As one insider told me (who is not me): ‘imagine an equally sexist name was given to, say, female pundits and journalists’ … what would the reaction be?’

With the amount of misandry omnipresent in mainstream media. I'm starting to question which way is up and which is down.

Ok, here's a source for that. Weird that so few articles are mentioning the specifics.

usatoday source

This is starting to make a whole lot more sense.

I can see how those buoys can actually be effective. But I wonder how expensive it would be to setup full coverage.

Also putting these on a river that serves as an international border without federal approval is some nonsense. It's like, what's next? Texas starts to unilaterally make trade agreements with mexico because they're the ones at the border?

I'm not a big fan of the pulling on the hearstrings. These people are dying with or without the border fences. And presumably if they're willing to take these risks, it's because the situation where they come from is even worse. You can't just simply point at the location where they end up dying and say that's where all the evil is. If they survive the river, they can die in the desert, if they survive the desert, they can die as a vagrant. If they get picked up, they can get sent back to mexico right back where they were in at least as much danger. If they get accepted as a refugee then they become the government's responsibility, which is not a solution that scales to the number of people that need it. That's before you even ask the question of whether the US government should accept responsibility (which I think it should, I suspect that the US's mismanaged war on drug is in large part to blame for the unrest in Mexico).

But the whole thing gets even more complicated because Mexican cartels are responsible for these illegal border crossing attempts. And they're likely lying to the immigrants about the benefits of crossing illegally. People may be risking their lives not knowing that what they're doing could kill them and that what they get in the end may not even be that much better than where they come from.

What you don't want is a situation where people are incentivized to risk their lives in illegal boarder crossings so that they can skip the line to obtain refugee status, taking spots away from people doing it the legal and safe way. That increases the overall misery and death. And if putting evil buoys that stink of death is going to get the job done, then it might be worth it.

Except it's not going to get the job done. And it's on an international river. And it's terrible optics. And they're illegal.

Does someone know WTF is actually going on? Or has a link to an article that actually tries to explain it properly instead of just injecting political bias?

Here's the few facts I was able to get:

There is money earmarked by congress to build a border wall. That money can't be used for anything else.

Biden doesn't want to build the wall. He thinks it's a waste of money and the money would be better spent elsewhere.

Somewhere in Texas a wall has been built, (by who? using what money?)

There's been back and fourth in the courts on the topic. One ruling is that the Federal Border Patrol isn't obligated to build the wall.

The Federal Border Patrol has in the past removed border walls, I think, I'm not clear on that one.

The Federal Border Patrol wants access to the place in Texas where a wall has been built. (So they can tear it down?)

Some texans official (don't know which groups) is physically preventing the Federal Border Patrol from gaining access.

Biden was hoping, that if the money is not spent then it could be repurposed for other things. I assume, this would happen via a congressional spending bill asking the money to be repurposed since Biden can't unilaterally do this.

So, those are facts I know, here are some things that I'd like to know don't know:

Which government entity is on the Texas side. I don't know who built the wall and with what money.

I don't know the official position of the Federal Border Patrol at different points in time on the issue.

I do have some info about Biden's official position (The wall is a waste of money better spent elsewhere). I'd still like to know if that position has been consistent over time. Especially in the context of removing the wall (that's spending more money to undo something that's already been done, unless the concern is that maintenance costs on the wall makes it more cost effective to remove it).

In terms of speculation for "true motives".

I think it's clear that Biden's stated position is as true a motive is you can get from a politician. They just don't think that walls/fences is an effective immigration control mechanism. They're really easy to defeat.

But if they tried to take down fences that have already been built, then I see two possible secondary agendas:

1. The federal border patrol is having a jurisdiction hissy fit. They consider the border wall to be their responsibility and they've been told not to build any, but some other government agency has built one, so they move it to get rid of it to show them who's boss.

2. If a wall gets build, it might support in people's mind that a wall was needed. This goes against Biden's political narrative.

I'm thinking this whole fiasco is 85% the federal border patrol having a hissy fit and 15% Texas having a huge illegal immigrant problem and they "as a whole" know that a fence won't fix anything But they gotta do something. They can't do nothing. And building a fence is the only not nothing thing they can figure out to do. Plus it makes the right wingers in the area happy because it supports their political narrative.

I don't live anywhere near Texas. But I watched this youtuber who's trying to make a forest in the middle of the desert. And this episode made it clear to me how bad the problem is:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_rVQlWoO3fA

Overall I'm just not convinced that it's just a matter of populist posturing. The immigration issue affects Texas so much to the point that they're willing to try things that are unlikely to work. But the people in charge of the border aren't similarly motivated.

Now, do the calculation again, but by gender.

And then do it again, and this time use race AND gender.

Deflation is bad because you can "invest" by just keeping cash around. Which means investors aren't contributing to economic activity.

A small amount of inflation helps, because investors understand that if they're not investing the cash they have, then they're essentially losing money.

High levels of inflation is bad, because prices can change so fast that it makes commerce too difficult with prices changing too frequently.

But that's for stable levels. Salaries tend to be very vulnerable to unexpected changes in inflation/deflation because they don't change that often and they're not pegged to inflation. Which means if the money unexpectedly devalues by 20%, then you effectively get a 20% pay cut and it might not be easy to negation a rectification with your employer and meanwhile you're still underpaid.

The reverse is true with unexpected deflation, you get an effective 20% pay raise and your employer can't do anything about it except fire you or go bankrupt. This is how deflation can lead to unemployment.

So deflation might help make a bit of wealth transfer from the capitalist class to the working class. But it's very temporary and would likely come at a great cost to the overall economy.

If you want to fix wealth inequality it's really simple: tax the rich, regulate monopolies and oligopolies.

And he's a fucking genius. Because, as far as I can tell, all of his trans jokes are really funny or nuanced. But his handicap jokes, some of them are just downright lame and insulting.

And everyone's coming after him for his trans jokes, not his handicap jokes.

You can't punch down on transpeople, their propaganda reach is massive. People are AFRAID to say the littlest bit negative about them.

That's why the handicap jokes. He wanted to show what actually happens when you punch down: nothing. No one gives a shit.

Anyway, that's my headcanon. Otherwise, some of these handicap jokes are completely inexcusable and don't live up to the standard set by his trans jokes.

From most perspectives, freedom is power. And one person's freedom is another person's slavery.

If you bring it back to the roots of life's purpose: to procreate exponentially. It always comes down to doing better than your neighbor.

You can come up with all the moral rules of thumbs you like, like "your rights stops where my nose begin". At the end of the day, if what John is doing enables him to procreate exponentially faster than Jack. Then Jack (on an evolutionary level) will perceive John as evil.

But "on an evolutionary level" isn't really a real thing. It manifests itself in our dreams and feelings. Like how we get envious of people who do better than us or how we feel pride when we do better than others.

It gets complicated because of the effectiveness of cooperation. Which is where things like altruism, compassion and empathy come from.

But even here, evolution tries to pierce through it with things like hypocrisy, subconscious bias and tribal allegiance.

From this context, I believe that for most people freedom is a feeling they get when they do better than the people around them, when they are more powerful than them. It makes for a good slogan, because everyone wants to feel free, the theory says that everyone can be free, but the practice is that not everyone can feel free.

When you use freedom as your theoretical basis of government, it sounds good. But in practice, people will have slightly different interpretation of what freedom means to them, one where they'll feel free but others won't.

You might think now, that we should simply work on a clear and objective definition for freedom, but that definition you're looking for is one where you'll feel free, but many others will feel oppressed.

The best way to resolve the the corruption issue is to not allow any individual to hold power [...[.

That's part of it, probably the biggest part of it. You also want a system that can come to a consensus through compromise when resolving social issues. You also want a system that is efficient and powerful (to compete against other societies).

But going back to the corruption thing. It's not enough, people can organise around an ideal to oppress entire groups. You can have a system where not individual or small group of individual hold power, but one where the whites can oppress the blacks, or the Christians can oppress the Atheists, etc....

Creating a system that substantially reduces corruption is insanely difficult. Corruption is the lynchpin of all the alternate systems being proposed, none are as good as the current system of capitalism + regulation + democracy.

What that system does, is it pretty much gives up on trying to eliminate corruption. Instead it tries to redirect its energies and minimize the damage it causes.

Basically, someone trying to become powerful in a capitalist system, is sort of cajoled into working hard to improve society.

The democracy + regulation aspect is what minimizes the damages caused.

Eventually, the "democracy + regulation" does get captured, and while it's pretty bad compared to how these systems should work, they still tend to perform their function to some extent.

If you contrast this with something like communism or socialism. Those seeking power immediately start by dismantling the systems that prevent corruption. The pressure is so strong, the system will collapse almost instantly, and I think history shows this to be the case.

As for Libertarian, I don't know. You always got someone who will show up telling you that you don't know what "True" libertarian is. When there's actually 200 different true libertarian and each requires 10,000 hours of study to fully understand.

But the few discussions I've had has been enough to convince me that the vast majority are either some kind of survivalist or people who see themselves as effective local business leaders. They just think that's a system that will shift the balance of power in their favor and many of them won't even deny it if you straight up ask them. They're sick of feeling oppressed and they want to become the oppressor.

But generally, it seems to me that most Libertarian systems fail to account for bad state actors. These libertarian systems tends to favor a system that shifts the balance of power to local groups. But has no system in place to keep that power local. There's no way this won't immediately lead to civil war, with the winner setting up a dictatorship.

From most perspectives, freedom is power. And one person's freedom is another person's slavery.

If you bring it back to the roots of life's purpose: to procreate exponentially. It always comes down to doing better than your neighbor.

You can come up with all the moral rules of thumbs you like, like "your rights stops where my nose begin". At the end of the day, if what John is doing enables him to procreate exponentially faster than Jack. Then Jack (on an evolutionary level) will perceive John as evil.

But "on an evolutionary level" isn't really a real thing. It manifests itself in our dreams and feelings. Like how we get envious of people who do better than us or how we feel pride when we do better than others.

It gets complicated because of the effectiveness of cooperation. Which is where things like altruism, compassion and empathy come from.

But even here, evolution tries to pierce through it with things like hypocrisy, subconscious bias and tribal allegiance.

From this context, I believe that for most people freedom is a feeling they get when they do better than the people around them, when they are more powerful than them. It makes for a good slogan, because everyone wants to feel free, the theory says that everyone can be free, but the practice is that not everyone can feel free.

When you use freedom as your theoretical basis of government, it sounds good. But in practice, people will have slightly different interpretation of what freedom means to them, one where they'll feel free but others won't.

You might think now, that we should simply work on a clear and objective definition for freedom, but that definition you're looking for is one where you'll feel free, but many others will feel oppressed.

The best way to resolve the the corruption issue is to not allow any individual to hold power [...[.

That's part of it, probably the biggest part of it. You also want a system that can come to a consensus through compromise when resolving social issues. You also want a system that is efficient and powerful (to compete against other societies).

But going back to the corruption thing. It's not enough, people can organise around an ideal to oppress entire groups. You can have a system where not individual or small group of individual hold power, but one where the whites can oppress the blacks, or the Christians can oppress the Atheists, etc....

Creating a system that substantially reduces corruption is insanely difficult. Corruption is the lynchpin of all the alternate systems being proposed, none are as good as the current system of capitalism + regulation + democracy.

What that system does, is it pretty much gives up on trying to eliminate corruption. Instead it tries to redirect its energies and minimize the damage it causes.

Basically, someone trying to become powerful in a capitalist system, is sort of cajoled into working hard to improve society.

The democracy + regulation aspect is what minimizes the damages caused.

Eventually, the "democracy + regulation" does get captured, and while it's pretty bad compared to how these systems should work, they still tend to perform their function to some extent.

If you contrast this with something like communism or socialism. Those seeking power immediately start by dismantling the systems that prevent corruption. The pressure is so strong, the system will collapse almost instantly, and I think history shows this to be the case.

As for Libertarian, I don't know. You always got someone who will show up telling you that you don't know what "True" libertarian is. When there's actually 200 different true libertarian and each requires 10,000 hours of study to fully understand.

But the few discussions I've had has been enough to convince me that the vast majority are either some kind of survivalist or people who see themselves as effective local business leaders. They just think that's a system that will shift the balance of power in their favor and many of them won't even deny it if you straight up ask them. They're sick of feeling oppressed and they want to become the oppressor.

But generally, it seems to me that most Libertarian systems fail to account for bad state actors. These libertarian systems tends to favor a system that shifts the balance of power to local groups. But has no system in place to keep that power local. There's no way this won't immediately lead to civil war, with the winner setting up a dictatorship.

I just don't understand the logic here. Don't get me wrong, I'm all in favor of abolishing the Duluth Model and the requirement to incarcerate someone on a domestic violence call.

But neither this situation, nor the story you linked to seems to have much to do with that policy.

In both situations, the police acted completely out of bounds. It is a completely different problem.

The story on the website was written in 2014 about an incident that happened in 1999, that's almost 25 years ago. It can't be considered relevant today. If there's a real systemic problem of this kind, you should have at least a dozen cases like this every single year.

Hopefully, in this most recent case we'll get some body cam footage released so we find out what really happened.

And also hopefully, the body cams is what will put this guy off the force forever. It's the second time he seems to have done something like this, but I'd bet that the first time, body cams were not standard practice yet.

Seems to me that the solution to stop this kind of thing from being a common problem is body cams, and that's what we have.

I look at it as the AI we build is humanity's child. It will outgrow us. And we will age out and die.

On a cosmic scale, an AI can operate in ways humans never could.

Even if you use the augmented humans path, eventually, all the human will be augmented out of existence until only the AI is left.

Wtf is this unhinged gaslighting that wouldn't even trick a two year old? You literally said:

All Republicans are Nazis.

All Nazis must hang.

Therefore, should all Republicans be hanged?

I get this is hyperbolae. But this hyperbolae is advocating for mass murder.

You do understand that you're one of the badies right?

If executive unions could enforced a max amount of hours worked for executives and other similar quality of life requirements. Maybe there would be fewer sociopaths and more humans in executive positions.

If you're in a swing state. You vote for Biden.

If you're not in a swing state, you vote third party.

Don't not vote, by voting you make your intention and commitment very clear. Even if your third party candidate never has a chance, mainstream politicians may notice the interest in that third party candidates platform and adopt some of his/her policies.

Participate in your state's primary elections. There's a lot more diversity of policies there and you can make your voice heard there as well.

Participate in your city and state elections, the amount of money effort and attention placed on federal elections (especially presidential) is completely outsized compared to local elections. Which means the amount of influence that you can have as an individual relative to amount of power the offices that you have influence over is huge compared to the same calculation at the federal level.

Many politicians start at the state and municipal level. So your influence there can be very helpful. Also if Trumps gets some success at creating a authoritarian dystopia at the federal level, it can be mitigated at the state and municipal level. Just like how each state can make sure to protect the right of abortion despite the supreme court flip on the subject.

Right, but telling Republicans that their representative wants to make America great again while thinking it's an insult. That's dialing the stupid up to 1000.

If what you're looking for is a decentralized pseudonymous system. Then this is absolutely possible with today's cryptography.

It's called public-private keys. You create a private key that you can use to "sign" your messages. And people can verify that is was you that wrote the message by using the public key.

No one can pretend to be you because only you have access to your private key and the public key can't be used to find out what the private key is.

It's still anonymous because you don't have to say who you are when you create the private key.

It's not perfect because the same person can create as many different keys as they want. So you can't really "ban" someone. They'll just create a new key and pretend to be someone new.

Fully decentralized, no censorship at the core of the system.

You pay a moderator to send you a filtered feed that filters out illegal content.

Then you upvote/downvote what you like and don't like. A local system looks at what other people upvoted and downvoted. People who upvoted/downvoted like you gain credibility people who upvoted/downvoted opposite you gain negative credibility. Then you get shown the content with the most credibility. And a little like pagerank, the credibility propagates, so people upvoted by others with high credibility will also have high credibility.

So, anyone can post anything to any subforum.

But in principle if you upvote/downvote posts based on whether they are appropriate to that subforum, then you'll only see posts that are appropriate for every subforum, because other users who upvote/downvote like you will also downvote off topic posts.

So you end up with the internet you vote for. If you downvote everyone that disagrees with you, you'll be in an echochamber. If you upvote does who disagree with you while making a good faith effort to bring up solid points, and you'll find yourself in an internet full of interesting and varied viewpoints.

You could also create different profile depending on what mood you're in.

Maybe you feel like reading meme so you use your memes profile where you only upvote funny memes and downvote everything else.

Or you're more feeling like serious discussions and you don't want to see meme so you use your serious discussions profile.

Isn't the Gaza hospital at the very least confirmed to have been a relatively minor explosion in the parking lot?

Why? Why should this person have said something about both sides?

Because failing to acknowledge the major differing and valid viewpoints in a complex situation contributes to echo chambers and radicalization which can ultimately lead to or contribute to political disfunction, civil war, war and deaths.

Because of the several layers of indirections I think it's completely unreasonable to expect people to live up to the expectation of acknowledging differing valid viewpoints, but people who fail to do so are still engaging in shitbaggery, in my opinion, because they contribute to the deterioration of the political discourse which can have catastrophic consequences.

As I said I generally think that engaging in shitbaggery in political discourse shouldn't harm your job /career. Unless your job relies heavily on your reputation, which lawfirms seem to weirdly believe is the case for lawyers. I personally don't get it, a lawyer's argument should always be just as a valid regardless of which lawyer makes the argument, but I know very little about law practice.

Why take sides at all.

Because they've wandered into an echo chamber and are now hyper aware of all the real bad things on side did plus a few false bad things. While all of the bad things the other side did have been downplayed or justified.

I sadly don't know enough on the topic to say more on this. And the amount of research needed to get even an idea of "who is worse" is massive due to all the misinformation (or misleading information) on the topic everywhere.

I do know that neither side is taking a sensible approach to the problem because right wing nutbags are in charge of both sides.