until it's actually tried!
(‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Genocide!' contains authoritarianism as an active ingredient and may destabilize your republic. Peace in the Middle East sold separately.)
Wanting to move them elsewhere is ethnic cleansing, which is often associated with genocide probably because past attempts to move a lot of people involved a lot of them dying due to technological limitations, eg see the British expulsion of Acadians from today's Canadian maritime provinces
The area isn't permanently uninhabitable, like Chernobyl. Someone is going to live there once it's rebuilt, and if that someone isn't the Palestinians, then it's ethnic cleansing.
That would still count in my book. The thing we are trying to prevent is the act of forcing 2 million people out of their homes at gunpoint and giving their land to someone else to build hotels on. The fact that the someone else is Arabic doesn't really change the fact that this would be a horrible thing to do to the people living there.
Maybe there would be a different legal word for it - "forced population transfer" instead of "ethnic cleansing" or something - but on moral grounds I don't see how it would make a difference.
Notable recent occurrences of ethnic cleansing have been comparatively bloodless (eg in Nagorno-Karabakh, less than 300 people died when >100K Armenians-99% of the population-departed).
The conditions in that case were maybe the most favorable in history, eg, short distance, destination being a functioning nation state dominated by your coethnics ready to receive you, aid organizations able to assist, modern technology
Yeah, that's probably a ceiling to how bloodless you can make the process. I reckon trans-shipping the Gazans over the West Bank could look pretty similar, as a logistical undertaking (everything else would be there other than "functioning nation-state", and even the West Bank is probably pretty functional albeit not in a way to handle an extra 2 million people)
Except the West Bank is not a "functioning nation-state dominated by their co-ethnics", it's a dysfunctional occupied territory dominated by their enemies. This is going to make the Gazans much less enthusiastic about the process.
Sometimes I spend a lot of time thinking of just the right comment I could make in one of these threads. I don't think I will ever come close to making a comment as perfect as this one.
Glad you liked it! I don't know if I'd call it a *fun* write, but it felt good to put to paper.
Still processing how quickly the satire became a reality right in front of me on the board. Kinda head-spinning to post a joke about overlooking the human tragedy your president proposes to create in favor of "legalistic navel-gazing" about whether that tragedy technically meets the definitions of particular very-bad words, only to see arguments emerge minutes later about whether this would really count as ethnic cleansing and whether ethnic cleansing is really all that bad.
I think approximately 100% of the people at all familiar with the situation in Gaza going back many years will agree that the existing system is bad/untenable/cyclically full of war.
I wont pretend to know a solution, but "Israel leaves Gaza alone" isn't on the table. If it were on the table, then we would see one or more October 7ths and then Israel would get involved again - which is again obvious to everyone.
Top level politicians giving it their best effort haven't solved this issue. We all also know that.
I'm not sure what end game we would expect here. Either we stay in a deadly cycle that everyone hates, or we fundamentally change the game. It may be that the game change is worse than the cycle, but I don't see how we complain about trying to fix the cycle given all of the complaints about the cycle.
I'd be more sympathetic to the complaints if they came with alternative solutions that were at all tenable.
Tenable is the crux of my objection. I agree that various attempts in the 70s-2000s were genuine and could have worked. But they didn't. A two state solution is not possible, and neither is a one state solution. We can see why - one or both sides will reject it.
If Trump has another option that can work, okay. We should have plenty of reason to doubt his plan will work as well, but people wanting to keep trying the same ideas of the last 50 years aren't being serious in my opinion.
Dang, I was just joking yesterday about turning Gaza into a charter city, and now here we are.
It's hard to know how to evaluate this. As a serious proposal? Or as a bunch of noises designed to possibly achieve some kind of political outcome?
There's some value in putting an even-worse-than-status-quo option on the table. It's also quite nice as a wedge issue that can separate ordinary Gazans (who would love to be resettled somewhere less sucky) from Hamas (who don't want to lose their power).
There's currently no country that will accept these "ordinary Gazans". Arab governments won't accept them for fear of angering their citizens. Is Trump going to settle them some place like TDR Congo?
Am I wrong? Is there some country that will have them? Australia maybe?
US can bribe (or threaten, or both) a country to take Gazans. IMHO, Syria might be a feasible option (new government desperately needs money and recognition...)
Well now the US has a new bargaining chip it can use against every other country.
Hey Mexico, do you want us to send you ten million Mexicans, or two million Gazans?
edit: I've got it! NEOM! The US can pay the Saudis to build NEOM on the condition that they fill it with Gazans. The Saudis get their dumb vanity project, the Gazans get new apartments, the US gets a bunch of beachside real estate which it can sell to offset the cost of building NEOM, everyone is happy.
"We will forcibly move two million people from another country into yours" is only a credible bargaining chip if you're willing to invade both countries and commit ethnic cleansing in at least one.
And okay, Trump's willingness to commit ethnic cleansing is probably not zero, but I'm less certain about the American people's willingness to support an invasion of Mexico for that purpose.
> I just don't see how the US taking ownership over Gaza puts America first. It looks to me like Trump let Bibi fuck him in the ass.
How so? The problem with Gaza is that there are Gazans there. That problem is going to be solved. I'm more doubtful that Israel is going to let him have that piece of land, seeing as they were planning development there themselves...
My personal preference would be to depopulate and terraform the West Bank, so that we can finally build England's green and pleasant land in Jerusalem.
No one's ethnic cleansing anything. Gaza is a failed state. Resettle the people and wipe it from the memory of the Earth. Honestly that would be kindest to the actual Palestinians. Break them out of the hopeless trap that they're currently in.
Under most definitions of the word, forcibly resettling an ethnic group from the area they live in is ethnic cleansing. (Especially if you're then taking the cleared land and resettling it with your own people, like how Trump suggested letting America have the vacated land.) I don't know what definition you're using where this wouldn't fit.
And to be clear, it would have to be done by force. You are not going to get 2 million people to abandon their homes and land without literally sending soldiers to force them out at gunpoint. You are deluding yourself if you think that can be done "cleanly" or "peacefully."
The partition of India is a bad example for you to use (I saw you use it elsewhere also), because it led to a bunch of long-term bad effects, notably two piles of, functionally, Indians who hate each other's guts snarling at each other across nuclear warheads. Might I very humbly suggest that you look at the Greek-Turk population exchange of the 1920s instead?
That's not true. If you had dealt with [him] four years ago, before they had a chance to organize around him... all of this could have been prevented. That would have been possible to accomplish just by yourself. It's too late for that now, obviously. You would only end up stoking the flames, and that's exactly what they want.
Yesterday I saw an interview of a woman that was deported from the US. She said she was fleeing the violence of the Catatumbo in Colombia, her husband was killed and her children threatened. When she took a bus in Mexico to her asylum date she was kidnapped for ransom. I know what people will say, she should come back and make things better in her country. I saw an interview of young men, barely teenagers, soldiers being sent there to try and restore order. They sounded so cheerful, I don't know how many of them will die in the jungle. It's all so senseless. I was originally planning not to post this here as I am afraid of facing hatred, but chatgpt of all things convinced me to amplify this story, it told me letting their suffering go unnoticed can feel like a silent victory to the perpetrators. It brought me to tears honestly, I hope writing this means something however small I guess.
Yes, it is tragic for some individuals but better them than us. We're not the social safety net for the rest of the world. It's like the old joke about the wealthy man who bankrupts himself to save the poor, and then ends up broke without having ended poverty. At some point you have to put yourself first. In my view we're well past that point.
By the way, if anyone wants to help with this, consider donating to the Colombian red cross. They're doing humanitarian help in this region. Hopefully google translate can help you navigate this website, I'm not 100% sure how easy it is to donate as a foreigner though.
Anton, you got quite unfriendly responses. I don't think you should conclude based on this that people here are heartless and have no social conscience. Think about the way you set up this discussion: You saw 2 interviews that stirred your compassion and your anger at the injustice people are suffering. You came here with the goal of having people get how you felt. If you were talking to friends they would probably understand that mostly you wanted them to see how you felt, and share experiences where they felt the same. But the people who read your post are not your close friends, and many of them probably know absolutely nothing about even basic stuff like your interests, your views, your profession, etc. It is not reasonable to expect them to resonate the way a friend would.
Also, it's natural for people who do not know you to take your post as an argument in favor of doing more to help people like this woman, and everyone, even the most liberal, has to come to terms with the fact that there is no way for them or their country to help everyone. So people were pushing back against the implied idea that they or their country should.
You happened to see an interview with one particular person, and felt moved by her situation. There are millions of people on the planet with situations as dire as this woman's, and you do not have for them the kind of sharp heartache you have for this woman. Regarding everyone except this one woman, you are as oblivious as all of are about the woman you saw interviewed.
It is unfair to shove one instance of someone's suffering in front of us and expect us to react to the person as you are. I think some of the irritability you encountered was a reaction to that unfairness.
>So people were pushing back against the implied idea that they or their country should.
I think you're rightly identifying a part of a broader trend where progressives have changed acts of charity into obligations and entitlements, as well as the corresponding reaction of those who don't buy into it
Yeah, that's ok. I expect indifference, people are busy, I understand. I have seen Americans in US social media laughing at people in this situation, this is not something I understand. I have some familiarity of the sort of people that comment here, I used to lurk more a long time ago, so the unfriendliness is entirely expected.
from your views and your choice to post them — I am horrified to hear about chatGPT expressing views about what steps you should take. Also, you should know that it makes no sense to turn to chat GP T when making a decision like whether to put up this
I went to chatgpt in order to find words of kindness. My friends were offline at the moment. It worked, I do not need to fish for kindness from here anymore.
Next time you should just write your own words and read them back to yourself. It would create an item of actual human compassion instead of a twisted simulacrum, and you could always share your creation with other people when they need it in turn.
This twisted simulacrum was pretty good, it gave me the impression of putting into words things I already knew were true, I would not have taken any decision if I thought the output absurd or uncompelling. If nothing else, it's been well trained in soothing platitudes, not unlike myself. Much better to have real human compassion of course, but that's unfortunately in precious little supply.
Sounds like bad situation. Nevertheless, we can’t let our country continue to be a dumping ground for anyone in the world who has problems. She is free to try anywhere else in the hemisphere. Come to think of it, why did she try the US and not some closer country? Perhaps there was some other factor on her mind?
"why did she try the US and not some closer country"
Because our Asylum laws are specifically designed for people in her situation. Because in the distant past (of 12 years ago) the US took pride in welcoming immigrants especially those in greatest need of help. Maybe she should thought a country full of Christians would welcome her and others fleeing terrible poverty, offer charity, and allow her to build a life here contributing to the wonder that is America.
At one point we were "a dumping ground for anyone in the world who has problems". Do you think the Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Pilgrims, etc that came here in droves were doing it for fun?
The arrival the settlers was ultimately a disaster for the original inhabitants. And your idea of what past immigration policy was like for other groups in simply incorrect. The strictness of immigration policy has varied greatly over our history but has rarely (maybe never?) been this costly, destabilizing, and permissive. The recent large-scale abuse of refugee and asylum programs is a novel phenomenon. We simply do not have the capacity to take every migrant who wants to come here without destroying our society. No country could handle that volume people from all over the world.
>Because our Asylum laws are specifically designed for people in her situation.
Actually no. US asylum laws are based on the UN Refugee Convention, according to which the definition of refugee does not include those who do not face persecution in all parts of their country. It sounds like she could have moved to other parts of Colombia (eg Bogota, the capital, is quite far from Catatumbo) - edited, not sure why I said Caracas other than not having had my coffee yet
One of the problems is that the limits of the asylum system have been eroded over time by leftists, including the aforementioned
Does your assessment also apply to the 300k Venezuelan refugees on TPS that Trump is threatening to send back? They clearly cannot just go somewhere else in Venezuela.
I'm not as familiar with the details of US specific legislation so I'll first state that the following might be based partly on untrue premises
In short, yes. From what I can tell, America's TPS system doesn't actually have anything to do with the asylum system (which, again, is rooted in the UN Convention). The asylum system does not apply to those not at personal risk due to a Convention ground (race, religion, political opinion, nationality, other social group), that is it does not include people who face some other generalized misfortune such as poverty or even war. It was designed this way to not entitle entire countries' populations to a legal right to emigrate to another country. So yea asylum laws were not designed for people like the 300k Venezuelans on TPS - they're not technically refugees, the confusion is from the difference between the legal meaning and how 'refugee' is used in everyday parlance
TPS seems to be a way for the executive to make ad hoc decisions to allow whole countries' populations to stay in the US legally should they manage to get in. Basically, TPS allowances are political decisions directly subject to the desires of the executive
The other factors are most likely economic, but I don't know if she was threatened in other parts of Colombia. If the other factors were economic she does not have a valid asylum claim, but I don't care, I feel for her and mourn our dead all the same.
Note she also claimed she was kidnapped in Mexico. Of course, she has a strong incentive to lie, I am not naive. However people have been killed in the Catatumbo, thousands have been displaced, I have heard reports of Mexican criminal gangs targeting asylum seekers from years back as they know they're a vulnerable population, and of course there's been deportations.
The deportation is not very surprising either, to be eligible for asylum you need to be feeling violence which targets race, religion or politics, being unable or unwilling to pay extortion money or being collateral damage among warring factions is not enough. You also have to be more then 50% likely to be killed, any less will not do. America does not possess the administrative capacity to process all the asylum seekers at the border, so a claimant will have to wait at the border for several months, unable to work legally and worried for her safety from criminal gangs. Once this is all done an extensive interrogation will be conducted looking for any inconsistencies in the story, if any slip through this is proof of lying and a reason to be sent back. It is no surprise that some judges have a 100% denial rate. This was the status quo before Trump, now I've been told no cases are being heard at all, of course.
Since the implication of all this is that the US is responsible to fix this woman's suffering, my Modest Proposal(TM) is that the clear solution is the US should invade Colombia, overthrow the government, annex the country and depose/execute most of the leadership, and appoint Nayib Bukele Lord High Governor and give him unlimited power to fix this. This will undoubtedly make Colombia nice enough for this woman to be happy there.
You are not responsible for her suffering, kindness is given freely or not at all. Colombia has some unique challenges that make a Bukele harder, the geography is more remote so that guerillas can retreat deep into the mountains, and some have support of the communist dictatorship next door that is Venezuela. Expresident Alvaro Uribe managed to improve the security situation, at the cost of things like massacres of civilians, dressed in military fatigues for the purpose of claiming the bonuses, but if someone like him ran for election I would vote for him. This problem has plagued the country in all of living memory so far, and one of the reasons it's been extremely hard to eradicate is the vast amounts of money they have at their disposal, product of American addicts buying drugs they "tax".
Part of the assumptions in my Modest Proposal(TM) is that Bukele would use his Middle Eastern heritage and father's chemical experience to bring their own system for dealing with rebels in difficult provinces, by which I mean using nerve agents on them.
From the American perspective, there are, at a rough guess, more than 7. billion people* whose lives would be greatly improved if they moved to America (or if we moved America to them; it's probably not true in all countries but it probably is true that Latin America would be better run under American rule, which is neither here nor there). Which ones should not be let in?
* the math on this looks like it's closer to 7.25B, based off this this:
-Currently 8.2bn people per World Population Clock
Surely you know gas agents are not a panacea? Assad's regime fell despite use of them. It can be comforting to think that with just enough brutality we could solve all our problems, but it is unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, not the world we live in. The reason I was initially hesitant to post this at all was the prospect of having to defend the idea of refusing such generous proposals as yours, though I did not expect it to involve the use of chemical weapons specifically. I believe I have nothing else constructive to say. This will be my last post, as I have shared everything I know about this case.
The security situation in the cities is different from the rural areas, you will not find guerillas in the cities. If you come as a tourist to Colombia, make sure to stay in the cities or in the towns near the cities. If you must go to a rural part, ask a local if it's a "red zone" in order not to inadvertently walk into one. Even if you stay in the cities, make sure not to go to the bad part of town, hopefully this is common sense everywhere in the world. Walking into a Medellin "comuna" or the south side of Bogota is not a good idea. Stay at the tourist part of town and you should have no problem. I recommend the nature parks in Colombia, as they can possess a stunning beauty, a walk to the Siecha lakes was a spiritual experience to me. This lake is safe because it is very close to the capital, and the reserve provides water to it. Of course, if a guide tells you you can continue at your own risk, turn back. I hope one day we will have peace.
Most people do, hundreds have been killed and thousands have been displaced in this latest bout of violence. If you go to Bogota you may find beggars with signs advertising they have been displaced by the conflict. They have had their lives upended by it, and many struggle finding jobs when all they have known in life is working a farm. This woman is likely trying to find a better life for herself.
Your question has been adopted in many asylum systems around the world as the 'internal flight alternative'. The definition of refugee isn't supposed to include anyone who isn't in danger throughout the entirety of their country. Unfortunately, if my country is any indication, it's been watered down to uselessness. People can just get their relatives back home to write a letter about how the thugs or gangsters or whoever have been asking them for their location and the adjudicators are obliged to find that internal flight alternatives aren't a viable option because they'd have to hide their location from their family
By US asylum law, individuals who seek asylum can't have an option to seek asylum at any intervening country. Someone coming by land from Columbia is going to go through quite a few other countries. Even if they can't stay in their own country, it's quite unlikely they are specifically targeted in every country between.
I'm all for asylum, but if you make "asylum" a free way to get into the US, it's going to get Goodharted and everyone suddenly needs asylum. That's one of the reasons that asylum is supposed to be in the first country they can reach, not the country that they would most prefer and can physically get to.
Yea, that's how it's supposed to be in a lot of countries. Originally the UN refugee agreement was meant to address the massive migrations in Europe after WW2 and got changed to include the entirety of the world beneath people's noses
Much of my professional work has concerned asylum and frankly my experience has made me go from "I'm all for asylum, but..." to Muskian "throw it all out including the baby"
I've got an idea the Dems could put in their "Project 2029." You know how all citizens born on naturalized in the United States are citizens according to the 14th amendment? Well, the Philippines was part of the United states before 1946. They weren't citizens, but that was an outgrowth of the insular cases, which are widely regarded as being wrongly decided. You can say they were in fact, citizens and thus their descendants after 1946 are automatically natural-born citizens too. Thus all 117 million Filipinos are eligible to immigrate to the United States. While the Supreme Court would likely take issue with this interpretation, the President could simply direct the border patrol, DHS, etc., not to deport any Filipino nor turn them away at the border.
Filipinos tend to be mostly Catholic or Evangelicals. The young white lib staffers of the Democratic Administration would oppose this proposal just as much as any Republican for that reason. But when I think more about this proposal, it doesn't sound all that bad lol. Currently, the Filipinos vote about evenly between the GOP and Democrats. I assume these Filipinos are on average more educated, wealthier, and liberal than their brethren back home. Your average Filipino will be more religious and seems to like strongmen(Rodrigo Duterte) so this split might end up slighly more in favor of the Republicans. Add to this the idea of adding 100+ million Christians to the US, and I am sold on your proposal lol.
If I'm paying, roughly 100+ likes, 25-50 matches and 5-10 dates a month on a single app. If I'm not paying, quite a bit worse but still some. (I'm 6'3, a gymrat, and told I'm fairly good looking, but not super hot or anything)
Personal experience: about 10 matches a month. But this was 3 years ago.
But there is a better way to look at online dating. Matches is not the only metric you need to optimize for. You need to actually write message to the women. They need to answer. Then you need to plan and go on a date. If you have 0 matches you need to work on your pictures. Everything >0 you should optimize the later steps. If you can "convert" every match into an actual date, 1-2 matches a week is plenty.
Disagree with that based on a lot of personal experience. Most women will have already decided if they want to meet you based on your profile. Canned humor works as well (or better) as highly personalized, thoughtful conversation.
I am striving to arrange a date within 5 - 10 messages. And if that doesn't happen it most likely isn't going to, it's a numbers game and until they meet you in person you are just another strange dating app man trying to fight against 100 other men for their attention
As someone who is not a 6'3 gymrat our experiences might differ quite a bit. Also age and region changes to game quite a bit. But i agree with the 5-10 messages until date. Everything longer and your window of opportunity closes fast.
My main point was: If you already have 25 matches but get only 5 dates I would optimize to get 10 dates out of 25 matches and not to increase the matches to 50. Big number looks nice but doesn't get you closer to your goal.
Yeah I didn't mean to come across as flippant, there was a time when I didn't know how to present myself at all and experienced how miserable dating apps could be. I still stand by my experience that between matching and getting a date there's not enough play to double your conversion rate as you suggest, did you experience otherwise? (After you meet skill/charisma is indeed a huge factor, it's just the dehumanizing aspect of the apps which is why you need to get off them within a handful of messages)
I expect there might be a lot of variance between different people. So not every advice works for everybody.
If you get a lot of matches and easy responses with canned humor I expect you profile/pictures to be very good. In this case I believe you that there is no room (and no need for) improving the later steps.
In my personal case I maybe messaged about half my matches. Because I was lazy or sometime because I reevaluated the woman's profile and decided against it. Easy room for improvements: only swipe if you really are attracted and then message all matches.
Similar for getting replies. If you are below a certain looks threshold (not bad looking, just below really hot guy) just writing "Hey" will just not work. I took the time to write personalized messages referring to something in her profile or pictures and got a huge boost in replies.
If you already always get replies or women even message you first you really don't need this. But please be aware this is not the experience of the average user.
In the debates about whether what Trump/Musk are doing is even constitutional to begin with, I saw the interesting position that since Congress passed a law saying such and such agency has to be funded and imposing restrictions on what the President can do with the agency, therefore this is illegal.
I think there is something strange about this, as it definitely makes the President seem much less of a chief executive and much more some kind of middle-manager, such that it seems that interpretation can be challenged.
I'm reminded of Yarvin arguing that this sort of "law" Congress passes isn't really a law in a sense the Founding Fathers would have understood it. Google gives me this definition of law:
the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties.
Since the law applies to everyone, it strikes me as strange that Congress gets to use its lawmaking power to micromanage the executive like this. I was wondering if someone could speak more about how this status quo came about.
The constitution spells out the powers of each branch of government. Get an AI to summarize them for you if like. Where those powers intersect there is debate of course.
But "congress power is to pass laws. Laws, according to the dictionary are..." Is not the right process for determining what us congress is empowered to do.
I am not sure Yarvin, a professed monarchist, is the best person to cite on constitutional principles. You should read the Constitution. It's pretty plainly laid out in there that the legislative branch has the power of the purse. Follow that up with a basic summary of the Impoundment act (which Ghillie Dhu provided) and you can answer your question.
At the risk of being rude, this is pretty Civic 101 stuff. Didn't everyone learn this high school? Or watch school house rock?
both his parents worked for the deepstate, and he's argued that the Actual Constitution (how the USG operates in practice) is basically a skeuomorph of the Written Constitution.
I didn't go to school in America. I think it must've been covered in my education in Puerto Rico regardless, but I never paid any attention in any class (speech sucks as a way to transmit information due to slowness and unsearchability).
The history of the US does paint a different picture regarding the relationship of the branches being that straightforward. I was reading in the NYT about the horror of what Trump is doing, and very far down in the article, they mention Truman once tried to seize control of the steel mills. That puts things in perspective, since that sure does seem much more aggressive than what Trump is doing. The Supreme Court struck him down, but not before there was a funny comic about Harry the First. And I don't know how what Trump is doing stacks up to what FDR did.
And there is the Warren Court that Hanania brought up today:
That definitely seems like a period where the Judiciary branch became more powerful than the other branches, or at least, definitely more powerful than we've been used to in recent times.
Hanania interestingly concludes that we haven't seen a president this revolutionary since Lyndon Johnson, so he didn't feel he needed to go as far as FDR to find someone similar. No idea what Johnson did, I should probably check that out.
That things have been as bad or worse in that past isn't justification for today's bad behavior. It is very clear that Trump and Musk are breaking the law and taking unconstitutional actions. It doesn't matter what FDR did almost 100 years ago.
That you grew up in Puerto Rico does explain things and so I apologize for my rudeness. I was, and continue to be, frustrated by more than just your comment. There seems to be a huge deficit of civic knowledge in the US and its leading to a lot of the issues we see right now.
Well, what came before does matter on establishing whether this is unprecedented. Turning the US into a fascist dictatorship would be unprecendented and it is something many are fearing (I feel pretty sure there will continue to be real elections).
I don't feel like the fact that sometimes one branch becomes more powerful than the others is bad or worse. Yarvin sees that as part of the natural process of politics. Governments should be judged more on a performance basis rather than on whether they adhere to some procedure or other.
ACX is a global audience, including some people who've never lived in the US and have about as much reason to understand the relationship between its branches as we have to understand the structure of the government of Nigeria. It might also include a few people who took high school US civics, but not college; some who don't watch TV, or at least not on Saturday mornings when SHR was playing; and probably more than a few who took high school civics and remember some of the catchier SHR lyrics but found a lot of disagreement between their memory and what they read about the US government doing in the news, as well as a *huge* amount of detail that's necessarily left out, and have concluded that things are quite a bit more vague and slippery than advertised in school. So any consensus here about the government is going to have measurable breadth.
Case in point: Congress can declare how much money is going to an agency; how much money is going to a specific project or initiative or contract within that agency; and could *theoretically* declare how much money is going to be spent on the refrigerator to be placed in the second floor break room of the south wing of the OPM building, but in practice they're probably going to say "N thousand to facilities management" and wisely leave finer grains to the manager there. Likewise for a lot of other things, like who exactly gets promoted to the next GS grade or how much time gets spent on adding a feature to the timesheet software versus tracking a bug. And if they tried to manage that small, the executive branch people would Look At Them Funny and hope it's just a misunderstanding and they don't have to tip the press off to shenanigans, and Congress knows that and keeps to a certain altitude.
There turns out to be a lot of discretion at play. There are sums of money Congress cares about strongly enough to itemize in one place, and equal sums they'll routinely allot in another place and leave the details to OPM. It can turn on whether someone gets some Congressional committee's attention, or one US Representative with an axe to grind, or even a sufficiently important journalist.
US Civics 101 and Schoolhouse Rock provide some valuable baselines for people to keep in mind as a sanity check, but they unfortunately often don't extend to a lot of the day to day issues that make the news.
If I didn't have the knowledge of the US governmental system of the good reasons you state, I wouldn't opine on US governmental system as confidently as many commenters here are doing.
If Congress says that certain money *must* be spent, and spent in a certain way, that should be binding. But generally Congress leaves a lot of leeway (or executive branch people take leeway anyway) about the details. For instance, Congress could never say that a specific person must get a Social Security check on April 12, 2025. Instead, the bureaucrats working in the SS office must determine if that person is eligible for SS, what the payment schedule is for April 2025 (maybe they run checks on April 18th instead), and so on.
Some funds have much more flexibility than others, often fully intentionally. $100 million for foreign aid can mean a lot of different things if the details are not spelled out, and they rarely are or can be to that level.
Now, with that said, the chief executive would have all of the power that any individual bureaucrat or agency would have in regards to how that money is or is not spent. In addition to that, any power that comes from oversight of the agency. So if a bureaucrat on any level could decide that we're spending $1 million of that money for X versus Y, then the President can also make that decision. If a bureaucrat at any level could decide *not* to spend that particular money, either at the present moment for a particular reason or generally, then the President could also make that decision. Theoretically that's what Trump and Musk are doing now.
I have no special insight into the details, and it's quite possible that this is an illegal impoundment issue. But I suspect that various people in the executive branch have been making these decisions for many years, and it's fully within Trump's power to make those same decisions without them. USAID, specifically, was not created by Congress - it was created by a JFK executive order. It was in the furtherance of Congress setting up funds that must be spent, but obviously if the actual implementation was as broad as needed to allow an EO to create an entire organization for spending it, then there's a lot of leeway permitted by Congress. Trump using that leeway should be legal. He might say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" if you will.
Correction: the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961 was Congress telling the executive to create an agency, JFK created it and gave it a name but he was responding to Congressional action.
But do you agree that another President can’t just ignore the law and eliminate the agency? I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me that if the President can do that, he can do anything.
If Trump ultimately eliminates the agency and doesn't replace it with something that still meets the requirements of the law, that would be illegal. But if JFK can create and staff the agency based on the broad law as written (rather than Congress establishing a specific agency as part of the law) then I don't see how a future president can't make adjustments.
I have more recently seen something about a law passed during Biden's time that may place limitations on future presidents, but I'm not sure how that works with what Trump is doing. SCOTUS has already made clear that an Executive Branch agency that is not beholden to the President is unconstitutional, so "hands off don't touch" can't be a constitutional option.
I’m a legal realist and believe that the Constitution “means” whatever 5 of 9 Supreme justices say it does at any given time. At the same time, I don’t see how the government can just pretend that laws like the Impoundment one and the Foreign Assistance Act no longer count without either action by Congress or the Supreme Court.
At that point there are no laws and we might as well go rob our neighborhood liquor store, right?
From Wikipedia: "Impoundment is an act by a President of the United States of not spending money that has been appropriated by the U.S. Congress. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to exercise the power of impoundment in 1801. The power was available to all presidents up to and including Richard Nixon, and was regarded as a power inherent to the office, although one with limits. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed in response to the abuse of power under President Nixon. The Act removed that power, and Train v. City of New York (whose facts predate the 1974 Act, but which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court after its passage) closed potential loopholes in the 1974 Act. The president's ability to indefinitely reject congressionally approved spending was thus removed." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_funds)
ISTM that there's a strong case to be made that impoundment is an inherent power of POTUS and the post-Nixon legislation restricting it is unconstitutional (N.B., the SCOTUS that heard Train was the same set of Justices that heard Roe).
This article argues, fairly persuasively in my opinion, that 19th century impoundments were generally authorized by statutory language about e.g. "authorizing and empowering" the President to spend "up to" a certain amount on a particular purpose. And in 1838, SCOTUS ruled that statutory language requiring money to be paid out as specified were binding on executive branch officials. Several 20th century Presidents before Nixon floated the idea of an inherent Presidential power of impoundment, but only Nixon pushed it and Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act shortly afterwards.
The implication of prosecutorial discretion as similarly extraconstitutional does give me pause about the degree to which this line of argument would be sufficiently persuasive to the current SCOTUS (especially given the ruling in the immunity case).
it was intended by the Founding Fathers that the House of Representatives would use their power over finances in order to influence the other branches of government. e.g. a quote from Federalist Paper 58:
"...This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure..."
So it's by design. Many other places where "Publius" makes similar statements. This is a major and well-known part of the system of checks and balances.
On the other hand, if the executive can disregard laws from Congress, particularly on an issue as fundamental as the budget, then the executive would be massively strengthened. This would also be pretty perverse
There are constant complaints that people are pushing local politics into the federal government, where there are massive conflicts because the federal government oversees more than one locality. These complaints are generally accompanied by the observation that you can't get anyone to vote in local elections (for example, state governor; federal senator) because nobody cares about anything but the presidential election.
I suggest conceptualizing this differently than people usually seem to: because no one will vote for any office other than president, that office is where all of the political power exists. Is it a problem for political power to be concentrated in the office that is subject to meaningful elections?
Well, the current approval rating of the Executive is currently 49%, and the approval rating of Congress is 24%. So, maybe it's not perverse? Maybe it's the opposite of perverse?
King is a bridge too far, but if you told me that in 2028 we would all smell what the Rock is cooking, I would believe you. At this point we all have to acknowledge that the WWE-White House pipeline is real.
Congress (well, the House) was elected at the exact same time as Trump was. Should Trump have lost the right to govern in term 1 when his approval rating was terrible?
Well sure if you ignore the text of the Constitution of the United States and think of operating the Republic as if Madison and Hamilton had come up with something similar to Facebook and they wanted to let ‘likes’ from the honeymoon period of a presidency guide us, you might have a point.
So yeah, no, if you give it a moment’s thought it’s pretty perverse.
BTW Trump’s ‘honeymoon’ approval rating is historically low. Biden’s approval rating was 57% at this point in his term. Barack Obama’s was 68%, Jimmy Carter’s was 66%.
A lot of commenters here would gain a lot by just reading the constitution and taking basic civics class. Amazing how many people don't understand the basics of our government.
And some other commenters would gain a lot by realizing that the constitution is nothing more than a rotting piece of parchment. Don't be surprised when people forsake a system that failed them.
It's one thing for them to openly rebuke that system; but, to support its destruction while claiming to uphold it is a hypocrisy that I just can't stand. If they want an autocrat they should just say that instead of coming up with bogus reasons this is all in accordance with our accepted laws.
When Congress passed that law, there was a president who signed it. That means something about the relationship between the executive branch and the legislative branch, right? If he decides he can kick that law to the curb, he is not only throwing a finger at Congress, but at the president who was in power when the law was enacted, and at the judicial branch as well because they are the ones who are supposed to sort out laws for us. In other words, he’s throwing his finger at the whole thing.
I think you are starting with a fundamentally flawed model that is something corporate like a board of directors and a CEO/company president. In the corporate model, the board is responsible for high level governance decisions and, to some extent, the overall mission/strategic direction, but the lead operating executive makes the tactical and operational decisions for implementation. (Side note: this is a simplistic model, even in the corporate world)
A better model of the (original) intention is to think of the legislative and executive branches as co-equal, each with specific areas of power only held by that branch and other areas of overlapping responsibility (especially to create checks and balances.)
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I have struggled with my weight my whole life, and I'd appreciate some new ideas/frames of mind on how to approach it.
The story so far:
- Standard-issue fat kid through my teens.
- Got problematically fat in my mid 20's, got catastrophically fat during early months of Covid
- Throughout this time had tried various diets, never with real energy or intensity
- During Covid got diagnosed with sleep apnea, got the CPAP, started sleeping well for the first time in my adult life
- Burst of new energy and fear of dying (I had hit 415 lbs) got me started on calorie counting, took it seriously, lost 130 lbs over the next 2 years. Also started lifting, took it seriously. Overall felt amazing.
- Met my future wife and got married shortly after
- Weight loss plateaued and then reversed due to it becoming much harder to eat at a deficit now that my maintenance calories had dropped so significantly, coupled with a general feeling of complacency and happiness in my new marriage
- Gained 15 pounds in year one of marriage, had a child
- Getting to the gym and taking eating right seriously got really hard due to lack of time and energy, gained 20 pounds in year two
- Had another child, did not make things easier, have gained another 10 pounds so far in year three
- Tried generic Ozempic, did not work at all. Made me sick, did not make me want to eat less or think less about about food
- Am currently on Metformin
I am now 335 lbs. For the sake of my wife and kids, I really want to get this under control. Things I am considering: Name-brand (really expensive!) Zepbound, and failing that, Bariatric surgery.
If you have some suggestions for other tools/methods/ideas I can try, I am very open to them.
As a single data point small piece of the puzzle thing-that-worked-for-me:
Psyllium Husk fibre supplement (ie Metamucil or similar). I dropped 30lbs in a year (starting at 265lbs). Plateaued after that but at least didn't come back on.
Not intentionally, it was recommended for a different issue. For the first time in my life I wasn't hungry all the time.
I'm on Team Bariatric Surgery. It sounds like you'd probably be a good candidate, so probably don't waste anymore time.
I had bariatric surgery (the sleeve, aka stomach stapling) 13 years ago, went from 250 > 145 at my lowest, and have put back on about 25 over the pandemic and my break-up after the pandemic (but have been maintaining 175 for over a year, not gaining. I can live with it, but I'd prefer to get back near my low). The weight gain was from sheer self-indulgence, partly from getting used to eating delicious stuff again with my boyfriend during the pandemic (though I didn't put on any weight while with him), then later not wanting to be bothered with eating inconveniently small portions semi-frequently. Plus some general lethargy from a couple of illnesses. My eating and exercise habits aren't what they should be, but they are still much better than they were before my surgery.
I needed the *very* high stakes of preparing for and complying with a surgical intervention to overcome the temptation of tasty food. Without stakes as high as "my surgery might not go well!" and "I'll feel uncomfortably sick and be malnourished if I don't eat right after the surgery" as dieting motivation, I was really good at procrastinating and rationalizing around just...not dieting in my day-to-day.
Usually bariatric patients have to do 6-12 months of prep work before a surgery, so I say...just get the ball rolling now. The success outcomes of bariatric surgery are much, much higher than white-knuckle diet and exercise, so just go ahead and do what works. Better to "cheat" weight loss with a bariatric surgery and succeed than fail at dieting.
I was in similar spot, lost over 100 lbs. I was lucky to be in a position where I could focus on it, but here's what worked for me:
- low carb diet, and learning variety of food I could eat and cook for myself. wraps, fajitas, pizza on low carb tortilla shells, lots roasted chicken, chicken wings, grilled chicken, lots of stir fry vegetables, cured sliced hams are easy/useful, salad, low carb chili I make regularly (go easy on beans which have the carbs).... probably missing things - bacon / eggs if you do breakfast. radishes are great snacks as are nuts if you don't eat too many.
- environmental control - not having any of the wrong food around, and making sure I didn't put myself in bad situations. (I will eat poorly if I get hungry). Travelling and eating out is very difficult, so I often took stuff with me. Some options I used in restaurant - naked buffalo wings, wendy's chili, meat + salad if sitdown.
- I exercised consistently in the morning for an extended period using exercise bike, I think 45 minutes to an hour. Often did a second ride later in the day. I'm not sure how important that is - diet seemed more important to stay on track, but exercise helps blood sugar. I also went through long period of walking up to 2hrs a day when I lived at a place that permitted. I currently walk each day, and that does help with blood sugar levels also -which helps appetite - but again not messing up the diet is more important to adhere to imho.
- Getting your weight down a bit from where you are will likely help blood sugar alot. Between 330 and down to 280 I noticed big difference in blood sugar stability, and at some point in there I went off metformin.
- drank diet drink, not many fruits work, but strawberries and blueberries are option
Hope this helps, but it did work for me. I weighed regularly to keep myself focused, and I did hit frustrating plateaus, but eventually things kicked back in.
I lost a lot of weight (230->195) when I started lifting weights seriously. I’d highly suggest 2-4 hours a week with a personal trainer. You’ll feel better and your body will work better regardless of what happens with your weight, plus it seems to lead to weight loss—far more than would be accomplished just by the calories burned in the activity itself.
You have to eat a ton of protein to make progress, which might make it easier to eat fewer calories overall.
Another commenter mentioned jumping jacks; I wouldn’t recommend dynamic loads with your body weight until your weight is lower, seems like an easy way to injure your joints. Instead, do kettlebells or another resistance modality where you can gradually increase the weight. A trainer is invaluable to teach good form, make sure you’re not risking injury, and make sure you’re continuing to make progress. Plus it’s way easier to put in the work when you have an appointment and are paying. Finally, a trainer can keep giving you new forms of exercise to keep things fun.
Consider drastic elimination diets? They spray plants with poison, you dont get to know when they swap poisons around, or even would poisons they tend to feed animals in your area and its unlikely you can track one that happens to effect you more then the average over likely weight gain which may take a week to see.
> I am now 335 lbs. For the sake of my wife and kids, I really want to get this under control. Things I am considering: Name-brand (really expensive!) Zepbound, and failing that, Bariatric surgery.
Everyone else has made great suggestions, so I'll just hit the things that nobody else hit upon yet:
1. Get a treadmill desk
Exercise is hard because adherence is hard - but do you know what’s easy? Slowly walking on a treadmill, in your own house, wearing whatever you want, while YOU’RE getting screen time, whether working or recreational.
The treadmill desks I’ve bought are UNDOUBTEDLY the single highest “unit of value in life per dollar spent” things I’ve ever owned in my entire life.
And if you’re like me and are always thinking “eh, I can do a smidge more than last time, why not?” and hit a single up-button on either speed or elevation, over time it can actually burn significant calories too.
I just found out recently I’d *inadvertently* been burning an extra 700-800 calories per day, while walking at an 8-10% incline for a few more hours.
2. Bariatric surgery
Is positive on costs / benefits, but you probably want gastric bypass vs banding.
The Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery study was able to keep track of 83% of a 1500 person sample who had gastric bypass for 7 years, and found that 7 years later, they had maintained a mean weight loss of 38kg (83.6 lbs), or around 28% of body weight.
For gastric banding, 7 years after surgery mean weight loss was 18kg, or 15% of body weight. Both had lower dyslipidemia at the 7 year mark, but only gastric bypass patients had lower rates of diabetes and hypertension.
Risk-wise, bariatric surgeries have a 17% complication rate, a 7% “needs resurgery” rate, and incremental mortality rates of ~.31% after thirty days. This is honestly probably fine. That’s 3.1 out of 1,000, and there’s 250k bariatric surgeries per year, so around 750 annual incremental deaths. The average one-year mortality rate for a 45 year old with a BMI of 45 is ~.9%, so not a ton of incremental risk from the surgery, and there’s some evidence that bariatric surgeries have beneficial effects on all cause mortality - the gastric bypass lowers diabetes rates, hazard ratios for cardiac mortality and myocardial infarction are 0.48—0.53 post surgery, and their 10 year cancer mortality rates are only 0.8% vs 1.4% in controls matched to characteristics who did not receive a surgery.
These are both from a post I did about weight loss, if you want some of the footnotes and studies, they're in there.
Thanks for this. Someone else linked your article, mostly things I knew already but still informative and well sourced.
I actually tried a treadmill desk! My plan was to work on it, but I could never get the ergonomics right for walking and typing comfortably at the same time, and more importantly, walking on the constrained surface of the treadmill exacerbated a persistent foot pain issue (corns). This meant that I eventually avoided going on it.
As for bariatric surgery, a realization that it was my only option to avoid dying is what kicked off my last burst of energy to calorie count and work out seriously. Maybe it'll work again!
> I actually tried a treadmill desk! My plan was to work on it, but I could never get the ergonomics right for walking and typing comfortably at the same time, and more importantly, walking on the constrained surface of the treadmill exacerbated a persistent foot pain issue (corns). This meant that I eventually avoided going on it.
Just one thought here - because it really is a good way to burn significant calories as a "background" thing without active conscious effort - there's a large and noticeable difference between the chintzy Chinese "treadmill desks" most people consider / try, and an actually good set up.
I've bought and used 4 or 5 different treadmill desks at this point. The best one by far has been a giant, 800+ pound commercial-grade Freemotion treadmill I bought from a gym that was going out of business and custom built an adjustable desk around. The difference is huge - the walking surface is wider and longer, and it actually has a suspension which mitigates the impact of footfall. It also has the ability to go up to an 18% incline grade, which is crazy, but incline (at 8%+) is how to actually burn significant calories.
It cost WAY more than a chintzy Chinese desk, but it's quality and ease of use and quality of life is much, much higher.
When comparing treadmill desks, the higher cost gets you second guessing yourself. When considering the costs and risks of surgery or the increased all cause mortality from being obese and sedentary, I think it's a pretty clear win, and might be worth considering.
-Try some of the other drugs in Ozempic family. Seems reasonable to hope one would have fewer side effects and better effects. Also, I read some speculation that the most recent one in use (or maybe it’s one that’s about to come out) looks like it might have stronger weight loss effects. Not sure if that’s valid or just hype, though.
-If you are taking an antidepressant or other psych med with a weight gain side effect, consider stopping drug. Obviously, do not do this if without the drug you are at risk of having major problems. If you have been taking a med for mild to moderate anxiety, try substituting CBT for the med.
-If you do not have any tendency to abuse drugs, consider taking amphetamine at dose prescribed for ADD. These drugs reduce appetite and increase energy for most people You will prob have to claim ADD symptoms to get it. I would not suggest this to someone whose weight problem was not severe.
-Consider spending money to clear more time for you to exercise. For ex, hire someone to help with child care or housework, eat out more, pay for grocery delivery, etc.
-Do something radical to lock yourself in to exercising— for ex, get rid of your car and bike. I did that 5 years ago, for the sake of fitness rather than weight loss, and it has worked out well. Or do some partial version where you simply swear to do something, for ex park car 2 miles from work every single day and walk the remainder. Or get an active dog that will drive the family crazy if not taken for long walks and runs daily.
-Rather than try to exert more willpower, do radical things to reduce temptation. For ex, have absolutely nothing in the house that is either high calorie or a moderate -calorie thing you like enough to eat in large quantities (things like pasta are often in this category). The rest of the family will have to go out for ice cream and favorite hi-cal meals.
Jeez Monkyyy it seems to me you are in a position to answer the question you have asked on your own. You have enough information from my previous posts, my present post, and general knowledge.
(1) I am not an MD.
(2) When I gave the advice I did, I did not mention the degree I do have, because I did not want to claim some extra authority for my ideas, but just to present them as the ideas of a fellow member of the forum.
(3) Even if I were an MD, life furnishes abundant evidence that MD’s are not compelled to toe the party line regarding drugs. Youtube and Twitter and other sites have many MD’s expressing unconventional ideas. Some of these ideas, such as that the covid vax killed more people than covid did, are obviously false and harmful. Some are questionable, ideas that most would disagree with. A few are probably excellent, though unconventional, advice. It is clear from the presence of lots and lots of these MD’s online spouting all kinds of unconventional ideas that US MD’s, at least, do have free speech. How has this escaped your notice?
I do not know what the rules are for MD’s when they are expressing ideas publicly, as opposed to doing a patient consult for which they are paid. My guess is that there are no rules, but that it would be possible for the law or the licensing board to take action against somebody who was spouting godawful harmful nonsense online. In my profession, there are vague guidelines about being a good and honest representative of the professional even in one’s personal life and in communications to the public. Those guidelines are so loose that I would have to be promoting something awful like armed robbery or use of heroin for it to be a violation. And in fact I do think the info I gave, which is that amphetamines might help, but the user risks dependence or addiction, was good.
(4) Even if my statement about amphetamines was questioned, I would be prepared to defend it. It did not say to use amphetamines, I suggested OP consider it, but avoid using them if they had had any problems with drug abuse. When I answer requests for information on this forum I assume OP is a responsible adult unless they sound cracked. I do not think it is wrong to give people like that information about something risky that might be worth the risk, and leave it up to their judgment whether to try what I have told them about. OP sounds intelligent and responsible, so I gave him all the info I have, including info about risks of some approaches. And OP’s weight problem will shorten his life, and meanwhile interfere with quality of life. Under these circumstances, I think it’s reasonable for someone to consider solutions that have some risk.
(5) I also suggested several other things.
Seems to me that all this should have been evident to you.
> Seems to me that all this should have been evident to you.
Im not in favor of the current policy nor advice; but as I understand it, "best practice" hates the old weight lost methods despite them being known to work(granted cigarettes also are known to work, 12 cups of coffee of caffeine with amphetamines pills or whatever the current body builders dose with are just dangerous) and its risky to suggest alternative treatments in light of politically favored ones. See legal troubles of people suggesting ivermectin after the corona vax. While the bone lost drug isnt nearly as pushed as the vax, I would think its politically favored enough and you took a surprising risk here for a hill I wouldn't die on.
> In my profession, there are vague guidelines about being a good and honest representative of the professional even in one’s personal life and in communications to the public. Those guidelines are so loose that I would have to be promoting something awful like armed robbery or use of heroin for it to be a violation.
details can escape me easily but I think this is relivent
I see allot of soft power being wielded towards people I agree with; while I can disregard soft power, Im unhinged by most estimates, and its still hard, and Im quite broke, I cant know how much of that is me picking the wrong battle at the wrong time publicly.
Soft power is still power, chilling effects are still censorship, while if you find yourself willing to face any legal danger to state your opinion, good on you, I would've skipped my least favorite class of drugs.
This forum is a very different place from youtube, etc; I did not deliver my suggestion in the role of an expert; and the idea I suggested that is mildly edgy is way way less extreme and politically hot than what got these 2 guys in trouble. The only soft power move being attempted in this situation is yours.
I suspect that he may have rather idiosyncratic nutritional issues, but you may be interested to check out the guy who writes the Experimental Fat Loss blog: https://www.exfatloss.com. His go-to diet involves a small amount of ground beef with some green leaves and tomato sauce, and pretty much all other calories from as much heavy cream as he wants to eat, which seems to allow him to lose weight without needing to exert superhuman willpower.
His leading hypothesis is that the modern diet contains much more polyunsaturated fatty acids (particularly linoleic acid) than a few generations ago, and that that is what is dysregulating many people’s weight.
First, what you're going through is totally normal. Everyone who has lost significant weight has experienced a bounce back. There's lots of theories why, no one knows why for sure, but it happens to everyone. You've only gained back ~33% of what you lost. Regaining 50-60% of your weight would not be unusual. It's not good, you should try to beat the odds, but it's not unusual.
Second, how heavy is your wife and how does she feel about weight loss? Have you discussed it with her?
Look, you need to eat clean and for that, your wife has to be on board. I can almost guarantee you're eating too much processed food. At 335 lbs, your maintenance calories are probably north of 3000/day. To be adding 1.5-2 pounds a month, you gotta be getting near 4000/day.
For reference, if you ate the McDonald's quarter pounder meal with fries and coke for every meal, you'd be at 3150/day. So you gotta be eating something on top of that.
Conversely, a pound of chicken breast is ~700 calories, 2 pounds of broccoli is ~300 calories, a pound of white rice is ~600 calories, and hot sauce has 0 calories. 4 pounds of food for 1600 calories. I know you're not eating that clean because you're not eating 8-10 pounds of physical matter a day. Your stomach ain't built like that; your sphincter ain't built like that.
But she's probably eating what you're eating. And she's probably comfortable with it. And there's no sustainable future where you're eating clean and she's eating your current diet. Saints can't eat white rice with veggies and chicken breast across the table from a pepperoni pizza.
The good news is that, at your weight and caloric intake, you can probably eat really good and still lose weight. You don't need to eat a pound of broccoli a day. You'd almost certainly lose weight on 2500-2800 calories/day and you can fit steak and ice cream and lots of great stuff in that budget. But you gotta get your wife on board. When I think of 4000 calorie days, I think of crushing a sleeve of Oreos. Your vice might be different but whatever it is, you got one, you probably can't have that in the house, and she's gotta be on board with that.
I eat plenty of junk, and I've taken steps to reduce my access to junk. But my challenge is that I want to eat all the time, and I don't have the option of creating the perfect environment for myself in the place where I spend 35%+ of my waking hours. The office is just stocked with crap.
As WoolyAI says, what you are going through is very typical. And it's unfortunate that your office environment is largely out of your control. I sympathize and hope you can find ways to make progress.
Have you worked with a therapist that specializes in distorted eating? They may be able to help you develop strategies to reset your relationship with food. You don't mention it but if you have any anxiety or past trauma that could be contributing to making a food a source of comfort they could help with this also.
Additionally, a coach or trainer could help with accountability and give you someone else who is "in your corner" and rooting for you. It's hard to make big changes like this alone!
I am also not against the surgical or medical interventions you mention. There is no silver bullet unfortunately.
Also, I think you should take a minute to appreciate that even when going through some very stressful periods over the last few years, you have only gained about 35lbs! I am sure it feels like a failure, but thats not atypical for someone of your age and period of life. I am at a similar point in life and gained 15 pounds last year too. You can do this!
If you want long-term weight loss, you need long-term change of what you eat, how you eat, and how much you exercise. The fundamentals of the whole thing are "calories in, calories out", that's the easy part. Losing weight is mostly a mind game. It's also a marathon, not a sprint, so pace yourself accordingly.
What to eat:
* Research the caloric density of every single food item and meal you typically consume, repeatedly, to get an intuitive feeling for the values so you can properly compare different and new foods. Don't rely on marketing/packaging either, READ THE LABELS for cold, hard numbers. If you live in some backwards, consumer-hating legislation that doesn't require such labels, research on the internet.
* As far as possible, prepare your own meals (within the family), so you have the best control over the ingredients. Look into meal prepping if you don't have time every day of the week. Make restaurant food or other unlabeled food the exception.
* Half the battle is won in the grocery store. You can't eat what you don't have in the house, and you don't have in the house what you don't buy.
How to eat:
* Make rules about eating, and make them effective, but not so restrictive that you can't realistically follow them most of the time. That might cause frustration and regression into the habits that got you into obesity in the first place. Example: Make a caloric goal for the day/week depending on your age, height, physical activity and other pertinent factors, but don't stress about keeping a food or weight diary.
* Reduce the worst offenders (identified above) to "cheat day" treats, especially drinks (e.g. sugary, alcoholic). Don't stress about breaking the rules unless breaking the rules becomes the new, old norm.
Exercise:
* Anything at all will help, as long as you do it somewhat regularly. Take a walk of whatever duration you're comfortable with, every other day. Do basic gymnastics inside your own home if outside is not an option, like sit-ups or jumping jacks. Anything to get the literal juices flowing. Increase intensity as your motivation and physical condition allows. Don't stress about missing a day or two unless it becomes the new, old norm.
* If you need to reframe exercise as something outside your normal life, get some kind of gadget, like a fitness wristwatch, exercise bike, or gym membership.
Mind games:
* Whatever rules about eating you have, question them. For example: Do you really need breakfast, dinner, lunch each day? Or will two of them suffice? Maybe even only one? Example: I do 24 hour fasting: Eat one meal per day, and nothing else.
* Keep the rules you follow simple. The simpler, the better, as long as they're still effective. This will immediately identify any other calorie intake as self-fraudulent and allows you to think of alternative action it before you break them. Don't stress about still breaking a good rule unless it becomes the new, old norm.
* When a hunger pang happens outside of your meal times, you can ride it out: It will typically disappear within minutes, half an hour at most. Or you can prepare a big jug of low-calorie drink (e.g. water, water with a shot of lemon juice, unsweetened tea) and take a big gulp every time just to shut the stomach up.
* Half the battle is won in the grocery store: In my experience, being steadfast in the store is much easier than at home. You can't eat what you don't have, and you don't have what you don't buy.
* Don't stress too much about your every day weight, or what food or exercise might have which effect on it. Weight yourself every couple days and get a gist of where the trend is going. Slow and steady progress is what you're aiming for. Even just 2 pounds per month will be noticable in the long run and tell you that you're doing good at a sustainable rate.
OMAD can suit some preferences, but it's an overkill prescription. Often times those with a weight problem *don't* only consume 3 square meals, they snack, particularly at night. Consuming food earlier in the day has its metabolic benefits. In and of itself there is zero problem with 3 meals, and it more likely suits family-oriented lifestyle.
I agree, OMAD requires much more flexibility than other rules. If you can pull it off, though, the advantage is that it makes it maximally hard to cheat yourself with snacks. With 3 meals a day, it's much easier to convince yourself that if you snack, you can make it up with the next meal or whatever because you still have caloric budget left. With OMAD, that is never the case, and you will always be aware that any snack outside your one meal is just that, a snack that you can then more consciously decide whether you really want it or not. Since weight loss is mostly a mind game, saving a snack from that mental advantage might well outweigh metabolic advantages from eating 2 or 3 meals.
Basically, I try to optimize for the mind game and keep the metabolic side as simple as possible even at the risk of being slightly sub optimal there.
From my own experience with losing weight: Nothing beats counting calories.
As for hunger: that's the feeling of calories leaving your body. Embrace it. Your animal brain will tell you that's a bad thing, and that you need to STOP IT NOW! It's lying to, ignore it.
Some low-hanging fruit if it hasn't applied yet: increase ratio of protein and fiber in your diet (more than you would think), consume whole foods, and restrict the amount of sweet and processed foods in the household (if they are around, you *will* eat them, purchase/make some alternatives). Also when counting calories, opt for a modest deficit to avoid tanking metabolism and keep hunger in check. Don't try to rush it, 0.5-1 lb a week is sufficient.
I've known people who've done all the above (bariatric surgery, drugs) and regained weight. Useful as that may be, it doesn't necessarily work, because a) it does not address emotional catalysts, addiction, habit, and b) it's still trivially easy to overconsume junk food after a recovery period.
A bag of chips is 1200 calories, which is as much as 17 apples. The hit of salty/sugary + fatty is moreish, and overrides satiety signals on top of being non-satiating in the first place.
Don't need to go crazy on exercise, but exercise in general correlated with long-term success. There could be several reasons for this, among: a) it protects lean body mass (muscle *and* organs) when losing weight and by extension metabolism, and b) relieves stress and helps regulate blood sugar and hunger
Highly recommend Layne Norton's book Fat Loss Forever
The best diet is the one you can sustain. Most people who diet *do* lose weight, but they gain it back, because they did not sustain it. This is a complete lifestyle change, once you hit maintenance calories you can't go back to consuming what you were before. Whether you gain weight back will not be a question of "if", it will be a question of "how fast".
edit: you may also benefit from seeing a therapist. They can equip you with tools through e.g. CBT to mitigate things like guilt, perspective, emotional eating, etc.
My cousin tried it and felt extremely sick, then discontinued it.
I tried a shot just for curiosity, but took the absolute minimum. One notch on the pen.
That made me _slightly_ nauseous for a couple of days and not hungry for >1 week.
When I spoke to my cousin, she had taken around 4-5 times what I took. So I wouldn't be surprised if more people try too big an initial dose and give up on it.
I also responded in the survey that I had a very negative experience with Aya.
First ceremony was perfectly nice, very interesting, very unique and beautiful experience.
Second ceremony... I thought I was experiencing a brain aneurism, I sobered up entirely from the pain, I thought I had >80% chance that I was dying that night. No ambulances were coming. No hallucinations or anything like that, only pain.
It is a really intense feeling to be sure you'll die.
It was relatively brief in terms of aftereffects though - maybe a few days of insane hangover, then an upswing of several weeks of diffuse happiness to make up for it.
I have no experience with psychedelics, but even the best stories of taking Ayahuasca I have heard seem very unpleasant to me. So much vomiting and exhaustion and existential dread. Even if I was guaranteed the most amazing divine experience I am not sure I would do it. Especially when alternatives like mushrooms don't appear to have such unpleasantries.
Yes, I have acquaintances that are doing it. One gets it through a wealthy, well-connected friend. One took it with an underground psychedelic therapist. The friend who took it found the woman and the setting to be safe and sane.
Thanks. I had some good contacts with the Psychedelic Society of Minnesota but the head of that group isn’t terribly together and there haven’t been any meet ups in over a year.
I’ll figure it out. It wasn’t that damn hard to cultivate my on psilocybin mushrooms.
I no longer need any SSRIs for my long term OCD after several self guided sessions with those. It’s just no longer an issue. Pretty amazing.
It would be no financial hardship to fly to South America to try the ayawaska. I’d want to find a place that keeps the woo bs to a minimum though.
getting free of OCD. By any chance would you be willing to describe your experience to someone in the field? As you probably know, many professionals are extremely interested in psychedelic experience as a
way of breaking free of painful prisons the mind has generated. I could steer you to a researcher who would be fascinated and not skeptical. And of course you could remain anonymous.
I found out through the friend with the wealthy contacts that in parts of S America ayahuasca is used in conventional churches, and is not thought of as disreputable and dangerous. That seems
promising, tho I expect you would not want to take it at a
church service either. But maybe it’s possible
to buy it legally, and find a local reliable source of advice about dose etc. There may also be ayahuasca retreats for people from the US.
Wait, are you talking about Christian churches, native religions, or something openly syncretistic? Because if those are Christian churches, that's *very* surprising.
Yes, Christian churches. Surprised the person who told me about it, also surprised me. He went to a privately organized ayahuasca retreat, and one of the two retreat leaders was a woman from S America who attended a church that used ayahuasca. My friend actually spoke with her about it. She was a well-educated, friendly person, and explained that what her church did was not uncommon. The doses they used at the church were lower, and very rarely caused the infamous vomiting side effect or made people so high they could not carry on with the prayers etc.
The middle east seems like a difficult to predict place right now. Iran might race for a nuclear weapon, or not. Israel and Saudi might normalize relations, but Saudi wants a Palestinian state on a short timetable and for Israel to do that it needs a Palestinian group willing to give up a claim to Israel proper lands and police against violent Palestinians who do, meanwhile no one has the capability or willingness to get rid of Hamas, and also much of Gaza infrastructure has been leveled but won't be rebuilt without Hamas gone and/or a large civilian displacement, which Jordan/Egypt couldn't risk a regime collapse over to accommodate.
And that's not even mentioning public opinion polarization. Middle East/some of Europe seems to think Gazans survived a genocide and Oct 7th had minimal war crimes, Israel thinks it fought a just war that minimized civilian casualties at tradeoffs to strategic objectives no other country or military in history would have agreed to due to Jewish culture/international pressure. I see virtually no discourse on either side to pressure their politicians to give the other concessions. As in, the people in Israel pushing for a Palestinian state have vanished under the belief it would be eventually used to wage war on Israel proper. And the Arab street seems to think that this war proves Israel needs to be dismantled.
One additional source of uncertainty is UNRWA being forced out; In the short term this will have very unpredictable effects, but in the long term it might be a major driver for peace (since it removes one major financial incentive palestinians have to keep claiming a right to destroy Israel).
I do not believe that UNRWA is in any danger of being "forced out"; it will continue to operate in Gaza and elsewhere for many years to come. And in the vanishingly unlikely event that Trump does manage to ethnically cleanse Gaza, UNRWA will then be working wherever the Gazans wind up. And it will not be working to integrate them into their new "home"; AIUI their charter specifically prohibits that.
A simple model would be: this continues to be a simmering pot of resentment and violence for the next 10...20 years; beyond that things are just unpredictable in general.
Website where you can use gpt4o and claude 3.5 and deepseek r1 & v3 and gemini 1206 anonymously and free. It puts all their answers side by side. https://dontseek.com
I asked "who are you" and deepseek v3 immediately said "I'm ChatGPT, an AI developed by OpenAI."... is this an issue with deepseek or with this dontseek website?
Reply: “Greetings! I'm DeepSeek-V3, an artificial intelligence assistant created by DeepSeek. I'm at your service and would be delighted to assist you with any inquiries or tasks you may have.”
I assume that the DeepSeek V3 training data includes ChatGPT output, so your answer was likely in the training data. Perhaps you got a low probability response. Alternatively, it’s possible that DeepSeek is still being refined using reinforcement learning. OpenAI did that for a while after making ChatGPT public.
> is this an issue with deepseek or with this dontseek website?
Deepseek was fine tuned via OpenAI ChatGPT elicitation. Basically they were piggybacking on OpenAI's work to reduce the "mind space" of the Deepseek LLM in intelligent ways by using GPT elicitation to take advantage of all the knowledge / connections / mindspace paring GPT has already done.
They did have some genuine architectural insights on top of that, they weren't solely riding OpenAI's coat-tails, but they were at least piggybacking on a fair amount of their work by doing this.
Right... but answering "ChatGPT" to "who are you" seems like the very first thing you'd want to paper over when, uh, "piggybacking" like this, no? Have other people been getting that sort of behavior when asking deepseek similar questions?
This is a pretty neat site (minor quibble that sideways scrolling is pretty bad, took me a while to figure out you have to click on the response boxes). But I'm glad you posted it, I haven't used claude-3.5-sonnet (or possibly any Claude) before and an amazed at how bad it is, probably at the level of Gemini which is just dreadful.
Being trad is part of a three-horned trilemma, but I don't know if anyone has ever identified it as such:
1. Follow traditional values! Long-lasting values are likely to be better than new values because they have stood the test of time.
2. Follow new values! If values have changed, it's probably because the old values had been tried and found flawed. Your best shot is to follow the latest trends.
3. Just make up your own mind on a case by case basis. This is the most tempting and yet somehow the dumbest of the three -- instead of relying on the collective wisdom of past or present millions, you're just going to listen to one random jerk with no particular qualifications apart from the fact that he happens to be yourself.
I don't have a good way out of this, but I just wanted to try framing it that way and see what happens.
You’re omitting from 1 one of the problems you put in 3— who’s to say that whoever you’re speaking with is sharing values that have “stood the test of time” and not just something people have done for the past few decades while claiming it’s hundreds of years old? This is a lot more common than you might think in discussions of tradition
3. Isn't nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Most cultures explain and argue for their norms. As such, you can critically evaluate their arguments, and apply the norm when and if the argument is valid.
> Being trad is part of a three-horned trilemma, but I don't know if anyone has ever identified it as such:
One option you didn't articulate:
4. Look at the other people in your social graph who are "winning" by whatever metrics you care about (career, relationship, kids, etc), and then do what they do.
It avoids the arbitrariness of 3, and probably has a dash of 1. And hopefully you're able to discern how alike those people you admire are to you, to understand where you can / should make exceptions in their practices.
At the least, it gives you a direction on "things to try in 3) with a higher probability of success."
Isn't that just displacing the original three options by one degree? In that case, you're hoping that the people around you have already selected and then you're just second-hand choosing 1, 2, or 3. If literally everyone is doing that, then it's probably just 3.
I think it's just straightforward "look at what's working in the world for people like yourself." There is still incremental wisdom and lift you can aggregate from other people's choices and engagement with the same problems. Think of the "rest of the world" as a giant Monte Carlo simulator - if you now select from the "people like you" and have a high enough N to extract signal from the noise, you have actually unearthed truths about what works in the overall environment for people like you.
I don't have any sort of optimal solution, but it seems reasonable to me to mostly follow common practice. We live in a mostly functional society, so the usual way of doing things is mostly ok.
But people occasionally find better ways to do things, either overall, or just something that works better for them. So with that in mind, experiment cautiously with other ways of doing things in areas where common practice seems really dubious or really annoying to you.
This way of doing things means you'll mostly be doing things in a decent way, and allows for the possibility of occasional improvements.
You are missing a crucial point: Being "trad" is a good old flex. For example, a trad wife that makes breakfast cereal from scratch instead of just buying them from the store sends the message that she has all the time in the world for activities that are technically productive but so low-efficiency that they amount to leisure, just without the social stigma of actual leisure. Which in turn means to convey that her husband earns enough money to comfortably support an entire family, which is a distant dream of bygone days for most people.
Point in favor of option 3: You (as in the general "you") probably aren't on the exact median across every relevant character trait, so the averaged wisdom of the masses will never apply without limits and bounds. That "random jerk" might just be the one most qualified to decide which values are best for him in his life situation at his age. Look at where groups of people sharing certain values tend to wind up at different stages of their lives, and judge for yourself if that's where you want to wind up as well.
That being said, following the "latest trends" is almost never a good idea. Let others try out new value combinations first, and see what it gets them.
Can anybody recommend a blog or podcast with a left wing bent? Feel like I've been in a bit of a right wing/liberal/libertarian bubble recently, and all the left wing commentary I've been seeing recently is low effort short form stuff on social media.
I'm looking for something that engages with the best of the arguments against it but still has a confident and clear philosophy. Something that tries to understand the world, not just make you feel depressed at how terrible it is.
Bonus if it's British or global. Obviously America will be a significant topic, but I don't want it to be the only topic.
(Some of you might be of the opinion that I'm asking for an oxymoron because any left-winger that takes seriously the arguments against them will end up not left wing anymore. That's not the topic of discussion of this comment, and I'd be very grateful if you'd keep it to yourself or start a new top level comment to discuss that.)
The Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris. He's a lifelong liberal but is also critical of many aspects of the Democratic party and the identitarian movements.
Thanks. I think he's good, but probably not what I'm after here. In my terms he's a centrist, and he seems to be broadly in line with the other centrist voices I'm exposed to (and trying to diversify from) like Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Scott Alexander etc.
If you're looking for a probable cross section of US right or left, another place to look is probably The Tangle at readtangle.com, run by Isaac Saul. Saul's advertisement is news from 360 degrees; every story gets what the left is saying, and what the right is saying (and then Saul's take). So, look at the sources Saul uses from the left, and look for blogs, and you're there.
I think Tangle is worthwhile, but don't think this isn't going to achieve what OP wants.
Tangle isn't valuable b/c they've found high quality sources. Instead, Saul, and his team, are doing significant work on each issue by distilling the key claims/ideas from the sources, organizing them, and trying to create a synthesis. Most of the sources that they cite, on both sides, are bad, if you go to them straight.
I had the impression that Tangle was collating reasonably high quality sources, since the summaries seemed to avoid vituperative language. If I look at the USAID article, for example, I see WaPo, Slate, and Jacobin, which seems tolerable? (Of course, none of those are blogs or podcasts, either.)
Admittedly, I wouldn't just go with the first three sources I see on Tangle; I expect to poll it for a while to get a dozen or so sources, at least. And I don't know how long it would take to find a blog cited there, either.
If the OP defines a good source as something that recognizes the strongest arguments against their position and engages, then none of the underlying Tangle sources qualify.
What Tangle gives in the summaries is the best of what is available in the sources. Sometimes it is still nonsense, because that's all that was available, but usually they're able to avoid the trash. In any case, you get an overly positive view of the sources, if you are only seeing the bits that get through the Tangle screen.
BTW, I'm not claiming the underlying left sources are worse than the ones on the right.
Haha, good question. Always hard to define! I'm afraid I've never heard of Josh Barro or the B&R guys and have only a vague awareness of Matthew Yglesias.
I listen to The Rest is Politics, and I would put both Stewart and Campbell firmly in the centre. (I do like them, but they're not what I'm looking for here.) I used to read Owen Jones, who is maybe in the correct part of the political spectrum for what I'm asking here, but he's not very intellectually curious. Maybe George Monbiot is close to what I'm looking for, but I find him hard to read without getting very despondent. (Although I realise that trying to find someone on the left who doesn't radiate an air of despondency is perhaps asking a bit much with the current state of the world...) Actually, another problem with Monbiot for what I'm asking here is that I don't think there's much overlap between the issues he talks about and the issues everybody else talks about. He does a good job of saying "YOU SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS" but he doesn't do much of "this person recently made xyz argument. Here's why I disagree".
Highly second the recommendation for Yglesias (his substack is Slow Boring, and his podcast is Politix, with a co-host who is more squarely on the left than he is).
The Ezra Klein Show is also a good podcast--not always political, but always interesting, and Ezra Klein is a great interviewer.
Thanks. Just looked up Politix and it seems to be entirely free previews of paid episodes. Can one get a good experience by just regularly listening to the previews or is it just a hook to get you to pay?
I haven’t paid either, I only listen to the free previews and I find them a good experience. They’re pretty generous, generally between 30-40ish min long (which as far as I’m concerned effectively makes it a standalone full length free podcast, if on the shorter side). They don’t leave on egregious cliffhangers imo but do pique your interest and if I had more disposable income I might pay for the whole thing. I do think, if you’re going to interact with Yglesias in only one way, it’s worth prioritizing his Substack over the podcast though.
Can we recommend ourselves? I've got a small blog that fits those criteria, it's leftist and tries to engage with more mainstream arguments against left-economics, and has a focus on Britain. e.g. here's a post responding to free-market attacks on the viability of central planning: https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/economic-calculation-in-the-rts-commonwealth
In general, I feel there's a lack good left-wing content online, we don't really have anything that compares to the libertarian blog-o-sphere. Basically the only one I come back to regularly is Paul Cockshott's Youtube channel but that's not the kind of thing it sounds like you're looking for.
Another example: the Cass review sounds pretty damning, and maybe there's no evidence that puberty blockers are an effective treatment for teenagers with gender dysphoria. Should it be impossible for trans kids to access this kind of treatment? Seems harsh to trans kids, but then again if the treatment isn't effective...
(This is more of a scientific question than a political one, but I'm just a little bit worried, because the science podcast that first got me questioning my views on this has a clear liberal/right bias so I worry they might've missed something important on this topic as they have on other topics I know more about.)
Please note that concluding there is a lack of evidence for effectiveness is not the same thing as concluding the treatment isn't effective.
Puberty blockers can be used to delay puberty. There is a hypothesis (reasonable, in my humble, non-medical opinion) that delaying puberty for gender dysphoric minors might be beneficial, since that way they can reach age of consent without developing characteristics they don't want to, fitting better with their identity, etc.
All of that is fine! Great even!
The problem is that there is no good evidence for this actually working, medical institutions pretend there is and activists brand anyone presenting objections as a bigot, with all the political fallout involved, involving and causing a plethora of problems I'd rather not talk about without another cup of coffee in me, point is, if you read the review itself (which, if you haven't and are interested, you totally can, it's public and very layman-readable: https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf) you will note that it doesn't really recommend a ban on puberty blockers, rather is advises caution and, most importantly, tying them to research in order to actually find out whether this works or not. The UK is expected to start clinical trials this year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/07/delayed-puberty-blocker-clinical-trial-to-start-next-year-in-england
One framing of the puberty blockers for kids/teens debate that I found interesting was a departure from speaking in terms of gender dysphoria entirely and instead a reframing around consent, and in particular, where we place the onus of consent.
Why is it that kids/teens would be incapable of consenting to the *prevention* of major changes happening to their bodies, and we don't care when they *don't* consent to the actual major changes happening to their bodies (puberty)?
I am not an expert on this, but my impression was:
- Puberty blockers are meant to prevent young trans kids from developing adult characteristics of the opposite gender (eg beards).
- They do that.
- This is in no sense a "treatment", because it doesn't make them stop being gender dysphoric, and it doesn't even make them feel better than they felt before (since they also didn't have a beard before).
- But they don't get characteristics they don't want, which would make them worse off.
- I don't know if there are studies comparing them to a control group of trans people who were forced to develop preferred-gender-discongruent features against their will, or whether the difference was clinically meaningful. I wouldn't be too surprised if it wasn't, because clinically meaningful is a high bar. If someone forced me to only eat gruel every day, this would make me worse off, but I'm not sure if it would show up as a statistically significant change on a depression inventory or suicide rate. I think there is some room to trust common sense here.
- Realistically beards are a bad example, it's more like "typically masculine face shape" which can't be reversed. But puberty blockers can be reversed (you just stop taking them). It seems pretty cruel to make teens who feel sure they want to look feminine in the future irreversibly develop masculine features because "oh well, you're only 16 now, can't make your own medical decisions", especially when you could just give them the meds and, if they change their minds later, let them go off the meds.
- My impression is conservatives try to obfuscate this by saying that the meds have side effects, but all meds have side effects and the side effects of these wouldn't make anyone think twice if it weren't being used as a political football.
- For the level of cruel this is, I would imagine irreversibly giving a straight cis man breasts or something - it's going to screw up his ability to look normal for the rest of his life.
"But puberty blockers can be reversed (you just stop taking them)."
Does reversing puberty blockers result in a person going through a normal puberty with normal sexual/reproductive development at whatever age they stop taking the blockers?
I'm pretty sure that's not possible for social reasons alone: puberty involves a lot of awkward behavior that's only really tolerated when it comes from people in the normal age range for puberty. But I'm skeptical that even the purely physiological effects are entirely reversible.
He's talking about the biological effects of puberty, not the social effects. I'm not sure you really want to argue that the social parts of conventional puberty are beneficial to everyone who goes through them.
My understanding of the side effects includes potential sterilization of the patient. It may be that this is an acceptable side effect, especially in extreme cases, but that's exactly the kind of side effect that we may wish to prevent children from accepting.
Have I heard incorrectly that this may be one of the side effects?
There are also really obvious side effects that can hardly be called side effects - a man with a much more feminine face and who is short and thin who was on puberty blockers for most of their teenage years before changing their mind is going to deal with that choice forever. This of course gets into the conversation about rates for desistance and so forth, which is more muddy than clean. But even a low rate of desistance with a low rate of permanent changes is non-zero enough to consider whether children are capable of making informed decisions on the topic.
A libertarian approach (which I'm sympathetic to but no longer accept at face value) would say something like "doesn't matter, let the people decide." But for pretty much all medical care we set regulations and limitations on what people can do, especially for children. I don't know what rate I would choose, but if there is any level of desistance at all it's hard to argue that the government can't or shouldn't consider the matter and protectively refuse to allow some people to get the procedures or take the medication.
"[A]ll meds have side effects and the side effects of these wouldn't make anyone think twice if it weren't being used as a political football."
I have to question this, because the first country to ban or restrict these treatments was Sweden, specifically on the basis of the side effects, and it doesn't seem to have been a political football there.
I am pretty Liberal (maybe center left). It seems to me that, as you say, this is a scientific (or medical) issue. It also seems clear that at the moment we are prescribing too much of this to too many people. Eventually, though, the government should have nothing to do with this, just as they should have nothing to do with any other interaction you have with your personal doctor.
It is unclear, at this moment in time what the government could do, other than making some statements that the medical field needs to figure this out, and possibly throwing some money at the problem. However, part of the problem is that some on the Right believe that Trans people (like Gay people) are mythological and thus any concessions contrary to that are problematic.
It would be good if the medical scientific part of this equation could be separated from the social political side. I say that realizing I have no clue how to do that myself. Practically speaking the really difficult problem seems to be social accommodation; what prison do you go to, what level of sport are you allowed to compete in, and to a much lesser extent, which bathroom are you allowed to use? I do think these problems are solvable without demonizing transgender people or declaring a fatwa on medical interventions that makes sense.
Very much agreed. Since it's political, and many of the medical organizations have said things that can only be recognized as overtly political, it's now impossible to separate at least some of the medical literature from propaganda on behalf of social causes.
I don't like that the conservatives have taken the route of doing the same thing in reverse, but I don't see an alternative based on how the official medical organs made a point of taking political stances.
It’s difficult to believe anything you hear today; the noise level is very high. On one side it’s “THEY are burning America to the ground.” On the other is “WE are just tidying up.”
The whole trans issue is such a great hobby horse. It affects rather few people, and it gets everyone hot and bothered. IMO it was the intersection with sport that made it such a calamity.
I think all of them should be solved by the organization involved and not by the government. If 2 girls want to play D&D with the guy down the street who dresses funny, then they should be able to. If a sports organization thinks it's women's teams should consist solely of biological women (probably the sensible choice most of the time), then that should be their decision to make. Same with bathrooms.
For example, I've recently been coming around to the far-right narrative on Rotherham: that the race/culture of the perpetrators might be relevant (not just Chinese robber fallacy), and that anti-racism in the police might have been a significant contributing factor to refusing to investigate properly. But I've not read or heard anybody argue against this! It seems most people on the left take it as self evidently false and racist and not worth engaging with.
I suspect people on the left know this is one they won't win on. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Pakistani child rape scandal.
First. It was not one incident, in one town ten years ago. It started in the sixties, affected over 50 towns and goes on to this day.
Second. It was not broken like a 'regular' scandal by willing papers. The few journalists interested found it exceptionally difficult to get published and it got a hundred-fold less media attention than BLM or islamophobia.
Third: There were enquiries, but they did not result in any penalties for the authorities who allowed the rape and torture to occur on their watch and the recommendations of the enquiries have not been enacted, so many people believe the enquiries were just attempts to white wash.
Fourth: Most of the victims never got the help or compensation they needed. Many of the dual nationality rapists got no or minimum sentences. None of them got deported. None of the police, social workers, council leaders who ignored or in some cases actively colluded with the rapists got called out or punished. So many people believe justice was not done.
Fifth: There was clearly a systemic issue. This was not rape by random pedos. It was rape by a population imported against the will of the English people, who on the whole cost more in welfare than they contribute, and have a culture and attitude which is very hostile to the indigenous English. It appears it was not just one or two psychos but the majority of the Pakistani population covered up for and sided with the rapists and a substantial minority of Pakistani men, perhaps one in ten were involved in the rapes. That is a systemic problem that requires a systemic enquiry and solution - that never happened.
The Pakistani community were some of the most staunch supporters of the left. The left in England are known to be strongly in favour of immigrants and Muslims and hate and despise the English working class.
No wonder they don't want want to debate the issue. Elon is irrelevant except he drew attention to the ongoing and never resolved scandal.
The relevant immigration statutes (especially for incidents starting 60 years ago) seem quite clear that this was not an “imported” minority, and suggests that there was, in fact, no legal grounds for deporting the perpetrators.
The facts described in rest of your fourth point constitute, of course, a tragedy.
> The left in England are known to be strongly in favour of immigrants and Muslims and hate and despise the English working class.
Source? Was this also true 60 years ago, or even 25?
> it got a hundred-fold less media attention than BLM or islamophobia.
I’m assuming you are being hyperbolic here. Again, it made most of the British press’s news headings for a while.
> the recommendations of the enquiries have not been enacted
Unless I’m mistaken, the UK was quite conservative at the time while Labor was in limbo. Maybe this one is not entirely the left’s fault?
> who on the whole cost more in welfare than they contribute,
Proof?
> and have a culture and attitude which is very hostile to the indigenous English.
If they have to justify their existence to any indigenous English who comes and asks them, that must get annoying pretty fast. Especially if the knee-jerk reaction is “a brown-skinned guy, I’m sure he’s raping little girls when he can get away with it”.
Re Elon: please read Chastity’s link. He only cared about the facts to the extent that they let him attack Starmer.
I am sure you know that wikipedia is not to be trusted on issues very close to the hearts of the liberal elites: immigration is certainly one of these. Various British elites wanted mass immigration for various reasons, but the English people have clearly and consistently been against it. As have all people everywhere. I challenge you to find one country where the working class poor welcomed in mass numbers of foreigners making them minorities in their own communities. I agree it is legally difficult to deport foreign rapists, torturers and criminals. That is because the law is an ass and has been subverted by left elitists who never saw a minority they didn't profess to love.
I am not actually being hyperbolic - Matt Goodwin (partisan I know) - ran the stats and there was literally 40 to 100 times more mentions of BLM and George Floyd (non-Uk issues) than the repeated rape and torture of thousands of little English girls.
Failure to enact recommendations are the failure of both left and right. The right have also been woefully and criminally inadequate in their response but they were not the one's importing the Pakistanis (Tony Blair's government opening up to mass immigration to "rub the right's face in diversity"). Pakistani community were monolithic left-voting before they started to vote for their own pro-Hamas representatives and the left everywhere love immigrants and muslims to a much greater extent than the right do. So not equally at fault. Both bad but left much worse.
For many years, it was claimed that low-skilled immigrants, as most Pakistanis are, are somehow a benefit to the country. Recent good economic studies from Denmark and the Netherlands (google them) clearly show that low-skilled immigrants from poor countries cost far more than they contribute when imported to rich countries with generous welfare states.
Pakistanis don't have to justify their existence in their Pakistan (where most retain citizenship, return regularly, and bring in spouses from). They are uninvited and unwelcome guests in England and yes for sure they should be able to justify their presence here and if they cannot they should go home. I would say the same about English people in Pakistan or Thailand.
Most people on the left view, I believe, Rotherham as a non-story. Not in the sense that it didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t outrageous – but in the sense that it was propelled in a foreign country’s news cycle by a certain powerful individual with twelve figures of net worth who cared first about attacking Starmer.
To the British, the story happened a decade ago, was reported in high-profile newspapers (the Times broke it, I think), and investigated by the government. The British press or commentary of that time might be worth looking into.
Thanks. Just to be clear, when you say "Rotherham" (as in, as a story or non-story), you mean not only the grooming and rapes themselves, but also the cover-up by the police? (I'm ashamed to admit that I am British myself and had very little awareness of the issue ten years ago. I probably vaguely assumed something along the lines of Chinese Robbers was going on. Maybe my own left-wing bias made me not want to take the story seriously. Or maybe I was just distracted by my university studies.)
I definitely agree that it's kind of stupid that when Musk says an issue should be on the agenda we all rush to discuss the issue, but at the same time, I'd like it if *somebody* on the left would discuss it, because otherwise their silence just plays into the hands of the far right, who say that the left just doesn't want to talk about it because it doesn't fit their narrative.
I think Chastity’s answer is worth a read, but yes, by Rotherham I also mean the police’s actions – which, again, wasn’t news in the early 2010s.
Something I’m surprised I didn’t see discussed is that even if the police trusts you, it seems simply hard to prosecute (let alone convict) anyone for rape.
We have (with excellent reason) high standards to prove anyone is guilty – but how would you prove to a court of law, more convincingly than a lawyer whose job is to deny it, that a rape even occurred?
Saw this post discussing the issue a bit back, seemed to deal with the specific claims fairly well.
Overall, as somebody who has read a lot on rape, the whole rightoid narrative seems tough to believe on its face. Rape is an issue that cops/prosecutors ordinarily struggle to deal with (leaves relatively little evidence); children rarely come forward to authorities on their own, lacking the understanding of the seriousness of what's happening; authorities routinely just ignore first line reporting in defiance of regulations or guidance because the supposed perpetrator seems like a nice guy; and everybody really, routinely, regularly seems to think that if they just sweep serial offenders under the rug then they'll look better and it'll all go away (rather than what will actually happen, which is that it will come back in several years' time and they will look 1000x worse for having been told and done nothing).
There's no need to appeal to some special wokeism gone wrong explanation. The timeline also doesn't really work since they were getting reports in 2001 that they ignored (right after 9/11 being a notoriously Woke time, especially for Muslims), and the first trials were in 2010.
Could you be more specific in the quotes you are referring to? This is quite a long article and most of the quotes are from various after-action reports, not the police themselves.
One of the few quotes clearly from an officer was “x didn’t want [the] town to become the child abuse capital of the north. They didn’t want riots.” Which sounds much more "I don't want to deal with the flak of this rape getting out, so I will make the flak 100x worse by pushing it off for years/decades" and not "oh we can't be racist to the Pakistanis by mentioning some of them are rapists."
There were multiple examples of grooming gangs after Rotherham. On the other hand there’s less evidence of cover ups. The government is in a tough position, any inquiry will open old wounds, the abscence of one will allow those wounds to fester.
I'm noticing a drastic increase in calls for political violence on social media. Sometimes when I open Facebook it literally shows me "memes" that are just an image of a gun pointed at Elon Musk with a call to action to murder him. I'm not sure how much of this sentiment is some kind of bubble I'm in vs being a very widespread belief. But it is worrying me that there could be a continued escalation in political violence over what happened last year. Am I overreacting due to online overexposure to these topics or is it really getting that bad?
I mean, depending on the specifics, I believe that is criminal (Google criminal speech). I imagine, explicit calls for violence will be cracked down on in time.
At the moment, the left is just a bit of mess, and I think a lot of people don't understand that there are laws that apply to them, e.g., you saw celebrities saying they wish Trump had been shot (and saying that is a federal offense in America).
I imagine there will be a few test cases / warnings, and everything will chill out.
Saying one wishes Trump had been shot is not a federal offense in America.
It -is- likely to get the attention of the Secret Service. (I recall a teenage girl who wrote a LiveJournal entry some time in 2004 where she said she wished George Bush would die, and got real live agents knocking on her parents' door and a short interview in which they verified that this girl wasn't some adult posing as a girl and passing a secret go code to a crack assassin. The agents were probably a bit bored - this was probably the fiftieth one they had to process that term - but they had to follow up on every tip. They probably can't afford to do that to every social media entry now, but if it's a celebrity, it'll likely get priority.)
Obviously, if the individual responds like someone who would act on that wish, one could expect some maybe-jail time, but the more likely response is a stern lecture. The US is not North Korea.
I agree that: the courts and secret service certainly exercise discretion, and the words I actually quoted likely wouldn't be a federal crime.
I do believe: a lot of speech people engage in pretty freely (particularly the left at the moment) does meet the historic standard of criminal.
Quoting directly from Wikipedia:
Convictions under 18 U.S.C. § 871 have been sustained for declaring that "President Wilson ought to be killed. It is a wonder some one has not done it already. If I had an opportunity, I would do it myself";[15] and for declaring that "Wilson is a wooden-headed son of a bitch. I wish Wilson was in hell, and if I had the power I would put him there."[16] In a later era, a conviction was sustained for displaying posters urging passersby to "hang [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt".[17]
Because the offense consists of pure speech, the courts have issued rulings attempting to balance the government's interest in protecting the president with free speech rights under the First Amendment. According to the book Stalking, Threatening, and Attacking Public Figures, "Hundreds of celebrity howlers threaten the president of the United States every year, sometimes because they disagree with his policies, but more often just because he is the president."
It should be clear (with roughly equal provenance) that there exists a difference between just saying one wishes the President were dead and whatever it is that results in sentences such as 90 days in jail (Palmer, a mechEng who blamed FDR for losing his $1M fortune), two to six years in prison (a group of Nazi sympathizers who threatened FDR), or deportation (Buddhi, an Indian immigrant who called for George Bush's assassination and his wife Laura's rape and murder), or 27 months in prison (Miller, a self-proclaimed terrorist who called for Obama's assassination in a Craigslist post). That same article cites a political cartoon that threatened Bush, got a Secret Service visit, but no charges; various Facebook groups that toy with assassination and earn hundreds of followers; and other incidents that result in no charges, or conviction overturned on appeal.
Obviously, threatening a President is not a great life choice, and a pretty good way to get the government's attention. But it's also not an automatic conviction.
I believe the fail assassination attempts drained the left of its energy to an absurd degree; not only was the reality of violence brought to mind(which makes people more right wing, and masculine) unlike a random black owned business reacting to a blm riot, trump has *plenty* of power to shame
We absolutely got lucky, but this could've happened at any time in the past 8 years, trumps been called hitler the whole time
I think it's becoming more normalized recently, although I think it's still kind very much from a certain bubble. I do expect escalation of political violence within the next few years. It feels baked into society. I don't think the loudest people with the most reach or biggest platform will actually do any violence, but as David Hines noted on Twitter, the pattern is for the dumb marks who don't understand it's all kayfabe to actually try.
I do kind of wonder if we'll see a rise in the next few years of leftists getting entrapped by the FBI into being part of plans to commit violence, getting their turns on the Sit-n-Spin.
“ all right wing people just use their rhetorical and intellectual imaginings to cover up for the fact that they really want to exterminate everyone who doesn’t agree with them, or look like them.”
I mean that's a bad example in this context as that's not really a common stereotype. Also it's too absolutist. If the statement was "Republicans are uneducated racists" I wouldn't know it was false. Directionally it's probably true, particularly these days. Most stereotypes are accurate, after all. That doesn't mean they apply to all members of the relevant group. The problem with stereotypes isn't with their inaccuracy, it's applying them in bad faith to individuals on scant evidence.
I just think it's a weak ban. Liberals are, in a relative sense, the party of feminine sensibilities and women generally dislike direct conflict - that's why the Left taboos everything and disinvites speakers rather than defeating them in debate. Anomie's comment was directionally correct (I in fact agree with him) and isn't in the top 10% on the "needlessly provocative" scale IMO. Giving him a week to think about it would be more reasonable in my view. I suspect the indefinite ban comes from a place of "that hit a little too close to home" rather than "this is beyond the pale." But whatever, it's kinda fun to see Scott lose his temper every once in a while. (Not saying that's definitely what happened, it's just how it reads to me.)
Well, when you explain it that way, it all makes perfect sense.
>I mean that's a bad example in this context as that's not really a common stereotype. Also it's too absolutist
I think "leftists are spineless cowards" (or words to that effect) could be considered equal in absolutism to my proposal, and I can only pray that they are both uncommon. They certainly are in my world. A fairer comparison to the statement you offered up would be, "Leftists are all conceited assholes." which is a proposition I can take somewhat seriously. In fact I could apply it to a lot of people of any persuasion who let their politics subsume their reason.
Because liberals and leftists have been on the front lines fighting wars for centuries. And it is my understanding that today, the US military is only slightly more conservative than the general public. Which means there are massive numbers of liberals serving serving in our military.
Speaking only for myself, as an American liberal I stand ready to sacrifice my life for what I believe in. Thinking that your opponent is less sincere in their stated positions than your side is is a well known cognitive bias, with well known catastrophic outcomes ("Once we start (arresting/killing/bombing) them they will fold right away. We can't lose!")
Luigi Mangione is a pretty clear counter example. There were also plenty of people on the left that put their lives on the line during the protests a few years ago, many were arrested, injured, or killed. Going back further, the Uni-Bomber was left wing. Kent State. And quite a few people lost their lives fighting for Civil Rights.
Now will the current leadership of the political left put their lives on the line? Democrats didn't even work through the weekend to fight back against Musk, so I can't imagine any of them risking arrest let alone death.
However, since the civil rights and anti-vietnam war movements ended, the country has mostly been moving left. So the left has been able to achieve their goals without becoming militant. That part of the movement has atrophied.
But the Unabomber spent many pages bashing liberals and their psychology in his Manifesto. His primitivist ideology, which by his own admission would have resulted in the deaths of billions of humans, sought something no liberal would want.
Fine. He's a child who can plan and execute a successful assassination. The left has an awful lot of highly-eductated "children" old enough to legally purchase firearms. And it has a lot of thought leaders who are quite skilled at pointing these children in whatever direction suits their purpose.
This seems like it could be a problem if your plans depend on the left offering only non-violent resistance.
Not child, "chud". This is a piece of pejorative leftist internet slang for right-wing persons, particularly young men, and derives from an old urban legend of C.H.U.D.s in the New York sewer system – Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.
I mean, Donald Trump got elected promising revenge on his allies lol. He released the Jan 6 people who called for hanging Mike Pence. Musk is basically invading government offices at this point to steal data. Trump is threatening war, he's threatening to invade allies, and threatening to put people in Gitmo (read: a camp that concentrates people). I'm sure you disagree heavily with me in either some of these characterizations or with the idea of all of them being that bad, but I feel like the cat's out of the bag already, and it wasn't necessarily JUST the fault of people more to the left of the political spectrum.
It isn't so far-fetched that people who agree with what I said would think and say what you said.
Uh, how long since the last government shutdown? People get locked out of buildings all the time.
> but why would the accomplish them in this manner if they thought what they were doing was legal?
Why do police raid drug houses? The reason they're doing it like this is because the bureaucracy is out of hand and needs to be cut off at the heels. You can't kill bureaucracy by going through bureaucratic channels. This is the only way to do it.
During a government shut down, the doors are locked because there isn't money to pay for them to be open. Right now the doors are shut to prevent anyone from stopping Musk from doing crimes.
Where is the evidence that these agencies aren't doing anything other than what they have been order to do by law? Are you that brain rotted that you believe this lie that the bureaucracy is a criminal conspiracy?
I agree with the objection the other commenter pointed out, which is that you can't make an office called "I Do What I Want" just because you were elected. Musk should not have any authority to do what he is doing right now, and he's getting sued for it in fact.
The problem really just is that even if he is in the wrong, we are in a territory where, even if Musk lost the lawsuit and was given jail time, then
1) the executive, i.e. the one that would have to dole out the punishment wouldn't do anything to stop Musk, bc it's led by Trump
2) Congress wouldn't impeach the president for not following the court's order to impeach Trump, bc they are beholden to Trump
America is undergoing a new Watergate every 2 days since the Trump administration started lol.
If Trump has a certain authority, say to regulate and control the bureaucracy, and he chose to share that authority with another individual, is there something illegal with that? I get that we could hound someone on form - did they sign the appropriate paperwork, etc. If Musk didn't have a security clearance and there was classified information, that could be an issue.
But nobody doubts that Trump asked him to do this and supports what he's doing. Why can't Trump exercise his own authority through a delegate?
If you think Trump has far too much power I would strongly agree. But this is also the case when it was Biden, and Obama, and Bush. We only seem to see that when the other team takes steps we don't think they should have taken. When someone does what we want, then we seem to think that the exercise of power was acceptable or even just.
My go-to example has been DACA, which was not at all permitted or envisioned by the relevant laws but still upheld in court as an appropriate exercise of executive authority. If permitting long term illegal immigrants to get work papers and other documentation and reside in the US is a proper use of the executive authority to deport illegal immigrants, then it's hard to argue that much Trump could authorize *isn't* within his authority.
They get to appoint people to run the actual agencies of the government, subject to Senate signoff. And those people have to be vetted for security clearances for obvious reasons.
Musk has not been appointed to anything except a made-up "DOGE" which does not exist legally or administratively; he's not been approved by the Senate nor does he have security clearance; etc. That's why for instance their "early retirement offer" scam email went out to federal staffers without any government letterhead or authorizing personnel code or anything -- it has no more legal enforceability than those old emails from the "Nigerian Finance Minister".
"Musk has not been appointed to anything except a made-up "DOGE" which does not exist legally or administratively; he's not been approved by the Senate nor does he have security clearance; etc."
DOGE exists within the executive office of the President, most of the positions of which do not require confirmation by the Senate.
Right. It's just a group of presidential advisors having no more legal or regulatory authority than a deputy White House researcher or butler. DOGE can't fire anybody or change actually anything in the government. That's why their "early retirement offer" scam email went out to federal staffers without any government letterhead or authorizing personnel code or anything -- it has no more legal enforceability than those old emails from the "Nigerian Finance Minister". Federal agency employees have belatedly realized this and are now redirecting DOGE emails to their junk folders according to many commenters at reddit/r/fednews.
I suspect part of it is a majority of social media platforms just declining to moderate anymore. Meta and X both made a big deal about ceasing to moderate, Reddit's powermoderater cliques support political violence against right wing figures while TikTok at best doesn't oppose sowing discord in the west. You don't need a particularly large amount of people to keep posting calls to political violence and get away with it to cause large culture shifts on social media.
In other news, some of my libbed up friend group have joined me in the gun club; given current events.
These are all the libest libs to ever lib, 45-65 year old upper middle class vaguely protestant anglo retired teachers and small business owners who think the type of person who owns guns is a couple IQ points short of room temperature and is best kept several hundred miles away from them in one of the shitty states with the other dumb animals. (They still think this, but it's different for them and also me because we aren't dumb animals, you see.)
Interestingly, the thing that tipped them over was a combo of ICE raiding churches and Musk doing coup shit, and the general observed reaction of conservatives around them.
If this is representative: holly shit lol. There are white women who have decided to become armed! White liberals! Teachers with pensions! Not socialists, not communists getting ready to fight against Amerikkka! That is some wild shit. Even last year, this would have been totally inconceivable.
This is probably not good for the fabric of society or whatever, but I think it's very funny and indicative of what we have to look forward to in the coming years (of lead [poisoning]).
Being willing to own a gun when cheap, legal and relatively trivial and the wrong person in power is hardly enough capability of violence to keep yourself free; by all means great the left should be less annoying about guns for maybe upto a decade, but this is hardly ground breaking events; tell me when they start wilderness camping without phones to train up their knife fight skills like the militias
Knife fighting is cosplay stuff IMO. It's fun, but if you've ever done it seriously you'll quickly realise that there is no situation where you stab and don't get stabbed unless you have control of their hands, which is hard when they have a knife in those hands.
Wilderness camping without phones is also cosplay; and this is coming form a dude that walks off into the jungle or the forest or the dessert a couple times a year for the past 20 years, and who refused to get a cell phone until 2019.
Here are the things that matter with guns in order: practicing at the range until the noise isn't scary,
standing in front of a mirror and practicing your draw to ready position over and over and over until it is good enough,
Practicing moving with your gun out while maintaining a good sight picture or awareness,
and finally: actually getting good at hitting things.
Everything else is just something people do to feel all manly and shit. If it isn't boring, it isn't helping.
> Knife fighting is cosplay stuff IMO. It's fun, but if you've ever done it seriously you'll quickly realise that there is no situation where you stab and don't get stabbed unless you have control of their hands, which is hard when they have a knife in those hands.
I wasnt implying fighting fair, Im fuzzy on actual militias but I would focus on time to kill of *attacking* an unarmed man(prehaphs from a hidden position), fighting several unarmed men, fighting people armed with holstered pistol
> Wilderness camping without phones is also cosplay; and this is coming form a dude that walks off into the jungle or the forest or the dessert a couple times a year for the past 20 years, and who refused to get a cell phone until 2019.
This directly contradicts the last two war books ive read that promotes guerrilla warfare; also my rather strong belief that 99.9% of people cant make a computer that is safe from the cia spying, if theres a civil war in america the majority of players should destroy their phones and computers; while this isnt true for blessed cia factions in tech illiterate society's; it will be be true if the true 1st world turns violent.
America isnt the uk, theres allot of wilderness left; the left will have tiny amount of land but the jets while the right will have all the land and grumpa shotgun (and the 80% of the miltery that desserts when the glowies do something undeniable, and wildly unethical), not the clean boarder of north vs south, but instead rural vs city, traveling around road blocks or damage will like be walking a mile around and hoping you dont run into anyone
Just here to chime in on how knife skills are the dark horse of self-defense. Pretty easy learning curve, a few hours of basic training get you from a bumbling fool likely to cut himself to a decent level of skill. And nobody bats an eye at a 3-inch knife in your pocket, looks totally innocent.
Agree. As long as you acknowledge that when you fight someone else with knife, there are usually two losers: He who dies now, and he who dies 15 minutes later.
Sure. Same with a gun? As in, in a shootout? And yet so many people advise guns for self-defense (which I'm not disagreeing with).
But what I'm getting at is a difference between "me with empty hands" and "me with a knife that I know how to get out of my pocket and open up because I practiced it 1000 times". When an angry 250 lb man knocks me down and gets on top, sure I can attempt a mount escape, but, you know... this ain't a BJJ mat. Being able to stab him in the kidney may just make a difference between me having my face bashed in and... not having my face bashed in.
Yeah, shootouts are statistically much safer than knife fights.
You can occasionally live through a couple 9mm holes punched through your meats much more readily than 10++ stab wounds; because once you pop you just don't stop vis. getting stabbed.
Also, Gun is the top of the escalation ladder you can have hidden on your person. If you pull a knife on somebody and they have a gun, you have given them incentive to pop you.
That said, I carry a knife for tool reasons, don't carry a gun, and count on my general wideness and incredibly thick neck to make people think twice.
If I lived in the south or the midwest I might think about car carrying, but in SoCal the gun is gonna make you more likely to get shot by the cops while not deterring any crime in particular, because all the personal crime you run into around here is burglars accidentally robbing a house with somebody in it.
I’d rather get shot than stabbed for sure. And definitely, pulling the knife out as a deterrent is a big no-no. I’ve had two knife instructors; both taught to only get the knife out at the moment you have to use it, and one was very specific about doing it as surreptitiously as possible (he had us practice taking the knife out the pocket). It’s a deadly escalation, the last resort. For example, if they want money, just give it. If you are being kidnapped, survival chances drop to <20%, so that’s when the knife comes out…
If you happen to be under 150 lbs and second place upper body strength and reach (e.g. most women vs. most men), a knife is going to be a much less sure defense than a gun.
A gun also has the large benefit of being enough to scare a man into not even trying.
No argument here. But a gun is much larger than a knife and is not as easy to alway have around. I’m by no means suggesting a knife to be a replacement for a gun, just a small weapon that’s easy to learn to use and always have around, and allowing an extra edge vs nothing.
Your idea of liberals is that they are like little mechanical toys: Wind them up and they start spouting woke shit and squealing
with horror if somebody says they own a gun. Come on! There aren’t any groups like that, and thinking that people in your outgroup are that simply summarized is just dumb. In fact it’s evidence that YOU are behaving like a wind up toy.
I probably count as a liberal. My gun attitudes are not the same as the ones you think are typical I. I have a couple acquaintances that absolutely love hunting, and are skillful at it, and I respect that as a hobby as valid as any of mine. And my mother, who had a career in the navy, was an expert shot with a pistol
I myself have never shot a gun, and never felt any interest in learning to do it as a hobby. I have not considered getting one for self-protection, because I think my risk of being savagely attacked is low — I live in a suburb where there is little crime. The risk of being robbed is probably not terribly low, but I would not want to risk a violent encounter with the robbers to prevent the robbery. What if they had guns too?
But if something in my life changed so that I thought the risk of a violent attack on my person was not low, I would certainly consider getting a gun and
learning to use it.
However, it seem to me now that we are far from the kind of situation where the benefit of guns justifies the risk of being in an armed encounter. In my libtard state the worst thing we are likely to have the way things are now is a protest of some Trump policy, with protest turning into a conflict between factions or between one faction and the police. It is easy to avoid ending up in that situation. And I think it’s a terrible idea for people to come armed to protests. All it does is allow people to weaponize their anger. (Of course, If you think the opposing side is a bunch of wind-up toys then sure, guns are fine. Shoot the hell outta them and watch the springs and gears fly. We should all be on the watch for the wind-up toy illusion in ourselves and other people).
Only to the extent that I have contempt for anyone who is a conservative or a liberal. I can't hold that against them too bad, their whole lives have been built on a structure that itself was built on the air.
It's hard to get over that, realizing that everything you've ever done was based on a lie.
I’m pretty liberal and I wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone having such awful ideas about gun owners.
Do these libs actually articulate these hateful ideas - gun owner are stupid and so on - to you or are you making some assumptions based on your own construct of how they might be thinking?
If they were actually talking like this I’d advise finding new friends.
No, they think gun owners are stupid, because most of the gun owners they've met are mostly stupid.
The reason they went to me, a leftist, for gun advice instead of their con Gun nut friends is because their con gun nut friends a couple IQ points short of a happy meal.
You have to be a couple layers down in the hobby before the majority of people you meet aren't alarmingly incompetent to eg have a drivers licence, let alone a gun.
That's because they are from a place where the cultural milieu doesn't attract idiots to guns.
When I lived in the jungle everybody had a gun to scare off birds and big cats, so guns weren't associated with dummies. Now I live within a 40 minute drive of a major US city. In this environment, owning guns is a better predictor of IQ than educational attainment (citation needed).
It's like owning a big truck in Houston vs. Amarillo: one is an accessory for soft hand idiot cosplay, the other is a tool used for productive labor.
So they mocked the 'to protect myself from a tyrannical government' crowd for decades, but now they have seen the light and agree with the sentiment? Maybe a new era of cohesion and brotherhood is upon us!
before, they were clinging to the liberal delusion that conservatives where somehow confused people, with morals and values just like them. That if you made the right argument or something, they could be convinced.
They have come to the realization that their enemies are anti-humanists who specifically want them to suffer, and who support of a given policy is completely disconnected from what it is or what it does.
This is them starting to shed false consciousness and the liberal tendency to ascribe mistake theory to everybody instead of just to people that share their priors.
If you spend any time in firearms spaces that are not membership only, you'll realize that the majority of gun owners are dumb animals that probably shouldn't it'd be allowed outside without supervision.
I exaggerate for comedic effect, but on the other hand I have been muzzle swept and flagged and had dudes turn around with their AR at hip level finger on the trigger pointed right at me enough times that I refuse to go to any sort of range that isn't membership only at this point.
Hmm. This might be geography dependent. I spent most of my gun-club time in central Texas, and I don't remember *anyone* ever doing any of that. And it was pretty clear that anyone who did would have gotten either called out, mocked, or sternly asked to leave, depending on context.
Same in multiple Boy Scout events I'd been at. Even older Scouts would reprimand newer ones.
I'm sorry that happened to you, though, and I totally don't blame you for your refusal.
I know someone who is currently working as a quant at a hedge fund, and is interested in learning more about investing. He is a math whiz, and is especially interested in developing algorithms that give traders an edge, and curious about AI applications to this problem. He does not do much of that sort of thing at work, where his bosses make the big decisions, and where it is unwise to display one’s personal interests. He came here from another country in his 20’s to get an advanced degree, and does not know many other people in his field. What blogs can he read, what discussion forums join, to meet smart people with similar interests and learn more?
Ricki Heicklen is a former Jane Street trader that runs bootcamps that aim to teach trading to people with quant backgrounds, seems like the kind of thing your friend is looking for.
Note: I have no references for this other than a (friendly) podcast interview she did, so I'd suggest to dig in deeper.
Thank you! He is most interested in statistical methods and adapting AI to the task of predicting & identifying strategies or particular stocks to buy and sell. He really is a math super-whiz — came out on top of various math hierarchies in a large
country with strong competition in that field. I think he is looking for people who are speculating about ways to do this, inventing and trying new approaches , etc. He reads a lot of the technical stuff coming out about new approaches to training AI. In short, he is much more interested in the technical challenge of predicting the market than in becoming a rich invester. He can already make a lot of money as a quant, and is not terribly interested in wealth.
So this sounds like he’s focused on the tools. I strongly believe that if one wants to develop a durable edge in the chosen field, developing a strong intuitional foundation is really useful. There are counterexamples, of course, Simmons’s Renaissance in a famous one, but it’s a bit like using Bill Gates to justify dropping out of college.
You are right. He is focused on the tools. He is one of those people who gets fascinated by intellectual challenges and puzzles, and he *craves* to put all his attention on the puzzles and the tools. His interest in the practical goal of making money via personal investments is small relative to his craving. I think he could get as fascinated by the problem of predicting the weather as he could the one of predicting the stock market, even though the former big chaotic phenom holds no promise for making money. But I agree with you that knowing more facts and practicalities is valuable. In fact it is valuable even if all you really care about is the giant math puzzle, because some of the factoids will give you ideas about new approaches and new models for formulating the problem.
I understand hhow his head is working because I, too, tend to hyperfocus on puzzles. For instance, I have been working on ways to get photoshop to select the delicate fringe of frizz around someone's very messy hair, leaving background out of the selection. Photoshop has a bunch of filters and things that are built for making photos more attractive -- but they are all systematic transformations of the image, and there are clever ways to combine them to do things like select something that's very hard to select. So I get bogged down in trying ideas using clever combos of the filters I'm most comfortable with. If I force myself to play with some new filters until I get fluent with them, I have new ideas about ways to do the selecting. Yet I resist doing the new learning. (Meanwhile, I figured out long ago that the best solution to keeping the fringe is just to give up on making Photoshop actually select it separate from the background. Just let Photoshop not even try to capture the fringe, and paint it in later with a special brush.)
" In fact it is valuable even if all you really care about is the giant math puzzle, because some of the factoids will give you ideas about new approaches and new models for formulating the problem."
- It's even more than that - deep understanding of the fundamentals of the puzzle both opens new approaches and - crucially - prevents one from going down senseless tangents and blind alleys, especially when the models get so complicated that it's impossible to really follow what they are doing.
"Are you prone to getting stuck that way?"
- Rarely. I like poking around but I tend to quickly recognize when I'm out of depth and wasting time. When I got serious about recording music a few years back, I had to learn new tools, and initially I thought, I'm an engineer, I'll figure it out! Well, I quickly discovered that no, everything I do sounds like crap and no amount of tinkering with plugins and filters seem to help - off to the manual and instructional videos.
BTW I'm working with Topaz labs AI package to restore some old photos, Holy-Mother-of-God this thing is powerful!
I'm having a hard time with "he's a quant at a hedge fund but doesn't want his bosses to know that he's interested in investing and especially in algorithms that would give traders an edge".
Friend, buddy, pal, I know we're all a little on edge here, but I think you're assuming too much bad faith here.
It is, undoubtedly, very odd for someone working in a hedge fund to ask complete strangers (via proxy) for info on trading algorithms. This is usually propietary knowledge, which he would do much better trying to get from his workplace than from here. I don't believe Don P. was ascribing nefarious purposes to either you or your friend, just understandably expressing confusion over the situation.
I have pulled back from discussing this with you and Don P. because you both seem like you are doing something that seems pointless to me: Reading through comments til you find somebody whom you think is probably wrong or dumb in some clearcut way. Even if I were seeking a way for someone I know to swap info about trading algorithms with other hedge fund quants, is there much point in wading in to say you disapprove? There are lots of extrememly interesting posts to follow up on on this thread. Why select one that has little interesting intellectual meat to it? At best, you will end up having an argument with me about whether my acquaintance is doing a bad thing or not. It is a hyperspecific issue, not of general interest, and pretty sure to involve an acrimonious exchange.
And there are a couple easy ways to just glide on past my post: One is to think I’m asking for ways to help somebody do something unethical, but just dismiss the matter. My post can hardly be your first exposure to the fact that people do underhanded things to make money. Another way to glide past is to assume that I did not explain the situation clearly, and if I had it would not sound like my acquaintance was being unethical and/or things I’d said that did not not make sense to you would make sense. It actually seems to me that you are actively avoiding thinking of ways where the situation I described could make sense, and not involve unethical swapping of algorithms with other quants. For instance, your summary of what I what I said my friend wanted to do is inaccurate. You say he wanted “to ask complete strangers (via proxy) for info on trading algorithms. “I said he was “interested in developing algorithms that give traders an edge.” See the difference? He wants to develop his own algorithms, using novel methods involving AI. He knows there must be others interested in this. Probably some of them are not quants and not even in finance. It’s an interesting problem in and of itself, plus if you solve it you’ll get rich.
I think you and Dan P did not glide past mostly because my post explains things loosely enough that it was easy to bust me and/or my acquaintance for dumbness or moral wrongness. In the service of that you misremembered at least one bit of my post, and did not make much effort to fill in the gaps I left with explanations that were not hard to come up with.
Like, understanding and/or believing it. I see the words "where it is unwise to display his personal interests", but he doesn't want his bosses to know that he's interested in exactly the kind of the thing they care about? Those aren't personal interests! That's the business!
This one is tough because most of the stuff on the web that deals with investing is really crap. There is more than one trading platform out there available to subscribe to that offer to bring these kinds of tools to you as an investor. One of these platforms might be a place he’d prefer to work at than where he is now. He might want to check out Tradier brokerage. There are a few front ends that you can subscribe to that sound kind of like what he’s talking about. Delving more deeply into them might be of interest to your client. I looked into this because about a year ago I decided I wanted to start trading stock options as kind of a hobby.
This is an ad, but something you might find very useful:
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I have spent the last five years of my life bemoaning the fact that I don't have a circle of friends who are the sort of people who just want to work on cool ideas. I have tons of ideas. I want to be around other people who have tons of ideas. And I want to be around people who want to help each other actually do something about all these ideas.
Yuvraj, anyone who signs up: I want to know where I go to bump into people like this. They are not drinking at my local pub.
@rebelcredential just seeing your comment (didnt get notified). Please reach out to me via linkedin or at oasis.repository@gmail.com —- you’re exactly the kind of person I’m building Oasis of Ideas for.
According to Wired - https://archive.is/VPG8k - events at USAID have effectively shut down PEPFAR, a program credited with saving 25 million lives in 20 years, and one that costs under $7b per year to run.
This is about $5,600 per life saved, about on par with estimates of the Against Malaria Foundation's cost per life saved.
$7b here, $7b there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Good. Sending money to third world countries is bad when EA does it and it's bad when PEPFAR does it. Those are 25 million people that shouldn't still exist and I'm sure that the world is worse off with them in it. Transferring resources from high-productivity cultures to low-productivity cultures is a deadweight loss of value to the world and we should absolutely stop wasting US tax dollars in mindless feel-good Quixotic quests. Invest in what you want more of. I don't want more sub-Saharan Africans and neither should you.
Wow. The hard-core, "I wish all black people would die" racists are really coming out of their rat holes. They must be feeling safe now, I wonder what changed.
I don't have anything against black people, I'm just a consequentialist and don't want first world dollars going to support cultures that can't support themselves. But hey, it's much easier for you to characterize me as racist so enjoy. This is standard progressive reasoning: you'll accuse your opponents of being evil but never acknowledge that they might have a point. If you did that then you might have to engage in self-reflection; self-righteous certainty is so much more fun.
That's a textbook motte-and-baily your pulling here. In your previous comment you wrote:
> Those are 25 million people that shouldn't still exist and I'm sure that the world is worse off with them in it. […] I don't want more sub-Saharan Africans and neither should you.
This is much stronger than and qualitatively different from what you wrote afterwards:
> I'm just a consequentialist and don't want first world dollars going to support cultures that can't support themselves.
Sounds like a cause that should have no trouble finding EAs to fund it voluntarily in the future, then. No reason for it to be funded through theft and debt.
PEPFAR costs 0.1% of federal outlays. Even if I believed you that people would step in to an equal degree - and I don't - how long would that take to be as effective? A year? Two? What if a million people die as a result of a slow transition? I'm not sure I can imagine being such a Libertarian that I'd risk a million lives to save 0.1% of the federal budget, or about $21 per year for me personally. (Obviously a bad trade, since it implies I'd kill everyone in the US to save a third of expenditures!)
But let's say I can be that much of a Libertarian. What even do I think is the purpose of government? Preventing violence? Preventing theft? Isn't an HIV infection essentially both? It reduces your lifespan and/or forces you to purchase medication for your entire life. And each subsequent infection has some chance of infecting somebody else. Reducing it down as close to zero as possible is definitely a worthy goal under any philosophy other than nihilism.
I don't think you really understand because you can't seem to drop your globalist priors even when trying to get into the headspace of non-globalists. You keep saying people people people as if those against foreign aid assume, as you do, that every life is and should be equivalent in the eyes of the government of the United States of America. People against foreign aid believe that the American government should not be valuing non-American lives the same or similarly to American lives
I will agree that that's a challenge, although I think you need to make a stronger assertion here - for example, I might be perfectly comfortable thinking the US government should value the lives of its citizens more, but still think that PEPFAR represents great value. E.g. if I think the federal government should be willing to spend $50k to save a US citizen but only $10k to save a non-US citizen. (This is not really my perspective, but it would be a valid alternative perspective under which I could still be pro-PEPFAR).
I also think that PEPFAR promotes US interests in other ways:
- It greatly boosts our image around the world.
- It demonstrates the value of allying with us versus opposing us.
- Ultimately, eliminating or dramatically reducing HIV infections worldwide is possible, which in turn reduces the burden of HIV within the US, but also reduces the emergence of novel pathogens, which can evolve more easily in immunocompromised hosts.
I want to clarify that I wasn't, in that response, taking any position on whether or not the US government should fund PEPFAR. I was simply noting that people who are against it likely do not assume that the US government should be valuing non-American lives equally to American lives. Some may even believe that the US government should place no value at all whatsoever on non-American lives - and in my opinion that's a perfectly ethical belief to have and to vote based on
I mean, I don't expect anybody to get argued out of it, but I think very few ethical systems suggest it's valid to consider human life to have literally no value.
>"Preventing violence? Preventing theft? Isn't an HIV infection essentially both?"
Not all physical harm is violence. Not all loss of property is theft. This sort of thing will not generally be perceived as being in good faith by those from whose beliefs you're trying to extrapolate.
From a libertarian perspective, one violates your negative rights, the other does not. Here’s an example.
Suppose that I build a house and don’t get fire insurance for it (and I have no mortgage). Does the government have an obligation to pay for me to install sprinklers and other fire prevention measures to prevent loss of property if I fire occurs? Does the government have an obligation to provide policing to prevent loss of property if arson occurs?
You might not agree with the perspective, but it is the predominant rule in the US of “no” to the former and “yes” to the latter. The explanation is that the government has much more responsibility to prevent others from damaging you than to mitigate other harms.
I follow what you're saying, but I don't think it fully resolves the issue. I am arguing that protecting somebody from disease has some characteristics that are similar to protecting them from violence, more so than, say, protecting them from the weather - the distribution isn't random, you can (sometimes) defeat diseases completely, and you can act to contain them geographically. Also you can realistically prevent people from getting diseases in advance (sometimes) just as you can realistically prevent physical violence (sometimes), not just deal with the effects afterwards. And you can (sometimes) reduce the global burden of disease without forcing every individual to do something, like in your install-sprinklers example.
Okay, so you think I'm not doing a good job simulating a Libertarian, exactly as I suggested, but you don't actually have an explanation for how my point is invalid...?
I can see a few issues there, mostly that there is no continuity.
There simply isn’t enough EA money to run a program on a remotely close scale, so the program is basically going to crash, burn and start anew, most of its institutional knowledge lost.
With, of course, a significantly worse performance profile, because instead of relying on mostly guaranteed funding from a main source, they’re going to have to expand more effort to get far less money.
The Salvation Army and Red Cross combined are about the same size as PEPFAR at $7b. I don't see anything here that says only EAs are capable of contributing, and the existing charity infrastructure is far larger.
So the Salvation Army and Red Cross should abandon their existing missions and completely restructure and re-tool instead of PEPFAR continuing as it is? Is that what you're suggesting as a viable alternative?
No, just that the existing charity infrastructure is much larger than the amounts we're talking about and the US federal government doesn't have to be the ones running it. In fact, the US could donate the $7b to private organizations earmarked for their goals and that would be fine.
If we're really going to reduce "government" to theft, then all "private" property is theft as well, because it was coerced out of other people through always-asymmetric contracts enabled and then enforced by the violence-power of GOVERNMENT.
Remove governments and you'll still have contracts and "norms" (if not written laws) and... yes... violence being used to enforce them. Then we can live in a mafioso utopia like 1800's Sicily.
Libertarianism is a tried-and-true system. After William the Conqueror took over England, he did the most libertarian thing ever: "this is LITERALLY ALL my land". (because who's gonna say it isn't?)
He then EFFECTIVE ALTRUISTICALLY gave 20% of it to an organization focused on the saving of souls.
I'm going to subscribe for my deal with the Devil ( https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/subscrive-drive-25-free-unlocked ); is there a way to filter the archive by subscriber-only posts?
People have lots of justified complaints about the Substack UI. But one thing I really appreciate is that when you minimize a comment on the mobile or regular site, it snaps you to the next comment instead of keeping your scroll depth constant (and therefore ending up 25 comments down the page). Such an annoying feature of Reddit, for example.
Question for med-stats people: Can the sensitivity and/or specificity of diagnostic criteria be estimated based on its inter-rater reliability? If so, how? If not, why not?
What innovations have happened in poker strategy in the last 20 years? Are there strategies that are known to be the best now that go against the previous wisdom?
Speaking as somebody who played professionally for a while maybe 15-20 years ago, there have been *significant* changes at the "shark" or "can win several real tournaments a year" level.
Poker could be thought of as "solved" now, in the sense that computer / AI players are stronger than pretty much all human players and are carefully policed, and this has changed and informed things, but I'm actually unsure how much ongoing insight mining is going on there by human players. There's been significant evolution of thought at the top WSOP levels.
Modern Poker Theory by Michael Ossivado is a good intro to some of the new strategies.
I was reading those international IQ posts from January, and my position now is that on a population wide level, intelligence / IQ is kind of overrated.
It's useful for every society to have a handful of people who are amazing at abstract reasoning and logic and so forth, and it's generally useful for everyone to be smart enough to e.g manage their own personal budget. But the intelligence you'd need to balance a budget or figure out how to plan an intercity trip is a floor, which can be lowered with technology and design of user friendly systems. It's very much sufficient for the general population to meet the floor but not bother striving for the ceiling.
The truth is, most people who aren't necessarily super smart can live productive and functional lives by leaning on their social strengths, and by copying what successful people do. Not everyone has to be a revolutionary thinker - it's perfectly acceptable to ask someone else for ideas or simply observe what works and ask.
In fact, I'd argue that often, a method or a model passed through and improved by a hundred or so average intelligence people may outperform something derived from first principles by someone who's got high IQ, because outside of very abstract things - pure mathematics or logic - the former can capture lots more real-world edge cases and variations. Maintaining the kind of social relationships where you can comfortably share information and mutually refine methods is much more important than generating good ideas ex-nihilo.
IQ is good for winning chess games. A lot of things may look like chess games in abstract (business strategy! Building a railway!) but upon closer inspection, every single chessboard is unique.
The boards don't always have the same number of squares, sometimes it's not even square shaped overall, sometimes entire bits are missing which you don't realise until you try to move a piece, also you're blindfolded and can't tell what any of your pieces really are, and you think your opponent is eating your pieces when you're not looking but then they accuse you of doing the same thing and then you both realise that there had been a racoon that has been swiping pieces at random the whole time. But also sometimes a Monopoly token clatters onto the board. And someone else drops in and messes up all the pieces every now and again.
It's still better to know chess strategies than not, but by itself it's definitely not going to win the game. If I had a choice between studying chess (as played on normal boards) and talking to other Chaos Chess players, talking to other players will usually be much more fruitful, because there are game states that you cannot derive from first principles unless you literally know everything and even the highest IQ folk among us have to specialise.
I do consider myself to have slightly higher than average IQ. The main personal benefit this confers is that school was a bit easier and as an adult I occasionally game credit card reward programs for fun, redeemable for 1 - 2 interstate return flights each time, and I can guess how much I'll get paid after tax withholding. A lot of these things are trivially reproducible using websites, apps, or copying what my smarter friends do.
A high IQ farmer probably designs the farm based on best scientific principles to maximise yield, possibly experimenting a little. A cunning farmer goes around the place near harvest time and copies what the highest yield farm is doing. A sociable farmer is friends with everyone, and receives the best tips everyone else cares to divulge. It's actually not obvious to me that the high IQ farmer is necessarily going to do best - it kind of depends on the model they're using, whereas if Cunning successfully copies everything relevant (in places where that's possible), they'd probably do decent despite having zero understanding of the underlying principles. Similarly, Sociable receives a huge trove of data points to try, also without needing to understand underlying principles.
And as I get more professional experience, I'm finding that understanding underlying principles is a bit overrated - your model ends up needing so many inputs that the effort to measure / monitor / process becomes disproportionate. The black box approach makes a lot of sense most of the time, and black box approaches don't really need much IQ, you just need to figure out what to look at and who to talk to.
I think you're conceptualizing intelligence too narrowly, as something that's only helpful for solving abstract theoretical problems. My intuition is that meta-skills such as "iterate on your successes and learn from your failures", or "learn from the successes and failures of others", or "do things that are conducive to your goals" are all going to correlate with intelligence/IQ.
If people had higher IQ on average they would have a better understanding of economics and physics. Then rent control would not be a policy with any kind of backing. Energy policy would be a lot sharper.
Example: the airplane on a treadmill. If you bring that up in an average space, you end up with interminable arguments and squabbling. If you bring it up in a higher IQ space then it settles very quickly once the key arguments are presented and understood. Lots of policy discourse could be that way!
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289610001133
"If people had higher IQ on average they would have a better understanding of economics and physics."
From my life experience spent mostly in environments dominated by high-IQ individuals -- and since I'm old enough to remember rotary telephones this is shall we say a decent-sized sample -- that is a pretty hilarious prediction.
Also I literally LOLed at this: "If you bring it up in a higher IQ space then it settles very quickly once the key arguments are presented and understood."
Not trying to sound cynical here, I'm really not, but honestly -- how many actual very-smart people have you observed interacting with each other in real life?
They are human beings not robots; their IQs are just one variable in how they behave and not the dominant one; etc.
Just really here and on DSL. And not once have I seen someone argue that chemtrails are real, or vaccines cause autism, or that the earth is flat, or that you can cure aids by having unprotected sex with a virgin. All things that are believed and debated in lower IQ spaces. I don’t believe I have seen someone argue for rent control either.
I have seen all of those things argued in the open threads here!
I had a college roommate, literally the smartest individual I met in four years at one of the nation's most-selective colleges, who argued seriously and at length that vaccines were the reason Americans were dying of lung cancer and the warnings on cigarette packs were just governmental nonsense. (And he wasn't even a smoker!)
A former colleague of mine holding two PhDs in the hard sciences was calmly certain not only that Area 51 was real but that the film "Independence Day" (featuring a POTUS discovering that Area 51 was real) was in fact a slick deflection/coverup for the actual Area 51.
The single looniest individual I've ever been acquainted with is a former employee of a relative of mine in the tech sector, a brilliant programmer whose sheer brainpower awed experienced software engineers, and who had to be begged to remember to wear both pants and underwear to the company's offices. (He would remember one or the other, at random as far as anyone could tell, but not both.)
My sister attended the University of Chicago as a student and then joined the staff of a highly-prestigious publication headquartered on campus, and has ten stories similar to the three I just mentioned.
Etc etc. People, not robots. That's all of us regardless of IQs.
People don't have the faintest idea how much emotion and presupppositions and the need to portray themselves as a certain type of character and a huge variety of other factors color their ability to understand something intellectually. And I suspect for each mistake a high-IQ person would never make, there are higher-order mistakes they make instead. Not to mention the fact ant self-observant person makes over time which is that we are all often wrong, even on topics we are sure about.
Too smart for their own good. That saying has been around a long time.
High IQ people do better on Econ and physics tests. They understand Econ and physics better. Are you saying there is zero correlation between understanding economics/physics and having sensible opinions on economics/physics?
How do you reconcile your anecdotes with Mallards linked study?
> Are you saying there is zero correlation between understanding economics/physics and having sensible opinions on economics/physics?
Are you familiar with the saying “it is hard to get a man to understand something when his livelihood depends on not understanding it?“
I am suggesting, apropos of your newest response, that habits such as straw-manning others' statements are common among both high and low IQ persons. Unfortunately.
More broadly about this topic, two followup points:
(a) To what degree such poor habits are more/less common up or down the IQ scale, I have frankly no idea. And no serious study that I'm aware of has offered an answer to that critical question.
(b) IQ tests measure reasoning ability in the _abstract_, on the page of a test, i.e. separate from interacting with other people. That is a crucial real-world ability. Successful reasoning in the context of interacting with others is also a crucial real-world ability, one for which no good term yet exists ("emotional intelligence" for example is not at all what I'm speaking of here). It is my life observation that the two do not, among real-life human beings out in the actual world, strongly correlate.
The ACX/SSC community is largely formed of people with nontypical neurological traits which cause them to prize truthseeking even when it's socially maladaptive, inhibits personal profit, cognitively discomfiting, or otherwise deleterious to the individual, in a way that neurotypical people broadly do not.
Basically, autism causes vaccines.
ACX commenters comprise a subculture within a subculture. Not representative.
I think Anonymous has the right read here.
Just by small way of illustration; it's hardly authoritative, but here's average IQ by state.
https://www.datapandas.org/ranking/average-iq-by-state#map
I don't see anything patterns here that leap out. Does MA have a better policy environment than HI? TX and NY have about the same averages, and wildly different policy; same for CA and LA.
Those are pretty small differences in IQ. Does Papua New Guinea have worse policy discourse than New Zealand?
"Lots of policy discourse could be that way!"
No, it couldn't. Once money, or personal gain more broadly, becomes involved, the intelligence resources are diverted to inventing new excuses for the policy that will benefit each given speaker, new contrived explanations for why the correct answer about the treadmill actually isn't true in spite of being observable. Otherwise, why do you think concretely totally discredited ideas like socialism are still given credit academically? Or to take an even clearer example, it's blatantly obvious that sex changes are physically impossible, but due to the nature of their mental illness, transsexuals still crave the counterfactual really strongly, so they bend all their ingenuity toward trying to deny the self-evident. The only distinction between the stupidest and the cleverest in this group is the quality and amount of their sophisms.
No offense, but you're making the classic mistake of naive utopianism here.
(EDIT – also, it's arguable that this is the original purpose of intelligence evolutionarily: not truth-seeking, but persuasion as a way to accrue more resources for oneself and one's offspring, at the expense of others.)
Similar to Jonathan Haidt noting something to the effect that college education doesn't make you have better positions, but just makes you better at inventing reasons to maintain the position you prefer. Broad paraphrase because I don't recall the actual quote.
Nearly all people engage in motivated reasoning, and possibly those who aren't aware of that possibility in themselves are most at risk of it.
I didn’t say ALL policy, I said “lots of policy.”
And, many of the things that are currently tribal shiboleths would have been nipped in the bud with a higher IQ population.
We'll have to agree to disagree on that second point.
How does your hypothesis hold up when tested against empirical data? For example, how strong is the correlation between a country's GDP or median income and the average IQ of its citizens?
Personally, I think you have a wrong mental image of people with high IQ, especially when you're saying things like
> […] a handful of people who are amazing at abstract reasoning and logic and so forth […]
> IQ is good for winning chess games.
> A high IQ farmer probably designs the farm based on best scientific principles to maximise yield […]
High IQ entails so much more than being good at games with simple, known rules. A better description would be "ability to solve problems". For example, you say:
> A cunning farmer goes around the place near harvest time and copies what the highest yield farm is doing. […] successfully copies everything relevant […]
How do you think this "cunning farmer" is able to decide which other farmer used better methods vs. who just got lucky due to circumstance? Or which methods of another farmer are worth copying vs which are ineffective?
> […] black box approaches don't really need much IQ, you just need to figure out what to look at and who to talk to.
Uh, yeah, "just figuring out what to look at and who to talk to" requires intelligence.
OC ACXLW Meetup 86 1) Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government & 2) Lynn Stout on the Dominant Business Paradigm
Saturday, February 8, 2025
2:00 PM – 5:00 PM
Location:
1970 Port Laurent Place, Newport Beach, CA 92660
Host & Contact:
Host: Michael Michalchik
Email: michaelmichalchik@gmail.com
Phone: (949) 375-2045
1) Motivated Numeracy and Enlightened Self-Government
Primary Reading
Article (Kahan, Dawson, Peters, Slovic):
Motivated Numeracy & Enlightened Self-Government
Optional Video
TED Talk: on Cognitive Bias and Numeracy
Background & Extended Summary
(A) Context and Rival Hypotheses
The authors probe why we see persistent public controversies—on gun control, climate change, etc.—despite seemingly overwhelming scientific evidence. They pit two main ideas against each other:
Science Comprehension Thesis (SCT): Claims conflict stems from a public deficit in scientific literacy or logical reasoning. Better education in math/science should reduce polarization.
Identity-Protective Cognition Thesis (ICT): Argues that group identity can overshadow even robust analytical skills. People often interpret data to conform with their cultural or partisan affiliations—particularly on issues coded with “tribal” significance.
(B) The Experiment
Setup: Participants had to interpret the results of an (allegedly) data-driven experiment displayed in a 2x2 contingency table. In reality, the data were designed so that the correct interpretation could be easily masked by heuristics.
Conditions:
Skin-Rash (neutral scenario): Showed whether a new cream helped or hurt patients.
Gun-Control (politicized scenario): Showed whether a city’s ban was linked to increased or decreased crime.
By toggling the headings, they made the “correct answer” either more or less politically comfortable for different ideological groups.
(C) Key Findings
Skin-Rash Condition: Higher numeracy correlated with better performance in data interpretation. SCT supporters might say, “Yes, see? More math skill = less error.”
Gun-Control Condition: However, more numerate participants used their quantitative prowess selectively. They were most accurate only if the correct interpretation matched their existing political stance (e.g., “liberal” participants best interpreted data showing a gun ban reduces crime, “conservatives” best interpreted data showing it increases crime).
Numeracy didn’t help cross partisan lines; it often hardened them, as high-math individuals used logic to reinforce identity-aligned conclusions.
This deepens our sense that polarization can be exacerbated by sophisticated reasoning tools when issues become entangled with cultural or partisan identity.
(D) Broader Implications
Simply boosting STEM education or “critical thinking” may not guarantee cross-partisan consensus on contentious topics (climate, health measures, etc.).
De-polarizing an issue—removing its identity-based cues—might be the more critical step to unlock people’s willingness to process data impartially.
The phenomenon highlights “expressive rationality,” where it’s individually beneficial to remain group-aligned, even if collectively it impedes evidence-based policymaking.
Motivated Numeracy Discussion Questions
Math Skills vs. Bias
Have you seen debates in which the most “informed” or data-savvy voices seem the most entrenched? Why might greater expertise sharpen factional divides rather than foster agreement?
Identity and Cost
The authors suggest maintaining identity is crucial for social standing. How might we reduce the “social cost” of accepting facts that differ from your group’s position?
Role of Communicators
If objective evidence alone isn’t enough, how can science communicators, journalists, or educators frame data in ways that mitigate cultural triggers?
Applications Beyond Guns
Do you see parallels in other conflicts (e.g., vaccines, nuclear power, economic stimulus)? Where might the same dynamic appear?
Implications for Self-Government
The paper’s title references “enlightened self-government.” Under what conditions can democracy thrive if so many policy questions can become “identity-charged”?
2) Lynn Stout’s Critique of Shareholder Primacy
Reading Links (Evonomics)
All from Lynn Stout’s collection: Evonomics: Lynn Stout Articles
How the Dominant Business Paradigm Turns Nice People into Psychopaths
Why Wall Street Isn’t Useful for the Real Economy
How Economists Turned Us Blind to Our Own Goodness
The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
Background & Extended Summary
(A) Lynn Stout (1957–2018)
An influential figure in corporate law, governance, and business ethics, Stout questioned whether the mantra of “maximize shareholder value” is legally required or even beneficial. She believed:
Shareholders don’t “own” corporations (a corporation is an entity that owns itself); they own shares.
Corporate law seldom mandates boards to single-mindedly chase short-term share price—that’s more an ideology (Friedman/Jensen & Meckling) than a legal fact.
(B) Articles Overview
How the Dominant Business Paradigm Turns Nice People into Psychopaths
Argues we’re not “homo economicus” in everyday life, but the standard corporate message (“focus solely on profit”) can crowd out altruistic or ethical impulses in investing and board decisions.
Mentions “socially responsible funds” as evidence many shareholders care about ethics, yet too many structures and norms push managers and investors into maximizing short-term returns above all else.
Why Wall Street Isn’t Useful for the Real Economy
Critiques the assumption that hyperactive trading always aids “efficient resource allocation.”
Points out only a small fraction of financial activity goes to underwriting new securities (i.e., raising real capital for companies). The vast majority is secondary market trading, which often adds limited societal value but extracts large fees and fosters short-termism.
How Economists Turned Us Blind to Our Own Goodness
Explores how the “incentive” model of policy (assuming humans are rationally selfish) can overshadow moral suasion and conscience.
Cites experiments on social dilemmas showing how easily contexts can make us either more cooperative or more selfish.
Warns that focusing too heavily on extrinsic rewards can “crowd out” prosocial norms that hold organizations and societies together.
The Myth of Maximizing Shareholder Value
Chronicles how the concept gained steam in the late 20th century, especially after Friedman’s and Jensen/Meckling’s essays.
Debunks the idea that corporate law requires maximizing share price, or that it’s always beneficial for all shareholders.
Suggests “satisficing” multi-goal governance—balancing stakeholder interests, growth, employee loyalty, R&D, etc.—can yield better long-term outcomes for both society and many shareholders (especially the diversified, patient, or ethically driven ones).
(C) Collective Takeaways
Stout sees “shareholder primacy” as oversimplifying business realities and ignoring humans’ capacity for moral concern, trust, and long-term relationships.
She dissects how the dominant economic paradigm can ironically degrade shareholder returns overall—akin to “fishing with dynamite,” short-term profit for some but harmful to the system’s health.
A broader perspective on corporate purpose might encourage “sustainable capitalism,” robust corporations, and ethical leadership—contrary to one-size-fits-all share price obsession.
Discussion Questions for Lynn Stout’s Critique
Psychopath vs. Prosocial
In daily life, we show empathy and fairness, yet in markets, we act purely self-interested. Why? Are laws and norms pushing different mindsets?
Wall Street’s Real Value
How can we reconcile the claim that modern finance is essential with the reality that speculation can overshadow real capital formation?
Conscience, Law, and Incentives
If overemphasizing extrinsic incentives crowds out altruistic instincts, how can policy or corporate governance harness pro-social motivations?
Satisficing vs. Maximizing
Stout endorses “satisficing” multiple goals (employee welfare, environment, stable relationships, etc.). Critics say that leads to “fuzzy accountability.” Are there ways to measure or structure multi-stakeholder success without devolving into chaos?
Policy Reform or Cultural Shift?
Should laws be changed to end illusions about “shareholder ownership,” or is the deeper fix about corporate culture, board norms, and investor expectations?
Walk & Talk
We will conclude our main discussion around 4 PM, then transition to an hour-long walk. Feel free to join in for an informal extension of the discussion or casual conversation. Everyone’s welcome, whether you prefer to debate economic paradigms or talk about local events.
Share a Surprise
As usual, if you’ve encountered any surprising articles, personal experiences, or side projects that spark intellectual curiosity, bring them along for our open-floor sharing.
Looking Ahead
Future Topics? We love suggestions—be they theoretical readings or real-world case studies.
Guest Contributors: If you’d like to co-facilitate or highlight a specific area of expertise, let Michael or any ACXLW regular know.
We Look Forward to Seeing You on February 8!
Should any questions arise, please contact Michael Michalchik at the email or number above. Both “motivated numeracy” and Lynn Stout’s insights on corporate ethics promise a lively, eye-opening meetup. Join us for an afternoon of deep and wide-ranging discussion. See you soon!
Forget all this "AI will destroy us" silliness: an actual sweet meteor of death is coming for us in 2032. In just the last 24 hrs the impact probability increased from 1% to 2.3%. This is... moving in a wrong direction... and fast.
https://cneos.jpl.nasa.gov/sentry/details.html#?des=2024%20YR4
This looks like a city killer more than a civilization ending meteorite. Still sucks if it ends up landing somewhere in India where the population density is high.
Most likely a pretty light show over the ocean. But we should know the approximate impact area far enough in advance to arrange for local population density to be zero on That Day.
It is the nature of impact-probability math that the impact probability increases at each reevaluation, until suddenly it drops to zero. There is a 2.3% chance that it will instead go to unity, but *only* a 2.3% chance. That the impact probability was ~1% last time we checked, only means that there was then a 50-50 chance that it would go to zero on the next evaluation, which didn't happen.
And if the asteroid does hit, it will be a sub-Tunguska event; the asteroid will not reach the surface, the damage will be localized, and we will have known the approximate impact area for weeks or months ahead of time. No one will die unless they are both massively unlucky and very stupid.
I’m partially jesting, but only partially. Of course it won’t kill us all, but I’m not sure why you think it won’t reach the surface. The bloody thing is 54 meters across! It will be a nuke without the radiation.
The threshold size for asteroids/whatever to survive passage through the Earth's atmosphere is generally given as 50-140 meters, depending mostly on the composition of the body. At fifty meters, it needs to be basically just a mass of nickel-iron metal, which a small fraction of asteroids are but this one doesn't appear to be.
If it "hits" the Earth, it will break apart in the upper atmosphere, the bigger pieces will break up further and ultimately vaporize, and you'll wind up with a big high-altitude explosion.
The altitude will not be high enough to completely eliminate damage at ground level, and it won't just be Chelyabinsk-style broken windows. But the surface damage will be localized, and there won't be a crater (or, from ocean impact and more worrisome, a tsunami).
I just looked up Chelyabinsk. 18m diameter, so let's assume 27 times as big. Chelyabinsk was estimated to be 30 Hiroshimas, so this would be around 900. Not great! OTOH, Chelyabinsk was est. 400-500 kilotons of TNT equivalent, so 30 times that is 12-15 megatons. Tunguska was est. 20-30 megatons as of 2019.
So, still sub-Tunguska (assuming about the same velocity; I don't know how safe that assumption is).
One could imagine the event being extremely destructive if that blast happens to be over a city, but I have it on good authority that cities are even harder to hit than the earth itself.
Tunguska was pretty nasty though, the only saving grave being it happened over the vast Siberian taiga. The earth is of course mostly covered in water so hopefully this thing blows up over the remote Pacific somewhere.
Up to 2.4% today.
> 12-15 megatons
Good guess. The estimate on NASA's website says 7.8 megatons (see link shared by 1123581321, look at "Energy").
We should race to ASI so that it can build a meteor-destroying super-laser!
… or maybe not. 2,3% is indeed worryingly high, I wonder what it would take to mitigate damage if we knew for certain it was headed to hit the Earth?
Yeah I don’t think I’ve ever seen the impact probability that high. I agree with J. S. that it’ll likely drop to more typical e-6 level, but… maybe not…
apparently back in 2004, the impact probability of 99942 Apophis got as high as 2.7%...
Where could I find these Russian propaganda movies?
https://united24media.com/anti-fake/why-russian-cringe-propaganda-painting-the-usa-as-the-main-enemy-is-on-the-rise-in-russia-2435
They sound like good candidates for "so bad, it is actually good".
Some of them might actually be good, if you can compartmentalize and ignore the political messaging. Russian Cinema has been amazing since the very beginning, and despite claims to the contrary, Soviet cinema was incredible. You just have to be able to compartmentalize.
Here's an example: Russian air defense shoots down Santa Claus (no I'm not making this up) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mEuF3uXHug4
The sick irony is that this came out right at the same time as they shot down an actual passenger plane (Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243).
I wish I could find the propaganda videos about how all Europeans were freezing and starving during winter 2022.
I remember seeing a video that seemed like an ad, and it showed "European Winter 2022", "European Winter 2023", "European Winter 2024" with progressively less light on the Christmas tree, and I think in the third video the family ate their hamster.
But there was also a serious news report, naming various European countries and their capital cities (including e.g. Paris and Berlin), describing how people living in these cities have no electricity during Christmas, and how all women need to prostitute themselves to get some food.
EDIT: I found the second one: https://old.reddit.com/r/RussiaUkraineWar2022/comments/zl2dhp/russian_propagandists_report_that_european/
Due to the brief fake Trump-Canada trade war I was inspired to learn about Canadian whiskey. Here's where I started and what I learned!
Where I started:
- I'm Canadian
- I don't really drink American whiskey anyway, I mostly like scotch (e.g. Glenfiddich for a popular one or Laphroaig for a peat-smoked one), so this was partly just academic, but still I was curious.
- Back in the day when I was 19 I started with e.g. Crown Royal and Canadian Club from the LCBO, but didn't actually like whiskey until I got into scotch.
- I knew that Canadian whiskey is often called rye. I knew that Canadian whiskey doesn't get the respect it once did. I knew that Canadian Club used to be seen as prestige, like it's the stuff Al Capone smuggled during prohibition and that people like Don Draper liked (he's fictional but it was accurate), but now it's the cheap second-shelf stuff in a plastic bottle at LCBO. So what gives?
What I learned (some details vague, double-check any specifics):
- Once upon a time, way back when, Canadians were drinking wheat whiskey (nobody drinks wheat whiskey anymore), but then Dutch and German immigrants started adding a bit of rye and people liked the little bit of a kick it gives. We called it "rye" even though rye was only a minor ingredient.
- Back in the day, I guess up to prohibition and maybe a bit past then(?), American whiskey would have been pretty rough, e.g. moonshine or young corn whiskey, and Canadian blended whiskey was aged longer and was seen as higher quality and smoother. And of course once prohibition started, smuggled Canadian whiskey was the best stuff Americans could get. Canadian whiskey is still seen as being "smooth."
- Canada legally allows you to call your whiskey "rye" as long as it still has the same general taste and character as this tradition, even though it was never mostly-rye, and even whether or not there's actually any rye in it at all. E.g. Don Draper's assistant calls Canadian Club "rye" even though it's actually mostly corn (canonically, I wonder if he knew?). In contrast, American "rye" legally has to be >51% rye.
- In modern times whiskey fans don't care as much about smooth anymore, they want complexity like you get from an old scotch. Also Americans later got good at making whiskey too like bourbon. These, plus the lack of as-strict standards about ingredients, both contributed to Canadian whiskey not getting the respect it used to.
- There are also some more recent high-rye Canadian whiskeys, though, like Lot No. 40 really is a 100% rye and is reputedly one of Canada's best whiskeys. I just bought a bottle and it's delicious.
- Even for the classic smooth style I guess there's variation, like maybe Wiser's or Forty Creek is better than Canadian Club Original (and also brands have different bottlings, like Canadian Club Classic 12 Year is probably better than Canadian Club Original). And even the cheap stuff is fine if you like that, and it's still good for mixing e.g. with soda or ginger ale.
- (Fun fact, what Canadians sometimes drink and call a "Rye & Ginger," New Zealanders love and call a "C. C. & Dry." I don't know why nobody's made it rhyme, calling it a "Rye & Dry"!)
In my 20s I would take a 16’ Lund from Nelson’s Resort on Crane Lake (Minnesota) through the Namakan Narrows to a weird little Canadian liquor store to buy Cutty Sark on the cheap. No US duties so it was a bargain compared to US prices. Probably saved 5 bucks
In my 30s I went through a Glenlivet phase. Occasionally when I’d order it neat in a bar they would try to pass Cutty Sark off as the pricier quaff. Yuk. Who were they trying to kid?
Present day they all taste pretty yucky.
Recently I went to a scotch tasting with work pals at a local joint calling itself Merlin’s Pub. They were going for a British Isles ambience, the sort of place where you could buy shepherds pie for dinner and see a ‘Keep Calm and Carry On’ sign on the wall.
The taste organizers were talking about things like ‘maritime notes’ but I was tasting ‘industrial paint thinner’.
Fun tangent about an early 2000s Canadian Club ad campaign, where originally they wanted to avoid any mention of dads and it being an old brand, but then leaned into it: https://www.printmag.com/branding-identity-design/sex-design-behind-canadian-club-whiskeys-brand-revival/
I've been thinking about that issue about which prison criminal transpeople should be sent to. I think there probably isn't a single right answer to that question. You can't put a transwoman sexual offender in a woman's prison for example, but you also also can't put a very feminine post-op transwoman in a man's prison.
Seems like an instance where the decision should be left to the judge.
Also, there must be at least a few lesbian rapists, I wonder how the hell they handle that.
Maybe, and I know this is crazy but just hear me out: we should try to prevent all people from being raped in prison
What's the path for that in America?
I don’t know. But if we are ok with cisgender people being raped then why not trans people?
Making all prisons exclusively solitary confinement would be a start.
This is a no-brainer. Although I'm sure you are merely posting this to be an edgy bad boy, you actually got this one right. All you have to do is let physically separated inmates call each other on the phone and they won't go insane, the way such confined people otherwise tend to do.
Well yeah, I'm not even the first person here to suggest that.
And I really am not just trying to be edgy. If I was, I would've said what that other commenter posted...
How old are you?
> but you also also can't put a very feminine post-op transwoman in a man's prison
I mean, you absolutely can. People would be pretty happy with that solution.
Isn't that person at an especially high risk of getting raped? I think "people" here stands for a specific political faction that apparently now thinks they represent all America.
Liberals aren't particularly fond of trans people either. Something about them compromising women's rights, allegedly. They're not going to bend over backwards just to protect them. It's just the progressives that are a problem, and the new administration seems quite intent on purging them from every position of power in the country.
You're talking about a particular subset of liberals that is A: rather small and B: not particularly influential in liberal circles. And I suspect even most of them do not want to see transwomen being raped in men's prisons.
I think people here stands for the prisoners. Anomie likes to be edgy like that.
I don't take in much from news commentators. But I have been listening/ (some watching) to the senate confirmation hearings. OMG some great theater. I've lost most of my respect for Bernie. (I mean he's still Bernie, but he's also now a died in the wool Dem.) And John Kennedy from Louisiana is perhaps now my favorite senator. (He reminds me of J. Stewart from "Mr. Smith goes to Washington".) A few days ago, I sent in a request to my state to change my voter registration. I think I'll probably change it to Republican. (I want to send the biggest FU I can to my former Democratic party.) I know this is a mostly anti-Trump space. (And I think Trump is an asshole, (and when I tell my Trump loving friends this, they mostly agree... yeah he's an asshole.)) But I want to just ask you all to give him and team Trump a chance. (I think the first thing we should agree on when talking about politicians is that they all are doing what they see as the right thing for our country. Yes they may have bad ideas, and yes they will all make mistakes, but to first approximation, they are not evil.)
After some thought, I realized that making a serious attempt at talking about the disconnect I see here would be instructive for both of us.
"I think the first thing we should agree on when talking about politicians is that they all are doing what they see as the right thing for our country. "
This right here is part of it. I think that is true for the median politician. I think that might even be true for politicians in the 10th percentile of integrity and decency. I don't think it's true for Trump. Or rather, I don't think Donald Trump's brain maintains any sort of a conceptual separation between "what's good for the country" and "what flatters Trump's ego." In particular, I think the idea that he could EVER help the country by stepping down, stepping back, genuinely cooperating with those that oppose him or effacing himself in any manner is utterly alien to his thinking. And that's exactly what it would take for me to "give him a chance." A very rough, non-exhaustive list of the sort of necessary behavior that would be required for "giving him a chance" to be even a morally acceptable thing to do (in my judgement) might look like this:
--Immediately re-enter the U.S. into the Paris Climate agreement, publicly acknowledge the truth and seriousness of climate change and apologize for his error. Start working with congress on a modest-but-serious package of *additional* climate measure the U.S. will take above and beyond what the agreement calls for, as a mea culpa to the rest of the world and an attempt to make up for lost time[1].
--Publicly admit that Joe Biden was the rightful winner of the 2020 election, and that his own repeated denials of this fact (long after his legal challenges were dead) were dishonest, self-serving and an unacceptable attack on the integrity of the nation's electoral process. Make monetary restitution (from his own personal funds) to the families of all those killed in the attack on the U.S., including the rioters and the police who later died by suicide. Make it clear that the restitution is intended as an apology for the major roll he played in creating and fueling that dangerous situation.
--Immediately divest himself of all his personal properties and investments, placing them in a blind trust to avoid conflicts of interest while he was president. Apologize for not doing so in 2016 and work with congress to draft legislation plainly requiring future presidents to do the same.
--Publicly apologize to the people of Panama, Denmark, Canada and Mexico for his various insults and attacks on their sovereignty. Publicly reverse his position on the tariffs on those countries, and pledge not to repeat the error. Disavow his use of emergency powers to circumvent congress' power to levy taxes and duties.
--Make a real, good faith attempt to convince justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh to step down from the Supreme Court, and work with BOTH parties in congress to select replacement justices who are highly qualified, have impeccable records of personal and professional conduct and are broadly agreed to be politically moderate.[2] Begin attempting to propose and study (but NOT enact) a solution to extreme the politicization of the Supreme Court, likely involving some sort of more bipartisan and less exploitable justice selection process. Have a recommendation ready before the start of the 2028 primary season so primary candidates can take positions on it and the American people can use it as part of their selection process.
--Work with congress (again, BOTH parties) to attempt to craft a bi-partisan compromise on immigration as should have been done 20 years ago. "Compromise" here meaning that it still includes immigration restrictions, provisions for enforcing them and reasonable border security, but doesn't try to militarize the border or use heavy-handed and inhumane tactics in doing so.
--Retract his proposed plan for ethnic cleansing in the Gaza Strip, apologize to the people of Gaza for saying so, and make a real attempt to stay out of the conflict in Gaza, adopting a maximally neutral position anywhere that his presence is unavoidable.
--Apologize to the U.S. victims of COVID for his poor handling of the initial phases of the crisis, work with congress to improve the U.S. future pandemic preparedness and response and work more closely with health organizations elsewhere in the world. Donate a substantial portion of his personal wealth to some sort of charitable cause helping those harmed by COVID, by way of restitution for the lives his incompetence failed to save.
I'm guessing your reaction will run to something like "wow, that's completely unreasonable." But it really, really is not. There a great many things that I could have put on here but didn't. Everything here is chosen to be geared towards amending some specific harm he has personally done to the U.S. body politic, and I certainly wasn't exhaustive when considering all the harms. None of these involve giving wholly to Democrats in a major way (except the climate change one which is LONG overdue), but rather attempt to build the bipartisan cooperation that has largely disappeared in the past 20 years. And no, nothing less would be sufficient. Abusers are very, very good at convincing people to give them one more chance and ignore past behavior. People of real integrity own up to their mistakes, apologize for them and attempt to make them right. The BARE MINIMUM for Trump to be a morally acceptable president is to offer substantial proof that he can act like a person of integrity, and not an abuser.
[1] Alternately, I could be persuaded that anthropocentric climate change is not happening and that Trump's actions here were correct (though not justified at the time). This would, at a minimum, take something in the nature of a worldwide scientific revolution in which large amounts of new evidence and improved models reshape the field. Or it would take me acquiring a serious concussive injury or an RFK style brain worm.
[2] Note that this would still leave the Supreme court with a Republican advantage, but one in which at least one moderate was needed to agree with any ruling.
So... in order for you to believe that Trump is doing what he sees as the right thing for the country... he would basically have to abandon his politics and those of the people who voted for him, in favor of your politics? That's what credibility looks like to you, adherence to liberal dogma? Wow, way to fail the idological Turing test, there.
Or if not, explain what e.g. a Republican politician who does not countenance rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement but does have the best for America as he sees it foremost in his mind would look like to you?
If you think admitting Joe Biden won the 2020 election is "adherence to liberal dogma" then you are part of the problem.
It is popular with Republicans to claim there was fraud, but "saying what is popular with your base" is a very different thing from "doing what you think is right for the country."
" he would basically have to abandon his politics and those of the people who voted for him, in favor of your politics? "
People who are capable of basic reading comprehension will have noticed that this point was already explicitly address. This would not be him abandoning his politics in favor of mine. This would be him attempting to make genuine restitution for the harmful things he's done, and to make a real effort to arrest the bipartisan fissuring that is rapidly poisoning American political life. YES, that means making compromises. The fact that you cannot tell the difference between a compromise and a capitulation is exactly the problem.
"Or if not, explain what e.g. a Republican politician who does not countenance rejoining the Paris Climate Agreement but does have the best for America as he sees it foremost in his mind would look like to you?"
That Republican politician should
1. Actually educate himself on the realities of climate change in a way that I guarantee that neither Trump nor most of the Republicans in congress have done.
2. If, after educating themselves, they have actual, reality-based criticisms of the Paris Agreement that don't involve brazen denials of established scientific truth, they may present those to the world and try to hash out an alternative that's more acceptable.
Yes, doing a minimally adequate job of governing does indeed require accepting basic truths of reality that have been well-known for four decades. If you cannot do that much than asking ANYONE to "give you a chance" is nothing more than a con-job.
"The fact that you cannot tell the difference between a compromise and a capitulation is exactly the problem."
The problem with your suggestions, yes. I did indeed read your assertion that it isn't unreasonable and understand that you meant it, I'm trying to explain to you how extremely preposterous this looks from the other side of the aisle. Out of your suggestions, the *only ones* that could be legitimately called compromise positions are admitting that Biden won 2020 and putting his assets in trust for the duration of his presidency with an apology for not doing it sooner. The rest legitimately just look like demands for Democratic politics from a Republican because you're angry that he's too Republican, no matter how you try to lampshade it. In particular, the bit about trying to reverse the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – something which he wasn't even particularly responsible for and which would have happened regardless of which Republican had beaten Clinton – is wholly absurd and can seemingly only be motivated by blind rage at you/the left losing that contest, not least since Gorsuch especially is a conscientious upholder of the Constitution and its principles, a far better jurist than any one of the last three Democratic appointments to the court and less prone to vote as part of an ideological block. (Sotomayor in particular I can't recall voting against liberal orthodoxy on legal grounds one single time in her entire tenure, although I speak under correction here as I am not a staunch SC watcher.)
As to your other point, I think you grossly overestimate the importance of politicians educating themselves and having reality-based opinions, because approximately none of them on either side use that as a basis for decisionmaking – a rhetorical bludgeon at most. What matters to me is that I and many others with me prefer Trump's stance here because *we have reality-based criticisms* of the accords and he's willing to *act* on that which is what matters when push comes to shove. When you suggest that in order to be credible he would have to abandon acting on our preference in favor of not only acting on yours but prostrating himself, and that this would constitute compromise rather than a humiliating surrender, you're demonstrating a myopia which is exactly the problem.
Agreeing here but I have no upvote option for some reason, perhaps because I'm a new visitor. Don't understand, fir instance, why suddenly Kavanaugh and Gorsuch ought to step down because they aren't near enough to liberal opinion.
I do think Trump badly failed on Covid and, as far as I can determine, there isn't enough substance to the 2020 stolen election narrative. And his character is far from perfect. He does plenty I like and a fair amount I'm not crazy about. But he was a needed correction to the direction our country had taken IMHO.
"As to your other point, I think you grossly overestimate the importance of politicians educating themselves and having reality-based opinions, because approximately none of them on either side use that as a basis for decisionmaking – a rhetorical bludgeon at most."
This right here. This is the ENTIRE problem. ALL of it. 100%.
Not because what you said is true. But because it is false. It is extremely, extremely false and you believing it makes it *quite thoroughly impossible* to have any productive dialog.
YES, people DO have principled beliefs and reality based opinions and YES some of those people are politicians and YES some of them bloody well do use those as a basis for decisionmaking. When you say "none of them on either side" I think that is quite telling. I think you are seeing uncommonly clearly out of one eye. I think you are looking at the people on your side, going "wow, yeah, they're all scumbags who don't care what's true" and projecting that to the other side because if it's true of the people who are FOR you, then how much more true *must* it be of people who are AGAINST you.
Now, don't think for a second from what I said that I don't think many Democratic politicians are also scumbags. I've never been a Democrat. I've never liked the Democrats. When I lived in the U.S. I would grudgingly hold my nose and vote for Democrats fairly often--we'll get to why in a second--but I never thought for a minute they were great people. They were adequate. HOWEVER, they were scumbags in the way that all politicians are scumbags. They'd sometimes do shady deal, dirty tricks, lack spine just when you wanted them to have it, talk out of both sides of their mouths, and have scandals that proved that they lacked moral fiber. I could write quite a number of words on the failings of one Joseph Biden, for example, who I am proud to have never voted for.
But the difference when I looked across the aisle was night and day. Not the difference in run-of-the-mill scumbaggery, mind you. Count up the shady deals and dirty tricks and maybe you'd come out with advantage D and maybe you'd come out with advantage R. The difference was exactly what you say is true of all politicians. Only it isn't. There was an ALARMING lack of reality-based opinions on the right. Climate change denial is the largest, most alarming one of those: this is understanding-the-world on easy mode and you guys are FAILING IT SO BADLY. Fifty years, man. This has been known and studied for fifty years. But no shortage of other examples abound: COVID takes the gold star for the *fastest* retreat from reality that I've ever seen any group do, but things like well-understood facets of American history[1], basic contours of current events...the list goes on. Democratic politicians sometimes waffle or weasel or lack spine, but they tend to stick largely in the vicinity of the truth, and their policies reflect it. Republican politicians will shoot of into cuckooland if their base demands it--not all of them mind you, Mike Pence kept his spine and "his side" literally tried to kill him for it--but far too many. How many "2020 election truthers" are there among today's elected officials? How about sometime Qanon followers or Pizzagate belivers[2]? Fewer, for sure, but one would be too many. I'd have loved to live in a world where I could vote against the scummy Democrats, but the only alternative I was ever offered wasn't just unpalatable, it was downright loony.
And then I talk to the voters that put them in office, and I see why. Anyone with spine gets primaried out. Or, y'know, has an angry mob try to hang them. The thing that I started this with, the "there's no reality-based opinions, just rhetorical bludgeons thing?" That's not the politicians. That's the voters. That's the Trumpers. Literally yesterday there was someone in the comments of Scott's government-spending thread basically saying "well clearly I'm not going to believe it any time a liberal says something will cause a bunch of deaths." That's a damn GOVERNMENT PROGRAM. The records are meticulously kept and open to the public. You can CHECK. Any time of Facebook I see anything posted about climate change or COVID or the scientific process in general there's a *flood* of comments about how "scientists always find whatever they're paid to find." I don't have to ask what party those people are from. And that. View. Is. INSANE. It is nuts. I've spent much of my life around scientists: most of them won't shut up about the minutia of their fields unless you shout at them. Nearly all of them could be making better money elsewhere. And all the really important scientific conclusions are shared by the *worldwide* scientific community. And again, I could go on. A certain fraction of the U.S. right wing seems to have convinced itself that there is NO TRUTH, ONLY POLITICS. The the ONLY thing you need to know about someone to gauge their trustworthiness or evaluate ANY claim they make is their political affiliation. And so *of course* they discover that more and more of the scientists are against them: if you can't even *conceive* of there being objective truth, how can anyone from the community of people who devote their lives to figuring it out *ever* reach you?
"The rest legitimately just look like demands for Democratic politics from a Republican because you're angry that he's too Republican, no matter how you try to lampshade it."
Mate, the fact that you believe this is TERRIFYING. Do you know what I would have done if Hillary Clinton had tried to overturn the 2016 election? I'd have denounced her. As loudly and publicly as I could have. A great many people who opposed Trump would have joined me. Do you know what I felt when I heard someone had taken a shot at Trump? Horror and dismay. I hate Trump more than I've hated almost anyone I can think of, and I would have given *absolute hell* to any Democratic politician who did anything other than denounce the assassin. If I discovered Obama or Biden had used the privileges of their office to ply foreign leader for dirt on Trump? I'd have called for THEIR impeachment too. If the Democrats had tried to pack the Supreme court, I'd have been out there writing paragraphs about how "yes, I know they started it, but this is a flatly unacceptable escalation."
" In particular, the bit about trying to reverse the appointments of Gorsuch and Kavanaugh – something which he wasn't even particularly responsible for..."
Right, remember where I started? About "wanting what's best for the nation." Sometimes leaders have to fix problems that are *not* their fault. Sometimes they have to take one for the team. Sometimes they have to make it not all about them. And yes, Gorsuch wasn't his fault and has been a decent jurist in many ways: McConnell was still in the wrong when he left that spot open, and hasn't even made a pretense of not being a hypocrite on that one. But Kavanaugh was a Trump pick and the issue isn't "Republicans got another supreme court justice," it was "Republicans decided they were going to ram the appointment through before the midterm, no matter how much basic decency they had to throw away." If Trump had made a different pick from day 1, or withdrawn Kavanaugh and picked someone with a modicum of integrity--who would have been confirmed after the midterm, Republicans kept the senate--he'd not be mentioned here. Again, the issue isn't "Republicans got to pick too many justices," it's "Republicans have been more and more open about manipulating the selection process for political power, and a body that was supposed to be considered somewhat impartial now appears flatly untrustworthy to many" And I'll grant that Republicans also had feeling about the court in the Obama years. Hence "finding some actual moderates to put on the court, while keeping the balance tilted towards Republicans." Hence "offering solutions to help the selection process produce a trustworthy court--trustworthy to *everyone.*" It is really, really BAD if a large portion of Americans (on either side) feel that the deepest root of their justice system is fundamentally unjust.
The things on my list were carefully chosen. The common denominator isn't "Democratic politics" and the fact that you think they were is, once again, terrifying. The point is that I'm watching the country I once called home *tear itself to pieces* and any time I try to COMMUNICATE THAT I get sneers and derision and an insistence that I'm trying to trick you. No, the things that you are calling "Republican politics" are not normal and usual, and OK. Bush was a crappy president in my eyes, but he'd have threatened his allies, denied a deadly pandemic, whipped up a mob to try to steal an election or call for fucking ETHNIC CLEANSING. I'd take eight guaranteed years of Romney or the ghost of McCain over one more year of Trump in a heartbeat. There are lots of issues near and dear to my hear that were nowhere to be seen: nothing about abortion, nothing about guns, nothing about taxes, nothing about the ordinary drop-some-bombs-on-backwater-countries-for-iffy-reasons sort of foreign policy. Republicans are going to do things I don't like in all of those areas, and they *should* if they win: that's what votes are for. But there are lines that should not be crossed, and Trump has spent eight years shitting on every one of those lines he could reach. Everything on that list, EVERYTHING was about one of three things: fundamental truth, basic human decency or bipartisan cooperation. The things that WILL destroy American if you keep treating them as conveniences to be discarded any time you think it will score you another win.
[2] I can already hear the retorts about wacky things Democrats believe. Please stop before you type them. Take a breath. Consider. Are they *really* on the same level as a literal troll story made up by 4chan?
Agreed about the COVID and stolen election, departures from reality on the Republican side. The again, Democrats have bought into the transgenderism narrative despite the ton of evidence against all its core assertions (evidence which is so assiduously kept out of the mainstream media that I grant you they simply aren't aware of it. But are willing to buy into the idea that those who are trans-skeptics are motivated by ignorance and bigotry rather than doing the logical thing and simply reading up on the trans-skeptic position. See the PITT substack for a very incomplete starter read).
And for some reason Democrats take positions on law and order that are not based in reality and permit tons of crime.
As to "ethnic cleansing", these are words, meaning nothing. It's not unreasonable or immoral to think that moving the Gazans elsewhere will be better both for them and Israel. Keeping them in Gaza just guarantees more unending strife for them and their children.
" But I want to just ask you all to give him and team Trump a chance."
The entire nation already did that. It ended with an attack on the nation's capital, attempting to end a two-century old democratic tradition. I'm generally pretty forgiving, but if you can't look at that and say "uh, maybe no more chances for that guy in particular," you've gone well past forgiving and well into quokka. It's not like there weren't dozens of other people the Republican Party could have tapped who *didn't* have a history of doing that, if that was something they actually found in any way upsetting.
Why did you respect Bernie at all in the first place? The guy has always been a loon in my view.
Oh Bernie is right about a lot of things. (Take over by big corporations, which have taken over much of government.) He could easily get on the Trump train... but he's somehow infected with TDS from those around him. I'm perhaps a Bernie bro having watched him on Rogan.
I think it's completely logical for Bernie to hate Trump. Bernie hates people who have a lot of money, that has almost always been his position. He's very consistent that way.
Yeah sure, But I thought he'd have a lot in common with Bobby.
During the Space Race, what was the general opinion that Soviet intelligence held about the U.S. space program and how accurate was it?
Welcome to the ass end of Hollywood. You work for the least desirable developement company that gets any work at all, so you really can't afford to be choosy.
Your latest assignment is to come up with a film that includes the following bit of dialog.
"Have I served in combat? You should understand that I serve on an Ohio-class submarine. We don't get in gunfights with raghead militias. We're the gatekeepers of the apocalypse. We fire one missile, we wreck a country. We fire the full stack, we destroy the world. So no, I have not served in combat."
What do you have in mind?
Small-town teen comedy featuring wacky neighbors. This line is coming from the absurd redneck stereotype who drunkenly uses his military experience to hog the karaoke machine.
An action movie where terrorists with a stolen nuclear warhead have taken over [insert thing with lots of civilians here], and the only available people who can Save the Day are the brand new Public Affairs lady for [thing with lots of civilians] and Civilian guy Attending [Thing] who happens to be a retired US Navy Chief Missile Technician and thus is the only person who can Disable the Nukes Before the Terrorists Can Use Them
(The MT would have had some weapons training as a member of the security force, so he can be at least somewhat credible threat to the terrorists).
COOL Card for MT, to describe the skills they get in training: https://www.cool.osd.mil/usn/rating_info_cards/mt.pdf
So, Die Hard meets Crimson Tide, basically
Edited; Thing With Lots of Civilians should be a Entertainment Company That is Definitely Not Disney-like Cruise (good luck getting the Mouse to buy off on this), Attractive Female Lead (formerly Public Affairs Lady) should be one of the assistant producers for all the shows (so you can explain her knowledge of the ship and where to go) and Attractive Male Lead (formerly Civilian Guy) should be there as the Best Man for his Sister's Wedding, who has always loved Entertainment Company That is Definitely Not Disney's shows and wanted to get married on their cruise (so you can explain why he's there but also leave him single for the inevitable romance)
So now it's Speed 2 meets Crimson Tide
Adaptation of The Producers with a low-end barroom braggart substituted for Hitler. Opening number features corny, earnest Ohio workers on lunch break at the Ohio-sub factory. Nose of the sub sticking out of the building and daisies popping up everywhere. Lying barroom drunk staggers among the singing worker-dancers, and they're popping daisies in his pockets.
A remake of the Last Detail, except the Navy guys are all submariners for some reason.
The guy who said that is only three ounces below the Navy's upper weight limit, has a neckbeard, and has paid thousands of dollars for Andrew Tate conferences and subscriptions.
A film about a grizzled, down-on-his-luck Hollywood screenwriter who has been forced descent to working on a rewrite of an execrable submarine-themed action movie to make ends meet, who ends up drunk in a bar, quoting the worst lines of dialogue from the original script contemptuously to the bartender, prompting him to start trying to turn his life around with unexpected results.
"No one ever got kicked off a rationalist forum for taking the meta option."
The first thing that occurs to me is to file the serial numbers off of The Hunt for Red October. Some kind of spy thriller involving submarines and rogue captains, maybe reverse the plot and have an American boomer captain forge false orders and go rogue. Depending on where he's going with it, the heroes could be a CIA/Navy joint team trying to get ahead of the sub, sneak on board somehow when it puts into port, and retake control of it.
Failing that, make a romantic comedy or goofy buddy movie where two of the lead characters are an enthusiastic but naive young man who befriends a jaded submarine crewmember while he's on leave and they get into hijinks together.
"Chief Johnson Goes to Washington puts a bit of backspin on an old formula. Johnson (J.K. Simmons) retires from the Navy after a long career, and runs for office in an obscure congressional district. He wins and heads to DC determined to fix the mess with a bit of directness and common sense, which he has plenty of. Several misadventures later, Johnson has discovered that complicated problems defy simple solutions, and ugly compromises have powerful constituencies defending cherished entitlements on both sides.
"The resulting film is hard to recommend. Simmons does what he can and his younger costars put in the work, but the film is talky and the camera work is static. There are a lot of people monologuing in offices. The one bit that does shine is the fidelity to the underlying material. Both of the script writers are former congressional staffers, and it really shows when they dive deep into obscure details of housing policy and water rights, to name just two areas. This one seems destined to be a cult favorite of armchair policy wonks, but everyone else should go watch something else."
What projects are pushing forward "data structures + algorithms = programs" *with funding*; stl is kinda getting old and I doubt stepov will do a major rewrite, it seems like no one does computer science where the goal is to produce programs with less code gets paid. Its all ai, cryto, new languages with hype, etc.
Nobody working on eg Rust std lib has the same philosophy and is getting paid?
I strongly suspect rust implements a subset of the stl that they can convince a compiler is memory safe; which truth be told is not a goal I think will be fruitful
"I spend months and wrote a research paper about how to convince a rust compiler to work on my doubly linked list" is less good *by allot* then "I spent an hour on a doubly linked list its over there, heres all my algorithms and data structures that are all in the same style"
I’m old school. I still occasionally pull a volume of Knuth’s off the shelf.
The guy wrote the book(s)
https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Programming-Volumes-1-4B-Boxed/dp/0137935102/ref=mp_s_a_1_1?crid=203P61BSKKPNN&dib=eyJ2IjoiMSJ9.W1yshZHh5h7sw9X5XePy5MffIFE1vIz_nl8Mp033lujlC5xx-mSlcN0uNASshclQD6KS11JAVyk05r0t2lx3vz6Riugr2QgELsfA3dxYDPDMlJ7yNUZkLLAbqUqzBrVg9BKj2n7lw7LynOs8z0Caw1gtK7ZQa42VxSc6pWoGpKM7r9rg4taoo5259UN_3BpCEORrzLX-qHyb9x30UW47_g.5eri0hUhJneyzENQUFygN62b7h6fijvVFVmJzV_pSUI&dib_tag=se&keywords=donald+knuth+algorithms&qid=1738789074&sprefix=donald+kn%2Caps%2C133&sr=8-1
I’ll write my own damn doubly linked list, thank you.
It seems like the official death toll for the Bihar Famine was 2353 (maybe the real number is higher), and that seems to be the last famine that caused widespread death in India. The bengal famine caused around 4 million deaths, before that there was 1876 famine that has an 8.2 million deaths, again under the British raj (during which wheat was still being exported to London at regular rates). If you just want a history of all the grievances Indians have towards the British Raj, any school textbook in India will suffice. Countless Indian Historians and economists have written papers and books on this. I think it's more useful to analyze the incentive structure that leads to these extreme misgovernance.
The British people I do not think were uniquely evil, they still valued justice, kindness and all other good virtues that most populations valued. They were racist, that is true, but racism was the norm of that time, and racism alone cannot explain the bad governance of the British Raj. Maybe it can explains the average humiliation they made Indians endure, or the lopsided justice system every time a Brit was involved but there are bigger problems to look at.
The fundamental issue is that the colonial system hired administrators whose career was beholden to a fickle group in London far more than the population they ruled, and once they were done, they left and often went back to London to end their lives, without having to deal with any of the havoc they caused in their territory. If anything good resulted from their administration, it had to happen due to their sense of honor that regularly was at odds with directives from London, or it happened because of their fondness for the land, which while present was clearly not enough as none of them actually chose to live in the country they administered unlike every other king, in human history. If Lee Kuan Yew was administering Singapore for China and went back to China after his 5 year term, he might consider all these policies reasonable:
1. Singapore can best function as an agricultural exporter to China, since China is industrializing well and it doesn't make sense to compete with China that clearly has more resources.
2. He can play the Malays off against the Tamils, so that they are too distracted fighting each other and make his administration easy.
3. During wartimes or emergency, all resources in Singapore need to be diverted to protect the motherland, because that is what matters the most.
If you change the incentives and tell Lee that his faith is forever sealed with Singapore, you end up with the opposite conclusion in each of these policies.
Prior to 1920 or so, irrigation collapsed in British controlled india. The consequences were dire. This was an astonishing fact for me, because maintaining proper irrigation is kind of the main task of any government beyond basic military defense.
The British would build shiny new dams in nodes of their profitable trade network, and leave the rest of the country to rock
https://x.com/AndreasKoureas_/status/1639329604996325379
https://xcancel.com/AndreasKoureas_/status/1639329604996325379#m
To summarize for those who don't like to click links:
Andreas Koureas on X argues that the Bihar Famine was not caused by Churchill's neglect or malice. He claims the famine was caused by a natural disaster, compounded by an inability to bring in food from Singapore, Burma, Malaya, or the Philippines because they were currently occupied by the Japanese. Japanese ships were a significant threat to shipping in the Bay of Bengal, capturing or destroying merchant vessels. The British Empire's shipping capacity was stretched to the limit at the time because of WWII. Despite this, as soon as Churchill heard about the famine he authorized 100,000 tons of grain to be shipped from Australia to India, despite the risk of Japanese raiding. Between August of '43 and the end of '44 1 million tons of grain were shipped to India. In April of '44 Churchill sent a telegram to Roosevelt asking for US assistance in shipping grain to India, which was refused because US shipping was at capacity due to the war. Andreas then argues that while Churchill said several racist things about Indians he did not have malice towards them.
I pine for a time like the 1950s when conservative Americans were implacably opposed to colonialism.
The right truly got cucked.
>Andreas Koureas on X argues that the Bihar Famine was not...
*Bengal famine.
This is a good analysis. Occasionally I see arguments for colonialism from right wing people as a solution to certain third world countries consistent underdevelopment, but it always ignores this (extremely important critique).
Even if extremely competent and just administrators are put in charge, there’s literally nothing stopping them from exploiting the colonial nation in ways that utterly disregard the colonized people. At least if your local warlord is ruling over and exploiting you, it’s *your* local warlord, who presumably can’t easily flee to luxury overseas if things go bad (although a lot of African dictators seem to do this with billions at the end of their rule).
"At least if your local warlord is ruling over and exploiting you, it’s *your* local warlord, who presumably can’t easily flee to luxury overseas if things go bad (although a lot of African dictators seem to do this with billions at the end of their rule)"
Will he be *your* warlord, though? The kind of place likely to have been colonized also was the kind of place lacking in national identify in the first place, so while their may have been someone who was from nearby, they may not have been of the same ethnicity. In the case of India, I am aware of a defense of the Raj from apparently very right-wing Indian elements that prior the Raj, the Indians suffered from the worst of *both world*: brutal, exploitative, colonial administrators who stayed for 1000 years (eg Muslims). At least the Raj left, after all-the Mughals are still there.
It isn’t that simple. Akbar was a tolerant Mughal Ruler, who decided to invent his own religion when ruling over the land. Mughals had times of relative peace between the religions. It’s just that when the Brits came, they were witnessing Aurangzeb who was probably the worst Mughal ruler in all of India, who decided to wage the most expensive war in Mughal History against South India, not win that war which eventually led to a dissolution of the Mughal empire into the Marathas and other small parts.
There was not an Indian Identity, but there was a civilizational identity. For example Hindus used to still gather for the “Kumbh Mela”, every 4-12 years like clockwork through all the different rulers they’ve had, they often had to cross kingdoms to do this pilgrimage.
The question is were the colonial rulers better/ worse than previous rulers India had. Of course the British view, and the dominant view of the 19th and 20th century is that they were the best rule India ever had. And yet when they left, India was one of the poorest countries in the world, not just Asia. There were few periods in history that had worse Hindu-Muslim Tensions than when British left, which led to the disastrous partition. They also created an Anglicized Socialist Ruling Class, that was determined to convert India into the next Russia or something similar, though to be fair, Russia and China beared the worst of that dynamic. It’s hard to look at the facts and think India was some well ruled country.
The only argument I see that might hold some water, was this was something that even happened to China that was never fully colonized by the west, so it was just something that happened even under capable rule. It’s a counterfactual we won’t know the answer to. I don’t fully buy it.
>Even if extremely competent and just administrators are put in charge, there’s literally nothing stopping them from exploiting the colonial nation in ways that utterly disregard the colonized people.
TBH that doesn't seem like a problem confined to colonialism, at least not any more. Plenty of senior politicians and civil servants in western democracies end up with lucrative positions in international corporations, more or less entirely insulated from conditions in the country they used to help run. When Rishi Sunak unexpectedly called the last British election, there were people suggesting he had a job lined up at some American firm and wanted to leave office quickly so he could take it up; I've no idea if this was true, but the fact it was considered credible tells you a lot.
I can't think of any examples of a prominent US politician who left office and then wound up living and working in a foreign country. I'm certain it has happened occasionally, but I am skeptical that it is common. Working for the US office of a large multinational corporation, yes, *that's* quite common, but that still leaves one pretty strongly coupled to the conditions in the US. As does having your extended family living in the United States.
Yes, it's mostly non-American politicians moving to America, for reasons others have said. But I do think that "conditions in the US" is too broad a brush. The sort of conditions that are good for, say, BlackRock or Goldman Sachs might not be good for your old constituents in Nowheresville, West Virginia.
My mind pretty quickly summoned the example of John C. Breckinridge. Admittedly, that was during a rather unusual time in US history, not at all common, just as you qualified.
As the richest country in the world, we don't need to go overseas to earn big bucks; they come to us and give us the big bucks. And there's no shortage of politicians and Formers that get paid by foreign entities for lobbying (John Allen getting paid by Qatar comes to mind immediately, as does Sue Mi Terry, although she was getting paid shockingly little for her services).
You can make both more money and gain influence in the US than any other Western country. You could work for some NGO in London and have a respectable amount of influence but you won't make a lot of money. You could work for some think tank in Dubai or Singapore and make tons of money but won't have any influence. America is the perfect place for both, so you will see some politicians from other Western countries move to the US but rarely the other way around.
Right, so the "exploiting the colonial nation in ways that utterly disregard the colonized people" dynamic being discussed, really doesn't work in the United States. And probably doesn't work terribly well in the rest of the industrialized world. Nobody with any sense is going to "utterly disregard" the people of the country they are going to finish out their career in, and that their grandchildren are probably going to grow up in. That doesn't make them benevolent altruistic civil servants, but it puts a cap on their villainy that isn't there for colonial administrations.
Perhaps there’s something of value when one has strong ethnic and cultural ties to the land. For the same reason a white leader of an African country would be accused of not representing the interests of the people, so is Sunak in the land of the Anglo-Saxons.
British elites loved their empire so much that when they lost the land they just invited in all their former subjects. Don't think they expected that within a generation their former subjects will become their rulers lol(Apparently Indians own more property in London than whites and the British finance sector in my experience nowadays is disproportionately Indian as well).
no shortage of English or Canadian politicians using America as a potential bolthole though
I have braided together 2 delusions:
- the Perfect Grand Strategy Game
- my Personal Moral Responsibility for helping avert ASI dystopia
Hear me out.
I am seriously anxious with AGI/ASI. If we were all going to die and it was certain, I could theoretically accept that. But "NOT KNOWING WHETHER OR NOT I CAN use my mind and flesh to help avert catastrophe", that keeps me up at night. No really, it's torturing me. Imagine if you were living in Ukraine and the bombs were falling and you had computer skills... how could you look yourself in the mirror if you didn't work in some "technological warfare" operation?
Meanwhile, there is 1 thing in this world where I have some "unique planning and insight": A simulation game of the Middle Ages. I've been planning it for 4+ years.
How could these possibly be related?
With Alignment, doesn't at least SOME of the problem come down to "weights/opinions/value-judgements" as well as "how to most beneficially conceptualize reality" Doesn't AI Alignment require "keeping more of the AI agents weighted in a 'vaguely-defined beneficial way' than not"?
And won't it be an ongoing problem? And if so, couldn't "we all" contribute, in a way, by molding our concepts, discourse, and cultural-expression in a more pro-social way?
Enter the "game"....................................................................................
If you've ever played historical strategy games, you know they can be overly-focused on hard power: becoming the largest, richest, widest.
While this reflects a certain truth about civilization, it is VERY incomplete. Individuals-and-groups also seek beauty, stability, justice, moral good, truth, honor, reputation, comforts, etc. Not all dreams are so "imperial".
AND
People don't always seek them in the order of Maslow's Pyramid. People can and DO sometimes sacrifice things "at the bottom" for the sake of things "at the top". Sometimes temporarily. Sometimes permanently.
I have plans for a game that's more complex: one that doesn't hide the "brutishness", but is still life-affirming and pro-social. I want a game where it is just as fun and interesting to "build peace", "build justice" or "build culture" as it is to build empires.
It's not that the game would introduce any new views of history that don't already exist on the web... but if it successfully influences other developers and players... maybe it can magnify these particular views... like a sort of "Grand Suggestion" to our culture and AI. Maybe not enormous in impact, but large compared to what I could achieve by commenting on ACX :-P.
If one suffers from war in Ukraine, they might leave. It's not that one's support might allow Ukraine decisively win. Comparing ASI fears to the war is gloomy.
One can also leave the crazy cult convincing one that AI is going to kill everyone. It's a choice to stay in the cult.
I find this offensive and nonsensical as climate change denial.
It's 100% my true opinion after giving the issue very much considered thought.
Sometimes I don't know whether the best thing I can do is "work on my game project",
or if there's something more substantial I can do... and hence the project is a waste of this One Life.
The phrase “a waste of this One Life” suggests that your conception of the value of life has gone septic
(and in case it's not clear, deep down I'm seeking answer to the following...)
IS THERE ANYTHING ELSE I CAN DO TOWARDS HELPING AVERT ASI DYSTOPIA?
Is there anything REALISTIC that someone ELSE can do? (which I can contribute to?) (granted, I live with a disability and my days can be hell or at least very unproductive sometimes)
Has anyone changed their mind about Trump in the past few hours?
Not on that timescale. But I would say his administration's actions since inauguration are a much better support of the flight 93 election case made 9 years ago than his first term. You could reasonably assess what he is doing now as having lots of two way risk ( high rewards actually possible) without being MAGA.
None of that was plausible in his first term. It was more like choosing to masturbate as the plane went down (if you wanted to embrace the premise that the plane was in fact going down)
Yeah I agree. He actually seems to be TRYING this time, and has built a cadre of at least seemingly competent people that can get things done.
I actually really don't like the whole Gaza thing, but I have to admit he's far more agentic in his second term, so far.
This is basically my vibe
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=wQ8WmiD4WUk
Yes, I'm actually beginning to like him now. I figured his second term would just be him running in circles giving outrage speeches for 4 years. Who knew a President could actually do things? Lord knows where it'll all end up but it sure is fun to watch for now.
I don't want the US responsible for Gaza, but his proposal is 100% the correct one and it's refreshing to see a President with the balls to actually say it. Palestine is a failed state and will never be viable. Put it in the dustbin of history where it belongs.
I don't see how you go from "Palestine is a failed state" or "the two-state solution is not viable" to "and therefore, ethnic cleansing is justified."
It's not ethnic cleansing. No one is suggesting murdering everyone. The population would be resettled and the horrible mess erased.
Stop misusing inflammatory terms just because you don't like the proposed outcome.
Literally the first line of the Wikipedia article. Feel free to check the edit history if you think that's a recent addition:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing
Yes, forced removal of an entire population is B-A-D. Not the least because it WILL involve murdering a large number of them. Guaranteed. If people with guns come to forcibly remove you and your families from their homes, fighting back is clearly, *obviously* an act of self defense.
If basic human decency is not a reason for you to oppose this, public opinion really ought to be. Much of the rest of the world does not share your cavalier attitude about forcing civilians from their homes at gunpoint and murdering those that resist. The international reputation of the U.S. WILL be badly damaged by such a move. There will be economic, diplomatic and military consequences for many, many years to come.
So is leaving Gazans there going to result in less suffering for them and more thriving than moving them to another location?
Jews moved a lot across the course of history and I for one am glad my ancestors chose (circa 1900) to leave both Russia and Germany and emigrate to the US.
I would posit that the Gazans would be extraordinary better off to move to the US than stay there, even if moved forcibly, though that's not going to be an option and they will be lucky if any decent country takes them.
Moving them to the US is, as you note, not on the table.
Moving them en masse to Egypt, Jordan, and similar countries, which don’t want them, to be housed and fed on those countries’ dime, is quite a different proposition.
A quick google says US per capita gdp is $82,769.40 and we have constant tension over every penny our government spends “helping foreigners” rather than the domestic population.
The per capita gdps of Egypt and Jordan are, respectively, $3,457.50 and $4,455.50
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.CD?locations=US
Even when refugees are few and a country is wealthy and accepting the with open arms, they don’t get the best that country has to offer. If we send these people en masse, to countries which lack wealth, over those countries’ objections, it is willfully naive to think they will be well taken care of.
That they will recieve anything remotely like “a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony” is staggeringly unlikely. “Barely resourced tents in the middle of the desert” is the far greater probability.
This is vanishingly unlikely to look anything like your ancestors moving to the US circa 1900. It is, however, uncomfortably likely to resemble my ancestors experience of being internally relocated within the Ottoman Empire in the early 1900s. “We aren’t *killing* you, just forcibly moving you to barely resourced tents in the middle of the desert, where we are sure you’ll figure things out somehow” is pretty much TLDR for the Armenian Genocide.
Moving them to another location will involve you fighting a bloody war with them, and them spending the next generation holding a grudge of the sort that inspires international terrorist movements and impedes local economic development. This will probably result in a great deal of suffering for them, and a fair bit for you as well.
The idea that, because you explain to them how you are trying to alleviate their suffering and how this will improve their lives in every way, and they then go along with it peacefully rather than picking up every weapon in sight and trying to kill you, is just another version of the hopelessly naive "they will greet us as liberators!" fantasy.
Even if what you are saying is true, it will not work and a great deal of harm will be caused.
Forcibly relocating an entire population based on ethnicity is a form of ethnic cleansing. They don't have to all die for it to be ethnic cleansing.
If they don't have to die then ethnic cleansing isn't that bad. The only reason it gets a pearl-clutching response is because people view it as a synonym for genocide.
If that's your definition then the partitioning of India was ethnic cleansing.
I hope Gaza gets power-washed. It's a failed state and nothing can change that. Let it die. It's better for the Gazans and it's better for the world.
How many of the 2 million people in Gaza would need to die in the process of power-washing it for you to think it was a bad decision?
E.g. people with guns come to move a family, the family resists, and some of the family dies?
Ethnic cleansing is very widely regarded as being very very bad. Your saying "it isn't that bad", no matter how confident you are in your moral reasoning, isn't going to change you and it isn't going to isolate you from the real and substantial blowback that will ensue if you do such a thing.
And if you do such a thing while flying the American flag, it isn't going to isolate *me* from the blowback. So I'd very much prefer that you not do that.
The partition of India resulted in about 1 million deaths to displace between 12 and 20 million people, depending on who's counting. That doesn't strike me as an example of good solutions to ethnic tension!
(And also, let's not forget that the Nazis started off by saying "move the Jews somewhere else" and then moved to extermination once they discovered no other countries would take them. Where are you planning to send the Gazans, and what are you going to do to Gazans who don't want to leave or can't find anywhere to go?)
The partition of India was an ethnic cleansing. That isn’t a controversial take and also doesn’t overstate the reality or imply that it was some second Holocaust.
But the real question here is what happens next? Pushing everyone out of Gaza doesn’t remove its problems, just disperses them to other countries. If you think Palestinian terrorism from the Gaza Strip is bad, wait until you have to deal with Palestinian terrorism from all the countries they’re expelled to. It’s happened before and it would happen again.
beyond offensive.
what if someone said Israel should be in the dustbin of history where it belongs?
oh right, half the Middle East already believes this, and will continue to believe this, and will believe this more adamantly after the ethnic cleansing that's being proposed
better yet, why not leave "apartheid" in the dustbin of history?
If the rest of the Middle East believes that... maybe it is time for one last war.
>what if someone said Israel should be in the dustbin of history where it belongs?
Then that person would be so stupid they practically drooled and I would be worried about their ability to feed themselves. Israel has 52k of per capita GDP and produces more than terrorism. That's not even approaching a coherent argument.
No one cares about your delicate sensibilities. Be offended all you want, Palestine is still a failed state. All the sob stories in the world won't change the economic reality there. They can't govern, control, or sustain themselves. Just give it up already.
I believe Israel should exist, because there's human beings who live there and it's not their fault they live there. And those people have value.
But otherwise, what is Israel contributing to the World, on balance, other than one crisis after another? And Netanyahu actively funded Hamas as part of his 4-D Chess Realpolitik Superbraining:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israeli_support_for_Hamas#:~:text=Israeli%20Prime%20Minister%20Benjamin%20Netanyahu,the%20education%20minister%20Naftali%20Bennet.
> Despite limited natural resources, intensive development of the agricultural and industrial sectors over the past decades has made Israel largely self-sufficient in food production, apart from grains and beef. Imports, totaling $96.5 billion in 2020, include raw materials, military equipment, investment goods, rough diamonds, fuels, grain, and consumer goods. Leading exports include machinery, equipment, software, cut diamonds, agricultural products, chemicals, textiles, and apparel; in 2020, exports reached $114 billion.
Israel has the second-largest number of startup companies after the United States and the third-largest number of NASDAQ-listed companies. It is the world leader for number of start-ups per capita and has been dubbed the "Start-Up Nation". Intel and Microsoft built their first overseas research and development facilities in Israel, and other high-tech multinational corporations have opened research and development centres in the country.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel#Economy
So they have an economy with imports and exports. And they're populated by transplants who could just as easily live in the Bay Area. How does this, on-balance, contribute to the world?
I just had a lot of fun asking chatgpt:
"how much of Israel's wealth is attributable to rich "first world" foreign immigrants with good education?" It was fun and made me feel very smug :-P.
If Israel were never founded but instead all this capital and brain investment stayed in Europe, wouldn't there have been a proportionate rise in "software and start-ups" in Europe by today?
Or, if the Jewish diaspora landed in............... the Island of Timor, and billions (trillions?) of dollars of foreign investment was poured in over decades, would that prove the original Timorese people were always culturally inferior and unfit to rule? (since they couldn't attract waves of brains and capital)
If the whole brainy population of San Francisco decided to relocate to Jamaica, should the inferior Jamaican people get pushed into a ghetto?
(yes, I know the danger of rhetorical questions. someone will answer them)
Israel is smart and wealthy because the smart and wealthy chose Palestine as the national equivalent of Pied-à-terre. But their actions and choices have also caused a lot of suffering and chaos.
Perhaps Israeli history has "subtracted" from the world.
No change, I remain impressed at his ability to actually solve problems instead of talking around them. The two state solution is not going to happen, and neither is the one state. While Trump's proposed plan has a lot of problems it has the benefit that it would actually solve the issue. I have not seen an alternative plan that would plausibly end the cycle of death and destruction in Gaza.
Agreed. Do these critics actually have a better plan? No, they just enjoy criticizing Trump and preening about how moral they are for "supporting" Palestinians. Why not try doing something that addresses the problem?
Ethnic cleansing won't work for the very obvious reason that Palestinians don't want to leave and are intent on destroying Israel, as demonstrated by their refusal to give up on the right to return during past peace negotiations. Those peace negotiations were primarily administered by the US and various peace deals were brokered between Israel and other Arab countries like Egypt and Jordan by the US. Trump's inflammatory remarks undermine decades of US foreign policy and contemporary relations between the US, Israel, and the Middle East countries. It's not just that what he's saying is retarded - it is obviously harmful to anybody not an accelerationist about war.
Calling for ethnic cleansing is an impressive, problem-solving, go-getter attitude now, apparently. Did we go back in time to the 1800s? I'm very glad that I'll never have to travel on an American passport again.
Trump's Gaza comments were so obviously stupid that even his fellow Republicans criticized them and tried to walk them back. Seeing the ACX comment section fawning over it was the last thing I ever expected.
It's actually not surprising at all, Yarvin is absolutely jubilant about the current state of affairs. https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-inc
I expected it. The local Trumpers are extremely vocal. I suspect a lack of gainful employment in that sector. Way too much free time. Anomie needs to get a job, especially. Although I'm not sure he's old enough to work.
It would not be about their ethnicity any more than sending members of the Italian Mafia to prison would be. If a people cannot live in peace with its neighbours, I don't see why it should be accorded special inalienable rights to the land it lives on, any more than a murderer has an inalienable right to stay in his home and not be sent off to prison.
Giving people rights that aren't paid for by responsibility is a terrible idea.
>> It would not be about their ethnicity any more than sending members of the Italian Mafia to prison would be.
Is it your position that all 2 million people in Gaza, right down to the toddlers, are members of Hamas?
Because that seems like it’s the only way this analogy works, and it’s staggeringly obvious how wrong it is.
No, it’s my position that issues like sovereignty or “ethnic cleansing” rely on treating a body of people as a collective whole. On the individual level, of course not every resident of Gaza is a member of Hamas, but on the collective level, this is what giving a measure of autonomy to the people of Gaza has produced.
"It would not be about their ethnicity any more than sending members of the Italian Mafia to prison would be."
That is rank, stinking bullshit and I think you know it. Arrests are not made on the basis of "being part of the Italian mafia" and CERTAINLY not on the basis of "being Italian." Arrests are made for CRIMES. Against people suspected of committing CRIMES. Further proof is required of ACTUAL CRIMINAL CULPABILITY before decisive action is taken.
Arrests are NOT made against the families, friends and neighbors of people who commit crimes, the are made against ONLY against those who were suspected of actually being involved. They are most certainly not made on the basis of ethnicity and location alone and you are damn well aware of that. Capturing Hamas militants--people who have actually known to have picked up arms or directly aided in attacks--and imprisoning them is WORLDS apart from uprooting families at gunpoint and shipping them off to somewhere they will be less inconvenient.
Collective punishment is explicitly forbidden under the Geneva Convention. There is not the faintest legal question that anything like this would be allowable under international law. If you are genuinely too ignorant to have the faintest clue what you're talking about, better to stay silent.
All your ranting and raving only makes you look insecure. If you had good arguments, you could afford to be civil.
Now, my point was about the relevance of the word ETHNIC in your phrase "ethnic cleansing". If the region were cleansed of the Palestinian people, it would not be because of their ethnicity, but because they couldn't live in peace with their neighbours.
As for the point that has you foaming at the mouth now, you seem to want to have it both ways. When it comes to sovereignty, you want to treat the Palestinians as a single people, with a right to a land. Yet when it comes to responsibility, you want to treat each individual separately, a hopelessly impractical task. That's a double standard. Are they to be treated as one people, or as individuals with no collective identity? If you would have it both ways, any rogue nation could wreak havoc by waging guerilla warfare with fully armed—but unacknowledged—militaries that the "moral" "law-abiding" nations could not retaliate against.
"International law" is a rickety thing that nations abide by as it suits them. It's certainly nothing the Gazan government has ever used as a guide. Nor is it some fount of morality.
"If you had good arguments, you could afford to be civil." This is a common refrain that doesn't bear up under scrutiny. Edgar A. Poe was undeniably a genius and he was constitutionally allergic to civility. I can think of numerous other cases.
"All your ranting and raving only makes you look insecure. If you had good arguments, you could afford to be civil."
If you had good arguments, presenting them without the tone-policing would make me look far worse. Complaining about my tone is a distraction from the fact that your position is utterly morally and intellectually bankrupt and you know it. Like this:
"When it comes to sovereignty, you want to treat the Palestinians as a single people, with a right to a land. Yet when it comes to responsibility, you want to treat each individual separately, a hopelessly impractical task. That's a double standard."
Seriously? Perhaps it WOULD be a double standard in a universe where they DID have sovereignty. But they do not. They. Never. Have. A double standard is saying "this group of people who were forcibly denied statehood, self-determination, sovereignty, who have not even been allowed an ELECTION in 19 years are all considered culpable for the actions of some of them. But Israel, which DOES have all those things and has nevertheless ALSO conspicuously failed to live in peace with its neighbors for its entire existence, is exempt from such considerations."
This is the *fundamental* crux of the matter. Hamas has taken unacceptable and unconscionable actions. So has the IDF. But Hamas can only in the loosest and most tenuous sense be said to represent the Palistinian People, while the Israeli government (of which the IDF is a part) is selected by a prosperous, democratic, safe[1] polity in regular elections. A polity that proceeds to regularly vote for the bombing of hospitals and schools, the denial of Palestinian rights and sovereignty and the continual exercise of Israeli power on *everyone* in Gaza. Despite my distaste for everything Israel has done, I have never once called for the forcible removal of its people from their homes, nor have I had a single kind word for anyone who did. Where, again, is your double standard here?
[1] If you dare complain about that characterization again, please compare to the people you're demanding be ethnically cleansed.
"Arrests are not made on the basis of 'being part of the Italian mafia'"
They absolutely are. In Italy, being a member of a mafia organization is in itself a crime, worth a minimum of three years in prison if they can pin it on you.
"In Italy, being a member of a mafia "
This in not remotely what was under discussion, but I can see how you might be confused. "Being part of the Italian mafia" and "being part of a mafia organization, which is located in Italy" are two VERY different things for the purposes of this discussion, and ought not be compared.
Also "if they can pin it on you." makes this whole line doubly irrelevant, as I discussed above.
> Did we go back in time to the 1800s?
You don't need to go back that far, it happened in the 1940s as well.
No. Pretty much what I would expect from a moral cretin.
His pathology has always been transparent.
Same here...
people tried to say "oh its 4-D chess and helps us" when i wrote below about tariffs, arguing they work in the sense of isolationism, but now Gaza. Yeah.
a funny little thing that got me is if you follow vtubers, fans like to buy merch to support them. Silly things like acrylic standups, keychains, etc.
thanks to trump they are now getting tariffed with processing fees on top of the tariff, lol. trump
is removing the de minimis exception for china. Considering how much storefronts like amazon rely on dropshipping going to be surprised they wont be raging against him.
Trump didn’t have the raw competence to get anything done in his first term, but Elon Musk does. They’re actually gutting the NGO blob this time. If this keeps up, I’ll regret not voting for him in the primaries!
I used to love him and now I love him slightly more, does that count?
Seen elsewhere:
"Its like we were expecting cake, but instead we got a surprise party, and a free car, and a free house, and our grandmother came back to life."
(I don't endorse this sentiment, but I think I get it.)
Lol
It does, you sick freak.
I didn't think he was serious about the tariffs.
I still don't know if he was. Was he? Is he? Was it a stunt to impress his base, knowing he would back down quickly? Might he still be serious in a month?
The China tariffs haven't been retracted
For a certain value of "hours." My opinion of Trump has actually gone down in the past few days, and folks, it wasn't high to begin with! I feel like I must have somehow absorbed, over the course of 2024, some of the sanguinity of some of his less rabid supporters--sure, he talks about revenge and retribution and dictatorship, but he won't do that much!
Oddly, my opinion about Musk hasn't changed at all. While I'm genuinely shocked by how many levers of power he was handed and how quickly, I am truly not surprised at all by what he is doing with them. In every case, it's "yeah, sounds like something he would do!" Examining this, I believe it's because my previous opinion of him hovered around "he would have to actually be Hitler for me to think less of him," and, well, so far he does clear that bar.
(I know what you're really asking here, and no, no change. Because I have eyes, I had already seen the ample signals Trump had sent lately suggesting that anyone who still somehow expected him to be some kind of principled isolationist, or to relieve the Gazans' suffering in some way Biden didn't, was likely to be deeply disappointed.)
The last few weeks have been like another Jan 6 moment. For a long time, I thought the left was just being alarmist about Trump, but they keep getting proved right again and again.
I think a lot of people, especially centrists, reflexively don't want to accept that the left was right about something!
Plus, there are a lot of people in the Trump camp practicing Macbeth politics.
It's less painful to make just one more rationalization - take one more step into the bloody river - than it is to turn back and admit that "holy shit my outtribe was actually right and he *is* a uniquely bad leader, and I put him into power. We really were the baddies this time."
Indulging that reflex to self-justify is, of course, deeply human. It's also how you end *up* deep in the bloody river, frantically throwing excuses around about how the ethnic cleansing was never supposed to really happen it was supposed to be a bargaining chip and even when it did happen it was supposed to be done safely and carefully and it's really the fault of Egypt for not providing better housing when the people we forced across the border got there and anyways the blue tribe would have done something worse and Hamas was elected 20 years ago so these people are all culpable and probably deserved what they got I'm not bad I'm not bad I'm not bad.
Hopefully we don't get there, but as long as people have their own personal egos and self-image wrapped up in the equation and are rationalizing backwards from "I'm not bad and I voted for him so he can't be bad or at least the left has has has to be as bad or worse," there'll be no shortage of rationalizations out there.
I changed my mind about my position that he didn't really read Yarvin and the resemblances are coincidental. Trump's peace plan is basically https://graymirror.substack.com/p/gaza-and-the-laws-of-war, and there's no way a second person independently came up with that idea.
They even used similar wording - "the LA of the Mediterranean" vs. "the Riviera of the Middle East" (Trump's version is better).
I highly doubt Trump himself reads Yarvin. Far more likely a staffer that we don’t know about, Musk, (who reads adjacent publications that would occasionally link to Yarvin) or Vance (who has read you, and what Republican reads ACX but not Gray Mirror?).
> what Republican reads ACX but not Gray Mirror?
*Raises hand*
Kinda curious what Vance's blogroll is. He undoubtedly reads Razib Khan, for example (his first footnote in Hillbilly Elegy).
It's still a little crazy to think we have a Poaster Vice President right now.
Plot twist: Scott linked to Yarvin in the course of a review of some other issue, and Trump reads ACX.
2nd Plot Twist: Trump actively subscribes and comments to ACX
The toad has a vocabulary of about 500 English words. No way he could pass as anyone but himself.
Just watch for heavy use of anemic adverbs like ‘very’, ‘very very’ and Jeff Spicoli like usage of ‘totally’ plus variations on ‘such as the world has ever seen’.
It wouldn’t take Quantico level profiling skills to pick the semi literate buffoon out of this crowd.
3rd Plot Twist: Trump used to subscribe to and comment on ACX, but got banned for low-content/high-temperature comments.
He could be any one of us! He could be you, he could be me, he could even be... Oh gods, why didn't I see it sooner? Obviously no one in this country would be named "Scott Siskin", that's the name of a bird! Someone has a lot of explaining to do...
Interesting! It got me thinking that maybe Vance had conveyed this idea to Trump after reading Yarvin.
What _is_ it with Trump and territory? Did he come down with a case of Putin envy? :-(
...What do you mean "come down"? You knew he had authoritarian sympathies, right? I thought that was why people liked him...
Many of us, not just Jeff, regard Trump as a (very, very) imperfect instrument of a very necessary change, and are simply determined not to let the perfect be a successful enemy of the good.
If someone in 2015 had asked you to set a floor on "good", would Donald Trump meet that standard today? Or are you the frog not noticing the water being boiled around you?
Frankly speaking, if someone in 2015 had asked me to set a floor on "good" I would probably just have said "as long as he kills some woke people he can do whatever he wants". Ten years ago I was much more sickened by the zeitgeist. I was seething so hard I would've boiled the water, not it me.
But taking your question in the spirit it was intended, I think he would, insofar as even his many catastrophic flaws (74 boxes of classified material, Donald?!) do not overshadow the extreme need for a reckoning with the status quo ante. The ideological capture of the entire managerial class and attendant big-government issues are *the* issue of our lifetime. It's increasingly obvious that no more gentle, rule-following, establishmentarian candidate could – or would even have wanted to – even try to act on this, and in some ways I think Trump is the better alternative to a later candidate with whom the Hitler comparisons would have been more accurate.
The one thing he's done that gives me genuine pause is equivocate on Ukraine. If he'd taken the maximalist Israel-style tack on that, suggested annexing Crimea to the US, and sent Zelensky a gigantic pile of guns, planes and to the point that liberals were worried that he was disarming our borders I would have been certain that he was in all ways the better candidate of the two we got to choose from, but his actual attitude is alarming.
To be fair, living through Nazi Germany must've been a blast if you hated Jews.
You mean, if you were German?
I think the ending of the show got bad reviews even from them.
Many Thanks! Well, not all authoritarians are interested in expanding territory. Some just seek to expand their power (and this is typical of most POTUSs, finding Congress pesky is not surprising for a POTUS from either major party).
EDIT: I don't know what fraction "liked" Trump. I view him as not-Kamala-Harris, censor-in-chief, doubler-of-illegal-immigration (as part of the Biden administration and sort-of kind-of, denied-in-retrospect border czar). Marginally lesser evil is still evil.
>censor-in-chief
Yes remember the time the Biden admin forced everyone filing for federal grants to remove a defined list of words from their filings because these were deemed wrong-think?
Oh wait, thats what Trump has been doing.
Many Thanks! Yes, Trump is doing that, and it looks like a meataxe approach to digging the woke crap out of the government.
That said, you are making a _terrible_ argument here. The left is _infamous_ for language policing, including speech codes in academia. _How_ many times have they switched the "polite" term for blacks on us?? Remember "latinx"? That one even pissed off the group the left claimed was being served by it.
Even if i grant you that your imagined language policing is all happening just like you believe it has, how is that the same as scrubbing certain terms from government documents because they are wrong-think?
I mean, just think: if Kamala had been elected, who's to say that she mightn't have plunged the nation into a constitutional crisis by...I don't know, legalizing weed or something?
It astounds me how absolutely obtuse so many people can be. Trump lays out exactly what crimes he wants to do, why he wants to do them, acknowledges they are crime, tries to do them, and yet some people will still be like "oh well i am not sure he really means it and harris was bad too". Total brain rot
Many Thanks! Hey, remember that Kamala was part of the Biden administration, and Biden _DID_ try to unilaterally stick the ERA into the constitution, despite having blown by the time limits on it by decades. Kamala herself is on record as saying, of uncensored free speech on the internet "it has to stop", a direct attack on the First Amendment. She was also very much a piece of shit.
> ...and Biden _DID_ try to unilaterally stick the ERA into the constitution, despite having blown by the time limits on it by decades
That never happened.
Here's the statement he issued: https://bidenwhitehouse.archives.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2025/01/17/statement-from-president-joe-biden-on-the-equal-rights-amendment/
Note what the statement does not include: any language to direct the government to publish the amendment, any changes to policy as a result of his belief, nothing to make it part of the Constitution at all. Not even directing some novelty copies of the Constitution with the new amendment printed up. It was using the bully puppet of the Presidency to try to make the issue salient but there was zero attempt to stick the ERA into the Constitution, unilateral or otherwise.
Note also the date: 3 days before Trump's inauguration. Essentially as lame as that duck was going to get. If he wanted to actually force it through he would have done so when he had time to potentially accomplish something.
Oh, for sure, for sure. We should all be breathing a sigh of relief that we haven't put into power the kind of Presidential administration that would shut down websites just because they contain disfavored sociopolitical content!
The news this evening that Musk and his little gang of tech randos have managed to gain control of the FDIC's systems and shut the actual agency staffers out of it, certainly has me thinking about some new stuff. Such as taking my ID to where we bank and clearing out our household bank accounts.
Is moving to Canada part of the plan?
Can we have a middle east containment thread? If Trump said what the media are saying he just said ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/02/04/trump-netanyahu-meeting/ ), I think we will need it.
On a less satirical note, here's the transcript if you want to compare what Trump actually said to any media reporting you're concerned may be inaccurate or alarmist.
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-press-conference-joint-benjamin-netanyahu-israel-february-4-2025/
Notably -
"Being in its [referring to Gaza] presence just has not been good and it should not go through a process of rebuilding and occupation by the same people that have really stood there and fought for it and lived there and died there and lived a miserable existence there. Instead, we should go to other countries of interest with humanitarian hearts, and there are many of them that want to do this and build various domains that will ultimately be occupied by the 1.8 million Palestinians living in Gaza, ending the death and destruction and frankly bad luck."
"The only reason the Palestinians want to go back to Gaza is they have no alternative. It's right now a demolition site. This is just a demolition site. Virtually every building is down.
They're living under fallen concrete that's very dangerous and very precarious. They instead can occupy all of a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony instead of having to go back and do it again. The US will take over the Gaza Strip and we will do a job with it too."
"I do see a long-term ownership position and I see it bringing great stability to that part of the Middle East, and maybe the entire Middle East."
Many Thanks!!!
Did you love the debates about January 6, but wish there were more dead bodies to look away from while you put forth your technical argument that “it’s only a coup if the military is involved?” Well congratulations! From the fine folks at TrumpCo, who brought you 'I Can't Believe It's Not Coup!'…
...now try, 'I Can't Believe It's Not Genocide!'
Its all the legalistic navel-gazing that you loved from arguments like “you can’t say he refused to transfer power, Biden *did* technically become President after the riots failed” or “well Biden bullied Facebook so I think that makes Kamala the bigger tyrant"... but now just *chock full* with those civilian casualties we all *love* to deny!
“Technically it was up to the *host countries* to ensure the safety and wellbeing of the Palestinians we pressured them into accepting!”
“The UN definition of ‘genocide’ requires acts be ‘committed with intent to destroy’ the victims, and you can clearly see from these statements that our intent was to relocate them to ‘a beautiful area with homes and safety and they can live out their lives in peace and harmony!’ It's a terrible tragedy and a mistake, but let's not debase ourselves with inflammatory language!”
“I’m sure whatever *Kamala Harris* would have done to fix the Middle East would have been even worse!”
Yes, now with 'I Can't Believe It's Not Genocide!' you can distract yourself and others from *both* the damage you’ve done to your republican institutions *and* staggering human suffering and loss of life *at the same time*!
Look for it in stores sometime in the next 4 years! But hopefully not! He's probably bluffing! Let's suspend judgment and alarmism until it's actually tried!
(‘I Can’t Believe It’s Not Genocide!' contains authoritarianism as an active ingredient and may destabilize your republic. Peace in the Middle East sold separately.)
Many Thanks!
Wanting to move them elsewhere is ethnic cleansing, which is often associated with genocide probably because past attempts to move a lot of people involved a lot of them dying due to technological limitations, eg see the British expulsion of Acadians from today's Canadian maritime provinces
Ethnic cleansing would be removing one ethnicity and leaving another. In this case we are talking about clearing out the entire human population.
There's precedent for this sort of thing, like when we build dams, or Chernobyl.
The area isn't permanently uninhabitable, like Chernobyl. Someone is going to live there once it's rebuilt, and if that someone isn't the Palestinians, then it's ethnic cleansing.
If it were sold to the UAE and filled with non-Palestinian Arabs would that still count?
I'm sure Palestinians and Emiratis would both say they are not the same, even if they all identify as Arab.
That would still count in my book. The thing we are trying to prevent is the act of forcing 2 million people out of their homes at gunpoint and giving their land to someone else to build hotels on. The fact that the someone else is Arabic doesn't really change the fact that this would be a horrible thing to do to the people living there.
Maybe there would be a different legal word for it - "forced population transfer" instead of "ethnic cleansing" or something - but on moral grounds I don't see how it would make a difference.
Notable recent occurrences of ethnic cleansing have been comparatively bloodless (eg in Nagorno-Karabakh, less than 300 people died when >100K Armenians-99% of the population-departed).
Not to mention the 900,000 Jews who were cleansed from North Africa and Arab nations during the 40s and 50s.
The conditions in that case were maybe the most favorable in history, eg, short distance, destination being a functioning nation state dominated by your coethnics ready to receive you, aid organizations able to assist, modern technology
Yeah, that's probably a ceiling to how bloodless you can make the process. I reckon trans-shipping the Gazans over the West Bank could look pretty similar, as a logistical undertaking (everything else would be there other than "functioning nation-state", and even the West Bank is probably pretty functional albeit not in a way to handle an extra 2 million people)
Except the West Bank is not a "functioning nation-state dominated by their co-ethnics", it's a dysfunctional occupied territory dominated by their enemies. This is going to make the Gazans much less enthusiastic about the process.
Well, we still have modern technology!
Sometimes I spend a lot of time thinking of just the right comment I could make in one of these threads. I don't think I will ever come close to making a comment as perfect as this one.
Bravo. (this is not sarcasm)
Glad you liked it! I don't know if I'd call it a *fun* write, but it felt good to put to paper.
Still processing how quickly the satire became a reality right in front of me on the board. Kinda head-spinning to post a joke about overlooking the human tragedy your president proposes to create in favor of "legalistic navel-gazing" about whether that tragedy technically meets the definitions of particular very-bad words, only to see arguments emerge minutes later about whether this would really count as ethnic cleansing and whether ethnic cleansing is really all that bad.
I think approximately 100% of the people at all familiar with the situation in Gaza going back many years will agree that the existing system is bad/untenable/cyclically full of war.
I wont pretend to know a solution, but "Israel leaves Gaza alone" isn't on the table. If it were on the table, then we would see one or more October 7ths and then Israel would get involved again - which is again obvious to everyone.
Top level politicians giving it their best effort haven't solved this issue. We all also know that.
I'm not sure what end game we would expect here. Either we stay in a deadly cycle that everyone hates, or we fundamentally change the game. It may be that the game change is worse than the cycle, but I don't see how we complain about trying to fix the cycle given all of the complaints about the cycle.
I'd be more sympathetic to the complaints if they came with alternative solutions that were at all tenable.
Many Thanks!
The US government has been working for decades to find a solution. The idea that no alternative solutions have been suggested is laughable.
Tenable is the crux of my objection. I agree that various attempts in the 70s-2000s were genuine and could have worked. But they didn't. A two state solution is not possible, and neither is a one state solution. We can see why - one or both sides will reject it.
If Trump has another option that can work, okay. We should have plenty of reason to doubt his plan will work as well, but people wanting to keep trying the same ideas of the last 50 years aren't being serious in my opinion.
Dang, I was just joking yesterday about turning Gaza into a charter city, and now here we are.
It's hard to know how to evaluate this. As a serious proposal? Or as a bunch of noises designed to possibly achieve some kind of political outcome?
There's some value in putting an even-worse-than-status-quo option on the table. It's also quite nice as a wedge issue that can separate ordinary Gazans (who would love to be resettled somewhere less sucky) from Hamas (who don't want to lose their power).
Many Thanks!
No no no, thank you!
There's currently no country that will accept these "ordinary Gazans". Arab governments won't accept them for fear of angering their citizens. Is Trump going to settle them some place like TDR Congo?
Am I wrong? Is there some country that will have them? Australia maybe?
US can bribe (or threaten, or both) a country to take Gazans. IMHO, Syria might be a feasible option (new government desperately needs money and recognition...)
Australia?? Heck no. We are already spiking antisemitism with the 2000 odd refugees we took in. Hoping to get rid of this government in short order
Time to correct the mistake of history and put them in Newfoundland
https://x.com/hamandcheese/status/1713028981979500777
Have you ever been to Newfoundland? I don’t think they would’ve liked it.
Well now the US has a new bargaining chip it can use against every other country.
Hey Mexico, do you want us to send you ten million Mexicans, or two million Gazans?
edit: I've got it! NEOM! The US can pay the Saudis to build NEOM on the condition that they fill it with Gazans. The Saudis get their dumb vanity project, the Gazans get new apartments, the US gets a bunch of beachside real estate which it can sell to offset the cost of building NEOM, everyone is happy.
"We will forcibly move two million people from another country into yours" is only a credible bargaining chip if you're willing to invade both countries and commit ethnic cleansing in at least one.
And okay, Trump's willingness to commit ethnic cleansing is probably not zero, but I'm less certain about the American people's willingness to support an invasion of Mexico for that purpose.
The US can already push Mexico around as much as it wants. I mean, we could force two million Gazans on them if we really wanted to.
I just don't see how the US taking ownership over Gaza puts America first. It looks to me like Trump let Bibi fuck him in the ass.
Does any American other than Trump want this situation?
"The US can already push Mexico around as much as it wants. I mean, we could force two million Gazans on them if we really wanted to."
The US quickly tired of Iraq, imagine what Mexicans could do.
Guerilla warfare only works when the enemy is concerned about civilian casualties.
> I just don't see how the US taking ownership over Gaza puts America first. It looks to me like Trump let Bibi fuck him in the ass.
How so? The problem with Gaza is that there are Gazans there. That problem is going to be solved. I'm more doubtful that Israel is going to let him have that piece of land, seeing as they were planning development there themselves...
>That problem is going to be solved.
How is it going to be solved? Give me one plausible scenario.
Jared Kushner seems pretty keen?
My personal preference would be to depopulate and terraform the West Bank, so that we can finally build England's green and pleasant land in Jerusalem.
Let’s put it on the shopping list with Panama Canal and Greenland and see if the idea goes anywhere.
Many Thanks!
...Is there anything even left to discuss at this point? It's over for them. No use crying over spilled milk.
Regardless of how over the war is for them, I think we still have a chance to avert an ethnic cleansing.
No one's ethnic cleansing anything. Gaza is a failed state. Resettle the people and wipe it from the memory of the Earth. Honestly that would be kindest to the actual Palestinians. Break them out of the hopeless trap that they're currently in.
>Resettle the people
Under most definitions of the word, forcibly resettling an ethnic group from the area they live in is ethnic cleansing. (Especially if you're then taking the cleared land and resettling it with your own people, like how Trump suggested letting America have the vacated land.) I don't know what definition you're using where this wouldn't fit.
And to be clear, it would have to be done by force. You are not going to get 2 million people to abandon their homes and land without literally sending soldiers to force them out at gunpoint. You are deluding yourself if you think that can be done "cleanly" or "peacefully."
Was the partition of India ethnic cleansing?
>You are deluding yourself if you think that can be done "cleanly" or "peacefully."
Oh you mean it would lead to ... unrest in Gaza? Oh no, anything but that.
The partition of India is a bad example for you to use (I saw you use it elsewhere also), because it led to a bunch of long-term bad effects, notably two piles of, functionally, Indians who hate each other's guts snarling at each other across nuclear warheads. Might I very humbly suggest that you look at the Greek-Turk population exchange of the 1920s instead?
> Was the partition of India ethnic cleansing?
Yes, obviously.
Who's "we"? Any chance you had to prevent this disappeared months ago. The die has already been cast. You can't stop this. No one here can.
You could put this comment under literally any politics post anywhere, and it would add the same amount to the discussion.
That's not true. If you had dealt with [him] four years ago, before they had a chance to organize around him... all of this could have been prevented. That would have been possible to accomplish just by yourself. It's too late for that now, obviously. You would only end up stoking the flames, and that's exactly what they want.
Many Thanks! I currently intend to step aside from the discussion I anticipate. I think silence is improbable.
Yesterday I saw an interview of a woman that was deported from the US. She said she was fleeing the violence of the Catatumbo in Colombia, her husband was killed and her children threatened. When she took a bus in Mexico to her asylum date she was kidnapped for ransom. I know what people will say, she should come back and make things better in her country. I saw an interview of young men, barely teenagers, soldiers being sent there to try and restore order. They sounded so cheerful, I don't know how many of them will die in the jungle. It's all so senseless. I was originally planning not to post this here as I am afraid of facing hatred, but chatgpt of all things convinced me to amplify this story, it told me letting their suffering go unnoticed can feel like a silent victory to the perpetrators. It brought me to tears honestly, I hope writing this means something however small I guess.
Yes, it is tragic for some individuals but better them than us. We're not the social safety net for the rest of the world. It's like the old joke about the wealthy man who bankrupts himself to save the poor, and then ends up broke without having ended poverty. At some point you have to put yourself first. In my view we're well past that point.
I thought that was a Dickens novel about a woman
By the way, if anyone wants to help with this, consider donating to the Colombian red cross. They're doing humanitarian help in this region. Hopefully google translate can help you navigate this website, I'm not 100% sure how easy it is to donate as a foreigner though.
https://accionistashumanitarios.org/
Anton, you got quite unfriendly responses. I don't think you should conclude based on this that people here are heartless and have no social conscience. Think about the way you set up this discussion: You saw 2 interviews that stirred your compassion and your anger at the injustice people are suffering. You came here with the goal of having people get how you felt. If you were talking to friends they would probably understand that mostly you wanted them to see how you felt, and share experiences where they felt the same. But the people who read your post are not your close friends, and many of them probably know absolutely nothing about even basic stuff like your interests, your views, your profession, etc. It is not reasonable to expect them to resonate the way a friend would.
Also, it's natural for people who do not know you to take your post as an argument in favor of doing more to help people like this woman, and everyone, even the most liberal, has to come to terms with the fact that there is no way for them or their country to help everyone. So people were pushing back against the implied idea that they or their country should.
You happened to see an interview with one particular person, and felt moved by her situation. There are millions of people on the planet with situations as dire as this woman's, and you do not have for them the kind of sharp heartache you have for this woman. Regarding everyone except this one woman, you are as oblivious as all of are about the woman you saw interviewed.
It is unfair to shove one instance of someone's suffering in front of us and expect us to react to the person as you are. I think some of the irritability you encountered was a reaction to that unfairness.
>So people were pushing back against the implied idea that they or their country should.
I think you're rightly identifying a part of a broader trend where progressives have changed acts of charity into obligations and entitlements, as well as the corresponding reaction of those who don't buy into it
Yeah, that's ok. I expect indifference, people are busy, I understand. I have seen Americans in US social media laughing at people in this situation, this is not something I understand. I have some familiarity of the sort of people that comment here, I used to lurk more a long time ago, so the unfriendliness is entirely expected.
>I know what people will say, she should come back and make things better in her country.
I don't think it's her responsibility to fix Colombia, but there are plenty of safe-ish countries she could've fled to.
Which ones?
Costa Rica is fine, and while Nicaragua is...not great, it's stable and it's citizens are not starving or being murdered by the bushel.
Well, it depends on what measure of safety you're taking, but: Chile, Argentina, Uruguay... maybe even Bolivia and Paraguay?
Completely separate
from your views and your choice to post them — I am horrified to hear about chatGPT expressing views about what steps you should take. Also, you should know that it makes no sense to turn to chat GP T when making a decision like whether to put up this
I went to chatgpt in order to find words of kindness. My friends were offline at the moment. It worked, I do not need to fish for kindness from here anymore.
Next time you should just write your own words and read them back to yourself. It would create an item of actual human compassion instead of a twisted simulacrum, and you could always share your creation with other people when they need it in turn.
This twisted simulacrum was pretty good, it gave me the impression of putting into words things I already knew were true, I would not have taken any decision if I thought the output absurd or uncompelling. If nothing else, it's been well trained in soothing platitudes, not unlike myself. Much better to have real human compassion of course, but that's unfortunately in precious little supply.
Same.
Sounds like bad situation. Nevertheless, we can’t let our country continue to be a dumping ground for anyone in the world who has problems. She is free to try anywhere else in the hemisphere. Come to think of it, why did she try the US and not some closer country? Perhaps there was some other factor on her mind?
"why did she try the US and not some closer country"
Because our Asylum laws are specifically designed for people in her situation. Because in the distant past (of 12 years ago) the US took pride in welcoming immigrants especially those in greatest need of help. Maybe she should thought a country full of Christians would welcome her and others fleeing terrible poverty, offer charity, and allow her to build a life here contributing to the wonder that is America.
At one point we were "a dumping ground for anyone in the world who has problems". Do you think the Irish, Italians, Germans, Jews, Pilgrims, etc that came here in droves were doing it for fun?
The arrival the settlers was ultimately a disaster for the original inhabitants. And your idea of what past immigration policy was like for other groups in simply incorrect. The strictness of immigration policy has varied greatly over our history but has rarely (maybe never?) been this costly, destabilizing, and permissive. The recent large-scale abuse of refugee and asylum programs is a novel phenomenon. We simply do not have the capacity to take every migrant who wants to come here without destroying our society. No country could handle that volume people from all over the world.
"your idea of what past immigration policy was like for other groups in simply incorrect"
How so? Specifically how is it incorrect? What claims did I make that were wrong?
"We simply do not have the capacity to take every migrant who wants to come here without destroying our society."
Prove this.
>Because our Asylum laws are specifically designed for people in her situation.
Actually no. US asylum laws are based on the UN Refugee Convention, according to which the definition of refugee does not include those who do not face persecution in all parts of their country. It sounds like she could have moved to other parts of Colombia (eg Bogota, the capital, is quite far from Catatumbo) - edited, not sure why I said Caracas other than not having had my coffee yet
One of the problems is that the limits of the asylum system have been eroded over time by leftists, including the aforementioned
Does your assessment also apply to the 300k Venezuelan refugees on TPS that Trump is threatening to send back? They clearly cannot just go somewhere else in Venezuela.
I'm not as familiar with the details of US specific legislation so I'll first state that the following might be based partly on untrue premises
In short, yes. From what I can tell, America's TPS system doesn't actually have anything to do with the asylum system (which, again, is rooted in the UN Convention). The asylum system does not apply to those not at personal risk due to a Convention ground (race, religion, political opinion, nationality, other social group), that is it does not include people who face some other generalized misfortune such as poverty or even war. It was designed this way to not entitle entire countries' populations to a legal right to emigrate to another country. So yea asylum laws were not designed for people like the 300k Venezuelans on TPS - they're not technically refugees, the confusion is from the difference between the legal meaning and how 'refugee' is used in everyday parlance
TPS seems to be a way for the executive to make ad hoc decisions to allow whole countries' populations to stay in the US legally should they manage to get in. Basically, TPS allowances are political decisions directly subject to the desires of the executive
The other factors are most likely economic, but I don't know if she was threatened in other parts of Colombia. If the other factors were economic she does not have a valid asylum claim, but I don't care, I feel for her and mourn our dead all the same.
Note she also claimed she was kidnapped in Mexico. Of course, she has a strong incentive to lie, I am not naive. However people have been killed in the Catatumbo, thousands have been displaced, I have heard reports of Mexican criminal gangs targeting asylum seekers from years back as they know they're a vulnerable population, and of course there's been deportations.
The deportation is not very surprising either, to be eligible for asylum you need to be feeling violence which targets race, religion or politics, being unable or unwilling to pay extortion money or being collateral damage among warring factions is not enough. You also have to be more then 50% likely to be killed, any less will not do. America does not possess the administrative capacity to process all the asylum seekers at the border, so a claimant will have to wait at the border for several months, unable to work legally and worried for her safety from criminal gangs. Once this is all done an extensive interrogation will be conducted looking for any inconsistencies in the story, if any slip through this is proof of lying and a reason to be sent back. It is no surprise that some judges have a 100% denial rate. This was the status quo before Trump, now I've been told no cases are being heard at all, of course.
Since the implication of all this is that the US is responsible to fix this woman's suffering, my Modest Proposal(TM) is that the clear solution is the US should invade Colombia, overthrow the government, annex the country and depose/execute most of the leadership, and appoint Nayib Bukele Lord High Governor and give him unlimited power to fix this. This will undoubtedly make Colombia nice enough for this woman to be happy there.
You are not responsible for her suffering, kindness is given freely or not at all. Colombia has some unique challenges that make a Bukele harder, the geography is more remote so that guerillas can retreat deep into the mountains, and some have support of the communist dictatorship next door that is Venezuela. Expresident Alvaro Uribe managed to improve the security situation, at the cost of things like massacres of civilians, dressed in military fatigues for the purpose of claiming the bonuses, but if someone like him ran for election I would vote for him. This problem has plagued the country in all of living memory so far, and one of the reasons it's been extremely hard to eradicate is the vast amounts of money they have at their disposal, product of American addicts buying drugs they "tax".
Part of the assumptions in my Modest Proposal(TM) is that Bukele would use his Middle Eastern heritage and father's chemical experience to bring their own system for dealing with rebels in difficult provinces, by which I mean using nerve agents on them.
From the American perspective, there are, at a rough guess, more than 7. billion people* whose lives would be greatly improved if they moved to America (or if we moved America to them; it's probably not true in all countries but it probably is true that Latin America would be better run under American rule, which is neither here nor there). Which ones should not be let in?
* the math on this looks like it's closer to 7.25B, based off this this:
-Currently 8.2bn people per World Population Clock
-340M Americans, leaving 7.86B Poor Deprived Non-Americans (PDNAs)
-Assume 1% of PDNAs are the tops in their country and would not actually improve their lives "greatly" by becoming Blessed Americans, leaving ~7.78 B
-per here, there's about 700M people who have more than $100K in wealth
https://www.visualcapitalist.com/global-wealth-distribution/
-per here, maybe a 135M of them Blessed Americans? Shading makes it kind of hard to tell
https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/15jlibp/oc_the_percentage_of_adults_that_have_at_least/
So we round it to around 7.25B PDNAs whose lives we can improve by admitting to the US
Surely you know gas agents are not a panacea? Assad's regime fell despite use of them. It can be comforting to think that with just enough brutality we could solve all our problems, but it is unfortunately or perhaps fortunately, not the world we live in. The reason I was initially hesitant to post this at all was the prospect of having to defend the idea of refusing such generous proposals as yours, though I did not expect it to involve the use of chemical weapons specifically. I believe I have nothing else constructive to say. This will be my last post, as I have shared everything I know about this case.
And yet Medillin is consistently ranked in lists of the "top twenty cities to visit this year" for tourists.
The security situation in the cities is different from the rural areas, you will not find guerillas in the cities. If you come as a tourist to Colombia, make sure to stay in the cities or in the towns near the cities. If you must go to a rural part, ask a local if it's a "red zone" in order not to inadvertently walk into one. Even if you stay in the cities, make sure not to go to the bad part of town, hopefully this is common sense everywhere in the world. Walking into a Medellin "comuna" or the south side of Bogota is not a good idea. Stay at the tourist part of town and you should have no problem. I recommend the nature parks in Colombia, as they can possess a stunning beauty, a walk to the Siecha lakes was a spiritual experience to me. This lake is safe because it is very close to the capital, and the reserve provides water to it. Of course, if a guide tells you you can continue at your own risk, turn back. I hope one day we will have peace.
Right, so why did this woman go all the way to the USA instead of moving to a nicer part of Colombia?
Most people do, hundreds have been killed and thousands have been displaced in this latest bout of violence. If you go to Bogota you may find beggars with signs advertising they have been displaced by the conflict. They have had their lives upended by it, and many struggle finding jobs when all they have known in life is working a farm. This woman is likely trying to find a better life for herself.
Your question has been adopted in many asylum systems around the world as the 'internal flight alternative'. The definition of refugee isn't supposed to include anyone who isn't in danger throughout the entirety of their country. Unfortunately, if my country is any indication, it's been watered down to uselessness. People can just get their relatives back home to write a letter about how the thugs or gangsters or whoever have been asking them for their location and the adjudicators are obliged to find that internal flight alternatives aren't a viable option because they'd have to hide their location from their family
By US asylum law, individuals who seek asylum can't have an option to seek asylum at any intervening country. Someone coming by land from Columbia is going to go through quite a few other countries. Even if they can't stay in their own country, it's quite unlikely they are specifically targeted in every country between.
I'm all for asylum, but if you make "asylum" a free way to get into the US, it's going to get Goodharted and everyone suddenly needs asylum. That's one of the reasons that asylum is supposed to be in the first country they can reach, not the country that they would most prefer and can physically get to.
Yea, that's how it's supposed to be in a lot of countries. Originally the UN refugee agreement was meant to address the massive migrations in Europe after WW2 and got changed to include the entirety of the world beneath people's noses
Much of my professional work has concerned asylum and frankly my experience has made me go from "I'm all for asylum, but..." to Muskian "throw it all out including the baby"
I've got an idea the Dems could put in their "Project 2029." You know how all citizens born on naturalized in the United States are citizens according to the 14th amendment? Well, the Philippines was part of the United states before 1946. They weren't citizens, but that was an outgrowth of the insular cases, which are widely regarded as being wrongly decided. You can say they were in fact, citizens and thus their descendants after 1946 are automatically natural-born citizens too. Thus all 117 million Filipinos are eligible to immigrate to the United States. While the Supreme Court would likely take issue with this interpretation, the President could simply direct the border patrol, DHS, etc., not to deport any Filipino nor turn them away at the border.
Birthright citizenship only applies to incorporated territories. The Phillippines don't qualify.
Filipinos tend to be mostly Catholic or Evangelicals. The young white lib staffers of the Democratic Administration would oppose this proposal just as much as any Republican for that reason. But when I think more about this proposal, it doesn't sound all that bad lol. Currently, the Filipinos vote about evenly between the GOP and Democrats. I assume these Filipinos are on average more educated, wealthier, and liberal than their brethren back home. Your average Filipino will be more religious and seems to like strongmen(Rodrigo Duterte) so this split might end up slighly more in favor of the Republicans. Add to this the idea of adding 100+ million Christians to the US, and I am sold on your proposal lol.
Your twitter still points to slatestarcodex dot com. Have you considered updating it?
If you are a straight man, roughly how many likes on dating apps do you get in a month?
If I'm paying, roughly 100+ likes, 25-50 matches and 5-10 dates a month on a single app. If I'm not paying, quite a bit worse but still some. (I'm 6'3, a gymrat, and told I'm fairly good looking, but not super hot or anything)
Personal experience: about 10 matches a month. But this was 3 years ago.
But there is a better way to look at online dating. Matches is not the only metric you need to optimize for. You need to actually write message to the women. They need to answer. Then you need to plan and go on a date. If you have 0 matches you need to work on your pictures. Everything >0 you should optimize the later steps. If you can "convert" every match into an actual date, 1-2 matches a week is plenty.
Disagree with that based on a lot of personal experience. Most women will have already decided if they want to meet you based on your profile. Canned humor works as well (or better) as highly personalized, thoughtful conversation.
I am striving to arrange a date within 5 - 10 messages. And if that doesn't happen it most likely isn't going to, it's a numbers game and until they meet you in person you are just another strange dating app man trying to fight against 100 other men for their attention
As someone who is not a 6'3 gymrat our experiences might differ quite a bit. Also age and region changes to game quite a bit. But i agree with the 5-10 messages until date. Everything longer and your window of opportunity closes fast.
My main point was: If you already have 25 matches but get only 5 dates I would optimize to get 10 dates out of 25 matches and not to increase the matches to 50. Big number looks nice but doesn't get you closer to your goal.
Yeah I didn't mean to come across as flippant, there was a time when I didn't know how to present myself at all and experienced how miserable dating apps could be. I still stand by my experience that between matching and getting a date there's not enough play to double your conversion rate as you suggest, did you experience otherwise? (After you meet skill/charisma is indeed a huge factor, it's just the dehumanizing aspect of the apps which is why you need to get off them within a handful of messages)
I expect there might be a lot of variance between different people. So not every advice works for everybody.
If you get a lot of matches and easy responses with canned humor I expect you profile/pictures to be very good. In this case I believe you that there is no room (and no need for) improving the later steps.
In my personal case I maybe messaged about half my matches. Because I was lazy or sometime because I reevaluated the woman's profile and decided against it. Easy room for improvements: only swipe if you really are attracted and then message all matches.
Similar for getting replies. If you are below a certain looks threshold (not bad looking, just below really hot guy) just writing "Hey" will just not work. I took the time to write personalized messages referring to something in her profile or pictures and got a huge boost in replies.
If you already always get replies or women even message you first you really don't need this. But please be aware this is not the experience of the average user.
> If you are a straight man, roughly how many likes on dating apps do you get in a month?
Not sure what "likes" corresponds to. Is this mutual right swipes? On average, women will right swipe ~5% of men:
https://imgur.com/H5oXiUZ
Basically just how many girls like your profile. You might not like all of them back(thus not a match).
In the debates about whether what Trump/Musk are doing is even constitutional to begin with, I saw the interesting position that since Congress passed a law saying such and such agency has to be funded and imposing restrictions on what the President can do with the agency, therefore this is illegal.
I think there is something strange about this, as it definitely makes the President seem much less of a chief executive and much more some kind of middle-manager, such that it seems that interpretation can be challenged.
I'm reminded of Yarvin arguing that this sort of "law" Congress passes isn't really a law in a sense the Founding Fathers would have understood it. Google gives me this definition of law:
the system of rules which a particular country or community recognizes as regulating the actions of its members and which it may enforce by the imposition of penalties.
Since the law applies to everyone, it strikes me as strange that Congress gets to use its lawmaking power to micromanage the executive like this. I was wondering if someone could speak more about how this status quo came about.
The constitution spells out the powers of each branch of government. Get an AI to summarize them for you if like. Where those powers intersect there is debate of course.
But "congress power is to pass laws. Laws, according to the dictionary are..." Is not the right process for determining what us congress is empowered to do.
I am not sure Yarvin, a professed monarchist, is the best person to cite on constitutional principles. You should read the Constitution. It's pretty plainly laid out in there that the legislative branch has the power of the purse. Follow that up with a basic summary of the Impoundment act (which Ghillie Dhu provided) and you can answer your question.
At the risk of being rude, this is pretty Civic 101 stuff. Didn't everyone learn this high school? Or watch school house rock?
both his parents worked for the deepstate, and he's argued that the Actual Constitution (how the USG operates in practice) is basically a skeuomorph of the Written Constitution.
I didn't go to school in America. I think it must've been covered in my education in Puerto Rico regardless, but I never paid any attention in any class (speech sucks as a way to transmit information due to slowness and unsearchability).
The history of the US does paint a different picture regarding the relationship of the branches being that straightforward. I was reading in the NYT about the horror of what Trump is doing, and very far down in the article, they mention Truman once tried to seize control of the steel mills. That puts things in perspective, since that sure does seem much more aggressive than what Trump is doing. The Supreme Court struck him down, but not before there was a funny comic about Harry the First. And I don't know how what Trump is doing stacks up to what FDR did.
And there is the Warren Court that Hanania brought up today:
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/trumps-executive-branch-revolution
That definitely seems like a period where the Judiciary branch became more powerful than the other branches, or at least, definitely more powerful than we've been used to in recent times.
Hanania interestingly concludes that we haven't seen a president this revolutionary since Lyndon Johnson, so he didn't feel he needed to go as far as FDR to find someone similar. No idea what Johnson did, I should probably check that out.
That things have been as bad or worse in that past isn't justification for today's bad behavior. It is very clear that Trump and Musk are breaking the law and taking unconstitutional actions. It doesn't matter what FDR did almost 100 years ago.
That you grew up in Puerto Rico does explain things and so I apologize for my rudeness. I was, and continue to be, frustrated by more than just your comment. There seems to be a huge deficit of civic knowledge in the US and its leading to a lot of the issues we see right now.
Well, what came before does matter on establishing whether this is unprecedented. Turning the US into a fascist dictatorship would be unprecendented and it is something many are fearing (I feel pretty sure there will continue to be real elections).
I don't feel like the fact that sometimes one branch becomes more powerful than the others is bad or worse. Yarvin sees that as part of the natural process of politics. Governments should be judged more on a performance basis rather than on whether they adhere to some procedure or other.
So moral relativism? Or just straight nihilism?
Political relativism. I don't think the structure of a government has any particular moral bearing.
ACX is a global audience, including some people who've never lived in the US and have about as much reason to understand the relationship between its branches as we have to understand the structure of the government of Nigeria. It might also include a few people who took high school US civics, but not college; some who don't watch TV, or at least not on Saturday mornings when SHR was playing; and probably more than a few who took high school civics and remember some of the catchier SHR lyrics but found a lot of disagreement between their memory and what they read about the US government doing in the news, as well as a *huge* amount of detail that's necessarily left out, and have concluded that things are quite a bit more vague and slippery than advertised in school. So any consensus here about the government is going to have measurable breadth.
Case in point: Congress can declare how much money is going to an agency; how much money is going to a specific project or initiative or contract within that agency; and could *theoretically* declare how much money is going to be spent on the refrigerator to be placed in the second floor break room of the south wing of the OPM building, but in practice they're probably going to say "N thousand to facilities management" and wisely leave finer grains to the manager there. Likewise for a lot of other things, like who exactly gets promoted to the next GS grade or how much time gets spent on adding a feature to the timesheet software versus tracking a bug. And if they tried to manage that small, the executive branch people would Look At Them Funny and hope it's just a misunderstanding and they don't have to tip the press off to shenanigans, and Congress knows that and keeps to a certain altitude.
There turns out to be a lot of discretion at play. There are sums of money Congress cares about strongly enough to itemize in one place, and equal sums they'll routinely allot in another place and leave the details to OPM. It can turn on whether someone gets some Congressional committee's attention, or one US Representative with an axe to grind, or even a sufficiently important journalist.
US Civics 101 and Schoolhouse Rock provide some valuable baselines for people to keep in mind as a sanity check, but they unfortunately often don't extend to a lot of the day to day issues that make the news.
If I didn't have the knowledge of the US governmental system of the good reasons you state, I wouldn't opine on US governmental system as confidently as many commenters here are doing.
If Congress says that certain money *must* be spent, and spent in a certain way, that should be binding. But generally Congress leaves a lot of leeway (or executive branch people take leeway anyway) about the details. For instance, Congress could never say that a specific person must get a Social Security check on April 12, 2025. Instead, the bureaucrats working in the SS office must determine if that person is eligible for SS, what the payment schedule is for April 2025 (maybe they run checks on April 18th instead), and so on.
Some funds have much more flexibility than others, often fully intentionally. $100 million for foreign aid can mean a lot of different things if the details are not spelled out, and they rarely are or can be to that level.
Now, with that said, the chief executive would have all of the power that any individual bureaucrat or agency would have in regards to how that money is or is not spent. In addition to that, any power that comes from oversight of the agency. So if a bureaucrat on any level could decide that we're spending $1 million of that money for X versus Y, then the President can also make that decision. If a bureaucrat at any level could decide *not* to spend that particular money, either at the present moment for a particular reason or generally, then the President could also make that decision. Theoretically that's what Trump and Musk are doing now.
I have no special insight into the details, and it's quite possible that this is an illegal impoundment issue. But I suspect that various people in the executive branch have been making these decisions for many years, and it's fully within Trump's power to make those same decisions without them. USAID, specifically, was not created by Congress - it was created by a JFK executive order. It was in the furtherance of Congress setting up funds that must be spent, but obviously if the actual implementation was as broad as needed to allow an EO to create an entire organization for spending it, then there's a lot of leeway permitted by Congress. Trump using that leeway should be legal. He might say "what's good for the goose is good for the gander" if you will.
Correction: the Foreign Assistance Act in 1961 was Congress telling the executive to create an agency, JFK created it and gave it a name but he was responding to Congressional action.
Yes. I think what I wrote and what you wrote do not disagree. Congress passed a law (FAA 1961) and JFK created a specific agency to carry out the law.
But do you agree that another President can’t just ignore the law and eliminate the agency? I’m not a lawyer but it seems to me that if the President can do that, he can do anything.
If Trump ultimately eliminates the agency and doesn't replace it with something that still meets the requirements of the law, that would be illegal. But if JFK can create and staff the agency based on the broad law as written (rather than Congress establishing a specific agency as part of the law) then I don't see how a future president can't make adjustments.
I have more recently seen something about a law passed during Biden's time that may place limitations on future presidents, but I'm not sure how that works with what Trump is doing. SCOTUS has already made clear that an Executive Branch agency that is not beholden to the President is unconstitutional, so "hands off don't touch" can't be a constitutional option.
I’m a legal realist and believe that the Constitution “means” whatever 5 of 9 Supreme justices say it does at any given time. At the same time, I don’t see how the government can just pretend that laws like the Impoundment one and the Foreign Assistance Act no longer count without either action by Congress or the Supreme Court.
At that point there are no laws and we might as well go rob our neighborhood liquor store, right?
From Wikipedia: "Impoundment is an act by a President of the United States of not spending money that has been appropriated by the U.S. Congress. Thomas Jefferson was the first president to exercise the power of impoundment in 1801. The power was available to all presidents up to and including Richard Nixon, and was regarded as a power inherent to the office, although one with limits. The Congressional Budget and Impoundment Control Act of 1974 was passed in response to the abuse of power under President Nixon. The Act removed that power, and Train v. City of New York (whose facts predate the 1974 Act, but which was argued before the U.S. Supreme Court after its passage) closed potential loopholes in the 1974 Act. The president's ability to indefinitely reject congressionally approved spending was thus removed." (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impoundment_of_appropriated_funds)
ISTM that there's a strong case to be made that impoundment is an inherent power of POTUS and the post-Nixon legislation restricting it is unconstitutional (N.B., the SCOTUS that heard Train was the same set of Justices that heard Roe).
This article argues, fairly persuasively in my opinion, that 19th century impoundments were generally authorized by statutory language about e.g. "authorizing and empowering" the President to spend "up to" a certain amount on a particular purpose. And in 1838, SCOTUS ruled that statutory language requiring money to be paid out as specified were binding on executive branch officials. Several 20th century Presidents before Nixon floated the idea of an inherent Presidential power of impoundment, but only Nixon pushed it and Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act shortly afterwards.
https://www.yalejreg.com/nc/the-president-has-no-constitutional-power-of-impoundment-by-zachary-s-price/
That is a strong rebuttal, thank you for sharing.
The implication of prosecutorial discretion as similarly extraconstitutional does give me pause about the degree to which this line of argument would be sufficiently persuasive to the current SCOTUS (especially given the ruling in the immunity case).
it was intended by the Founding Fathers that the House of Representatives would use their power over finances in order to influence the other branches of government. e.g. a quote from Federalist Paper 58:
"...This power over the purse may, in fact, be regarded as the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure..."
So it's by design. Many other places where "Publius" makes similar statements. This is a major and well-known part of the system of checks and balances.
On the other hand, if the executive can disregard laws from Congress, particularly on an issue as fundamental as the budget, then the executive would be massively strengthened. This would also be pretty perverse
Well, from a completely different perspective:
There are constant complaints that people are pushing local politics into the federal government, where there are massive conflicts because the federal government oversees more than one locality. These complaints are generally accompanied by the observation that you can't get anyone to vote in local elections (for example, state governor; federal senator) because nobody cares about anything but the presidential election.
I suggest conceptualizing this differently than people usually seem to: because no one will vote for any office other than president, that office is where all of the political power exists. Is it a problem for political power to be concentrated in the office that is subject to meaningful elections?
Don’t hundreds of Congress-critters collectively represent our big diverse country better than one guy who might have lost the popular vote?
Depends. Who voted for the Congressmen?
The voting pools aren't even similar.
Well, the current approval rating of the Executive is currently 49%, and the approval rating of Congress is 24%. So, maybe it's not perverse? Maybe it's the opposite of perverse?
The Rock (Dwayne Johnson) has an 82% approval rating. Should he be made king?
King is a bridge too far, but if you told me that in 2028 we would all smell what the Rock is cooking, I would believe you. At this point we all have to acknowledge that the WWE-White House pipeline is real.
I'm sure it would go down if he ran for office...
Congress (well, the House) was elected at the exact same time as Trump was. Should Trump have lost the right to govern in term 1 when his approval rating was terrible?
Well sure if you ignore the text of the Constitution of the United States and think of operating the Republic as if Madison and Hamilton had come up with something similar to Facebook and they wanted to let ‘likes’ from the honeymoon period of a presidency guide us, you might have a point.
So yeah, no, if you give it a moment’s thought it’s pretty perverse.
BTW Trump’s ‘honeymoon’ approval rating is historically low. Biden’s approval rating was 57% at this point in his term. Barack Obama’s was 68%, Jimmy Carter’s was 66%.
A lot of commenters here would gain a lot by just reading the constitution and taking basic civics class. Amazing how many people don't understand the basics of our government.
And some other commenters would gain a lot by realizing that the constitution is nothing more than a rotting piece of parchment. Don't be surprised when people forsake a system that failed them.
It's one thing for them to openly rebuke that system; but, to support its destruction while claiming to uphold it is a hypocrisy that I just can't stand. If they want an autocrat they should just say that instead of coming up with bogus reasons this is all in accordance with our accepted laws.
When Congress passed that law, there was a president who signed it. That means something about the relationship between the executive branch and the legislative branch, right? If he decides he can kick that law to the curb, he is not only throwing a finger at Congress, but at the president who was in power when the law was enacted, and at the judicial branch as well because they are the ones who are supposed to sort out laws for us. In other words, he’s throwing his finger at the whole thing.
I think you are starting with a fundamentally flawed model that is something corporate like a board of directors and a CEO/company president. In the corporate model, the board is responsible for high level governance decisions and, to some extent, the overall mission/strategic direction, but the lead operating executive makes the tactical and operational decisions for implementation. (Side note: this is a simplistic model, even in the corporate world)
A better model of the (original) intention is to think of the legislative and executive branches as co-equal, each with specific areas of power only held by that branch and other areas of overlapping responsibility (especially to create checks and balances.)
If you want to trace through references, you might start with Advisory Opinions latest podcast, at 20:50: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/youre-fired/id1490993194?i=1000688814817
They cite:
2013 DC Circuit Court decision by Kavanaugh
1975 Train vs City of New York
1971 Office of Legal Counsel/William Rehnquist memo
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I am reminded of the aphorism, “Those who know don’t talk, and those who talk don’t know”.
I have struggled with my weight my whole life, and I'd appreciate some new ideas/frames of mind on how to approach it.
The story so far:
- Standard-issue fat kid through my teens.
- Got problematically fat in my mid 20's, got catastrophically fat during early months of Covid
- Throughout this time had tried various diets, never with real energy or intensity
- During Covid got diagnosed with sleep apnea, got the CPAP, started sleeping well for the first time in my adult life
- Burst of new energy and fear of dying (I had hit 415 lbs) got me started on calorie counting, took it seriously, lost 130 lbs over the next 2 years. Also started lifting, took it seriously. Overall felt amazing.
- Met my future wife and got married shortly after
- Weight loss plateaued and then reversed due to it becoming much harder to eat at a deficit now that my maintenance calories had dropped so significantly, coupled with a general feeling of complacency and happiness in my new marriage
- Gained 15 pounds in year one of marriage, had a child
- Getting to the gym and taking eating right seriously got really hard due to lack of time and energy, gained 20 pounds in year two
- Had another child, did not make things easier, have gained another 10 pounds so far in year three
- Tried generic Ozempic, did not work at all. Made me sick, did not make me want to eat less or think less about about food
- Am currently on Metformin
I am now 335 lbs. For the sake of my wife and kids, I really want to get this under control. Things I am considering: Name-brand (really expensive!) Zepbound, and failing that, Bariatric surgery.
If you have some suggestions for other tools/methods/ideas I can try, I am very open to them.
As a single data point small piece of the puzzle thing-that-worked-for-me:
Psyllium Husk fibre supplement (ie Metamucil or similar). I dropped 30lbs in a year (starting at 265lbs). Plateaued after that but at least didn't come back on.
Not intentionally, it was recommended for a different issue. For the first time in my life I wasn't hungry all the time.
Try the surgery.
I'm on Team Bariatric Surgery. It sounds like you'd probably be a good candidate, so probably don't waste anymore time.
I had bariatric surgery (the sleeve, aka stomach stapling) 13 years ago, went from 250 > 145 at my lowest, and have put back on about 25 over the pandemic and my break-up after the pandemic (but have been maintaining 175 for over a year, not gaining. I can live with it, but I'd prefer to get back near my low). The weight gain was from sheer self-indulgence, partly from getting used to eating delicious stuff again with my boyfriend during the pandemic (though I didn't put on any weight while with him), then later not wanting to be bothered with eating inconveniently small portions semi-frequently. Plus some general lethargy from a couple of illnesses. My eating and exercise habits aren't what they should be, but they are still much better than they were before my surgery.
I needed the *very* high stakes of preparing for and complying with a surgical intervention to overcome the temptation of tasty food. Without stakes as high as "my surgery might not go well!" and "I'll feel uncomfortably sick and be malnourished if I don't eat right after the surgery" as dieting motivation, I was really good at procrastinating and rationalizing around just...not dieting in my day-to-day.
Usually bariatric patients have to do 6-12 months of prep work before a surgery, so I say...just get the ball rolling now. The success outcomes of bariatric surgery are much, much higher than white-knuckle diet and exercise, so just go ahead and do what works. Better to "cheat" weight loss with a bariatric surgery and succeed than fail at dieting.
I was in similar spot, lost over 100 lbs. I was lucky to be in a position where I could focus on it, but here's what worked for me:
- low carb diet, and learning variety of food I could eat and cook for myself. wraps, fajitas, pizza on low carb tortilla shells, lots roasted chicken, chicken wings, grilled chicken, lots of stir fry vegetables, cured sliced hams are easy/useful, salad, low carb chili I make regularly (go easy on beans which have the carbs).... probably missing things - bacon / eggs if you do breakfast. radishes are great snacks as are nuts if you don't eat too many.
- environmental control - not having any of the wrong food around, and making sure I didn't put myself in bad situations. (I will eat poorly if I get hungry). Travelling and eating out is very difficult, so I often took stuff with me. Some options I used in restaurant - naked buffalo wings, wendy's chili, meat + salad if sitdown.
- I exercised consistently in the morning for an extended period using exercise bike, I think 45 minutes to an hour. Often did a second ride later in the day. I'm not sure how important that is - diet seemed more important to stay on track, but exercise helps blood sugar. I also went through long period of walking up to 2hrs a day when I lived at a place that permitted. I currently walk each day, and that does help with blood sugar levels also -which helps appetite - but again not messing up the diet is more important to adhere to imho.
- Getting your weight down a bit from where you are will likely help blood sugar alot. Between 330 and down to 280 I noticed big difference in blood sugar stability, and at some point in there I went off metformin.
- drank diet drink, not many fruits work, but strawberries and blueberries are option
Hope this helps, but it did work for me. I weighed regularly to keep myself focused, and I did hit frustrating plateaus, but eventually things kicked back in.
I lost a lot of weight (230->195) when I started lifting weights seriously. I’d highly suggest 2-4 hours a week with a personal trainer. You’ll feel better and your body will work better regardless of what happens with your weight, plus it seems to lead to weight loss—far more than would be accomplished just by the calories burned in the activity itself.
You have to eat a ton of protein to make progress, which might make it easier to eat fewer calories overall.
Another commenter mentioned jumping jacks; I wouldn’t recommend dynamic loads with your body weight until your weight is lower, seems like an easy way to injure your joints. Instead, do kettlebells or another resistance modality where you can gradually increase the weight. A trainer is invaluable to teach good form, make sure you’re not risking injury, and make sure you’re continuing to make progress. Plus it’s way easier to put in the work when you have an appointment and are paying. Finally, a trainer can keep giving you new forms of exercise to keep things fun.
Consider drastic elimination diets? They spray plants with poison, you dont get to know when they swap poisons around, or even would poisons they tend to feed animals in your area and its unlikely you can track one that happens to effect you more then the average over likely weight gain which may take a week to see.
> I am now 335 lbs. For the sake of my wife and kids, I really want to get this under control. Things I am considering: Name-brand (really expensive!) Zepbound, and failing that, Bariatric surgery.
Everyone else has made great suggestions, so I'll just hit the things that nobody else hit upon yet:
1. Get a treadmill desk
Exercise is hard because adherence is hard - but do you know what’s easy? Slowly walking on a treadmill, in your own house, wearing whatever you want, while YOU’RE getting screen time, whether working or recreational.
The treadmill desks I’ve bought are UNDOUBTEDLY the single highest “unit of value in life per dollar spent” things I’ve ever owned in my entire life.
And if you’re like me and are always thinking “eh, I can do a smidge more than last time, why not?” and hit a single up-button on either speed or elevation, over time it can actually burn significant calories too.
I just found out recently I’d *inadvertently* been burning an extra 700-800 calories per day, while walking at an 8-10% incline for a few more hours.
2. Bariatric surgery
Is positive on costs / benefits, but you probably want gastric bypass vs banding.
The Longitudinal Assessment of Bariatric Surgery study was able to keep track of 83% of a 1500 person sample who had gastric bypass for 7 years, and found that 7 years later, they had maintained a mean weight loss of 38kg (83.6 lbs), or around 28% of body weight.
For gastric banding, 7 years after surgery mean weight loss was 18kg, or 15% of body weight. Both had lower dyslipidemia at the 7 year mark, but only gastric bypass patients had lower rates of diabetes and hypertension.
Risk-wise, bariatric surgeries have a 17% complication rate, a 7% “needs resurgery” rate, and incremental mortality rates of ~.31% after thirty days. This is honestly probably fine. That’s 3.1 out of 1,000, and there’s 250k bariatric surgeries per year, so around 750 annual incremental deaths. The average one-year mortality rate for a 45 year old with a BMI of 45 is ~.9%, so not a ton of incremental risk from the surgery, and there’s some evidence that bariatric surgeries have beneficial effects on all cause mortality - the gastric bypass lowers diabetes rates, hazard ratios for cardiac mortality and myocardial infarction are 0.48—0.53 post surgery, and their 10 year cancer mortality rates are only 0.8% vs 1.4% in controls matched to characteristics who did not receive a surgery.
These are both from a post I did about weight loss, if you want some of the footnotes and studies, they're in there.
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/the-maximally-pessimistic-obesity
Thanks for this. Someone else linked your article, mostly things I knew already but still informative and well sourced.
I actually tried a treadmill desk! My plan was to work on it, but I could never get the ergonomics right for walking and typing comfortably at the same time, and more importantly, walking on the constrained surface of the treadmill exacerbated a persistent foot pain issue (corns). This meant that I eventually avoided going on it.
As for bariatric surgery, a realization that it was my only option to avoid dying is what kicked off my last burst of energy to calorie count and work out seriously. Maybe it'll work again!
> I actually tried a treadmill desk! My plan was to work on it, but I could never get the ergonomics right for walking and typing comfortably at the same time, and more importantly, walking on the constrained surface of the treadmill exacerbated a persistent foot pain issue (corns). This meant that I eventually avoided going on it.
Just one thought here - because it really is a good way to burn significant calories as a "background" thing without active conscious effort - there's a large and noticeable difference between the chintzy Chinese "treadmill desks" most people consider / try, and an actually good set up.
I've bought and used 4 or 5 different treadmill desks at this point. The best one by far has been a giant, 800+ pound commercial-grade Freemotion treadmill I bought from a gym that was going out of business and custom built an adjustable desk around. The difference is huge - the walking surface is wider and longer, and it actually has a suspension which mitigates the impact of footfall. It also has the ability to go up to an 18% incline grade, which is crazy, but incline (at 8%+) is how to actually burn significant calories.
It cost WAY more than a chintzy Chinese desk, but it's quality and ease of use and quality of life is much, much higher.
When comparing treadmill desks, the higher cost gets you second guessing yourself. When considering the costs and risks of surgery or the increased all cause mortality from being obese and sedentary, I think it's a pretty clear win, and might be worth considering.
Definitely don't do the band - like breast implants, they have to be replaced!
I had the sleeve, it was a great middle ground between band and bypass.
OK. I brainstormed.
-Try some of the other drugs in Ozempic family. Seems reasonable to hope one would have fewer side effects and better effects. Also, I read some speculation that the most recent one in use (or maybe it’s one that’s about to come out) looks like it might have stronger weight loss effects. Not sure if that’s valid or just hype, though.
-If you are taking an antidepressant or other psych med with a weight gain side effect, consider stopping drug. Obviously, do not do this if without the drug you are at risk of having major problems. If you have been taking a med for mild to moderate anxiety, try substituting CBT for the med.
-If you do not have any tendency to abuse drugs, consider taking amphetamine at dose prescribed for ADD. These drugs reduce appetite and increase energy for most people You will prob have to claim ADD symptoms to get it. I would not suggest this to someone whose weight problem was not severe.
-Consider spending money to clear more time for you to exercise. For ex, hire someone to help with child care or housework, eat out more, pay for grocery delivery, etc.
-Do something radical to lock yourself in to exercising— for ex, get rid of your car and bike. I did that 5 years ago, for the sake of fitness rather than weight loss, and it has worked out well. Or do some partial version where you simply swear to do something, for ex park car 2 miles from work every single day and walk the remainder. Or get an active dog that will drive the family crazy if not taken for long walks and runs daily.
-Rather than try to exert more willpower, do radical things to reduce temptation. For ex, have absolutely nothing in the house that is either high calorie or a moderate -calorie thing you like enough to eat in large quantities (things like pasta are often in this category). The rest of the family will have to go out for ice cream and favorite hi-cal meals.
-Use Beeminder.
> If you do not have any tendency to abuse drugs, consider taking amphetamine
aint you a licensed doc?(i.e. bound and controlled, your free speech gets limited by "best practice" opinions)
Jeez Monkyyy it seems to me you are in a position to answer the question you have asked on your own. You have enough information from my previous posts, my present post, and general knowledge.
(1) I am not an MD.
(2) When I gave the advice I did, I did not mention the degree I do have, because I did not want to claim some extra authority for my ideas, but just to present them as the ideas of a fellow member of the forum.
(3) Even if I were an MD, life furnishes abundant evidence that MD’s are not compelled to toe the party line regarding drugs. Youtube and Twitter and other sites have many MD’s expressing unconventional ideas. Some of these ideas, such as that the covid vax killed more people than covid did, are obviously false and harmful. Some are questionable, ideas that most would disagree with. A few are probably excellent, though unconventional, advice. It is clear from the presence of lots and lots of these MD’s online spouting all kinds of unconventional ideas that US MD’s, at least, do have free speech. How has this escaped your notice?
I do not know what the rules are for MD’s when they are expressing ideas publicly, as opposed to doing a patient consult for which they are paid. My guess is that there are no rules, but that it would be possible for the law or the licensing board to take action against somebody who was spouting godawful harmful nonsense online. In my profession, there are vague guidelines about being a good and honest representative of the professional even in one’s personal life and in communications to the public. Those guidelines are so loose that I would have to be promoting something awful like armed robbery or use of heroin for it to be a violation. And in fact I do think the info I gave, which is that amphetamines might help, but the user risks dependence or addiction, was good.
(4) Even if my statement about amphetamines was questioned, I would be prepared to defend it. It did not say to use amphetamines, I suggested OP consider it, but avoid using them if they had had any problems with drug abuse. When I answer requests for information on this forum I assume OP is a responsible adult unless they sound cracked. I do not think it is wrong to give people like that information about something risky that might be worth the risk, and leave it up to their judgment whether to try what I have told them about. OP sounds intelligent and responsible, so I gave him all the info I have, including info about risks of some approaches. And OP’s weight problem will shorten his life, and meanwhile interfere with quality of life. Under these circumstances, I think it’s reasonable for someone to consider solutions that have some risk.
(5) I also suggested several other things.
Seems to me that all this should have been evident to you.
> Seems to me that all this should have been evident to you.
Im not in favor of the current policy nor advice; but as I understand it, "best practice" hates the old weight lost methods despite them being known to work(granted cigarettes also are known to work, 12 cups of coffee of caffeine with amphetamines pills or whatever the current body builders dose with are just dangerous) and its risky to suggest alternative treatments in light of politically favored ones. See legal troubles of people suggesting ivermectin after the corona vax. While the bone lost drug isnt nearly as pushed as the vax, I would think its politically favored enough and you took a surprising risk here for a hill I wouldn't die on.
> In my profession, there are vague guidelines about being a good and honest representative of the professional even in one’s personal life and in communications to the public. Those guidelines are so loose that I would have to be promoting something awful like armed robbery or use of heroin for it to be a violation.
details can escape me easily but I think this is relivent
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/jordan-peterson-court-challenge-rejection-1.7086681
> life furnishes abundant evidence that MD’s are not compelled to toe the party line regarding drugs
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ivermeticin-arkansas-inmates-covid-19-doctor-eva-madison-fda-warnings/
> How has this escaped your notice?
I see allot of soft power being wielded towards people I agree with; while I can disregard soft power, Im unhinged by most estimates, and its still hard, and Im quite broke, I cant know how much of that is me picking the wrong battle at the wrong time publicly.
Soft power is still power, chilling effects are still censorship, while if you find yourself willing to face any legal danger to state your opinion, good on you, I would've skipped my least favorite class of drugs.
This forum is a very different place from youtube, etc; I did not deliver my suggestion in the role of an expert; and the idea I suggested that is mildly edgy is way way less extreme and politically hot than what got these 2 guys in trouble. The only soft power move being attempted in this situation is yours.
I suspect that he may have rather idiosyncratic nutritional issues, but you may be interested to check out the guy who writes the Experimental Fat Loss blog: https://www.exfatloss.com. His go-to diet involves a small amount of ground beef with some green leaves and tomato sauce, and pretty much all other calories from as much heavy cream as he wants to eat, which seems to allow him to lose weight without needing to exert superhuman willpower.
His leading hypothesis is that the modern diet contains much more polyunsaturated fatty acids (particularly linoleic acid) than a few generations ago, and that that is what is dysregulating many people’s weight.
Two comments.
First, what you're going through is totally normal. Everyone who has lost significant weight has experienced a bounce back. There's lots of theories why, no one knows why for sure, but it happens to everyone. You've only gained back ~33% of what you lost. Regaining 50-60% of your weight would not be unusual. It's not good, you should try to beat the odds, but it's not unusual.
Second, how heavy is your wife and how does she feel about weight loss? Have you discussed it with her?
Look, you need to eat clean and for that, your wife has to be on board. I can almost guarantee you're eating too much processed food. At 335 lbs, your maintenance calories are probably north of 3000/day. To be adding 1.5-2 pounds a month, you gotta be getting near 4000/day.
For reference, if you ate the McDonald's quarter pounder meal with fries and coke for every meal, you'd be at 3150/day. So you gotta be eating something on top of that.
Conversely, a pound of chicken breast is ~700 calories, 2 pounds of broccoli is ~300 calories, a pound of white rice is ~600 calories, and hot sauce has 0 calories. 4 pounds of food for 1600 calories. I know you're not eating that clean because you're not eating 8-10 pounds of physical matter a day. Your stomach ain't built like that; your sphincter ain't built like that.
But she's probably eating what you're eating. And she's probably comfortable with it. And there's no sustainable future where you're eating clean and she's eating your current diet. Saints can't eat white rice with veggies and chicken breast across the table from a pepperoni pizza.
The good news is that, at your weight and caloric intake, you can probably eat really good and still lose weight. You don't need to eat a pound of broccoli a day. You'd almost certainly lose weight on 2500-2800 calories/day and you can fit steak and ice cream and lots of great stuff in that budget. But you gotta get your wife on board. When I think of 4000 calorie days, I think of crushing a sleeve of Oreos. Your vice might be different but whatever it is, you got one, you probably can't have that in the house, and she's gotta be on board with that.
I eat plenty of junk, and I've taken steps to reduce my access to junk. But my challenge is that I want to eat all the time, and I don't have the option of creating the perfect environment for myself in the place where I spend 35%+ of my waking hours. The office is just stocked with crap.
As WoolyAI says, what you are going through is very typical. And it's unfortunate that your office environment is largely out of your control. I sympathize and hope you can find ways to make progress.
Have you worked with a therapist that specializes in distorted eating? They may be able to help you develop strategies to reset your relationship with food. You don't mention it but if you have any anxiety or past trauma that could be contributing to making a food a source of comfort they could help with this also.
Additionally, a coach or trainer could help with accountability and give you someone else who is "in your corner" and rooting for you. It's hard to make big changes like this alone!
I am also not against the surgical or medical interventions you mention. There is no silver bullet unfortunately.
Also, I think you should take a minute to appreciate that even when going through some very stressful periods over the last few years, you have only gained about 35lbs! I am sure it feels like a failure, but thats not atypical for someone of your age and period of life. I am at a similar point in life and gained 15 pounds last year too. You can do this!
I appreciate the kind words.
If you want long-term weight loss, you need long-term change of what you eat, how you eat, and how much you exercise. The fundamentals of the whole thing are "calories in, calories out", that's the easy part. Losing weight is mostly a mind game. It's also a marathon, not a sprint, so pace yourself accordingly.
What to eat:
* Research the caloric density of every single food item and meal you typically consume, repeatedly, to get an intuitive feeling for the values so you can properly compare different and new foods. Don't rely on marketing/packaging either, READ THE LABELS for cold, hard numbers. If you live in some backwards, consumer-hating legislation that doesn't require such labels, research on the internet.
* As far as possible, prepare your own meals (within the family), so you have the best control over the ingredients. Look into meal prepping if you don't have time every day of the week. Make restaurant food or other unlabeled food the exception.
* Half the battle is won in the grocery store. You can't eat what you don't have in the house, and you don't have in the house what you don't buy.
How to eat:
* Make rules about eating, and make them effective, but not so restrictive that you can't realistically follow them most of the time. That might cause frustration and regression into the habits that got you into obesity in the first place. Example: Make a caloric goal for the day/week depending on your age, height, physical activity and other pertinent factors, but don't stress about keeping a food or weight diary.
* Reduce the worst offenders (identified above) to "cheat day" treats, especially drinks (e.g. sugary, alcoholic). Don't stress about breaking the rules unless breaking the rules becomes the new, old norm.
Exercise:
* Anything at all will help, as long as you do it somewhat regularly. Take a walk of whatever duration you're comfortable with, every other day. Do basic gymnastics inside your own home if outside is not an option, like sit-ups or jumping jacks. Anything to get the literal juices flowing. Increase intensity as your motivation and physical condition allows. Don't stress about missing a day or two unless it becomes the new, old norm.
* If you need to reframe exercise as something outside your normal life, get some kind of gadget, like a fitness wristwatch, exercise bike, or gym membership.
Mind games:
* Whatever rules about eating you have, question them. For example: Do you really need breakfast, dinner, lunch each day? Or will two of them suffice? Maybe even only one? Example: I do 24 hour fasting: Eat one meal per day, and nothing else.
* Keep the rules you follow simple. The simpler, the better, as long as they're still effective. This will immediately identify any other calorie intake as self-fraudulent and allows you to think of alternative action it before you break them. Don't stress about still breaking a good rule unless it becomes the new, old norm.
* When a hunger pang happens outside of your meal times, you can ride it out: It will typically disappear within minutes, half an hour at most. Or you can prepare a big jug of low-calorie drink (e.g. water, water with a shot of lemon juice, unsweetened tea) and take a big gulp every time just to shut the stomach up.
* Half the battle is won in the grocery store: In my experience, being steadfast in the store is much easier than at home. You can't eat what you don't have, and you don't have what you don't buy.
* Don't stress too much about your every day weight, or what food or exercise might have which effect on it. Weight yourself every couple days and get a gist of where the trend is going. Slow and steady progress is what you're aiming for. Even just 2 pounds per month will be noticable in the long run and tell you that you're doing good at a sustainable rate.
OMAD can suit some preferences, but it's an overkill prescription. Often times those with a weight problem *don't* only consume 3 square meals, they snack, particularly at night. Consuming food earlier in the day has its metabolic benefits. In and of itself there is zero problem with 3 meals, and it more likely suits family-oriented lifestyle.
I agree, OMAD requires much more flexibility than other rules. If you can pull it off, though, the advantage is that it makes it maximally hard to cheat yourself with snacks. With 3 meals a day, it's much easier to convince yourself that if you snack, you can make it up with the next meal or whatever because you still have caloric budget left. With OMAD, that is never the case, and you will always be aware that any snack outside your one meal is just that, a snack that you can then more consciously decide whether you really want it or not. Since weight loss is mostly a mind game, saving a snack from that mental advantage might well outweigh metabolic advantages from eating 2 or 3 meals.
Basically, I try to optimize for the mind game and keep the metabolic side as simple as possible even at the risk of being slightly sub optimal there.
This is essentially what I was doing when I was losing weight steadily. I've just had an extremely hard time getting back into this routine
Seconding all of this.
From my own experience with losing weight: Nothing beats counting calories.
As for hunger: that's the feeling of calories leaving your body. Embrace it. Your animal brain will tell you that's a bad thing, and that you need to STOP IT NOW! It's lying to, ignore it.
Some low-hanging fruit if it hasn't applied yet: increase ratio of protein and fiber in your diet (more than you would think), consume whole foods, and restrict the amount of sweet and processed foods in the household (if they are around, you *will* eat them, purchase/make some alternatives). Also when counting calories, opt for a modest deficit to avoid tanking metabolism and keep hunger in check. Don't try to rush it, 0.5-1 lb a week is sufficient.
I've known people who've done all the above (bariatric surgery, drugs) and regained weight. Useful as that may be, it doesn't necessarily work, because a) it does not address emotional catalysts, addiction, habit, and b) it's still trivially easy to overconsume junk food after a recovery period.
A bag of chips is 1200 calories, which is as much as 17 apples. The hit of salty/sugary + fatty is moreish, and overrides satiety signals on top of being non-satiating in the first place.
Don't need to go crazy on exercise, but exercise in general correlated with long-term success. There could be several reasons for this, among: a) it protects lean body mass (muscle *and* organs) when losing weight and by extension metabolism, and b) relieves stress and helps regulate blood sugar and hunger
Highly recommend Layne Norton's book Fat Loss Forever
The best diet is the one you can sustain. Most people who diet *do* lose weight, but they gain it back, because they did not sustain it. This is a complete lifestyle change, once you hit maintenance calories you can't go back to consuming what you were before. Whether you gain weight back will not be a question of "if", it will be a question of "how fast".
edit: you may also benefit from seeing a therapist. They can equip you with tools through e.g. CBT to mitigate things like guilt, perspective, emotional eating, etc.
Appreciate all this, will check out the book
On Ozempic: Could it be the dose?
My cousin tried it and felt extremely sick, then discontinued it.
I tried a shot just for curiosity, but took the absolute minimum. One notch on the pen.
That made me _slightly_ nauseous for a couple of days and not hungry for >1 week.
When I spoke to my cousin, she had taken around 4-5 times what I took. So I wouldn't be surprised if more people try too big an initial dose and give up on it.
I ramped up as recommended and got sick from the get go unfortunately
I also responded in the survey that I had a very negative experience with Aya.
First ceremony was perfectly nice, very interesting, very unique and beautiful experience.
Second ceremony... I thought I was experiencing a brain aneurism, I sobered up entirely from the pain, I thought I had >80% chance that I was dying that night. No ambulances were coming. No hallucinations or anything like that, only pain.
It is a really intense feeling to be sure you'll die.
It was relatively brief in terms of aftereffects though - maybe a few days of insane hangover, then an upswing of several weeks of diffuse happiness to make up for it.
I have no experience with psychedelics, but even the best stories of taking Ayahuasca I have heard seem very unpleasant to me. So much vomiting and exhaustion and existential dread. Even if I was guaranteed the most amazing divine experience I am not sure I would do it. Especially when alternatives like mushrooms don't appear to have such unpleasantries.
I’m not asking for contact information here but is it possible to do this without leaving the United States?
Yes, I have acquaintances that are doing it. One gets it through a wealthy, well-connected friend. One took it with an underground psychedelic therapist. The friend who took it found the woman and the setting to be safe and sane.
Thanks. I had some good contacts with the Psychedelic Society of Minnesota but the head of that group isn’t terribly together and there haven’t been any meet ups in over a year.
I’ll figure it out. It wasn’t that damn hard to cultivate my on psilocybin mushrooms.
I no longer need any SSRIs for my long term OCD after several self guided sessions with those. It’s just no longer an issue. Pretty amazing.
It would be no financial hardship to fly to South America to try the ayawaska. I’d want to find a place that keeps the woo bs to a minimum though.
Wow, congratulations on your progress
getting free of OCD. By any chance would you be willing to describe your experience to someone in the field? As you probably know, many professionals are extremely interested in psychedelic experience as a
way of breaking free of painful prisons the mind has generated. I could steer you to a researcher who would be fascinated and not skeptical. And of course you could remain anonymous.
I found out through the friend with the wealthy contacts that in parts of S America ayahuasca is used in conventional churches, and is not thought of as disreputable and dangerous. That seems
promising, tho I expect you would not want to take it at a
church service either. But maybe it’s possible
to buy it legally, and find a local reliable source of advice about dose etc. There may also be ayahuasca retreats for people from the US.
Wait, are you talking about Christian churches, native religions, or something openly syncretistic? Because if those are Christian churches, that's *very* surprising.
Yes, Christian churches. Surprised the person who told me about it, also surprised me. He went to a privately organized ayahuasca retreat, and one of the two retreat leaders was a woman from S America who attended a church that used ayahuasca. My friend actually spoke with her about it. She was a well-educated, friendly person, and explained that what her church did was not uncommon. The doses they used at the church were lower, and very rarely caused the infamous vomiting side effect or made people so high they could not carry on with the prayers etc.
The middle east seems like a difficult to predict place right now. Iran might race for a nuclear weapon, or not. Israel and Saudi might normalize relations, but Saudi wants a Palestinian state on a short timetable and for Israel to do that it needs a Palestinian group willing to give up a claim to Israel proper lands and police against violent Palestinians who do, meanwhile no one has the capability or willingness to get rid of Hamas, and also much of Gaza infrastructure has been leveled but won't be rebuilt without Hamas gone and/or a large civilian displacement, which Jordan/Egypt couldn't risk a regime collapse over to accommodate.
And that's not even mentioning public opinion polarization. Middle East/some of Europe seems to think Gazans survived a genocide and Oct 7th had minimal war crimes, Israel thinks it fought a just war that minimized civilian casualties at tradeoffs to strategic objectives no other country or military in history would have agreed to due to Jewish culture/international pressure. I see virtually no discourse on either side to pressure their politicians to give the other concessions. As in, the people in Israel pushing for a Palestinian state have vanished under the belief it would be eventually used to wage war on Israel proper. And the Arab street seems to think that this war proves Israel needs to be dismantled.
Is there a simple model for how this resolves?
Well in about 1 billion years the earth will be too hot to be habitable so that would be a pretty guaranteed resolution.
An AGI takeover of the planet will lead to the Israel/Palestine dispute being solved much sooner than that.
One additional source of uncertainty is UNRWA being forced out; In the short term this will have very unpredictable effects, but in the long term it might be a major driver for peace (since it removes one major financial incentive palestinians have to keep claiming a right to destroy Israel).
I do not believe that UNRWA is in any danger of being "forced out"; it will continue to operate in Gaza and elsewhere for many years to come. And in the vanishingly unlikely event that Trump does manage to ethnically cleanse Gaza, UNRWA will then be working wherever the Gazans wind up. And it will not be working to integrate them into their new "home"; AIUI their charter specifically prohibits that.
A simple model would be: this continues to be a simmering pot of resentment and violence for the next 10...20 years; beyond that things are just unpredictable in general.
Website where you can use gpt4o and claude 3.5 and deepseek r1 & v3 and gemini 1206 anonymously and free. It puts all their answers side by side. https://dontseek.com
I asked "who are you" and deepseek v3 immediately said "I'm ChatGPT, an AI developed by OpenAI."... is this an issue with deepseek or with this dontseek website?
the model itself does that
Wild but not that surprising! Thanks for this, not sure that I would have sought out deepseek to try at all if it wasn't for this.
Going directly to DeepSeek, I got:
Question: “Who are you?”
Reply: “Greetings! I'm DeepSeek-V3, an artificial intelligence assistant created by DeepSeek. I'm at your service and would be delighted to assist you with any inquiries or tasks you may have.”
I assume that the DeepSeek V3 training data includes ChatGPT output, so your answer was likely in the training data. Perhaps you got a low probability response. Alternatively, it’s possible that DeepSeek is still being refined using reinforcement learning. OpenAI did that for a while after making ChatGPT public.
> is this an issue with deepseek or with this dontseek website?
Deepseek was fine tuned via OpenAI ChatGPT elicitation. Basically they were piggybacking on OpenAI's work to reduce the "mind space" of the Deepseek LLM in intelligent ways by using GPT elicitation to take advantage of all the knowledge / connections / mindspace paring GPT has already done.
They did have some genuine architectural insights on top of that, they weren't solely riding OpenAI's coat-tails, but they were at least piggybacking on a fair amount of their work by doing this.
Right... but answering "ChatGPT" to "who are you" seems like the very first thing you'd want to paper over when, uh, "piggybacking" like this, no? Have other people been getting that sort of behavior when asking deepseek similar questions?
Yeah, I think they just straight up didn't care about hiding it.
And yeah, other people have found the same thing, it's part of what inspired OpenAI to dig into it, and discover that they fine tuned off of them.
This is a pretty neat site (minor quibble that sideways scrolling is pretty bad, took me a while to figure out you have to click on the response boxes). But I'm glad you posted it, I haven't used claude-3.5-sonnet (or possibly any Claude) before and an amazed at how bad it is, probably at the level of Gemini which is just dreadful.
"Pretty neat site" actually means a lot to me, thanks for trying it
Being trad is part of a three-horned trilemma, but I don't know if anyone has ever identified it as such:
1. Follow traditional values! Long-lasting values are likely to be better than new values because they have stood the test of time.
2. Follow new values! If values have changed, it's probably because the old values had been tried and found flawed. Your best shot is to follow the latest trends.
3. Just make up your own mind on a case by case basis. This is the most tempting and yet somehow the dumbest of the three -- instead of relying on the collective wisdom of past or present millions, you're just going to listen to one random jerk with no particular qualifications apart from the fact that he happens to be yourself.
I don't have a good way out of this, but I just wanted to try framing it that way and see what happens.
You’re omitting from 1 one of the problems you put in 3— who’s to say that whoever you’re speaking with is sharing values that have “stood the test of time” and not just something people have done for the past few decades while claiming it’s hundreds of years old? This is a lot more common than you might think in discussions of tradition
3. Isn't nearly as bad as you make it out to be. Most cultures explain and argue for their norms. As such, you can critically evaluate their arguments, and apply the norm when and if the argument is valid.
If you identify as "Trad" and aren't doing 1 then how can you be "Trad"? (putting aside the myriad potential answers to what is tradition/traditional)
Melvin is saying that being trad constitutes occupying prong one of the three-horned trilemma. Thus it is "part of the trilemma".
> Being trad is part of a three-horned trilemma, but I don't know if anyone has ever identified it as such:
One option you didn't articulate:
4. Look at the other people in your social graph who are "winning" by whatever metrics you care about (career, relationship, kids, etc), and then do what they do.
It avoids the arbitrariness of 3, and probably has a dash of 1. And hopefully you're able to discern how alike those people you admire are to you, to understand where you can / should make exceptions in their practices.
At the least, it gives you a direction on "things to try in 3) with a higher probability of success."
Isn't that just displacing the original three options by one degree? In that case, you're hoping that the people around you have already selected and then you're just second-hand choosing 1, 2, or 3. If literally everyone is doing that, then it's probably just 3.
I think it's just straightforward "look at what's working in the world for people like yourself." There is still incremental wisdom and lift you can aggregate from other people's choices and engagement with the same problems. Think of the "rest of the world" as a giant Monte Carlo simulator - if you now select from the "people like you" and have a high enough N to extract signal from the noise, you have actually unearthed truths about what works in the overall environment for people like you.
I don't have any sort of optimal solution, but it seems reasonable to me to mostly follow common practice. We live in a mostly functional society, so the usual way of doing things is mostly ok.
But people occasionally find better ways to do things, either overall, or just something that works better for them. So with that in mind, experiment cautiously with other ways of doing things in areas where common practice seems really dubious or really annoying to you.
This way of doing things means you'll mostly be doing things in a decent way, and allows for the possibility of occasional improvements.
When it comes to values, I don’t see much choice, but number three.
You are missing a crucial point: Being "trad" is a good old flex. For example, a trad wife that makes breakfast cereal from scratch instead of just buying them from the store sends the message that she has all the time in the world for activities that are technically productive but so low-efficiency that they amount to leisure, just without the social stigma of actual leisure. Which in turn means to convey that her husband earns enough money to comfortably support an entire family, which is a distant dream of bygone days for most people.
Point in favor of option 3: You (as in the general "you") probably aren't on the exact median across every relevant character trait, so the averaged wisdom of the masses will never apply without limits and bounds. That "random jerk" might just be the one most qualified to decide which values are best for him in his life situation at his age. Look at where groups of people sharing certain values tend to wind up at different stages of their lives, and judge for yourself if that's where you want to wind up as well.
That being said, following the "latest trends" is almost never a good idea. Let others try out new value combinations first, and see what it gets them.
Can anybody recommend a blog or podcast with a left wing bent? Feel like I've been in a bit of a right wing/liberal/libertarian bubble recently, and all the left wing commentary I've been seeing recently is low effort short form stuff on social media.
I'm looking for something that engages with the best of the arguments against it but still has a confident and clear philosophy. Something that tries to understand the world, not just make you feel depressed at how terrible it is.
Bonus if it's British or global. Obviously America will be a significant topic, but I don't want it to be the only topic.
(Some of you might be of the opinion that I'm asking for an oxymoron because any left-winger that takes seriously the arguments against them will end up not left wing anymore. That's not the topic of discussion of this comment, and I'd be very grateful if you'd keep it to yourself or start a new top level comment to discuss that.)
Thanks!
The Making Sense podcast by Sam Harris. He's a lifelong liberal but is also critical of many aspects of the Democratic party and the identitarian movements.
Thanks. I think he's good, but probably not what I'm after here. In my terms he's a centrist, and he seems to be broadly in line with the other centrist voices I'm exposed to (and trying to diversify from) like Alastair Campbell, Rory Stewart, Scott Alexander etc.
If you're looking for a probable cross section of US right or left, another place to look is probably The Tangle at readtangle.com, run by Isaac Saul. Saul's advertisement is news from 360 degrees; every story gets what the left is saying, and what the right is saying (and then Saul's take). So, look at the sources Saul uses from the left, and look for blogs, and you're there.
Same for the right, obviously.
I think Tangle is worthwhile, but don't think this isn't going to achieve what OP wants.
Tangle isn't valuable b/c they've found high quality sources. Instead, Saul, and his team, are doing significant work on each issue by distilling the key claims/ideas from the sources, organizing them, and trying to create a synthesis. Most of the sources that they cite, on both sides, are bad, if you go to them straight.
I had the impression that Tangle was collating reasonably high quality sources, since the summaries seemed to avoid vituperative language. If I look at the USAID article, for example, I see WaPo, Slate, and Jacobin, which seems tolerable? (Of course, none of those are blogs or podcasts, either.)
Admittedly, I wouldn't just go with the first three sources I see on Tangle; I expect to poll it for a while to get a dozen or so sources, at least. And I don't know how long it would take to find a blog cited there, either.
If the OP defines a good source as something that recognizes the strongest arguments against their position and engages, then none of the underlying Tangle sources qualify.
What Tangle gives in the summaries is the best of what is available in the sources. Sometimes it is still nonsense, because that's all that was available, but usually they're able to avoid the trash. In any case, you get an overly positive view of the sources, if you are only seeing the bits that get through the Tangle screen.
BTW, I'm not claiming the underlying left sources are worse than the ones on the right.
Noah Millman writes good stuff, basically just a better Yglesias in my book:
https://gideons.substack.com/
Amicus really gets into the theory. Like halfway between Philosophy Bear and Zizek.
https://homosum.substack.com/
Gemma Mason writes really great stuff but more from caring than outright lefty viewpoint:
https://foldedpapers.substack.com/
> Like ... Zizek
Harsh but fair
Thanks! I'll check them out. :)
I've always liked Philosophy Bear's blog: https://philosophybear.substack.com which Scott has on his Recommendations list.
Thanks. I've read a bit of his stuff before and didn't quite click with it, but maybe I'll try again.
What is your threshold for left wing? Do center-left libs (like Matthew Yglesias, Josh Barro, the B&R guys) count?
Haha, good question. Always hard to define! I'm afraid I've never heard of Josh Barro or the B&R guys and have only a vague awareness of Matthew Yglesias.
I listen to The Rest is Politics, and I would put both Stewart and Campbell firmly in the centre. (I do like them, but they're not what I'm looking for here.) I used to read Owen Jones, who is maybe in the correct part of the political spectrum for what I'm asking here, but he's not very intellectually curious. Maybe George Monbiot is close to what I'm looking for, but I find him hard to read without getting very despondent. (Although I realise that trying to find someone on the left who doesn't radiate an air of despondency is perhaps asking a bit much with the current state of the world...) Actually, another problem with Monbiot for what I'm asking here is that I don't think there's much overlap between the issues he talks about and the issues everybody else talks about. He does a good job of saying "YOU SHOULD BE TALKING ABOUT THIS" but he doesn't do much of "this person recently made xyz argument. Here's why I disagree".
Highly second the recommendation for Yglesias (his substack is Slow Boring, and his podcast is Politix, with a co-host who is more squarely on the left than he is).
The Ezra Klein Show is also a good podcast--not always political, but always interesting, and Ezra Klein is a great interviewer.
Thanks. Just looked up Politix and it seems to be entirely free previews of paid episodes. Can one get a good experience by just regularly listening to the previews or is it just a hook to get you to pay?
I haven’t paid either, I only listen to the free previews and I find them a good experience. They’re pretty generous, generally between 30-40ish min long (which as far as I’m concerned effectively makes it a standalone full length free podcast, if on the shorter side). They don’t leave on egregious cliffhangers imo but do pique your interest and if I had more disposable income I might pay for the whole thing. I do think, if you’re going to interact with Yglesias in only one way, it’s worth prioritizing his Substack over the podcast though.
And Noah Smith
Can we recommend ourselves? I've got a small blog that fits those criteria, it's leftist and tries to engage with more mainstream arguments against left-economics, and has a focus on Britain. e.g. here's a post responding to free-market attacks on the viability of central planning: https://claycubeomnibus.substack.com/p/economic-calculation-in-the-rts-commonwealth
In general, I feel there's a lack good left-wing content online, we don't really have anything that compares to the libertarian blog-o-sphere. Basically the only one I come back to regularly is Paul Cockshott's Youtube channel but that's not the kind of thing it sounds like you're looking for.
You certainly can. I'll check out that post and maybe some of your others afterwards. Thanks. :)
Another example: the Cass review sounds pretty damning, and maybe there's no evidence that puberty blockers are an effective treatment for teenagers with gender dysphoria. Should it be impossible for trans kids to access this kind of treatment? Seems harsh to trans kids, but then again if the treatment isn't effective...
(This is more of a scientific question than a political one, but I'm just a little bit worried, because the science podcast that first got me questioning my views on this has a clear liberal/right bias so I worry they might've missed something important on this topic as they have on other topics I know more about.)
Please note that concluding there is a lack of evidence for effectiveness is not the same thing as concluding the treatment isn't effective.
Puberty blockers can be used to delay puberty. There is a hypothesis (reasonable, in my humble, non-medical opinion) that delaying puberty for gender dysphoric minors might be beneficial, since that way they can reach age of consent without developing characteristics they don't want to, fitting better with their identity, etc.
All of that is fine! Great even!
The problem is that there is no good evidence for this actually working, medical institutions pretend there is and activists brand anyone presenting objections as a bigot, with all the political fallout involved, involving and causing a plethora of problems I'd rather not talk about without another cup of coffee in me, point is, if you read the review itself (which, if you haven't and are interested, you totally can, it's public and very layman-readable: https://cass.independent-review.uk/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/CassReview_Final.pdf) you will note that it doesn't really recommend a ban on puberty blockers, rather is advises caution and, most importantly, tying them to research in order to actually find out whether this works or not. The UK is expected to start clinical trials this year: https://www.theguardian.com/society/article/2024/aug/07/delayed-puberty-blocker-clinical-trial-to-start-next-year-in-england
One framing of the puberty blockers for kids/teens debate that I found interesting was a departure from speaking in terms of gender dysphoria entirely and instead a reframing around consent, and in particular, where we place the onus of consent.
Why is it that kids/teens would be incapable of consenting to the *prevention* of major changes happening to their bodies, and we don't care when they *don't* consent to the actual major changes happening to their bodies (puberty)?
This point and others can be found in this (quite radical and distinctively left) article by Andrea Long Chu, something I'm sharing not as something I necessarily endorse but as a thought provoking counter-viewpoint: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/trans-rights-biological-sex-gender-judith-butler.html
I am not an expert on this, but my impression was:
- Puberty blockers are meant to prevent young trans kids from developing adult characteristics of the opposite gender (eg beards).
- They do that.
- This is in no sense a "treatment", because it doesn't make them stop being gender dysphoric, and it doesn't even make them feel better than they felt before (since they also didn't have a beard before).
- But they don't get characteristics they don't want, which would make them worse off.
- I don't know if there are studies comparing them to a control group of trans people who were forced to develop preferred-gender-discongruent features against their will, or whether the difference was clinically meaningful. I wouldn't be too surprised if it wasn't, because clinically meaningful is a high bar. If someone forced me to only eat gruel every day, this would make me worse off, but I'm not sure if it would show up as a statistically significant change on a depression inventory or suicide rate. I think there is some room to trust common sense here.
- Realistically beards are a bad example, it's more like "typically masculine face shape" which can't be reversed. But puberty blockers can be reversed (you just stop taking them). It seems pretty cruel to make teens who feel sure they want to look feminine in the future irreversibly develop masculine features because "oh well, you're only 16 now, can't make your own medical decisions", especially when you could just give them the meds and, if they change their minds later, let them go off the meds.
- My impression is conservatives try to obfuscate this by saying that the meds have side effects, but all meds have side effects and the side effects of these wouldn't make anyone think twice if it weren't being used as a political football.
- For the level of cruel this is, I would imagine irreversibly giving a straight cis man breasts or something - it's going to screw up his ability to look normal for the rest of his life.
"But puberty blockers can be reversed (you just stop taking them)."
Does reversing puberty blockers result in a person going through a normal puberty with normal sexual/reproductive development at whatever age they stop taking the blockers?
I'm pretty sure that's not possible for social reasons alone: puberty involves a lot of awkward behavior that's only really tolerated when it comes from people in the normal age range for puberty. But I'm skeptical that even the purely physiological effects are entirely reversible.
Yes. The development of my libido was delayed by the exact amount of time I was taking the blockers, which was very interesting to see.
He's talking about the biological effects of puberty, not the social effects. I'm not sure you really want to argue that the social parts of conventional puberty are beneficial to everyone who goes through them.
And I'm *asking* about the biological effects. I already have a pretty good idea what the social effects are.
My understanding of the side effects includes potential sterilization of the patient. It may be that this is an acceptable side effect, especially in extreme cases, but that's exactly the kind of side effect that we may wish to prevent children from accepting.
Have I heard incorrectly that this may be one of the side effects?
There are also really obvious side effects that can hardly be called side effects - a man with a much more feminine face and who is short and thin who was on puberty blockers for most of their teenage years before changing their mind is going to deal with that choice forever. This of course gets into the conversation about rates for desistance and so forth, which is more muddy than clean. But even a low rate of desistance with a low rate of permanent changes is non-zero enough to consider whether children are capable of making informed decisions on the topic.
What nonzero rate of desistance would you say is low enough to be acceptable?
A libertarian approach (which I'm sympathetic to but no longer accept at face value) would say something like "doesn't matter, let the people decide." But for pretty much all medical care we set regulations and limitations on what people can do, especially for children. I don't know what rate I would choose, but if there is any level of desistance at all it's hard to argue that the government can't or shouldn't consider the matter and protectively refuse to allow some people to get the procedures or take the medication.
"[A]ll meds have side effects and the side effects of these wouldn't make anyone think twice if it weren't being used as a political football."
I have to question this, because the first country to ban or restrict these treatments was Sweden, specifically on the basis of the side effects, and it doesn't seem to have been a political football there.
I am pretty Liberal (maybe center left). It seems to me that, as you say, this is a scientific (or medical) issue. It also seems clear that at the moment we are prescribing too much of this to too many people. Eventually, though, the government should have nothing to do with this, just as they should have nothing to do with any other interaction you have with your personal doctor.
It is unclear, at this moment in time what the government could do, other than making some statements that the medical field needs to figure this out, and possibly throwing some money at the problem. However, part of the problem is that some on the Right believe that Trans people (like Gay people) are mythological and thus any concessions contrary to that are problematic.
"However, part of the problem is that some on the Right believe that Trans people (like Gay people) are mythological"
Yeah they're pretending to be something they're not, IMO.
It would be good if the medical scientific part of this equation could be separated from the social political side. I say that realizing I have no clue how to do that myself. Practically speaking the really difficult problem seems to be social accommodation; what prison do you go to, what level of sport are you allowed to compete in, and to a much lesser extent, which bathroom are you allowed to use? I do think these problems are solvable without demonizing transgender people or declaring a fatwa on medical interventions that makes sense.
Very much agreed. Since it's political, and many of the medical organizations have said things that can only be recognized as overtly political, it's now impossible to separate at least some of the medical literature from propaganda on behalf of social causes.
I don't like that the conservatives have taken the route of doing the same thing in reverse, but I don't see an alternative based on how the official medical organs made a point of taking political stances.
It’s difficult to believe anything you hear today; the noise level is very high. On one side it’s “THEY are burning America to the ground.” On the other is “WE are just tidying up.”
The whole trans issue is such a great hobby horse. It affects rather few people, and it gets everyone hot and bothered. IMO it was the intersection with sport that made it such a calamity.
I think all of them should be solved by the organization involved and not by the government. If 2 girls want to play D&D with the guy down the street who dresses funny, then they should be able to. If a sports organization thinks it's women's teams should consist solely of biological women (probably the sensible choice most of the time), then that should be their decision to make. Same with bathrooms.
For example, I've recently been coming around to the far-right narrative on Rotherham: that the race/culture of the perpetrators might be relevant (not just Chinese robber fallacy), and that anti-racism in the police might have been a significant contributing factor to refusing to investigate properly. But I've not read or heard anybody argue against this! It seems most people on the left take it as self evidently false and racist and not worth engaging with.
I suspect people on the left know this is one they won't win on. There are a lot of misconceptions about the Pakistani child rape scandal.
First. It was not one incident, in one town ten years ago. It started in the sixties, affected over 50 towns and goes on to this day.
Second. It was not broken like a 'regular' scandal by willing papers. The few journalists interested found it exceptionally difficult to get published and it got a hundred-fold less media attention than BLM or islamophobia.
Third: There were enquiries, but they did not result in any penalties for the authorities who allowed the rape and torture to occur on their watch and the recommendations of the enquiries have not been enacted, so many people believe the enquiries were just attempts to white wash.
Fourth: Most of the victims never got the help or compensation they needed. Many of the dual nationality rapists got no or minimum sentences. None of them got deported. None of the police, social workers, council leaders who ignored or in some cases actively colluded with the rapists got called out or punished. So many people believe justice was not done.
Fifth: There was clearly a systemic issue. This was not rape by random pedos. It was rape by a population imported against the will of the English people, who on the whole cost more in welfare than they contribute, and have a culture and attitude which is very hostile to the indigenous English. It appears it was not just one or two psychos but the majority of the Pakistani population covered up for and sided with the rapists and a substantial minority of Pakistani men, perhaps one in ten were involved in the rapes. That is a systemic problem that requires a systemic enquiry and solution - that never happened.
The Pakistani community were some of the most staunch supporters of the left. The left in England are known to be strongly in favour of immigrants and Muslims and hate and despise the English working class.
No wonder they don't want want to debate the issue. Elon is irrelevant except he drew attention to the ongoing and never resolved scandal.
The relevant immigration statutes (especially for incidents starting 60 years ago) seem quite clear that this was not an “imported” minority, and suggests that there was, in fact, no legal grounds for deporting the perpetrators.
(https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_immigration_to_the_United_Kingdom, https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_abode_in_the_United_Kingdom )
The facts described in rest of your fourth point constitute, of course, a tragedy.
> The left in England are known to be strongly in favour of immigrants and Muslims and hate and despise the English working class.
Source? Was this also true 60 years ago, or even 25?
> it got a hundred-fold less media attention than BLM or islamophobia.
I’m assuming you are being hyperbolic here. Again, it made most of the British press’s news headings for a while.
> the recommendations of the enquiries have not been enacted
Unless I’m mistaken, the UK was quite conservative at the time while Labor was in limbo. Maybe this one is not entirely the left’s fault?
> who on the whole cost more in welfare than they contribute,
Proof?
> and have a culture and attitude which is very hostile to the indigenous English.
If they have to justify their existence to any indigenous English who comes and asks them, that must get annoying pretty fast. Especially if the knee-jerk reaction is “a brown-skinned guy, I’m sure he’s raping little girls when he can get away with it”.
Re Elon: please read Chastity’s link. He only cared about the facts to the extent that they let him attack Starmer.
I am sure you know that wikipedia is not to be trusted on issues very close to the hearts of the liberal elites: immigration is certainly one of these. Various British elites wanted mass immigration for various reasons, but the English people have clearly and consistently been against it. As have all people everywhere. I challenge you to find one country where the working class poor welcomed in mass numbers of foreigners making them minorities in their own communities. I agree it is legally difficult to deport foreign rapists, torturers and criminals. That is because the law is an ass and has been subverted by left elitists who never saw a minority they didn't profess to love.
I am not actually being hyperbolic - Matt Goodwin (partisan I know) - ran the stats and there was literally 40 to 100 times more mentions of BLM and George Floyd (non-Uk issues) than the repeated rape and torture of thousands of little English girls.
Failure to enact recommendations are the failure of both left and right. The right have also been woefully and criminally inadequate in their response but they were not the one's importing the Pakistanis (Tony Blair's government opening up to mass immigration to "rub the right's face in diversity"). Pakistani community were monolithic left-voting before they started to vote for their own pro-Hamas representatives and the left everywhere love immigrants and muslims to a much greater extent than the right do. So not equally at fault. Both bad but left much worse.
For many years, it was claimed that low-skilled immigrants, as most Pakistanis are, are somehow a benefit to the country. Recent good economic studies from Denmark and the Netherlands (google them) clearly show that low-skilled immigrants from poor countries cost far more than they contribute when imported to rich countries with generous welfare states.
Pakistanis don't have to justify their existence in their Pakistan (where most retain citizenship, return regularly, and bring in spouses from). They are uninvited and unwelcome guests in England and yes for sure they should be able to justify their presence here and if they cannot they should go home. I would say the same about English people in Pakistan or Thailand.
Most people on the left view, I believe, Rotherham as a non-story. Not in the sense that it didn’t happen, or that it wasn’t outrageous – but in the sense that it was propelled in a foreign country’s news cycle by a certain powerful individual with twelve figures of net worth who cared first about attacking Starmer.
To the British, the story happened a decade ago, was reported in high-profile newspapers (the Times broke it, I think), and investigated by the government. The British press or commentary of that time might be worth looking into.
Thanks. Just to be clear, when you say "Rotherham" (as in, as a story or non-story), you mean not only the grooming and rapes themselves, but also the cover-up by the police? (I'm ashamed to admit that I am British myself and had very little awareness of the issue ten years ago. I probably vaguely assumed something along the lines of Chinese Robbers was going on. Maybe my own left-wing bias made me not want to take the story seriously. Or maybe I was just distracted by my university studies.)
I definitely agree that it's kind of stupid that when Musk says an issue should be on the agenda we all rush to discuss the issue, but at the same time, I'd like it if *somebody* on the left would discuss it, because otherwise their silence just plays into the hands of the far right, who say that the left just doesn't want to talk about it because it doesn't fit their narrative.
> I'd like it if *somebody* on the left would discuss it,
Scott himself discussed it back in 2014 on Slate Star Codex.
I think Chastity’s answer is worth a read, but yes, by Rotherham I also mean the police’s actions – which, again, wasn’t news in the early 2010s.
Something I’m surprised I didn’t see discussed is that even if the police trusts you, it seems simply hard to prosecute (let alone convict) anyone for rape.
We have (with excellent reason) high standards to prove anyone is guilty – but how would you prove to a court of law, more convincingly than a lawyer whose job is to deny it, that a rape even occurred?
https://www.reddit.com/r/Destiny/comments/1hv243b/effortpost_elon_musk_amplified_false_claims_about/
Saw this post discussing the issue a bit back, seemed to deal with the specific claims fairly well.
Overall, as somebody who has read a lot on rape, the whole rightoid narrative seems tough to believe on its face. Rape is an issue that cops/prosecutors ordinarily struggle to deal with (leaves relatively little evidence); children rarely come forward to authorities on their own, lacking the understanding of the seriousness of what's happening; authorities routinely just ignore first line reporting in defiance of regulations or guidance because the supposed perpetrator seems like a nice guy; and everybody really, routinely, regularly seems to think that if they just sweep serial offenders under the rug then they'll look better and it'll all go away (rather than what will actually happen, which is that it will come back in several years' time and they will look 1000x worse for having been told and done nothing).
There's no need to appeal to some special wokeism gone wrong explanation. The timeline also doesn't really work since they were getting reports in 2001 that they ignored (right after 9/11 being a notoriously Woke time, especially for Muslims), and the first trials were in 2010.
There are multiple cases of people explicitly saying "I was told to cover this up for fear that people would do a racism if the truth got out": https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/01/04/grooming-gangs-scandal-cover-up-oldham-telford-rotherham/
Could you be more specific in the quotes you are referring to? This is quite a long article and most of the quotes are from various after-action reports, not the police themselves.
One of the few quotes clearly from an officer was “x didn’t want [the] town to become the child abuse capital of the north. They didn’t want riots.” Which sounds much more "I don't want to deal with the flak of this rape getting out, so I will make the flak 100x worse by pushing it off for years/decades" and not "oh we can't be racist to the Pakistanis by mentioning some of them are rapists."
There were multiple examples of grooming gangs after Rotherham. On the other hand there’s less evidence of cover ups. The government is in a tough position, any inquiry will open old wounds, the abscence of one will allow those wounds to fester.
I'm noticing a drastic increase in calls for political violence on social media. Sometimes when I open Facebook it literally shows me "memes" that are just an image of a gun pointed at Elon Musk with a call to action to murder him. I'm not sure how much of this sentiment is some kind of bubble I'm in vs being a very widespread belief. But it is worrying me that there could be a continued escalation in political violence over what happened last year. Am I overreacting due to online overexposure to these topics or is it really getting that bad?
I mean, depending on the specifics, I believe that is criminal (Google criminal speech). I imagine, explicit calls for violence will be cracked down on in time.
At the moment, the left is just a bit of mess, and I think a lot of people don't understand that there are laws that apply to them, e.g., you saw celebrities saying they wish Trump had been shot (and saying that is a federal offense in America).
I imagine there will be a few test cases / warnings, and everything will chill out.
Saying one wishes Trump had been shot is not a federal offense in America.
It -is- likely to get the attention of the Secret Service. (I recall a teenage girl who wrote a LiveJournal entry some time in 2004 where she said she wished George Bush would die, and got real live agents knocking on her parents' door and a short interview in which they verified that this girl wasn't some adult posing as a girl and passing a secret go code to a crack assassin. The agents were probably a bit bored - this was probably the fiftieth one they had to process that term - but they had to follow up on every tip. They probably can't afford to do that to every social media entry now, but if it's a celebrity, it'll likely get priority.)
Obviously, if the individual responds like someone who would act on that wish, one could expect some maybe-jail time, but the more likely response is a stern lecture. The US is not North Korea.
I agree that: the courts and secret service certainly exercise discretion, and the words I actually quoted likely wouldn't be a federal crime.
I do believe: a lot of speech people engage in pretty freely (particularly the left at the moment) does meet the historic standard of criminal.
Quoting directly from Wikipedia:
Convictions under 18 U.S.C. § 871 have been sustained for declaring that "President Wilson ought to be killed. It is a wonder some one has not done it already. If I had an opportunity, I would do it myself";[15] and for declaring that "Wilson is a wooden-headed son of a bitch. I wish Wilson was in hell, and if I had the power I would put him there."[16] In a later era, a conviction was sustained for displaying posters urging passersby to "hang [President Franklin D.] Roosevelt".[17]
Quoting from that same page:
Because the offense consists of pure speech, the courts have issued rulings attempting to balance the government's interest in protecting the president with free speech rights under the First Amendment. According to the book Stalking, Threatening, and Attacking Public Figures, "Hundreds of celebrity howlers threaten the president of the United States every year, sometimes because they disagree with his policies, but more often just because he is the president."
It should be clear (with roughly equal provenance) that there exists a difference between just saying one wishes the President were dead and whatever it is that results in sentences such as 90 days in jail (Palmer, a mechEng who blamed FDR for losing his $1M fortune), two to six years in prison (a group of Nazi sympathizers who threatened FDR), or deportation (Buddhi, an Indian immigrant who called for George Bush's assassination and his wife Laura's rape and murder), or 27 months in prison (Miller, a self-proclaimed terrorist who called for Obama's assassination in a Craigslist post). That same article cites a political cartoon that threatened Bush, got a Secret Service visit, but no charges; various Facebook groups that toy with assassination and earn hundreds of followers; and other incidents that result in no charges, or conviction overturned on appeal.
Obviously, threatening a President is not a great life choice, and a pretty good way to get the government's attention. But it's also not an automatic conviction.
compared to 2023 or 2020?
Election years are special, and this year seemed calm enough.
Well, other than two attempted assassinations.
I believe the fail assassination attempts drained the left of its energy to an absurd degree; not only was the reality of violence brought to mind(which makes people more right wing, and masculine) unlike a random black owned business reacting to a blm riot, trump has *plenty* of power to shame
We absolutely got lucky, but this could've happened at any time in the past 8 years, trumps been called hitler the whole time
I think it's becoming more normalized recently, although I think it's still kind very much from a certain bubble. I do expect escalation of political violence within the next few years. It feels baked into society. I don't think the loudest people with the most reach or biggest platform will actually do any violence, but as David Hines noted on Twitter, the pattern is for the dumb marks who don't understand it's all kayfabe to actually try.
I do kind of wonder if we'll see a rise in the next few years of leftists getting entrapped by the FBI into being part of plans to commit violence, getting their turns on the Sit-n-Spin.
Banned for this comment, which makes a broad (and false, and offensive) generalization about a political group.
How do you know it's false?
“ all right wing people just use their rhetorical and intellectual imaginings to cover up for the fact that they really want to exterminate everyone who doesn’t agree with them, or look like them.”
How do you know it’s false?
I mean that's a bad example in this context as that's not really a common stereotype. Also it's too absolutist. If the statement was "Republicans are uneducated racists" I wouldn't know it was false. Directionally it's probably true, particularly these days. Most stereotypes are accurate, after all. That doesn't mean they apply to all members of the relevant group. The problem with stereotypes isn't with their inaccuracy, it's applying them in bad faith to individuals on scant evidence.
I just think it's a weak ban. Liberals are, in a relative sense, the party of feminine sensibilities and women generally dislike direct conflict - that's why the Left taboos everything and disinvites speakers rather than defeating them in debate. Anomie's comment was directionally correct (I in fact agree with him) and isn't in the top 10% on the "needlessly provocative" scale IMO. Giving him a week to think about it would be more reasonable in my view. I suspect the indefinite ban comes from a place of "that hit a little too close to home" rather than "this is beyond the pale." But whatever, it's kinda fun to see Scott lose his temper every once in a while. (Not saying that's definitely what happened, it's just how it reads to me.)
Well, when you explain it that way, it all makes perfect sense.
>I mean that's a bad example in this context as that's not really a common stereotype. Also it's too absolutist
I think "leftists are spineless cowards" (or words to that effect) could be considered equal in absolutism to my proposal, and I can only pray that they are both uncommon. They certainly are in my world. A fairer comparison to the statement you offered up would be, "Leftists are all conceited assholes." which is a proposition I can take somewhat seriously. In fact I could apply it to a lot of people of any persuasion who let their politics subsume their reason.
Among other proofs, people kept coming after Kyle Rittenhouse even after he'd shot the first one.
Because liberals and leftists have been on the front lines fighting wars for centuries. And it is my understanding that today, the US military is only slightly more conservative than the general public. Which means there are massive numbers of liberals serving serving in our military.
Speaking only for myself, as an American liberal I stand ready to sacrifice my life for what I believe in. Thinking that your opponent is less sincere in their stated positions than your side is is a well known cognitive bias, with well known catastrophic outcomes ("Once we start (arresting/killing/bombing) them they will fold right away. We can't lose!")
Luigi Mangione is a pretty clear counter example. There were also plenty of people on the left that put their lives on the line during the protests a few years ago, many were arrested, injured, or killed. Going back further, the Uni-Bomber was left wing. Kent State. And quite a few people lost their lives fighting for Civil Rights.
Now will the current leadership of the political left put their lives on the line? Democrats didn't even work through the weekend to fight back against Musk, so I can't imagine any of them risking arrest let alone death.
However, since the civil rights and anti-vietnam war movements ended, the country has mostly been moving left. So the left has been able to achieve their goals without becoming militant. That part of the movement has atrophied.
But the Unabomber spent many pages bashing liberals and their psychology in his Manifesto. His primitivist ideology, which by his own admission would have resulted in the deaths of billions of humans, sought something no liberal would want.
Mangione is a chud, did you not see the reactions to this being discovered? Any number of liberal girls going "Oh nooooo, he's a Rogan viewer!"
Fine. He's a child who can plan and execute a successful assassination. The left has an awful lot of highly-eductated "children" old enough to legally purchase firearms. And it has a lot of thought leaders who are quite skilled at pointing these children in whatever direction suits their purpose.
This seems like it could be a problem if your plans depend on the left offering only non-violent resistance.
Not child, "chud". This is a piece of pejorative leftist internet slang for right-wing persons, particularly young men, and derives from an old urban legend of C.H.U.D.s in the New York sewer system – Cannibalistic Humanoid Underground Dwellers.
What do you mean? The administration wants some violent resistance. How else will we get our Reichstag fire?
> Liberals don't have the spine to sacrifice their life for their beliefs.
Wow
I mean, Donald Trump got elected promising revenge on his allies lol. He released the Jan 6 people who called for hanging Mike Pence. Musk is basically invading government offices at this point to steal data. Trump is threatening war, he's threatening to invade allies, and threatening to put people in Gitmo (read: a camp that concentrates people). I'm sure you disagree heavily with me in either some of these characterizations or with the idea of all of them being that bad, but I feel like the cat's out of the bag already, and it wasn't necessarily JUST the fault of people more to the left of the political spectrum.
It isn't so far-fetched that people who agree with what I said would think and say what you said.
>Musk is basically invading government offices at this point to steal data
Yeah when the other team wins an election they get to run the government.
When you "run the government" you generally don't lock employees out of their offices and prevent members of congress from entering the building.
You may agree with Musk/Trump's end goals, but why would the accomplish them in this manner if they thought what they were doing was legal?
Uh, how long since the last government shutdown? People get locked out of buildings all the time.
> but why would the accomplish them in this manner if they thought what they were doing was legal?
Why do police raid drug houses? The reason they're doing it like this is because the bureaucracy is out of hand and needs to be cut off at the heels. You can't kill bureaucracy by going through bureaucratic channels. This is the only way to do it.
During a government shut down, the doors are locked because there isn't money to pay for them to be open. Right now the doors are shut to prevent anyone from stopping Musk from doing crimes.
Where is the evidence that these agencies aren't doing anything other than what they have been order to do by law? Are you that brain rotted that you believe this lie that the bureaucracy is a criminal conspiracy?
I agree with the objection the other commenter pointed out, which is that you can't make an office called "I Do What I Want" just because you were elected. Musk should not have any authority to do what he is doing right now, and he's getting sued for it in fact.
The problem really just is that even if he is in the wrong, we are in a territory where, even if Musk lost the lawsuit and was given jail time, then
1) the executive, i.e. the one that would have to dole out the punishment wouldn't do anything to stop Musk, bc it's led by Trump
2) Congress wouldn't impeach the president for not following the court's order to impeach Trump, bc they are beholden to Trump
America is undergoing a new Watergate every 2 days since the Trump administration started lol.
The other commenter doesn't know what he's talking about, as I pointed out to him.
You point #1 and #2 are just part of the system of checks and balances, in this case checks on the power of the judiciary.
If Trump has a certain authority, say to regulate and control the bureaucracy, and he chose to share that authority with another individual, is there something illegal with that? I get that we could hound someone on form - did they sign the appropriate paperwork, etc. If Musk didn't have a security clearance and there was classified information, that could be an issue.
But nobody doubts that Trump asked him to do this and supports what he's doing. Why can't Trump exercise his own authority through a delegate?
If you think Trump has far too much power I would strongly agree. But this is also the case when it was Biden, and Obama, and Bush. We only seem to see that when the other team takes steps we don't think they should have taken. When someone does what we want, then we seem to think that the exercise of power was acceptable or even just.
My go-to example has been DACA, which was not at all permitted or envisioned by the relevant laws but still upheld in court as an appropriate exercise of executive authority. If permitting long term illegal immigrants to get work papers and other documentation and reside in the US is a proper use of the executive authority to deport illegal immigrants, then it's hard to argue that much Trump could authorize *isn't* within his authority.
They get to appoint people to run the actual agencies of the government, subject to Senate signoff. And those people have to be vetted for security clearances for obvious reasons.
Musk has not been appointed to anything except a made-up "DOGE" which does not exist legally or administratively; he's not been approved by the Senate nor does he have security clearance; etc. That's why for instance their "early retirement offer" scam email went out to federal staffers without any government letterhead or authorizing personnel code or anything -- it has no more legal enforceability than those old emails from the "Nigerian Finance Minister".
"Musk has not been appointed to anything except a made-up "DOGE" which does not exist legally or administratively; he's not been approved by the Senate nor does he have security clearance; etc."
DOGE exists within the executive office of the President, most of the positions of which do not require confirmation by the Senate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Executive_Office_of_the_President_of_the_United_States&oldid=1273620904
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Department_of_Government_Efficiency&oldid=1274016569
Right. It's just a group of presidential advisors having no more legal or regulatory authority than a deputy White House researcher or butler. DOGE can't fire anybody or change actually anything in the government. That's why their "early retirement offer" scam email went out to federal staffers without any government letterhead or authorizing personnel code or anything -- it has no more legal enforceability than those old emails from the "Nigerian Finance Minister". Federal agency employees have belatedly realized this and are now redirecting DOGE emails to their junk folders according to many commenters at reddit/r/fednews.
You're mistaken. That was the original plan announced, not what was carried out. It is now a formal part of the government: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_DOGE_Service
I suspect part of it is a majority of social media platforms just declining to moderate anymore. Meta and X both made a big deal about ceasing to moderate, Reddit's powermoderater cliques support political violence against right wing figures while TikTok at best doesn't oppose sowing discord in the west. You don't need a particularly large amount of people to keep posting calls to political violence and get away with it to cause large culture shifts on social media.
In other news, some of my libbed up friend group have joined me in the gun club; given current events.
These are all the libest libs to ever lib, 45-65 year old upper middle class vaguely protestant anglo retired teachers and small business owners who think the type of person who owns guns is a couple IQ points short of room temperature and is best kept several hundred miles away from them in one of the shitty states with the other dumb animals. (They still think this, but it's different for them and also me because we aren't dumb animals, you see.)
Interestingly, the thing that tipped them over was a combo of ICE raiding churches and Musk doing coup shit, and the general observed reaction of conservatives around them.
If this is representative: holly shit lol. There are white women who have decided to become armed! White liberals! Teachers with pensions! Not socialists, not communists getting ready to fight against Amerikkka! That is some wild shit. Even last year, this would have been totally inconceivable.
This is probably not good for the fabric of society or whatever, but I think it's very funny and indicative of what we have to look forward to in the coming years (of lead [poisoning]).
Being willing to own a gun when cheap, legal and relatively trivial and the wrong person in power is hardly enough capability of violence to keep yourself free; by all means great the left should be less annoying about guns for maybe upto a decade, but this is hardly ground breaking events; tell me when they start wilderness camping without phones to train up their knife fight skills like the militias
Knife fighting is cosplay stuff IMO. It's fun, but if you've ever done it seriously you'll quickly realise that there is no situation where you stab and don't get stabbed unless you have control of their hands, which is hard when they have a knife in those hands.
Wilderness camping without phones is also cosplay; and this is coming form a dude that walks off into the jungle or the forest or the dessert a couple times a year for the past 20 years, and who refused to get a cell phone until 2019.
Here are the things that matter with guns in order: practicing at the range until the noise isn't scary,
standing in front of a mirror and practicing your draw to ready position over and over and over until it is good enough,
Practicing moving with your gun out while maintaining a good sight picture or awareness,
and finally: actually getting good at hitting things.
Everything else is just something people do to feel all manly and shit. If it isn't boring, it isn't helping.
> Knife fighting is cosplay stuff IMO. It's fun, but if you've ever done it seriously you'll quickly realise that there is no situation where you stab and don't get stabbed unless you have control of their hands, which is hard when they have a knife in those hands.
I wasnt implying fighting fair, Im fuzzy on actual militias but I would focus on time to kill of *attacking* an unarmed man(prehaphs from a hidden position), fighting several unarmed men, fighting people armed with holstered pistol
> Wilderness camping without phones is also cosplay; and this is coming form a dude that walks off into the jungle or the forest or the dessert a couple times a year for the past 20 years, and who refused to get a cell phone until 2019.
This directly contradicts the last two war books ive read that promotes guerrilla warfare; also my rather strong belief that 99.9% of people cant make a computer that is safe from the cia spying, if theres a civil war in america the majority of players should destroy their phones and computers; while this isnt true for blessed cia factions in tech illiterate society's; it will be be true if the true 1st world turns violent.
I mean, if you plan to mount a campaign of insurgency, sure.
That isn't what is gonna happen in the US if shit goes down though.
It will be a Troubles Bomb in me Potato situation, not a Red Dawn American Mujahadeen scenario.
The important skills there will be hiding from surveillance in populated areas, not hiding from patrols in the woods.
"a Troubles Bomb in me Potato situation"
Ha ha!
America isnt the uk, theres allot of wilderness left; the left will have tiny amount of land but the jets while the right will have all the land and grumpa shotgun (and the 80% of the miltery that desserts when the glowies do something undeniable, and wildly unethical), not the clean boarder of north vs south, but instead rural vs city, traveling around road blocks or damage will like be walking a mile around and hoping you dont run into anyone
Just here to chime in on how knife skills are the dark horse of self-defense. Pretty easy learning curve, a few hours of basic training get you from a bumbling fool likely to cut himself to a decent level of skill. And nobody bats an eye at a 3-inch knife in your pocket, looks totally innocent.
Agree. As long as you acknowledge that when you fight someone else with knife, there are usually two losers: He who dies now, and he who dies 15 minutes later.
Sure. Same with a gun? As in, in a shootout? And yet so many people advise guns for self-defense (which I'm not disagreeing with).
But what I'm getting at is a difference between "me with empty hands" and "me with a knife that I know how to get out of my pocket and open up because I practiced it 1000 times". When an angry 250 lb man knocks me down and gets on top, sure I can attempt a mount escape, but, you know... this ain't a BJJ mat. Being able to stab him in the kidney may just make a difference between me having my face bashed in and... not having my face bashed in.
Yeah, shootouts are statistically much safer than knife fights.
You can occasionally live through a couple 9mm holes punched through your meats much more readily than 10++ stab wounds; because once you pop you just don't stop vis. getting stabbed.
Also, Gun is the top of the escalation ladder you can have hidden on your person. If you pull a knife on somebody and they have a gun, you have given them incentive to pop you.
That said, I carry a knife for tool reasons, don't carry a gun, and count on my general wideness and incredibly thick neck to make people think twice.
If I lived in the south or the midwest I might think about car carrying, but in SoCal the gun is gonna make you more likely to get shot by the cops while not deterring any crime in particular, because all the personal crime you run into around here is burglars accidentally robbing a house with somebody in it.
I’d rather get shot than stabbed for sure. And definitely, pulling the knife out as a deterrent is a big no-no. I’ve had two knife instructors; both taught to only get the knife out at the moment you have to use it, and one was very specific about doing it as surreptitiously as possible (he had us practice taking the knife out the pocket). It’s a deadly escalation, the last resort. For example, if they want money, just give it. If you are being kidnapped, survival chances drop to <20%, so that’s when the knife comes out…
Hope I never have to use this training.
If you happen to be under 150 lbs and second place upper body strength and reach (e.g. most women vs. most men), a knife is going to be a much less sure defense than a gun.
A gun also has the large benefit of being enough to scare a man into not even trying.
No argument here. But a gun is much larger than a knife and is not as easy to alway have around. I’m by no means suggesting a knife to be a replacement for a gun, just a small weapon that’s easy to learn to use and always have around, and allowing an extra edge vs nothing.
Your idea of liberals is that they are like little mechanical toys: Wind them up and they start spouting woke shit and squealing
with horror if somebody says they own a gun. Come on! There aren’t any groups like that, and thinking that people in your outgroup are that simply summarized is just dumb. In fact it’s evidence that YOU are behaving like a wind up toy.
I probably count as a liberal. My gun attitudes are not the same as the ones you think are typical I. I have a couple acquaintances that absolutely love hunting, and are skillful at it, and I respect that as a hobby as valid as any of mine. And my mother, who had a career in the navy, was an expert shot with a pistol
I myself have never shot a gun, and never felt any interest in learning to do it as a hobby. I have not considered getting one for self-protection, because I think my risk of being savagely attacked is low — I live in a suburb where there is little crime. The risk of being robbed is probably not terribly low, but I would not want to risk a violent encounter with the robbers to prevent the robbery. What if they had guns too?
But if something in my life changed so that I thought the risk of a violent attack on my person was not low, I would certainly consider getting a gun and
learning to use it.
However, it seem to me now that we are far from the kind of situation where the benefit of guns justifies the risk of being in an armed encounter. In my libtard state the worst thing we are likely to have the way things are now is a protest of some Trump policy, with protest turning into a conflict between factions or between one faction and the police. It is easy to avoid ending up in that situation. And I think it’s a terrible idea for people to come armed to protests. All it does is allow people to weaponize their anger. (Of course, If you think the opposing side is a bunch of wind-up toys then sure, guns are fine. Shoot the hell outta them and watch the springs and gears fly. We should all be on the watch for the wind-up toy illusion in ourselves and other people).
I'm interested that your definition of "the libbest libs to ever lib" includes small business owners.
THere is nothing more liberal than extracting value from someone else's labor. It is possibly the most liberal thing of all!
There are tons of progressive small business owners and self-employed people. I'm one.
I am curious to know how they have become your friends because you seem to have a lot of contempt for them.
Only to the extent that I have contempt for anyone who is a conservative or a liberal. I can't hold that against them too bad, their whole lives have been built on a structure that itself was built on the air.
It's hard to get over that, realizing that everything you've ever done was based on a lie.
I’m pretty liberal and I wouldn’t give the time of day to anyone having such awful ideas about gun owners.
Do these libs actually articulate these hateful ideas - gun owner are stupid and so on - to you or are you making some assumptions based on your own construct of how they might be thinking?
If they were actually talking like this I’d advise finding new friends.
They would be complete assholes in my book.
No, they think gun owners are stupid, because most of the gun owners they've met are mostly stupid.
The reason they went to me, a leftist, for gun advice instead of their con Gun nut friends is because their con gun nut friends a couple IQ points short of a happy meal.
You have to be a couple layers down in the hobby before the majority of people you meet aren't alarmingly incompetent to eg have a drivers licence, let alone a gun.
I grew up within walking distance of a National Forest. All my male friends owned guns. None of them were idiots.
That's because they are from a place where the cultural milieu doesn't attract idiots to guns.
When I lived in the jungle everybody had a gun to scare off birds and big cats, so guns weren't associated with dummies. Now I live within a 40 minute drive of a major US city. In this environment, owning guns is a better predictor of IQ than educational attainment (citation needed).
It's like owning a big truck in Houston vs. Amarillo: one is an accessory for soft hand idiot cosplay, the other is a tool used for productive labor.
So they mocked the 'to protect myself from a tyrannical government' crowd for decades, but now they have seen the light and agree with the sentiment? Maybe a new era of cohesion and brotherhood is upon us!
We are all united in thinking the other side must die!
Truly utopia is upon us.
And perhaps the best part of it is the complete lack of self-awareness on their part, eh?
I think this is actually true self-awareness.
before, they were clinging to the liberal delusion that conservatives where somehow confused people, with morals and values just like them. That if you made the right argument or something, they could be convinced.
They have come to the realization that their enemies are anti-humanists who specifically want them to suffer, and who support of a given policy is completely disconnected from what it is or what it does.
This is them starting to shed false consciousness and the liberal tendency to ascribe mistake theory to everybody instead of just to people that share their priors.
Is there a rationalist term for people who shed one false consciousness in favor of another?
"And from the chrysalis emerged...the caterpillar"
(alt text shameless stolen from https://achewood.com/2006/08/14/title.html)
"(They still think this, but it's different for them and also me because we aren't dumb animals, you see.)"
Clearly, they have dizzying intellects.
No, I think this is legitimate.
If you spend any time in firearms spaces that are not membership only, you'll realize that the majority of gun owners are dumb animals that probably shouldn't it'd be allowed outside without supervision.
I exaggerate for comedic effect, but on the other hand I have been muzzle swept and flagged and had dudes turn around with their AR at hip level finger on the trigger pointed right at me enough times that I refuse to go to any sort of range that isn't membership only at this point.
Hmm. This might be geography dependent. I spent most of my gun-club time in central Texas, and I don't remember *anyone* ever doing any of that. And it was pretty clear that anyone who did would have gotten either called out, mocked, or sternly asked to leave, depending on context.
Same in multiple Boy Scout events I'd been at. Even older Scouts would reprimand newer ones.
I'm sorry that happened to you, though, and I totally don't blame you for your refusal.
Does anyone know of any rationalist-adjacent people or events in Hong Kong?
I know someone who is currently working as a quant at a hedge fund, and is interested in learning more about investing. He is a math whiz, and is especially interested in developing algorithms that give traders an edge, and curious about AI applications to this problem. He does not do much of that sort of thing at work, where his bosses make the big decisions, and where it is unwise to display one’s personal interests. He came here from another country in his 20’s to get an advanced degree, and does not know many other people in his field. What blogs can he read, what discussion forums join, to meet smart people with similar interests and learn more?
Ricki Heicklen is a former Jane Street trader that runs bootcamps that aim to teach trading to people with quant backgrounds, seems like the kind of thing your friend is looking for.
Note: I have no references for this other than a (friendly) podcast interview she did, so I'd suggest to dig in deeper.
A couple of good resources:
Subscribe to https://bloomberg.com/opinion/authors/ARbTQlRLRjE/matthew-s-levine
And Cullen Roche is a must: https://disciplinefunds.com/research/
Thank you! He is most interested in statistical methods and adapting AI to the task of predicting & identifying strategies or particular stocks to buy and sell. He really is a math super-whiz — came out on top of various math hierarchies in a large
country with strong competition in that field. I think he is looking for people who are speculating about ways to do this, inventing and trying new approaches , etc. He reads a lot of the technical stuff coming out about new approaches to training AI. In short, he is much more interested in the technical challenge of predicting the market than in becoming a rich invester. He can already make a lot of money as a quant, and is not terribly interested in wealth.
So this sounds like he’s focused on the tools. I strongly believe that if one wants to develop a durable edge in the chosen field, developing a strong intuitional foundation is really useful. There are counterexamples, of course, Simmons’s Renaissance in a famous one, but it’s a bit like using Bill Gates to justify dropping out of college.
You are right. He is focused on the tools. He is one of those people who gets fascinated by intellectual challenges and puzzles, and he *craves* to put all his attention on the puzzles and the tools. His interest in the practical goal of making money via personal investments is small relative to his craving. I think he could get as fascinated by the problem of predicting the weather as he could the one of predicting the stock market, even though the former big chaotic phenom holds no promise for making money. But I agree with you that knowing more facts and practicalities is valuable. In fact it is valuable even if all you really care about is the giant math puzzle, because some of the factoids will give you ideas about new approaches and new models for formulating the problem.
I understand hhow his head is working because I, too, tend to hyperfocus on puzzles. For instance, I have been working on ways to get photoshop to select the delicate fringe of frizz around someone's very messy hair, leaving background out of the selection. Photoshop has a bunch of filters and things that are built for making photos more attractive -- but they are all systematic transformations of the image, and there are clever ways to combine them to do things like select something that's very hard to select. So I get bogged down in trying ideas using clever combos of the filters I'm most comfortable with. If I force myself to play with some new filters until I get fluent with them, I have new ideas about ways to do the selecting. Yet I resist doing the new learning. (Meanwhile, I figured out long ago that the best solution to keeping the fringe is just to give up on making Photoshop actually select it separate from the background. Just let Photoshop not even try to capture the fringe, and paint it in later with a special brush.)
Are you prone to getting stuck that way?
" In fact it is valuable even if all you really care about is the giant math puzzle, because some of the factoids will give you ideas about new approaches and new models for formulating the problem."
- It's even more than that - deep understanding of the fundamentals of the puzzle both opens new approaches and - crucially - prevents one from going down senseless tangents and blind alleys, especially when the models get so complicated that it's impossible to really follow what they are doing.
"Are you prone to getting stuck that way?"
- Rarely. I like poking around but I tend to quickly recognize when I'm out of depth and wasting time. When I got serious about recording music a few years back, I had to learn new tools, and initially I thought, I'm an engineer, I'll figure it out! Well, I quickly discovered that no, everything I do sounds like crap and no amount of tinkering with plugins and filters seem to help - off to the manual and instructional videos.
BTW I'm working with Topaz labs AI package to restore some old photos, Holy-Mother-of-God this thing is powerful!
I'm having a hard time with "he's a quant at a hedge fund but doesn't want his bosses to know that he's interested in investing and especially in algorithms that would give traders an edge".
Are you maybe trying to pick a fight? Something about how the person I described is either dumb or unethical?
He is not, but I may have described his agenda in a way that left some loopholes through which somebody can implement a gotcha. If that’s whattup
I don’t want to play.
Friend, buddy, pal, I know we're all a little on edge here, but I think you're assuming too much bad faith here.
It is, undoubtedly, very odd for someone working in a hedge fund to ask complete strangers (via proxy) for info on trading algorithms. This is usually propietary knowledge, which he would do much better trying to get from his workplace than from here. I don't believe Don P. was ascribing nefarious purposes to either you or your friend, just understandably expressing confusion over the situation.
I have pulled back from discussing this with you and Don P. because you both seem like you are doing something that seems pointless to me: Reading through comments til you find somebody whom you think is probably wrong or dumb in some clearcut way. Even if I were seeking a way for someone I know to swap info about trading algorithms with other hedge fund quants, is there much point in wading in to say you disapprove? There are lots of extrememly interesting posts to follow up on on this thread. Why select one that has little interesting intellectual meat to it? At best, you will end up having an argument with me about whether my acquaintance is doing a bad thing or not. It is a hyperspecific issue, not of general interest, and pretty sure to involve an acrimonious exchange.
And there are a couple easy ways to just glide on past my post: One is to think I’m asking for ways to help somebody do something unethical, but just dismiss the matter. My post can hardly be your first exposure to the fact that people do underhanded things to make money. Another way to glide past is to assume that I did not explain the situation clearly, and if I had it would not sound like my acquaintance was being unethical and/or things I’d said that did not not make sense to you would make sense. It actually seems to me that you are actively avoiding thinking of ways where the situation I described could make sense, and not involve unethical swapping of algorithms with other quants. For instance, your summary of what I what I said my friend wanted to do is inaccurate. You say he wanted “to ask complete strangers (via proxy) for info on trading algorithms. “I said he was “interested in developing algorithms that give traders an edge.” See the difference? He wants to develop his own algorithms, using novel methods involving AI. He knows there must be others interested in this. Probably some of them are not quants and not even in finance. It’s an interesting problem in and of itself, plus if you solve it you’ll get rich.
I think you and Dan P did not glide past mostly because my post explains things loosely enough that it was easy to bust me and/or my acquaintance for dumbness or moral wrongness. In the service of that you misremembered at least one bit of my post, and did not make much effort to fill in the gaps I left with explanations that were not hard to come up with.
I swear I’m honestly confused but if you consider that hostile I understand why you don’t care to continue.
Like, understanding and/or believing it. I see the words "where it is unwise to display his personal interests", but he doesn't want his bosses to know that he's interested in exactly the kind of the thing they care about? Those aren't personal interests! That's the business!
Yeah, see my longer and more considered reply above. Please
feel free to conclude that both me and the person I described are flaming assholes.
This one is tough because most of the stuff on the web that deals with investing is really crap. There is more than one trading platform out there available to subscribe to that offer to bring these kinds of tools to you as an investor. One of these platforms might be a place he’d prefer to work at than where he is now. He might want to check out Tradier brokerage. There are a few front ends that you can subscribe to that sound kind of like what he’s talking about. Delving more deeply into them might be of interest to your client. I looked into this because about a year ago I decided I wanted to start trading stock options as kind of a hobby.
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I have spent the last five years of my life bemoaning the fact that I don't have a circle of friends who are the sort of people who just want to work on cool ideas. I have tons of ideas. I want to be around other people who have tons of ideas. And I want to be around people who want to help each other actually do something about all these ideas.
Yuvraj, anyone who signs up: I want to know where I go to bump into people like this. They are not drinking at my local pub.
@rebelcredential just seeing your comment (didnt get notified). Please reach out to me via linkedin or at oasis.repository@gmail.com —- you’re exactly the kind of person I’m building Oasis of Ideas for.
According to Wired - https://archive.is/VPG8k - events at USAID have effectively shut down PEPFAR, a program credited with saving 25 million lives in 20 years, and one that costs under $7b per year to run.
This is about $5,600 per life saved, about on par with estimates of the Against Malaria Foundation's cost per life saved.
$7b here, $7b there and pretty soon you're talking about real money.
Good. Sending money to third world countries is bad when EA does it and it's bad when PEPFAR does it. Those are 25 million people that shouldn't still exist and I'm sure that the world is worse off with them in it. Transferring resources from high-productivity cultures to low-productivity cultures is a deadweight loss of value to the world and we should absolutely stop wasting US tax dollars in mindless feel-good Quixotic quests. Invest in what you want more of. I don't want more sub-Saharan Africans and neither should you.
Wow. The hard-core, "I wish all black people would die" racists are really coming out of their rat holes. They must be feeling safe now, I wonder what changed.
I don't have anything against black people, I'm just a consequentialist and don't want first world dollars going to support cultures that can't support themselves. But hey, it's much easier for you to characterize me as racist so enjoy. This is standard progressive reasoning: you'll accuse your opponents of being evil but never acknowledge that they might have a point. If you did that then you might have to engage in self-reflection; self-righteous certainty is so much more fun.
That's a textbook motte-and-baily your pulling here. In your previous comment you wrote:
> Those are 25 million people that shouldn't still exist and I'm sure that the world is worse off with them in it. […] I don't want more sub-Saharan Africans and neither should you.
This is much stronger than and qualitatively different from what you wrote afterwards:
> I'm just a consequentialist and don't want first world dollars going to support cultures that can't support themselves.
Well... I appreciate your honesty and intellectual consistency, at least.
Sounds like a cause that should have no trouble finding EAs to fund it voluntarily in the future, then. No reason for it to be funded through theft and debt.
PEPFAR costs 0.1% of federal outlays. Even if I believed you that people would step in to an equal degree - and I don't - how long would that take to be as effective? A year? Two? What if a million people die as a result of a slow transition? I'm not sure I can imagine being such a Libertarian that I'd risk a million lives to save 0.1% of the federal budget, or about $21 per year for me personally. (Obviously a bad trade, since it implies I'd kill everyone in the US to save a third of expenditures!)
But let's say I can be that much of a Libertarian. What even do I think is the purpose of government? Preventing violence? Preventing theft? Isn't an HIV infection essentially both? It reduces your lifespan and/or forces you to purchase medication for your entire life. And each subsequent infection has some chance of infecting somebody else. Reducing it down as close to zero as possible is definitely a worthy goal under any philosophy other than nihilism.
I don't think you really understand because you can't seem to drop your globalist priors even when trying to get into the headspace of non-globalists. You keep saying people people people as if those against foreign aid assume, as you do, that every life is and should be equivalent in the eyes of the government of the United States of America. People against foreign aid believe that the American government should not be valuing non-American lives the same or similarly to American lives
I will agree that that's a challenge, although I think you need to make a stronger assertion here - for example, I might be perfectly comfortable thinking the US government should value the lives of its citizens more, but still think that PEPFAR represents great value. E.g. if I think the federal government should be willing to spend $50k to save a US citizen but only $10k to save a non-US citizen. (This is not really my perspective, but it would be a valid alternative perspective under which I could still be pro-PEPFAR).
I also think that PEPFAR promotes US interests in other ways:
- It greatly boosts our image around the world.
- It demonstrates the value of allying with us versus opposing us.
- Ultimately, eliminating or dramatically reducing HIV infections worldwide is possible, which in turn reduces the burden of HIV within the US, but also reduces the emergence of novel pathogens, which can evolve more easily in immunocompromised hosts.
I want to clarify that I wasn't, in that response, taking any position on whether or not the US government should fund PEPFAR. I was simply noting that people who are against it likely do not assume that the US government should be valuing non-American lives equally to American lives. Some may even believe that the US government should place no value at all whatsoever on non-American lives - and in my opinion that's a perfectly ethical belief to have and to vote based on
I mean, I don't expect anybody to get argued out of it, but I think very few ethical systems suggest it's valid to consider human life to have literally no value.
>"Preventing violence? Preventing theft? Isn't an HIV infection essentially both?"
Not all physical harm is violence. Not all loss of property is theft. This sort of thing will not generally be perceived as being in good faith by those from whose beliefs you're trying to extrapolate.
Okay, but why is one a valid target of government policy and not another? Merely noting that there are distinctions isn't really relevant.
From a libertarian perspective, one violates your negative rights, the other does not. Here’s an example.
Suppose that I build a house and don’t get fire insurance for it (and I have no mortgage). Does the government have an obligation to pay for me to install sprinklers and other fire prevention measures to prevent loss of property if I fire occurs? Does the government have an obligation to provide policing to prevent loss of property if arson occurs?
You might not agree with the perspective, but it is the predominant rule in the US of “no” to the former and “yes” to the latter. The explanation is that the government has much more responsibility to prevent others from damaging you than to mitigate other harms.
I follow what you're saying, but I don't think it fully resolves the issue. I am arguing that protecting somebody from disease has some characteristics that are similar to protecting them from violence, more so than, say, protecting them from the weather - the distribution isn't random, you can (sometimes) defeat diseases completely, and you can act to contain them geographically. Also you can realistically prevent people from getting diseases in advance (sometimes) just as you can realistically prevent physical violence (sometimes), not just deal with the effects afterwards. And you can (sometimes) reduce the global burden of disease without forcing every individual to do something, like in your install-sprinklers example.
I was only pointing out that you're failing the ideological Turing test here.
Okay, so you think I'm not doing a good job simulating a Libertarian, exactly as I suggested, but you don't actually have an explanation for how my point is invalid...?
I can see a few issues there, mostly that there is no continuity.
There simply isn’t enough EA money to run a program on a remotely close scale, so the program is basically going to crash, burn and start anew, most of its institutional knowledge lost.
With, of course, a significantly worse performance profile, because instead of relying on mostly guaranteed funding from a main source, they’re going to have to expand more effort to get far less money.
The Salvation Army and Red Cross combined are about the same size as PEPFAR at $7b. I don't see anything here that says only EAs are capable of contributing, and the existing charity infrastructure is far larger.
So the Salvation Army and Red Cross should abandon their existing missions and completely restructure and re-tool instead of PEPFAR continuing as it is? Is that what you're suggesting as a viable alternative?
No, just that the existing charity infrastructure is much larger than the amounts we're talking about and the US federal government doesn't have to be the ones running it. In fact, the US could donate the $7b to private organizations earmarked for their goals and that would be fine.
Libertarians can complain about taxes as soon as the state stops protecting the original theft, that being property rights.
If we're really going to reduce "government" to theft, then all "private" property is theft as well, because it was coerced out of other people through always-asymmetric contracts enabled and then enforced by the violence-power of GOVERNMENT.
Remove governments and you'll still have contracts and "norms" (if not written laws) and... yes... violence being used to enforce them. Then we can live in a mafioso utopia like 1800's Sicily.
Libertarianism is a tried-and-true system. After William the Conqueror took over England, he did the most libertarian thing ever: "this is LITERALLY ALL my land". (because who's gonna say it isn't?)
He then EFFECTIVE ALTRUISTICALLY gave 20% of it to an organization focused on the saving of souls.