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[silverspawn]

I think people also don't get how much legal trouble Trump is in. We've gotten tons of evidence so far that the courts are overall not treating Trump with kids gloves. He's already lost significant civil cases. If he gets re-elected he probably gets out of everything, but if not, I think him going to prison is more likely than not. He's been successful at stalling things, but not at winning anything.

[faust]

- People argue that the court won't do it anyway, and the attempt will politically backfire. This makes more sense to me than the above, which is to say, very little. The judicial system seems way way less corrupt and partisan than the legislative system, so declining an opportunity to decide things there seems crazy. And I don't particularly buy the backlash either; why would a moderate be outraged that this argument was taken seriously? If they're actually a moderate, it shouldn't seem all that unreasonable. Moderates won't like January 6 at all.

I mean, in my understanding the political backfiring is more about the danger of mobilizing Trump's base further rather than about scaring off moderates.

It still should be done, I think, ultimately because even a failed case against Trump will put his behavior under scrutiny. Same reason the AfD should be banned in Germany, really (also that case is much more likely to succeed).

[silverspawn]

- People argue that the court won't do it anyway, and the attempt will politically backfire. This makes more sense to me than the above, which is to say, very little. The judicial system seems way way less corrupt and partisan than the legislative system, so declining an opportunity to decide things there seems crazy. And I don't particularly buy the backlash either; why would a moderate be outraged that this argument was taken seriously? If they're actually a moderate, it shouldn't seem all that unreasonable. Moderates won't like January 6 at all.

I mean, in my understanding the political backfiring is more about the danger of mobilizing Trump's base further rather than about scaring off moderates.

Ah; yeah, I admit this makes more sense.

But the ship has now sailed, anyway. The supreme court decided to take up the case, so to the extent that a non-successful attempt can be made, it has been made.

[silverspawn]

Just folded 64o on the SB. That was at least a 500 IQ move.

[silverspawn]

poker hiatus begins tomorrow. Maybe.

[silverspawn]

Lawfare episode about the political aspects of the section 3 thing

Unsurprisingly, I think the counter-case is very weak. I'm particularly baffled by the whole idea that we should treat everything like a political matter instead of trying to figure out what the law says. I already like Originalism more than other approaches, but generally, alternatives to Originalism don't strike me as that absurd. But this -- man, politics is infinitely more dysfunctional than the judicial system, why on earth would we want to make everything political? That just seems like a recipe for disaster.

My view is the exact opposite: judges should be as originalist as possible. Even if this meant making blatantly harmful decision in some cases (which isn't the case here), I would say that's a cost worth paying. Keep the influence of politics small at any cost.

And I don't think it's accurate to make it as a descriptive statement, either.

[silverspawn]

This guy just has an incredibly nihilistic view of law, which strikes me as both completely false and horrible for the country (or the entire world, really) if it were true. Honestly, if judges had so little concern for the actual law, my guess is that democracy as a system just basically wouldn't work, or at any rate, would stop working very quickly when politics gets polarized. It just seems like a recipe for anarchy.

[silverspawn]

I think there's a good chance that in another Everett Branch, we've figured out a system that only lets a part of the population vote, and that this works much better than democracy. Everyone seems to agree on paper that democracy is just the least bad of the options, but then turn around and treat it as some kind of intrinsic good. Democracy is horrible, and yeah alternatives so far have been worse, but taking both of these facts together means that Constitutions or equivalents like Germany's Grundgesetz (basic law) are good, not bad.

[silverspawn]

I mean the the truth is that only a handful of legitimate alternatives to Democracy  have been attempted. It's the equivalent of standing in front of a million different slot machines, trying out five of them, and finding that among those, #4 works best. To extend the analogy further, we can assume that every other slot machine requires a trillion dollars up front to see how well it works. In this situation, it's one thing to conclude that trying out others isn't worth it and we should just stick with machine #4 (seems reasonable), but it makes no sense to assume that #4 is actually the best one, and it makes equally little sense to declare #4 infallible and oppose gambling restrictions that have been shown to work pretty well.

[silverspawn]

For no particular reason I was interested in how well DallE would reproduce this album cover if I described it



It came up with this:



The original is better (the green is a little too much), but you could definitely use Dall-E to make serviceable album covers if you try a little.

[faust]

Everyone seems to agree on paper that democracy is just the least bad of the options, but then turn around and treat it as some kind of intrinsic good.

Not everyone. I think democracy is inherently the best option, and many of the problems with the current system stem from a lack of democracy rather than too much of it. Particularly when it comes to the organization of corporations. But I can agree with your sentiment if we only replace a single word:

I mean the the truth is that only a handful of legitimate alternatives to DemocracyCapitalism have been attempted. It's the equivalent of standing in front of a million different slot machines, trying out five of them, and finding that among those, #4 works best. To extend the analogy further, we can assume that every other slot machine requires a trillion dollars up front to see how well it works. In this situation, it's one thing to conclude that trying out others isn't worth it and we should just stick with machine #4 (seems reasonable), but it makes no sense to assume that #4 is actually the best one, and it makes equally little sense to declare #4 infallible and oppose gambling restrictions that have been shown to work pretty well.

[silverspawn]

I would agree for both Democracy and Capitalism. How do you justify that democracy is inherently the best option, rather than just the least bad one?

[silverspawn]

Unrelated, I've been listening a lot to Peter Attia, who has this health podcast that I thin is pretty great. He's also the person who got me to start exercising seriously, I think I've talked about that before.

Anyway, the episode linked above is half about the effect of sunlight on mood, sleep, and mental health. I have mood issues and I definitely have sleep issues, the evidence seems solid and the intervention cheap, so I didn't hesitate an ordered a SAD lamp. (Then I ordered it again because it immediately broke but alas.) It's just a very bright light that you're supposed to have on (but not look at directly) for a while in the morning to imitate the effects of sunlight. Not needed if you actually go outside all morning, but very much needed if you're inside, whether windows are open or not because the light that comes in through windows is nowhere near bright enough.

Do I feel like it already had a tangible effect after two uses? Actually, yeah I do. Obviously hard to say for sure, but I can't imagine I'll ever discontinue it.

[silverspawn]

The story that sunlight regulates the internal clock and hence you run into sleep rythm problems when not having enough in the morning just seems quite strong; it makes evolutionary sense and seems born out by the data.

[Awaclus]

Yeah the original is definitely better.

[silverspawn]

It's not elites running the world, but it's as much of an overlap with that hypothesis as we'll likely get

[silverspawn]

I'll add that the moral outrageousness and the general idiocy of gain-of-function research does not even rely on Covid actually coming from a lab, as long as we agree that it could have come from one.

[silverspawn]

Shinzen's chart of human happiness

[faust]

I would agree for both Democracy and Capitalism. How do you justify that democracy is inherently the best option, rather than just the least bad one?

Because I believe that inherently every person should have a say in the organization of their own lives.

That is probably not going to satisfy a utilitarian mindset. But I feel like it's pretty hard to make utilitarian arguments on the organization of a state because it seems very hard to predict outcomes of unprecedented changes. But at the very least I think it's established that people having the feeling of agency over their own lives is correlated to happiness.

[faust]

It's not elites running the world, but it's as much of an overlap with that hypothesis as we'll likely get

It's extremely funny to me that the author of this chose to lead with a random 4Chan post to introduce the idea of manufactured consent, rather than citing the leftist scholars who actually developed that theory.

And then the first paragraph is just "look at how much smarter I am than the unwashed masses". Oh my god. Why are all these libertarians such arrogant shitheads?

Why do we have to go to superlatives like "crime of the century"? How about climate change for the crime of the century?

I don't care much what the cause of COVID-19 was, and mostly the people interested in that stuff seem to look for a way to attach blame for the pandemic to the Biden administration somehow, which is also why Fauci is shoehorned into this post.

[silverspawn]

Why do we have to go to superlatives like "crime of the century"? How about climate change for the crime of the century?

I think because climate change isn't considered a crime since there's no single group of people responsible

[silverspawn]

I don't care much what the cause of COVID-19 was, and mostly the people interested in that stuff seem to look for a way to attach blame for the pandemic to the Biden administration somehow, which is also why Fauci is shoehorned into this post.

I strongly suspect you're seeing ghosts with this point. LW people typically aren't following politics closely; I'd be surprised if Fauci is associated with the administration. Also I suspect that among prominent writers, support for Biden should be something like 90%. I can't say for sure since politics isn't discussed, but I'm aware of 0 Trump supporters there, the last surveys I've seen have republican support at tiny numbers, and no one is voting third party because they're consequentialists, at least in the general election.

And also, Biden particular is viewed pretty favorably rn because of the executive order on AI. Biden has done more for reasonable AI regulation than any other president, and none of the relevant competitors have made noises that look as good. Which isn't to say that the executive order was awesome, but the competition is just really bad.

[silverspawn]

Oh, I guess except Robert F. Kennedy Jr is an exception but who I mean who cares about him

[silverspawn]

Also I'm giggling at the idea of a LW post unironically citing leftwing or rightwing scholars rather than 4chan

[faust]

I guess I have only myself to blame for derailing the conversation on democracy being the best governing system, which I think is much more interesting.