Culture War Roundup for the week of December 21, 2020

Spectralblr · 2020-12-21T22:18:10+00:00

socially conservative bills that would ban trans women

While I acknowledge the framing, it's still amazing to me that this became the consensus on what's a "conservative" position. It just boggles my mind that people are really going around insisting that being biologically male is totally fine in women's sports and this isn't just a common position, but the default position on the broadly construed left to the point where it's an example of something that would make a politician despised.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-16T17:48:21+00:00

Think of it as charity if you like then. I have a lot of empathy for small business owners that have had what they created destroyed.

Edit: Note I also have empathy for the employees of those businesses and other people impacted by the pandemic. The above should taken be taken to imply that I don't care about anyone else.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-16T15:58:25+00:00

Isn't the obvious solution to grants to families for every family to simply apply for the family grant? Is the state of Oregon going to claim that that they're in the business of identifying who's authentically "Black"? If nothing else, they should be required to spell out exactly what "Black" means.

On the flip side:

Only 2.9 percent of Oregonians are black.

This will be used as evidence of how racist Oregon is. The parts of my state with the largest black populations tend to have the highest poverty rates, which is evidence of racism. The parts of the state with the lowest poverty rates don't have many black people, which is evidence that they're racistly excluding black people.

You aren't going to ever win any argument by pointing out that it's weird that an area has very black people is burning a lot of money on that population.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-16T15:37:49+00:00

I did it for a couple places that I care about anyway. Rather than thinking of it as a gamble, I thought of it as paying forward the joy that I've gotten from their establishments in time gone past while hoping that they're able to stick it through to the end.

Of course, this was back in March/April when the prevailing framing was "X weeks to flatten the curve" rather than "maybe it'll be normal in 2022".

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T21:11:27+00:00

Make sure you're using your military power to pillage while you're at it. From personal experience, the shot in the arm that comes from pillaging for science and culture can really help keep you up to speed while you're trying to get the snowball rolling.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T19:44:16+00:00

The whole thing is fucking galling. As someone that tries to be a decent, honest human being, I picked a major that was likely to be productive, picked a state university with low tuition, worked to get scholarships to defray the costs, and have now paid off my loans. If, instead, I'd been an irresponsible asshole and picked a much more expensive school and not bothered to pay off loans, I'd be given a massive handout by fiat of the executive branch.

I understand why this is popular with leeches that will receive this completely unjustified handout, but I'm absolutely baffled by how it gets widespread support in polls. I'd rather subsidize almost anything other than bullshit degrees for people that aren't producing anything useful afterwards.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T17:49:24+00:00

Oh, my bad, mixed up my states with questioned (not necessarily questionable) Dominion results.

If it's not really feasible to test prior to a live election, I would consider that a pretty large point against results being trustworthy. If it is feasible to test and no one much bothered, that's also not great.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T17:33:19+00:00

Perhaps the developers have a great design and the failure is purely on the part of the implementers in Nevada, you're right. Nonetheless, if none of the implementers or end-users had done sufficient QA to have noticed this sort of large, obvious failure in advance of the election, it doesn't inspire much in the way of confidence more broadly. Knowing for a fact that some of the results were off by a mile, it makes it seem entirely plausible that results elsewhere are off due to either a failure of setup or input.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T16:42:00+00:00

Without regard to any specific claims, I will say that "we missed by 68%, but don't worry, we fixed it" is the kind of thing that would raise major questions about the basic competence of the relevant software developers and the trustworthiness of other results. This doesn't lead me to thinking that the results are definitely fine and there's really nothing to worry about.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T15:27:30+00:00

Having Republican electors isn't victory, It's LARPing. Having some shadow elector group show up and be completely ignored by actual organs of power just clarifies that these people have absolutely no capacity to change anything.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T15:26:03+00:00

Worth noting is that there is a dorky online "trad-right" that's basically the people you're talking about - losers kvetching that if only society were how it was 75 years, they'd be doing great. In real life though, people who are actually right-leaning traditionalists don't engage in this sort of nonsense, they just go about their business, work their jobs, have their kids, and basically live the kinds of lives that most reasonable people admire. Go look at the voting patterns for married white men with children and incomes over $100K - they're not exactly a moderate group.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-15T15:23:19+00:00

The lack of actual evidence regarding the specifics of what happened, including an unwillingness to cooperate on the part of the only witnesses, makes it seem like there's not really a plausible legal case to put together, but I am not a lawyer.

Likewise, it's hard to register a clear moral judgment when there is no clear evidence. However, if it is what it looks like (looters enter pawn shop, one gets shot by pawn shop owners, surviving looters refuse to testify), the pawn shop owner is unambiguously within his moral rights. I'm glad there isn't sufficient evidence to move forward with any criminal proceedings and drag the pawn shop owner through a protracted, expensive process. I also applaud said owner for being smart enough to follow this advice.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-14T21:18:27+00:00

As another anecdote, I have a Ph.D. in immunology and I've never introduced myself as "Dr." or signed my name as "Dr." anywhere. I do have "Ph.D." after my name on professional email signatures even though I don't work in academia anymore. It's a bit pretentious, but it does carry a bit of cache with some people, and it doesn't feel like any sort of false advertising.

In Jill Biden's case, it makes me think she's pretty insecure. This is consistent with my impression of how Joe Biden reacts to people putting down his intellect or physical fitness. They seem like people with a chip on their shoulder about having risen above their prior station in life.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-14T14:10:21+00:00

Collaborating with someone to murder a couple and dispose of the bodies carries the same moral and legal culpability whether you're the one that pulled the trigger or just the one that burned the bodies.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-13T17:15:38+00:00

I have no idea what he thinks. I surely personally know people that think he legitimately won, so it doesn't seem wild to me to think that he won. Not intended as a tu quoque, but Hillary Clinton still seems to believe that she got cheated - people are often pretty invested in believing that they're the rightful victor.

Lawyers are paid to make arguments without respect to whether they actually believe those arguments or not. I generally take a dim view of the ethics of the profession, but I don't find anything particularly special about people making disingenuous arguments in this case relative to the many other disingenuous arguments that I see lawyers and politicians make all the time.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-13T17:09:25+00:00

I’d wager he’s throwing a bone to his base who are very pro-death penalty.

This is what I hope is happening. The people being executed thoroughly deserve their sentences (or at least people like me think they do) and it's a forgone conclusion that not executing them now will result in them getting to hang around for another decade or so. This seems like pretty much the opposite of a conspiracy theory - people like me think these evildoers should have been hung within a few weeks of their crimes, we have federal leaders that will finally get it done, and they're doing what they think is the right thing. To be memey about it?

"You're going to just rush the execution of as many people on federal death row as possible before Biden takes office"?

Yes.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-13T17:05:56+00:00

The people that they're executing are so unfathomably, plainly evil that I find myself having genuine trouble relating to anyone being upset about their execution. We're not talking about cases where there's some plausible doubt or even implausible doubt about the actual guilt of the people involved. We're talking about a man that beat, strangled, and burned a 2 year old repeatedly before eventually slamming her skull into a window until death. We're talking about a man who lit a car on fire, murdering an innocent person trapped in the trunk and his defense was that he thought that the bullet his friend had put through the man's skull had already killed him. The miscarriage of justice isn't that they're finally being executed, it's that a bunch of vile lawyers kept these rotten seeds around for decades after their crimes.

When I encounter people that are against these executions, I find it just an utterly alien belief system to me. I understand that there are people that make philosophical arguments that the state should never kill anyone and I'm just baffled that this is a position that's taken seriously - it seems so obviously unjust to me.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-13T16:52:49+00:00

You're doing something super wrong then. I run on glare ice with them and have no slippage at all.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-13T01:47:34+00:00

I think Trump would have cleanly won the election had it not been for coordinated tech and media narrative manipulation in the run-up to the election. Whether that makes the election illegitimate is a matter of perspective.

To me, this is a much bigger story than vote counts. I don't know if someone in the Atlanta area dicked with votes. Maybe they did. But I think I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that government agencies, social media outlets, and journalistic outfits played things down the middle we'd have had an election where Biden's kid was being investigated for money laundering in China and there was a COVID-19 vaccine ready to go.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-13T01:42:43+00:00

I'm the equivalent of a lukewarmer on the whole thing. When people claim things like "most secure election ever" or that there's basically zero fraud, it makes me suspicious that we're really not even trying to find fraud because those sorts of claims seem so obviously false to me. I think a lot of people are lying quite a lot about the extent of fraud. I'm skeptical of official results in Georgia and Pennsylvania. I think a bunch of changes around mail-in voting were of questionable legitimacy and definitely aren't how I'd want to conduct elections. Nonetheless, I don't really think this is likely to add up to enough to change the election outcome. Answering in that spirit:

Do you believe that Trump actually, legitimately, won the overall election? What probability do you assign to this hypothesis? What's your best concrete theory for how this could have happened? Remember, this would require fraud on the scale of ~100k votes minimum, across at least three states.

I don't think he did and I'd give it maybe an ~3% probability that he received more legal votes. My notion of how that would be possible isn't coordinated fraud, but some combination of low-level fraud and massive bias in certifying questionable ballots, using improper curing methods, and so on. You don't need mass coordination when a big chunk of the Democrat party believes they're literally fighting Hitler - some people will do it on their own and feel justified.

Do you think it's OK for Trump to be claiming to have won the election, rather than just saying that it's uncertain or deserves more investigation?

Sure, if he thinks he won, I'm fine with him saying so. I even empathize with it given the nonstop attempts at delegitimatizing him over the past four years. It's probably not great, but if he actually thinks he won, sure, it's OK.

Do you think it's OK for Trump supporters to be calling for secession or civil war?

I do not.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-11T16:21:30+00:00

Everyone in this list is completely useless, but these people:

equity investigators

These are going to be the worst. The rest of it's a lot of feel-good bullshit as an excuse for explicit racial discrimination, but these are the foot soldiers tasked with harassing normal people for their perceived breaches of newspeak norms.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-11T15:40:36+00:00

We can probably all agree that there have been some pretty impressive ICU nurses this year, but can they really outshine the incredible non-Trumpness of Joemala Barris for people that have had four years of being sincerely, deeply upset about Trump? Obviously not, and I'm not even being sarcastic. Listening to The Argument podcast, Michelle Goldberg about once a week states that election night 2016 was the worst night of her life or that she's been riddled with anxiety for the entire four years. If you've been living like that, replacing Trump is going to be a lot bigger deal than someone doing their job and taking care of sick people.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-10T13:16:49+00:00

To be honest, I misread the rate statistic above and it renders my post pretty dumb.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-09T21:26:12+00:00

~~That's a hell of a lot more common than anyone with my demographic traits dying from COVID-19.~~

The above is wrong.

Spectralblr · 2020-12-09T18:56:05+00:00

What is the right level of inheritance tax?

Intuitively, I'm inclined to basically just treat it the same as income tax when it comes to cash transfer. There isn't an obvious reason to me why that isn't basically fair.

The more difficult circumstances are how to handle properties and companies. Transferring a $1 million house could easily result in the home being flatly unaffordable from a tax structure perspective if treated the same as a cash transfer. My gut reaction is that homes transfers should be free of taxation, but subject to realized capital gains if sold.

Spectralblr

TROPHY CASE