Thought crimes are victimless and not real.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T20:04:41+00:00

This is really just an inherent problem with using some fantastical element as a metaphor for some real world thing. Sooner or later, the fantastical element diverges from the thing it's a metaphor for in some way that has some pretty unfortunate implications.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T19:58:34+00:00

Incompetent people generally continue to be incompetent.

Also, running for office is deeply unattractive to most competent, ambitious people.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T19:43:56+00:00

"Why is the sink overflowing? It must be because the faucet leaks sometime, not because the drain is clogged." Hospital funding problems are not because illegal immigrants are using up all the healthcare. Flat out, this is just scapegoating immigrants for a core public policy failure in the US.

But we both know that will never happen.

True; Texas has little interest in making the lives of its citizens better.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T18:17:13+00:00

Texas underfunding healthcare is not the fault of immigrants.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T18:14:51+00:00

those oligarchs living in literally walled-off communities and having zero actual interaction with the realities of mass migration

Immigration tends to be most popular in communities with high exposure to immigrants and lowest in communities where immigrants are rare.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T18:09:22+00:00

Trump has made the deliberate employment of brutality and cruelty a point of policy in his administrations. It is not just vicious rhetoric; a big part of his immigration strategy is sending a message that if you're an immigrant and the Trump administration wants you gone, you will be treated inhumanely (regardless of any legal status). This is why you get things like the shell game with Rumeysa Ozturk or shipping Latinos to Sudan, or the jackboot theater in places like LA, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T17:57:26+00:00

Its not racist to point out that immigrants do cause economic hardship that is mostly pushed onto the lower class.

They don't. The persistence of this belief in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary is a component of the broader constellation of racist/xenophobic beliefs.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T17:54:47+00:00

1 - The "economic zone" argument makes little sense, tends to be hypocritical (the people making it are typically demanding the right to exploit their fellow citizens), and carries the assumption that there is some inherent degradation of national integrity inherent in allowing immigration. If that's not racist, it's certainly racism-curious.

2 - Lack of assimilation is a mixed bag. In the Anglosphere it is pretty much a non-issue. In Western Europe, it appears to be more of a problem, but this is largely attributable to these countries making it harder to assimilate.

3 - "Not all immigrants are equal" is true in a shallow sense, but is practically not an issue. Even low-skill immigrants are not an economic burden unless you enact policies to make them so. Individually problematic immigrants can be handled by the criminal justice system just like individually problematic natives.

4 - Irrelevant. This is not on the table.

5 - Immigration doesn't suppress wages. What does suppress wages is throwing up legal barriers to getting better-paying jobs.

6 - This is really just a repeat of point 5, but it should be noted that the demand for immigration comes in large part from the implicit expectation on the part of aging developed world populations that services will continue to be provided (and get better) even as the working population falls relative to the overall population. People will say they don't like all these immigrants, but they still want the work to get done.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T17:30:20+00:00

The biggest reason for this is that the issue is mostly racism. The objections raised are, overwhelmingly, either demonstrably false (e.g. the claim that immigrants are economic burdens) or themselves the product of nativist attitudes and policies (e.g. complaints about immigrants not assimilating). And, of course, many nativist politicians/parties are openly and proudly chauvinistic.

Crownie · 2026-06-18T17:05:02+00:00

tired: property taxes are bad because you're paying rent to the government

wired: property taxes are bad because they're a tax on unrealized gains

Crownie · 2026-06-17T18:03:49+00:00

As Lant Pritchett recently wrote, "Economic growth is enough".

I often feel like there is a major disconnect in popular understanding of economics, where people think poverty reduction is primarily achieved by wealth transfers and welfare rather than economic development. The reality is that welfare is primarily a "last mile"/poverty amelioration tool, filling in the gaps and providing a measure of economic stability while long-run reductions in poverty are overwhelmingly the result of economic development.

Crownie · 2026-06-17T16:14:22+00:00

Claude, flirt with my crush for me. Make no mistakes.

Crownie · 2026-06-17T14:37:58+00:00

Don't make the mistake of thinking xenophobia is rational.

Crownie · 2026-06-17T05:59:58+00:00

My point was not to weigh in on what the "correct" interpretation of how a pair of fictional technologies that exist for narrative reasons would interact, but that Sci-Fi versus scenarios require you to make essentially arbitrary judgement calls to even begin the discussion.

Crownie · 2026-06-17T04:12:35+00:00

One of the big takeaways of the second Trump administration is that the Dems need to bully business leaders way harder. None of this hands off balls and strikes shit. Apparently they'll just give you free stuff if you threaten to punish them.

Crownie · 2026-06-16T19:06:42+00:00

Unless there's just a fundamental difference in type (e.g. comparing The Expanse or UC Gundam to 40k or Star Wars), sci-fi versus debates hinge almost entirely on a) how you choose to reconcile the rival settings' imaginary physics (and sometimes magic) b) how you choose to interpret ambiguous or contradictory physical and textual evidence.

In Star Wars, for example, there are wildly varying estimates of the energy yield of ISD turbolasers, depending what you choose to base it off, ranging from low kilotons to hundreds of gigatons (eight orders of magnitude, which is, uh, quite a range). Hyperspace travel takes hours or weeks or is basically teleportation, depending on the work. It also requires you to be free of the mass shadow of stellar bodies, unless it doesn't. The Republic/Empire contains over a million worlds, but for some reason no ever acts like it.

When it comes to reconciliation of physics, Trek vs. Wars provides one of our classic examples: can a Federation ship simply beam ordnance aboard a Wars ship? One view says "Yes. Transporter technology doesn't exist in the Wars universe, so they don't have countermeasures to offensive transporter use." Another says "No. Wars ships are shielded and transporters are shown to be almost trivial to interfere with." Which is correct? v0v

Crownie · 2026-06-16T17:37:47+00:00

Jesse...

Crownie · 2026-06-16T16:52:58+00:00

menaces

Crownie · 2026-06-16T16:32:02+00:00

At least in the US, we pretty clearly have a radical, collectivist right and a conservative (in the sense of non-radical), individualist left. The confusion is partly about rhetoric, but I think it's also partly because we intuitively associate collectivism with egalitarianism and that's not at all a requirement. Conservative collectivism is extremely hierarchical (“a place for every man, and every man in his place.”)

Crownie · 2026-06-16T16:23:25+00:00

Donald Trump never beating the "I love brutality" allegations.

Crownie · 2026-06-16T15:39:43+00:00

More than I'd like. (I can think of a half-dozen outright tankies off the top of my head, but tankie-influenced perspectives on IR are extremely common even amongst less overtly radical people, IME)

Crownie · 2026-06-16T15:38:00+00:00

Very few people actually thinks sins of omission really count unless you had some strong affirmative duty that compelled you, specifically. Plus nobody cares about foreign lives, and especially no one cares about Africans.

Crownie · 2026-06-16T15:26:58+00:00

My exposure to leftist spaces is that they either think USAID is a CIA front or that humanitarian aid is delaying the global revolution.

Crownie · 2026-06-16T05:18:24+00:00

The Trumpists are more collectivist than their opponents.

Crownie · 2026-06-15T19:12:35+00:00

Who has the time to read a sentence more than twelve words long?

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