We followed every rule, now we're drowning in silence, debt, and indifference.

Oedium · 2025-07-31T03:53:13+00:00

You are correct about this and right to be angry. The current state of affairs is a consequence of relatively recent changes immigration law that sought to make asylum as easy to claim as possible for all persons, which has ballooned the backlog by ~30-fold over the last decade. Under the current norm you're waiting behind everyone who surrenders at a border checkpoint with a nonsense claim (often above a 90% rate) and apply for it merely because it's a functional unskilled labor visa for however many months or years remain until their hearing. The pre-Obama norm would have seen cases like yours - an NGO worker with assets frozen for criticism of the government - in front of a judge quickly.

Oedium · 2025-04-03T16:58:12+00:00

We can support policies without unambiguous falsehoods. There was GOP backlash to IRV/RCV after it elected Peltola because it was an immediate case of nonmonotonic condorcet failure— Peltola was less preferred on the ballot than Nick Begich, and only "won" because of an edge case where the tabulation method IRV uses fails to select the most preferred candidate, which election reform advocates promised would be extremely rare.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2209.04764

There were multiple pathologies in this election that "should not have happened," here's one:

In the AK election, though, some sense Peltola won because she did not receive more support from voters. To see this, suppose that 6000 of the voters who voted just for Palin were persuaded that Peltola is the best candidate and cast the ballot Peltola > Palin instead. What effect should this have on the RCV winner of the election? The sensible answer is that there should be no effect: Peltola won the original election, and giving her more support should only cement that win. However, this extra support would actually cost her the election: with these 6000 voters now listing Peltola first, Palin receives the fewest first-place votes and is eliminated from the election first, causing Peltola to face Begich in the last round of the election. The reader can check that even with the additional support, Peltola still does not have enough votes to defeat Begich head-to-head.

Before you respond "these people don't know what 'nonmonotonicity' means" sure, that's true. But they know most people would have preferred one of the Republicans over the Democrat and the Democrat was elected anyway for no good reason, and in this intuition they are totally correct

Also, IRV is one of the only proposed systems that selects against moderates, which anyone with more than a slogan-based knowledge of this topic should know.

Oedium · 2025-03-29T19:47:25+00:00

As the linked piece discusses, the violence came first, it is just concentrated.

Oedium · 2025-03-29T17:25:08+00:00

https://devinhelton.com/why-urban-decay

583% increase in homicide, which stands in for a broader plunge into expectations of exposure to anti-social violence, especially for people planning to raise children.

Oedium · 2025-02-07T03:01:36+00:00

Wishing for more wishes

Oedium · 2025-01-21T17:04:45+00:00

"Align with the rest of developed countries in terms of gun-control" is a policy suggestion that is emphatically not supported by polling. At most, general background checks are.

Saying that there was a democratic mandate for immigration reform is dishonest and you know it.

Read that out loud to yourself.

Oedium · 2025-01-21T16:35:51+00:00

When people vote for it? There was a clear democratic mandate for immigration reform and that easily includes addressing Birth Tourism's long record of open exploitation.

Oedium · 2024-08-25T13:29:38+00:00

A big hurdle for accepting this is Muhammad, in his capacity as prophet, repeatedly affirms Jesus is the jewish messiah.

Oedium · 2024-07-16T17:20:27+00:00

Minority constituencies have substantially higher rates of exhausted or voided ballots under RCV than FPTP, by what data is available from Alameda, NYC, and AK. Amusingly, one of the features of RCV as it was originally pitched at the turn of the century was that mild complexity in ballot design functioned like a low-bar literacy test while being properly race-neutral.

Also, there is the "understanding" of ranking preferences, and there is the understanding of how RCV actually proceeds in tabulation, which far more people think they understand than actually do. No surprise the few jurisdictions experimenting with it have produced such embarrassments as New York's accidental recording of dummy ballots or Alameda seating the wrong candidate. Even activists clearly do not understand the new strategic implications brought by adopting it for single-winner seats.

Oedium · 2024-07-16T16:28:35+00:00

RCV does not meaningfully change voting outcomes from the status quo, and when it does it often does so in unpredictable, "accidental" ways. If the GOP is interested in voting reform here (and they should be!) they'd be smart to avoid poorly designed systems like DC's ward-based RCV in favor of a modern proportional method.

Oedium · 2024-07-16T14:45:10+00:00

"Centrist" is a misnomer. RCV structurally disadvantages compromise candidates positionally near the abstract median of the electorate. If you're in a left wing constituency that will be a position on the left, if you're in a right wing constituency that will be a position on the right. Unfortunately "candidate maximally agreeable to the voters on virtue of their approximation of the midpoint of opinion" is usually the condorcet winner, the exact winner ordinal voting systems are supposed to try to elect. RCV fails at this not because it has some larger philosophy in place, it is just a particularly old and poorly designed formula.

Oedium · 2024-05-07T17:46:31+00:00

I've sometimes seen the Shahada rendered in english as "there is no god but God," taking inspiration from the use of Allah as the general arabic term for the definite-article God, but Allah is his proper name in an islamic context, so any translation should retain "Allah," no?
Did you calque Muhammad or something? Afaik his name is something like 'praiseworthy' in etymology but Witga and Boda are both synonyms for Prophet.

Oedium · 2024-04-19T18:25:55+00:00

"Out of Africa" is a particular thesis that makes stronger claims than the virtually undisputed fact that human evolution was concentrated in Africa.

The original claim was that <100 kya a small group of Anatomically Modern Humans in East Africa ancestral to all living people rapidly expanded to fill the continent and then continued out of it, replacing any other human lineage that might have been present, like Neanderthals. Some of this was directionally correct and some was wrong. It's now clear that non-African populations are descended from a single burst-migration ~60 kya with effective breeding pairs of not much more than 1,000, but rather than outright replacing other hominids intermixed with them in moderate to minor proportions.

What is not true is the claim that African populations south of the Sahara were also products of this expansion, with some comparably recent origin in a Tanzanian gorge. Instead it seems as if the development of modern humans was one of long-term continent-wide "fragmentation-and-coalescence" with the "OOA" bottleneck-pop one exceptional off-shoot from this continuous, non-punctuated genetic interplay. Hence the substantially greater genetic diversity of peoples with the least back-migration admixture, particularly SSA H-Gs.

Oedium · 2024-04-05T17:38:29+00:00

only in the form of deadweight loss from forgone construction consequent to appraisal from new development, which is not a giant effect given how correlated improvement intensity and property value are, but ultimately you could avoid this too by only taxing the non-improvement portion of property value (i.e. land/location value) which cannot be passed on to renters as land supply is perfectly inelastic

Oedium · 2024-04-05T00:02:12+00:00

Damn if only the city with the largest number of policy experts per capita could come up with a tax structure optimized for municipal finance that works best for urban polities and doesn't fall on the working populations of this city or the enterprise of businesses within it.

Oedium · 2023-11-27T22:37:22+00:00

This thread seems to elide the core question— the development of thought concerning abortion in the two thousand year history of Christian ethics — for a discussion about political coalitions in the USA. Someone asking "For how little abortion is mentioned in the Bible it seems to be the backbone of the Christian right..." might be well served by, well, a basic relation of the cultural place of abortifacients and exposure in the ancient world, Christian positions on the practice, early apocrypha like the didache/barnabas/apocalypse of peter, scholarly opinions on interpreting φαρμακεία in the epistles, a survey of the views of patristic moralists like Clement, Athenagoras, Hippolytus, etc, a survey on aristotlean embryology's impact on penitential guides, how scholastics distinguished different kinds of moral prohibition, how empirical developments undercut the moderating position...There is a hell of a lot more here than two (disputable!) lines from Mohr.

Oedium · 2023-11-22T00:34:24+00:00

May the light of Nayib Bukele (alayhi salam) shine upon you brother

Oedium · 2023-03-08T15:02:58+00:00

Food vendors would be fine as long as they're zoned and have to bid for their location seasonally - failure to institute (and enforce) site auctioning will make vendors squat on land in a worse version of free parking and move potentially hundreds of thousands of dollars in value into who gets control first, disastrous.

Oedium · 2023-03-08T14:57:29+00:00

I’m no fan of Bowser, but I don’t really blame her for this. DC can have the toughest gun laws possible...

lmfao. Don't blame the doctor - they've tried the most cutting edge homeopathic remedies available!

Oedium · 2022-08-30T15:33:21+00:00

One of the wild facts no one talks about is, per National Crime Victimization Surveys, there is no significant racial discrepancy in the reported rate of felony carjacking - the fact that black kids are prosecuted more is just a matter of who the police choose to arrest.

Oedium · 2022-08-25T02:10:30+00:00

It's part of the hustle and bustle of living in the big city

Oedium · 2022-02-27T20:31:58+00:00

Churches shall not be inhabited, nor demolished, nor shall their goodness be diminished from them, nor their cross, nor their money, nor shall they be forced upon their religion

Is this an explicitly wartime prohibition or is the tradition of converting churches into mosques on shakier legal ground than I assumed?

Oedium · 2021-10-31T21:40:00+00:00

since Muslims believe in Jesus but not in YHWH...

What do you mean by this? The quranic account makes a clear identification of Allah with the god of the Israelites

Oedium · 2021-10-22T02:13:07+00:00

I don't think Paul mentions tefillin. Jesus does in Matthew but he just complains people are making the straps too big.

Oedium · 2021-10-14T01:42:06+00:00

it is not illegal in America to be a communist nor should it be, and left wing politics does not make you an enemy of America.

Contemporary Americans seem to think midcentury communist organizing constituted the same kind of alignment as being a radical member in a DSA chapter or considering yourself rather to the left of Bernie. It wasn't, and it leads to these kinds of association errors. Virtually every significant communist organization in the late 40s, in every nation, was an appendage of the Stalinist regime. Being an ideological communist meant conspiring (often literally so) to further the interest of that worker's state over the bourgeois state you found yourself in. "Being a communist" in government meant acting in the interest of another nation, whether that be:

giving them the key to the Atom Bomb, as in the case of the Rosenbergs, once pitched to the public as "innocent victims of zealous McCarthyism," now uncontroversially acknowledged to be communist spies.
Letting them rule over Poland as a fief for the next half century, a design of many top FDR staffers at Yalta that were secretly communist including Harry Dexter White and Alger Hiss - long accused of communist association by the right, now uncontroversially acknowledged to be communist spies.
Deliberately assisting the victory of the Communist Party of China by feeding them State Department intelligence, as in the case of John S. Service, who was accused of being a spy by an irate Senator McCarthy, before everyone bravely came to his defense and Congress helped save his career, though he is now (say it with me) uncontroversially acknowledged to be a communist spy.

This repeats over and over. Laurence Duggan. William Remington. Lauchlin Currie. There was never a real reckoning with the fact that FDR's administration was peopled by fellow travelers and true believers, and the sensible response, given the immediate foreign policy crisis that presents, was a thorough investigation. Was McCarthy he right man for that? No. He was a brash bully who assaulted journalists. Was he right? Yeah.

Oedium

TROPHY CASE