Biden had a chance to undo Trump’s mistakes. He dropped the ball. He squandered the chance to re-enter the Iran nuclear deal, and instead doubled-down.

Oops.

The Parliament as a whole was (possibly willfully) ignorant, but the sponsors for his commendation were intimately familiar with his history.

the law and not their political views

The law is a consequence of political viewpoints. The issue of Roe, for instance, is decided by the interpretation of a basket of Constitutional rights and privileges.

If laws weren’t up to ideological interpretation, we wouldn’t need judges or lawyers to begin with. They’d just be clerks administration filed paperwork with predetermined outcomes.

The judges appointed by the opposition party, protect the laws made by the opposition party

Why would you want a judge protecting bad laws?

Hence a single government can not just stack the courts.

But a party that’s held power for decades can. Mexico spent nearly a century under a single party. You’ll find similar dynamics in Japan, Germany, Korea, the UK, China, Venezuela, Russia, Pakistan, Thailand…

Imagine a Venezuela election in which Maduro is replaced, but the Chavez/Maduro packed court simply rules the new government illegitimate and strikes down all their decisions. Do you just wait until all the Chaveismo judges retire/die? Or do you replace them?

In fairness, that was just a coup and regime change effectively at gunpoint.

Justice in most cases means opposing political power

When has the court ever ruled in opposition to political power?

Sortition is one way, if you don’t want some entrenched faction reproducing itself.

It isn’t as though you can’t corrupt a candidate after they take office. Look at Clarence Thomas.

Do you want neutral judges or do you want judges that align with the popular view?

John Roberts spent his confirmation process convincing everyone he was a “neutral” balls and strikes judge. All his opinions are phrased to imply he is taking a rational and fact based approach to the law. Yet his decisions are all in favor of hard right positions.

Do you want a judge like that? Or do you want an “activist” judge that respects unions, defends abortion rights and voting rights, and curtails the power of private industry to subvert democracy?

What do you want from a judge or a sheriff?

You want someone who aligns with the legislature and President. If your courts are stacked with the opposition party and there’s no legal way to replace them, they become a judicial firewall against any legislative reform.

So Canada fucked up

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Canada loves Eastern European fascists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal

On 22 September 2023, Yaroslav Hunka, a Ukrainian Canadian who fought in the SS Division Galicia of the military wing of the Nazi Party, the Waffen-SS, was invited to the House of Commons of Canada to be recognized by Speaker Anthony Rota, the Member of Parliament for Hunka’s district. Hunka received two standing ovations from all house members, including Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau, other party leaders, and visiting Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy.

Hunka’s membership in the Waffen-SS was reported initially by The Forward, which quoted a tweet by the academic Ivan Katchanovsk. The story was picked up by the Canadian media, receiving international attention.

The incident, seen as a political blunder and a scandal, such that it drew comparisons to the most embarrassing moments in Canada’s history, was leveraged by the Russian establishment to further its justifications for waging war in Ukraine, which had been started under a pretext of “denazification”, among other stated reasons. Rota resigned as speaker five days later, and the House unanimously adopted a motion to condemn Nazism and withdraw its recognition of Hunka. Prime Minister Trudeau and Canadian government officials apologized to the worldwide Jewish community. The handling of suspected World War II war criminals in Canada became a renewed matter of public interest.

I’ve been at companies with generic PTO and companies with explicit sick leave which is considered additional to PTO.

The theory of sick leave is that people with serious or chronic illnesses need that additional time and shouldn’t be compelled to come in at the expense of their long term well being. Also, if you’ve got the flu, don’t show up and spread it around just have some extra days to get better.

If you want to get ideological about it, this is the nut of the whole “From each according to their ability, to each according to their need” thing the 19th century leftists were talking about. I do get the broader argument that we should just have more PTO generally speaking, shorter work days and work weeks, and more time for ourselves and our loved ones. But I think segregating out “sick leave” specifically for people who need additional time to recover form illness is generally better policy than handing someone a (often smaller and stingier) set of generic PTO and telling them to spend it on the worst days of their life.

Get a Henson razor and a free pack of 100 blades with code REALLIFELORE at https://bit.ly/3oL97pK

Might be a good video, but I really do hate this shit.

I’m not sure what people think AI was ever going to be…

The heavy investment in AI is coming under the assumption that these advanced processes will replace huge portions of the human workforce.

So we don’t need lawyers, because we just put prompts into a Law AI and it gives us a verdict. We don’t need doctors, because we just put symptoms into a Medical AI and it gives us a diagnosis and treatment plan. We don’t need salespeople, because we just put the product into a Marketing AI and it spits out a bunch of comvincing ad copy.

the concept of what a brain is will probably be questioned as well.

We already connect our brains to our computers. We just use screens and keyboards as our interface.

I suppose you could argue that a guy with a calculator or a camera or a chat app is mentally different than one without it. But I think the goal with AI is supplementing human minds, not complementing then.

Try eating raw grain.

strawmen and false equivalencies

shrug

Flinging up “list of logical fallacies” as chafe is the standard Reddit defense mechanism against any kind of serious conversation.

Well… if you want to get really into anthropology, there’s an argument that outsourcing our digestion (via early agriculture) actually made us a lot weaker and dumber. It was social pressure (often explicit enslavement) that forced people into the agricultural lifestyle. But that a booming population powered by cheap, reliable agriculture allowed multitudes to outperform by volume what exceptionally smart and strong but scarce individuals achieved in small tribes.

More advanced forms of sterilization became necessary as populations hit certain critical levels of risk for pathogens and other hygiene problems. And so modern techniques, like vaccination and pasteurization, are really just extensions of this ten-thousand year trend towards urbanization that require health and safety precautions as a condition of our dense population centers.

This wasn’t just biological evolution. Our ability to process, transmit, and record information made our species heavily dependent on these technological techniques and the passing down of the instructions to perform them. The health risks are now bound up in our ability to maintain a working, useful library of information and to perform the rituals necessary to keep our food and water sufficiently sterile.

It’s to start the break down of food.

That too. But killing parasites in meat and fish is another big benefit.

We evolved to outsource our digestion to cooking.

To a degree. But we also just died more often to infection and disease. Cooking reduced mortality rates, which spurred a larger population, whose members transmitted the knowledge of how and what to cook before eating.

I found it interesting that Trump claims if he wins the election, he’ll have the Russia / Ukraine conflict resolved BEFORE he even takes office.

He’s invoking the Iran Hostage Crisis, I think. Reagan famously cut a deal with the Ayatollah to release the American hostages on the day of his inauguration, despite Carter having nailed down a prisoner exchange months earlier.

If that’s the case, then it seems like he could choose to end the conflict at any time.

He’s full of shit. This isn’t a hostage negotiation where Biden did 95% of the work for him already. This is an intractable siege spanning a third of the country’s land area which has been spiraling into long range bombings of the respective civilian capitals. Trump isn’t going to be able to leverage a ceasefire that’s already on the table, because Zelensky isn’t asking for a ceasefire, he’s asking for permission to use higher capacity long range missiles to force Russian troops off the southern front.

I have no doubt that he can’t actually end it without basically giving in entirely to Russia.

The siren song Trump sings is that he could have prevented the '22 invasion by playing nice with Putin before tanks crossed the border. And 100%, if there had been a detente prior to the outbreak of open conflict, hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved. Even at a concession of territory, this arguably would have been preferable to the holocaust committed across the territory to date.

But the reality is that he was just as happy to sell advanced weapons systems to Ukraine in 2018 as Biden has been in extending military aid today. If anything, Trump was more responsible for the Ukraine/Russia war going hot than Biden. And not even for particularly noble reasons (MIC $$$!!!)

Trump falsely promised Ukrainian leadership his full support in the event of a Russian retaliation, sold them a bunch of tacti-cool military surplus, and then turned around and tried to cut the same fucking deal with the Russians.

In this sense, it also invokes Reagan who was famous for sending Rumsfeld to cut arms deals with both Iran and Iraq shortly before the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq War.

Promising both countries your support, goading them into conflict, and then pulling back to let them duke it out is textbook John Bolton foreign policy. And guess who was whispering in Trump’s ear all through that first term in office?

My reference to Tiananmen wasn’t implying that people are ignorant of it, but rather that it can’t be discussed openly in a public forum.

They can and do. Whole books are written on the subject. But, again, there’s a question of perspective. You’re not going to get shelf-space at a Chinese book store selling something titled “How the Deng Government Destroyed China: The Tienamen Square Incident and the Death of Chinese Democracy” for the same reason you’re not going to get Barnes & Noble to host your copy of “George Washington: America’s Hitler” or convince Ron DeSantis to put a copy of Das Kapital in every Florida student library.

Write an analysis of it on Weibo that criticizes the government and see where that gets you

The post will be taken down and your account will likely be suspended. But then you’ll get the same treatment on Twitter trying to post the word “cisgender”. Does that mean Americans simply don’t know about transgenderism? Or does it mean moderators for an arch-conservative are running the largest social media site in your country?

opposing viewpoints aren’t actively suppressed by the government

Tell that to Edward Snowden and Julian Assange. Tell it to Bong Hits for Jesus guy. Tell it to folks trying to distribute voter registration information in Florida, Idaho, Kansas, Missouri, Montana and Tennessee.

Equating the two is off by several orders of magnitude.

One of the problems with discussing any kind of Chinese censorship in the United States is that Americans assume they are uniquely privileged and that Chinese people are exceptionally surveilled and repressed. This is largely because the folks making the assertion are saying things that would get you censored in China, but not in the US. By contrast, there are people in the US who have lost their jobs, their property, and their freedom as a consequence of verbally challenging the US government. They aren’t able to voice their grievances because they are censored for saying the things you are not allowed to say. They could say these things in China without consequence and quite a few people in China do espouse these views. But where as boycotting Israel or burning an American flag won’t cost you your career in Chinese state government, like it will in Texas or Florida, we don’t consider this an essential freedom.

The specific set of taboos are different in our two countries. But political taboos exist in both and trigger reactionary responses in both. This does not preclude having a conversation about certain events. But it does shape how people view these events and who they assume are righteous relative to who they assume are tyrannical.

You can talk about the J6 riots around the US Capitol. But you can’t run for office as a Democrat and say “The J6ers were right and justified in their actions, I support them!” because the party will kick you out. You’ll be excommunicated from Dem social circles. You won’t be able to get contracts from Dem officials in blue states. Anyone offering you a job in these circles will fire you. Dem media won’t host you on their shows. Your “social credit score” will be in the trash. Does that mean the Dems have censored you? Or does that mean you’ve alienated everyone you need to do business with the party?

I must say I’m very surprised that your HK and TW people share your views.

I didn’t say they share my views. I’ve seen every angle of the argument and quite a few of them have different opinions.

But they argue over a shared history. Mainlanders don’t get confused when someone from Taiwan talks about Tienamen. Taiwanese people don’t stare blankly at the name Chiang Kai-Shek. Folks from Hong Kong aren’t unfamiliar with the British Occupation.

People aren’t simply ignorant of the facts. They tend to be biased due to their material conditions. If you’re a mid manager at the Houston branch of Sinopec, you didn’t get there because you were a John Bircher. Meanwhile if you’re on the payroll of the Foremost Group, you’ve got a very real financial incentive to oppose Chinese unification (but also a real incentive to oppose US tariffs on China).

Work as a contractor long enough and you’ll get all different kinds of viewpoints. They’ll be adversarial, not simply ignorant.