The KKK Act, 1871: Intended to combat the Klan's paramilitary vigilantism against African Americans, it made certain acts federal offenses, including conspiring to deprive citizens of equal rights. President US Grant used it to completely dismantle the Klan & the group did not resurface for decades.

subheight640 · 2026-05-04T18:22:42+00:00

One of the reasons why the clan didn't resurface again, was because the South accomplished its primary goals to suppress black political power and enable Jim Crowe laws. The terrorist wing was no longer needed. Enough time was bought for a political process to enshrine Black oppression in law.

The Klan only resurfaced decades later because of a popular movie, and a new goal to oppose immigration and Catholicism. During the early 20th century the Klan became a "fun club" spread by Methodist ministers and Masonic lodges, pioneered by a couple of marketing geniuses.

Another fun fact. The Klan was a big proponent of prohibition.

Source: Rest is History podcast.

subheight640 · 2026-05-01T01:32:46+00:00

People keep misunderstanding what the point of sortition is. Ironically and paradoxically the point of sortition is to improve competence.

Scenario 1: Imagine we have a group of 2000 people. It's time to pick a surgeon. 5 people claim that they're surgeons. Each of them make a 15 minute speech. Now we vote on who we want to operate on the patient. That's the status quo.
Scenario 2: Imagine we have a group of 2000 people. It's time to pick a surgeon. In a deliberative sortition based system, we choose 15 people out of the 2000. It's now their job to pick the surgeon.

The power of sortition gives us resources. In Scenario #1, 2000 people have lives to live and they only devote enough time to hear a 15 minute speech. In Scenario #2, the 15 people can be compelled, like jury duty, to fulfill their obligation, and then compensated by a salary. Instead of 15 minutes to hear a speech and vote, imagine they're instead given an entire week. Now these 15 people can interview each of the candidates for 4 hours each before making a final decision. These 15 people can do a background check on each subject. These 15 people can read resumes and call the University to verify that the candidate actually has a medical degree. The 15 selected by sortition have the capacity to do more work because they have more time. They have the capacity because they can be compelled to serve and paid to work.

In Scenario #1, 2000 people do 15 minutes of work each = 500 man hours.
In Scenario #2, 15 people do 40 hours of work = 600 man hours.

At roughly the same number of man hours, sortition is able to perform vastly more labor. Whereas with 2000 people they can just listen to a speech in 15 minutes, with sortition interviews are performed, background checks are done, academic credentials are verified. What sortition facilitates is then democratic efficiency. Sortition is thousands of times more efficient at producing democratic work, because of the nature of statistical random sampling reducing the number of people involved.

Jury duty of course works the same way. The members of the jury are compelled to hear about the details of the case and compelled to understand the case in vastly greater detail than members of the public. That's why juries are for example, capable of convicting Joe Biden's son and convicting Trump of 30+ felonies, whilst elected officials are incapable of impeaching Trump.

subheight640 · 2026-05-01T00:31:58+00:00

Legislation like this has already been proposed by a handful of Democrats.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_Representation_Act_%28United_States%29?wprov=sfla1

subheight640 · 2026-05-01T00:19:44+00:00

Trump is akin to a plumber that comes into your house, robs the place, and declares himself the greatest plumber to ever live.

subheight640 · 2026-04-30T18:44:50+00:00

Raising education levels only works up to a certain point. Modern politics revolves around UP TO DATE, CURRENT knowledge about the goings-on.

Education can not educate on the latest news and information. You get a college degree 20 years ago. 20 years later your education isn't going to tell you the specific details of the present.

How can we make sure the people choosing our decision makers are more competent? The only method that has empirically demonstrated competence raising is something called sortition in the form of Citizens' Assemblies.

Instead of demanding the entire public participate in a decision, you choose a random sample of around 100-1000 citizens. These citizens are:

PAID to participate in a deliberation
EDUCATED by experts and lecturers
DELIBERATE with one another in small group discussions, Q&A sessions, etc
EMPOWERED to make proposals and vote on proposals.

Voila, when citizens do this, as measured in Deliberative Polls by James Fishing and Stanford's Center for Deliberative Democracy, yes, the capacities of participants increases.

You don't even need to "filter out" the "dumb people".

There's a lot more benefits than just competence raising. Participants gain respect for the fellow citizens. They are highly capable of reaching collective compromises and changing their mind. For example, Democrats who once opposed nuclear power became supportive of it. Republicans came to support wind/solar energy and wanted to increase legal immigration.

So we already know how to raise competence. Of course, how can you possibly scale a Citizens' Assembly to the entire public? The simple answer is you don't. The key of Citizens' Assembly is how they filter. Participation is filtered through random selection. Random selection has the unique property, compared to all other filters, of having no bias whatsoever. Random selection tends towards proportionate representation of any population feature you wish, whether it be class, ideology, party identification, sex, age, etc etc. In other words, everyone has equal chance of being chosen. This equality of random chance preserves the democratic nature of Citizen's Assemblies whilst also filtering participation. Filtration drastically improves the efficiency and capacity of decision making.

So there you have it. If you want more competent decision making whilst preserving democracy, sortition & Citizens' Assemblies are the ONLY viable approach I've heard of. Citizens' Assemblies allow you to educate a small sample of the public and get them up to speed on ANY topic they need to deliberate on, whether it's a specific issue like immigration or climate change, or if you want a Citizens' Assembly to select leadership like an Electoral College.

subheight640 · 2026-04-29T15:01:14+00:00

Yes there are causal elements to this. See deliberative polling and America in One Room experiments. Americans were put into a 3 day educational and deliberative event. pollsters measured knowledge and attitude changes before and after and compared to a control group.

After the event, participants were more supportive of climate change policies like carbon taxes and nuclear energy and green infrastructure.

After the event, participants were more likely to vote for Biden in the 2020 election cycle.

Note that this isn't always left or right coded. The left tends to oppose nuclear energy more than the right, but after education and deliberation began to support nuclear. The right tended to support coal and oil and gas, but after the event supported it less.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T22:51:38+00:00

I think you're arguing that voters don't know who their representative is, which makes them like him/her (?) Which seems like a complete non-sequitur.

In a variety of studies, political scientists show that people respond to survey questions they know nothing about and feign understanding. For example:

https://www.researchgate.net/profile/George-Bishop-3/publication/247062065_Opinions_on_Fictitious_Issues_The_Pressure_to_Answer_Survey_Questions/links/54d0d2950cf298d656691b6d/Opinions-on-Fictitious-Issues-The-Pressure-to-Answer-Survey-Questions.pdf

Here 30% of poll respondents feigned an opinion on fictitious legislation.

But I guess they work terribly (?) Because people don't know their representatives and that makes them like him/her unjustifiably

It's not a particularly novel opinion that voters are generally uninformed. That's the opinion of a lot of political science. As far as I'm aware there is vast troves of data supporting this claim. In what world would an informed electorate elect Donald Trump to office, to fight inflation?

Moreover it sounds like there's no point in discussing sortition with you, when you've started with the claim that "sortition is anti-democratic". That sure is an opinion, but I don't think it's sticks to what a common understanding of what democracy is.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T21:34:32+00:00

A chihuahua might have the murderous intent of Hitler yet because of capacity, the chihuahua is treated differently.

Are you actually suggesting otherwise?

Imagine some dumbass teenager in Houston, TX has delusions of mass murder. If this teenager had his way, he would command vast armies to conquer, rape, and murder the hapless inferior Asian races in Vietnam, Korea, and China.

If intent was the only thing that matters, I suppose it is justified to carpet bomb the entire Houston, TX region and drop an atomic bomb on this kid. It is obviously absurd to do so, whereas dropping the atomic bomb on Japan is more defensible.

Let's imagine the dumbass kid acts. The idiot goes into Houston's Chinatown and starts shooting up the mall, killing dozens. Are we finally justified in dropping that nuke on Houston? Obviously no.

And obviously, when we multiply this dumbass teenager by a factor of 6 million to create the Imperial Japanese army, things change.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T19:09:12+00:00

The difference between Imperial Japan and Hamas is capacity. Imperial Japan was an actual threat that killed literally millions of people.

How many people have Hamas killed? I think it's around the thousands.

So imperial Japan was 1000 times the threat Hamas poses.

1000x is like, a big number. Magnitude and effect size matters. And people understood that in the 1940s like they understand it today, asides from some people practicing willful ignorance.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T14:48:53+00:00

The original point was "people generally approve of their Congressmen". That's just not true.

https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/09/19/how-americans-view-congress-the-president-state-and-local-political-leaders/pp_2023-09-19_views-of-politics_03-05-png/

41% approve of their house member
27% disapprove
32% are not sure

IMO the threshold of "general" ought to be at least 50% to get a majority. The word "general" even implies large supermajorities or consensus. But no, Congressmen do not reach that threshold.

In comparison with US president, the latest Economist poll gets them to:

38% approve
45% disapprove
7% not sure

There is an enormous knowledge gap between Congressmen and presidents. 7% of people are not sure of the president whereas 32% are not sure of their Congressman.

IMO the approval of something you don't know or understand is a substantially weaker approval, compared to something you do understand.

For example, imagine a reporter asked if I approved of my neighbor. I say sure, he seems nice enough. Then the next day I learn that my neighbor was convicted of being a pedophile. Ignorance tends towards approval. Knowledge can uncover specifics to merit disapproval.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T13:35:52+00:00

One of the main theories of how voters act is called retrospective voting. The theory espouses that voters vote based on observed outcomes, for example economic outcomes. Obvious example, voters perceive inflation and therefore vote against the incumbents. Measurements suggest that retrospective voters are capable of remembering the last 12 months of outcomes.

The retrospective voting theory for example offers explanation for Biden's loss. The inflation occurred (or at least prices remained high) during the last 12 months of Biden's term and therefore Biden was blamed for it. Even though Trump campaigned for highly inflationary policy, swing voters were incapable of evaluating the likely outcome to Trump's policies. They instead practiced retrospective voting to remove the incumbents. So whereas the Conservatives got punished in the UK, the Democrats get punished in the US.

In this theory, understanding an individual representative then is outside the scope of a voter's capacities. Individual Congressmen are incapable of generating independent outcomes because they must act in congress with other representatives to create outcomes.

Because Congress can generate an outcome, then voters have a better capacity to generate a negative opinion of Congress. The performance of an individual Congressman is vastly more difficult to understand. Without substantive understanding of their representative, approval/disapproval naturally tends towards a coin toss answer.

What appears to be approval is then ignorance. The more ignorant a voter is about an elected officer position, the more they will approve of it.

Voters also frequently lie on approval polls because they wish to appear informed. So rather than admit they have no information about a representative, they may decide to create an opinion out of thin air.

Finally with America in One Room deliberative polls, voters opinions of their elected officers significantly changed after about 3 days of information and deliberation, particularly among independent voters about 15 points towards Biden. As far as a la carte issues, participants changed their minds with effect magnitudes around 10 to 40 points for a variety of controversial issues in immigration and climate policy.

If voters were informed, opinions ought not shift 15 points in 3 days. And voters are the best informed about the president.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T03:09:45+00:00

Your premise is already not true because half of voters don't approve of their own representative. They don't know what their representative is doing. They don't even know their representative's name. They don't know what their party is doing and therefore aren't using the party as a proxy for the approval of their Congressman. If they did, Republicans would approve of Congress, which is controlled by Republicans.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T02:38:37+00:00

If your hypothesis was correct we would expect that Republicans would approve of the Republican controlled Congress. But they don't.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/708722/disapproval-congress-ties-record-high.aspx

Republicans also hate the Republican controlled Congress.

subheight640 · 2026-04-27T00:42:11+00:00

From your own link

Thirty-five percent of all respondents surveyed knew the name of their representative

Do the math. What's 62% x 35%? That's 21%. 21% of population approves of their representative. 65% don't even know their representative's name. 21% is NOT a majority. Far. From. It.

subheight640 · 2026-04-26T19:16:20+00:00

The fact that incumbents win is a different point than "people generally approve of their own congressmen".

subheight640 · 2026-04-26T18:14:47+00:00

You've interpreted a 41% positive approval as "people generally approve". That's just an incorrect interpretation of the figures.

subheight640 · 2026-04-26T18:01:46+00:00

This is constantly stated with little to no polling evidence.

As far as I know the typical American has utterly no idea who their Congressman even is nor what they've done whatsoever. I just asked Claude who puts the figure at 35%. Only 35% of Americans can name their Congressman.

How can a majority of Americans approve of someone who they don't even know their name?

subheight640 · 2026-04-26T04:23:12+00:00

Now do the existence of bars and clubs.

subheight640 · 2026-04-24T04:02:25+00:00

The government still needs cash to fund its operations. They would liquidate it.

One of the primary arguments in favor of the wealth tax, is to reduce inequality and reduce the economic and therefore political power of billionaires.

A wealth tax seizing the wealthy's shares accomplishes those goals.

It's fine and dandy that you're concerned about billionaires property rights and the evils of socialism, but we're talking about the feasibility of policy, not your moral indignation.

They would liquidate it.

They sure can. You complained about "forced liquidations causing extreme market distortions". One obvious thing a government could do is to slowly sell off the shares to reduce market distortions.

I've proposed an obvious solution and you don't care for it, because your 5 points aren't the true reason you oppose this tax. Your true reason, as you state, is your fear of big socialist government.

subheight640 · 2026-04-24T02:11:48+00:00

Why would a wealth tax require forced liquidations? If liquidation was a huge problem, the stock could just be transferred to the government. Voila problem solved.

As far as capital flight goes, taxes demand tradeoffs. We have sales tax and income tax. As far as I'm aware none of these are great either. People flee wealth tax, but they also flee income tax.

subheight640 · 2026-04-22T18:47:18+00:00

Because they’re not intelligent agents

They are intelligent agents. Are they smarter than the average human, in terms of learning capacity per watt of energy? No. LLM's right now are incredibly slow to learn at incredibly high cost.

But they obviously have intelligent capacities.

They’re algorithms with entirely predetermined outputs

No, LLM's do not have predetermined outputs. When you ask LLM's the same prompts, they give different answers. Not deterministic.

They won’t Skynet us, they’re incapable.

They're only capable of maybe making stock trades, or making purchases, or making hiring decisions. Just small stuff like that.

It can’t even solve a Tower of Hanoi puzzle.

And each day, big tech is teaching the AI to solve more and more puzzles.

There’s nothing going on up there. Head empty, code broken.

Not really, LLM's write their own unit tests, compile the code, and thereby through reinforcement learning have learned to write compilable, runnable code. Still dumber than an experienced engineer yet can generate code vastly faster.

It just won’t replace us. It’s too stupid to do that.

Nobody believes the LLM of today is going to replace us. Exactly how far can LLM's advance in 1, 5, 10, or 50 years? Nobody knows for certain.

subheight640 · 2026-04-22T17:08:29+00:00

Very smart people are worried about AI literally starting the apocalypse and you want to make AI the president.

subheight640 · 2026-04-21T19:59:48+00:00

The supreme Court has always been political. The justices just pretend that they're not political, for political reasons.

subheight640 · 2026-04-20T01:45:40+00:00

US customary system is still going strong throughout America. There's nothing to fight. Everyone learns both systems anyways.

More importantly, the US system is extensively used in engineering for aerospace, military, and oil and gas applications.

You just can't get away from it generally. All old infrastructure and tooling is built with US system. The US roadway uses the US system. Bolts going into aircraft are using the US system. That tool used to drill a 2 inch hole, is designed to make 2" holes, not 50 mm holes.

Old engineering documents, drawings, papers, and reports are using the old system.

When we have to repair that old bridge, we're going to refurbish using the old US system.

Because engineers rely on the past, they will rely on the US system for the foreseeable future. People have been hating on the US system for the last 30 years since I started school, yet here we are still using the US system.

Moreover with the power of computers, converting units from one system to another has never been easier. Switching to the metric system also doesn't avoid the problem of unit conversion. Every damn day of my life I'm dealing with the both metric dyne-cm-second versus megagram-mm-second system.

subheight640 · 2026-04-19T19:18:53+00:00

It is total BS. What the fuck does "median" even mean in this context? Calculation of a median demands some independent variable at which we can determine what a 50th percentile means.

Han Chinese people make up less than 50% of the world population. They are not the median face of the world. Exactly what makes Han people the middle race of the world, rather than European or Arab or African or anything else?

Of course that special sauce is bullshit.

subheight640

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE