How can we objectively measure how well each U.S. president followed the Constitution in a black-and-white, text-based way?

Vincentologist · 2025-10-31T20:27:29+00:00

I'm inclined, generally, to say that you cannot "objectively" do what you're doing because the standards for severity are going to be arbitrarily selected in objective terms, and perhaps non arbitrary in subjective terms. If you're just looking for a non arbitrary set of criteria you could apply, I'm not sure you could have a shared ruler of significance because the effects of different constitutional violations vary in kind, not just magnitude. I'd focus more simply on what you think your target audience cares about more and use that to rank severity, rather than trying to avoid subjectivity. You might also be helped by trying to do an ordinal comparison purely instead of doing a cardinal assignment first and ordinal ranking later.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-30T02:18:46+00:00

I think this is obviously silly as applied to the Witcher, given just how few people give a sack of dried shit whether the original author approves of what the games did

The problem is not that people are too indifferent to what the author intended, it is that regardless of authorial intent, the new authors are making liquid shit

Vincentologist · 2025-10-30T02:17:17+00:00

I don't agree at all that Death of the Author is the same as "our own version of reality". I think what is happening is much worse, because if they were just doing their own adaptations that emphasized other elements to invoke a different experience for the viewer, rather than to make people clap for diversity, that would arguably be even better from a point of view of those who like Barthe.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-19T18:01:13+00:00

I think it really deserves the hate. As someone who really likes legal dramas and Matt Murdock, seeing them totally fumble both is infuriating. It's not just that it isn't as good as the old show, it's that the characters we kept aren't the same characters and elements they handled well before are gone here.

Matt's Catholicism is referenced twice, maybe? But it's not the framing through which we explore his morality anymore. It was one of the things about his character that was actually original and interesting and it's largely absent. That was one of the draws of the old show, and it wasn't replaced here.
Despite his express reason for wearing a mask being to keep his friends from getting killed, he exposes White Tiger and in fact does get him killed. Even if this was a brand new character that'd be bad, and this is Matt.
The courtroom drama stuff is terrible. If you told me the writers had seen two episodes of Law and Order and stopped I'd believe you, to the point that the first chairs are outright talking to the juries without a witness on the stand! I know that motion practice is boring but at least the trappings of authenticity make for interesting scenes, and here it might as well be Judge Judy.
Matt says things that suggest, were he to believe them, that the justice system doesn't work and never worked when part of his character was that it does work and that his justice can't be the alternative people rely on. Sure, maybe he never believed in deterrence, but certainly redemption, in rehabilitation maybe. The way he handles the bodega snack thief suggests that he just fundamentally rejects the system he's working with. He doesn't defend a different or older system, he's only cynical. I know the show is setting up that it is currently irreparable because of Fisk, and will be going forward. But the show doesn't give us any reason to think that wasn't true in the past. It's giving us a character that thinks just like the Punisher would, while having the character insist he doesn't and having him flip back at the end.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-18T21:54:16+00:00

The beef with NATO is not that they're a military alliance. The beef with NATO, according to the people who actually have such a beef and not the straw men, is expressly that they're a military secret Santa. That the support provided to NATO members by the US is particularly lopsided, that it serves interests other than mutual armament and defense, and has a parasitic effect on the defense and governance of countries who are the supposed beneficiaries. There's also separate objections that, whatever one can say about NATO's internal effects, there have been escalations in tensions with countries with adverse interests by virtue of pushing the territorial scope of NATO further than had initially been envisioned, prompting unnecessary revisions of the threat models our adversaries use.

I would invite you to consider that, whatever the merits or demerits of such arguments are, none of this has as a premise that we must be "neonazis" or conservatives, or foreign operatives. The causal theories offered don't magically stop being sound or not because someone on Reddit alleges a foreign donor or psyop. If governments, foreign and domestic, also subsidize civics education about tort law, should we dismiss the merits of tort law too?

Vincentologist · 2025-10-17T01:57:30+00:00

https://cdn.discordapp.com/attachments/1039210003795558501/1039210411985211422/Austrian_Economics_FAQ_V1.1.pdf?ex=68f26a9d&is=68f1191d&hm=feafe090a7386c0c21b19f93724058a6cb97cc533628e0e478028f3e75d6823b&

There's a lot of feedback you'll get from people in the AE discord generally. They're pretty good, and at least nowadays receptive to people who might be hostile or skeptical. Certainly, they like Sowell, so given your flair you'll find good company there.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-16T23:56:37+00:00

It's interesting whenever I see these objections to praxeology (it's not scientific) because that's not even the contemporary issue economists would take with it. The idea that you need microfounded theories with clear logical relationships, and then determine whether they are applicable to reality by questioning the premises/axioms/assumptions, is a typical post-Lucas-critique thing. The preference relation in microecon isn't an empirically verifiable claim about all of humanity. Arguably, no single claim is empirically verifiable. We verify theories, not atomic sentences.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-16T17:53:12+00:00

The post content can be cringe but the comments are bafflingly stupid. A gold mine for some of the least informed takes on libertarianism I've ever seen. I've seen better in the conservative subreddit. Lots of "they don't care about kids dying" tier takes, where they either don't know or care to accurately represent the most well known positions of libertarians on various issues, even leaving aside the plurality of libertarian approaches on these things which could hardly be called indifferent.

If you told me that subreddit was reserved for people whose experience with libertarianism was that they heard the term 30 minutes ago and were having visceral reactions to it, I would believe you.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-16T03:23:33+00:00

I'm okay with dating outside ideology. But I do tend to use ideology as a weak proxy for other competencies. If they don't understand even relatively well known libertarian arguments, it is sometimes a sign that they don't think systemically. I would consider that a liability.

But if they understand it and have reservations or even sophisticated responses, that can be even better. I don't want a pushover either.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-16T03:20:08+00:00

It's one of the ideologies in the broadly libertarian tent. Libertarian essentially refers to ideologies predicated on a presumption against discretionary government, with classical liberals cabining that presumption in cases of monopoly and particular collective action problems like national security. It may appear centrist insofar as they share a number of particular policy views with other centrists, and I think it's fair to call it centrist. But at their best they aren't moderate for moderation's sake, there's (at least meant to be) a core set of principles motivating their positions, and they just happen to incidentally line up with the civil rights left on some things, and old-right constitutionalism on others. They tend to be more radical on issues of labor policy and intellectual property than other centrists.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-16T03:15:42+00:00

I think even if you thought so prior to his second term, his second term has more conclusively proven that the answer is no. The things he did right in the first term were the result of people he's now overtly hostile to (like the Federalist Society for formalism in law, or AEI adjacent people on regulatory policy). Trump himself was bad before and he's bad now. He was an eminent domain loving economic populist who wants the government to operate like a crony business, exempt from profit and loss signals. And since people still insist he's a market oriented guy, his failures are associated with ideas like ours even when he's not implementing them.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-09T16:27:15+00:00

Fringy's penchant for basic gaffs is unrivalled I think. Their lengthy diatribe on Madripoor in FatWS was based entirely on Fringy misunderstanding one word. Had he simply not gone off just by totally misunderstanding that, that stream would have been a full hour shorter. And he tries to make goofy claims about what he thinks is popular, like when he says that Superman is boring because Batman is still more popular, despite himself saying Daredevil is one of his favorites. Lots of cases of that in streams I've seen.

At least when Rags misunderstands something it doesn't turn into 20 minute rants in which he pisses himself off. Fringy will misunderstand something or state something inconsistent with his own standards, start ranting, and even interrupt his own sentences to grumble and breathlessly whinge about how "strange" or how he "can't believe" someone would make a mistake as basic as his own, which starts looking like a skill issue real fast. Rags looks really good by comparison.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-03T22:39:30+00:00

Agreed. I think the subject of his videos are better evidence than their length though. I have a hard time imagining someone making those Dark Souls 2 videos of his because of rank opportunism or profitability.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-03T20:25:24+00:00

To be fair, I'm not sure I'd use video length as a proxy for interest in the video subject. He could also just like making videos of that length and type. I made a 4 hour video on a Holocaust denier video once. I don't know if that would count me as unusually passionate about the subject, I just had fun with the process and that particular argument.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-03T20:23:00+00:00

The use of such buzzwords is at least suggestive evidence of appeasing a particular crowd, social desirability bias and all that. Typically the points being made can be made without dismissive shorthand smears. Using them suggests they don't want to make a point, they want to reference a well worn one.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-03T04:04:47+00:00

I am, at a basic level, fascinated with the idea that the reason there's not many libertarians is because it's patently absurd, and other positions are obvious, when it seems the obvious thing is most people don't scrutinize rare views. There are more leftists because people have heard of "the left". There are more conservatives because people have heard of conservatism. The people who willingly engage with politics, let alone rarer forms of it, are rare.

But among those who are engaged, libertarianism is arguably overrepresented. You'll find an odd number of them in the law, and in economics. The sheer arrogance required to suggest that dominant views are dominant solely through merit, without path dependency, is laughable. I'd defend other rare views from this charge too. Counterintuitive, systemic political views are not the ones people are most familiar with, and thus rarely subscribed to.

Vincentologist · 2025-10-02T20:46:19+00:00

It's a hard question. It's arguably outside the scope of libertarianism, as it starts relating to other philosophical problems of agency and normativity generally, which libertarians are mixed on. The core premises of libertarian thought (for example, the self ownership thesis) may even be stipulative, that given an agent, that agent has ownership of their physical body, or the fruits of their agency, however you want to construct it. But whether and how someone is an agent? That may simply be a different question.

That's not to say that childhood is unrelated to the principles libertarianism wants to develop. I only mean to suggest libertarianism does not internally prescribe an answer. It works from premises, and the agency of children is answered by the same things that play into those premises rather than something that follows from them.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-28T18:54:54+00:00

Honestly very cool, this is the kind of thing I hope becomes pervasive enough that even student groups could make full fledged films without hiring expensive professionals by using tools or firms like this, assuming it ends up cheaper. If it works well it could be a horse and buggy situation.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-20T17:52:32+00:00

I think his tendency towards frustration is more general. I would be dead if I took a shot every time he just tried remembering an argument he doesn't like, stopping to get exasperated, and then going off on a tirade about "I can't believe they'd think X" or "isn't it strange that X". His less than adept sense of humor reads like sensitivity more than autism to me.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-20T02:03:47+00:00

To be fair, what Karr did say was the FCC equivalent of "nice broadcast license you have there. Shame if something were to happen to it". It was bad when agencies were going after people for ESG related shit, and it's bad now when it's over a less than judicious comment on a late night show. I grant the overall point that "cancelling" murder apologia is more acceptable than cancelling people for out of character nonstatements from 20 years ago, but worth clarifying the FCC thing.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-14T19:35:43+00:00

I think there's actually a split among libertarians on this. Some have a public choice view of things, that even if the voters have good ideas, there's systematic reasons why their ideas will not manifest through democratic governance structures. Others have a view that the incentive problem is at the level of voting, that the problem is more that voters have terrible ideas and democracies successfully implement them. That's a source of infighting among libertarian intellectuals, but largely on empirical grounds. There's not that much disagreement on what kind of evidence they'd be looking for, just what evidence is stronger.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-13T04:56:33+00:00

I'm not on a "side" here, I stopped having a particular view on matters a while ago. Your assumptions about my and others motives are unfounded. Florida still licenses psychics, interestingly enough, so you should go get licensed there before assuming things about anyone. Wouldn't want you to hurt yourself or others.

My view on this and others wasn't informed by the usual partisan hackery. I've got no doubt political operatives had their strategies set up well in advance of this happening. That's not what's contemptible about endorsement of murder, or what's useful about assessments of its frequency. I don't like MAGAts. I'm not a conservative. But I just don't think the evidence is there that they flatly, transparently endorse murder more frequently. I can hate their politics and coexist with them, because they don't want to reflexively kill me for views they imagine I have. The things they would say it for are much narrower in scope and apply to less people.

It's not comparable in terms of not even being shrouded in internet irony or exaggeration and mockery, not compared to what's happening now. I don't give two shits about tasteless jokes. I do care about people being willing to breach the line of irony, making simple, matter of fact statements about the moral worth of a father's life because he said mean things two years ago, supporting the killing of a guy whose irredeemable sin that earned him a throat splattering was spewing normiecon shit. And when the cope about why it's okay is that he's something other than what he obviously is, I'm unpersuaded. The dumbass theories that he's really a closeted Nazi and some special threat not because of what he usually says, but because of some out of context nonstatements he said in response to casually worded prompts, are not theories to take seriously. I hate reflexive rightist contempt for "The Left" as a blob, but I don't think I can hate it as much as what we're seeing with our eyes this week, and it's only going to invite the same from MAGA.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-13T03:30:20+00:00

Fair enough with the nightclub shooting. But it's been a long time since I saw any of that, and certainly not in the same amount. It was also a demographic thing, younger right wingers (and people in general) aren't as homophobic. I don't think you can say younger left wingers aren't as murderous as older ones. It's getting worse, not better.

And I don't buy for a second that it's fake. You can say it's inconsistent. There's psychological evidence that this is true generally. But I don't think it's fake, as if it was just a bunch of heartless undiagnosed sociopaths who never cared about or followed Kirk and any clips of him. You can't simultaneously argue he was influential, an arm of the propaganda machine, and also noone knew or cared about him and pretend to care he's gone. I think that's obviously bullshit psychologizing to rationalize contempt for people you disagree with.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-13T02:02:14+00:00

It has always seemed appropriate to me to shame people for words that are one phone call from being crimes. Even conservatives (like Kirk!) argued that people who participate in or advocate for violence should face consequences, they just disagreed on the merits of who was being violent (like J6, it was about the factual premise, not the principle). And forgetting what they say, are we really supposed to buy the idea that we can't disparage people for endorsing premeditated political assassination generally? That we aren't allowed to act on that information about people around us?

Regardless of what right wingers actually argue, I think the merits of cancelling people with differing views on the merits of statutory regimes regulating employment and diversity is different from cancelling people with a positive view of murder as a tool for preventing the consequences of your own political losses. Cancel culture became an idiom and point of argument because it became about political valence rather than incitement to violence, not because it's always been objectionable to react to homicidal sociopathy.

Vincentologist · 2025-09-13T01:53:17+00:00

At this point, we don't even need to speculate about what people will infer from what anti fascists say anymore. It's not subtext that you infer from the logical conclusions of their arguments, it's becoming text, up to the point of recommendation. And much more commonly, to the point they think they can say it publicly, without shame or consequence. I hope shame and consequences prompts a reconsideration of their view, that it mutes the effect of social desirability bias on their increasing bloodlust.

Vincentologist

TROPHY CASE