damnyou

No memory safe language in existence can meet your standards, since they're all written on a bedrock of unsafe code.

Safe Rust solves the problem of memory safety (assuming that any unsafe code is correct). Unsafe Rust continues to be potentially memory unsafe. That is equivalent to other memory safe languages like Java (which is memory safe under the assumption that the JVM has no memory safety bugs and any JNI code is correct), and a very large improvement over C and C++.

Yes, yes, that's the standard scientific racist line. "Oh we just care about educational outcomes".

Not all libertarians, but many right-libertarians, certainly. (I have some wonderful left-libertarian friends.)

Anyone who ignores structural racism and espouses the policy positions that Murray does is either ignorant or racist. Murray, being a public figure whose ideas have had real impact on the material conditions of marginalized people, does not have the excuse of ignorance.

I'm speaking from personal experience here. I used to be on the right-libertarian train myself before I realized that oppression was primarily structural and that a laissez-faire approach always perpetuates it. I genuinely do not believe one can be non-racist and espouse Murray's policy positions once one understands this basic fact.

If you want to learn more about how welfare reform in the 1990s—something Murray influenced a great deal—affected millions of lives, I'd recommend the first season of a podcast called The Uncertain Hour.

Given that a number of people on this site and elsewhere insist Murray isn't racist, even acknowledging that he is would be a nice change.

I'm claiming that Murray is a white supremacist primarily because his welfare reform and UBI proposals are white supremacist.

Well, for his accurate beliefs, let's look to another excerpt from In Our Hands:

"The libertarian solution is to prevent the government from redistributing money in the first place. Imagine for a moment that the $2 trillion that the US government spends on transfer payments were left instead in the hands of the people who started with it. If I could wave a magic wand, that would be my solution. It is a case I have made elsewhere."

His eugenicist UBI is an alternative to his ideal proposal.

As a public figure with extensive writings, his internal state of mind does not matter.

---

edit to respond because I'm "posting too fast":

So as long as you don't write anything down or have yourself recorded as having said racist things, you can't be racist?

What? A logical statement does not imply it's converse. I'm talking about public figures like Murray here, not average private individuals. Besides, structural racism of the sort Murray advocates for has a much greater impact on material conditions than what some rando believes in their heart.

Murray is not merely a racist. He's a white supremacist eugenicist. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26126606

edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: UBI isn't inherently bad but Murray's version is. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26127207

Yglesias is a center left commentator, with the emphasis on center.

Using your first and middle name is not anonymous by any stretch of the imagination.

No, I don't, because I'm sure he's constructed post hoc rationalizations in his head about how he's not actually as bad as it seems.

I evaluate him like I do any other public figure: based on his writing and the impact he's had on public policy debates. His internal state of mind does not matter at all.

"Supports welfare reform" and "edge cases of UBI" are doing a lot of work there.

I, too, support modernizing our governmental assistance programs, but not in a way that's white supremacist and eugenicist. There are welfare reform ideas I disagree with that I don't think are white supremacist either. Murray's ideas and policies, however, are beyond the pale.

I've laid out my case for why Charles Murray is a white supremacist. Beyond that it's just a matter of free speech and free association.

The reaction to my posts is rather remarkable. I've lost 30 karma so far just for stating a bunch of facts and opinions that challenge the hegemonic narrative on "Hacker News".

Oh no, I'm being cancelled. I should go write about it on Quillette. /s

White supremacists are happy to co-opt East Asian (not Asian in general, only East Asian) populations for their purposes when convenient.

Your response doesn't engage with the rest of my post either, which I think is the primary evidence that he's a white supremacist. I'm not going to rehash race-IQ arguments because I find them tiring and not very consequential.

I like and support UBI (for complex reasons some of which are related to the arguments in Seeing Like a State). However, some implementations of UBI are white supremacist and eugenicist, and Murray's version is one such implementation.

This does not mean that UBI is inherently eugenicist or white supremacist. A UBI which did not replace literally all government assistance, which took into account the fact that some people will always need and should get more assistance than others, and which started from birth rather than adulthood, would not be eugenicist.

Abominable as it is, my views are not just based on the Bell Curve's race-IQ discussion.

* In Losing Ground, Murray talks about about how welfare should be restricted because Black people are having too many kids. His book had a great deal of influence on the "welfare reform" instituted in the mid-1990s in the US.

* In In Our Hands, Murray proposes replacing all government assistance with "an annual $10,000 cash grant to everyone age twenty-one or older". Not only is this eugenics because everyone, abled or not, with medical needs or not, must be able to survive on $10,000 a year; but note the absence of a UBI for kids: the proposal would punish poorer people--who are disproportionately Black for historical reasons rooted in racist institutions like slavery, redlining and the War on Drugs--for having too many kids.

All of this is pretty textbook social Darwinist white supremacism--all of these views are regularly espoused at Stormfront and other such places.

Charles Murray is quite clearly a white supremacist, and the race-IQ stuff is only a small part of the case for it.

---

Edit: I'm "posting too fast" so responding here: I didn't know about Nathan Cofnas so I googled him and he appears to be standard-issue IDW: writes for Quillette, defends bigots like Kathleen Stock, etc. Any blowback they got is well-deserved.

From https://quillette.com/2021/01/14/philosophers-smear-one-of-t...:

Stock argues that, for example, it is okay for cis women to object to a lesbian with a penis—what in ye olden days of 2014 was known as a heterosexual man

This is of course a complete lie: trans people have been recognized and understood across many cultures for thousands of years, sometimes as a third gender but usually not as the gender they were assigned at birth. This is both ignorant and hateful. Cofnas deserves to be "cancelled", as does anyone else who writes for Quillette to be frank (for the same guilt-by-association reason, which remains just as valid for Quillette as it is for Murray).

Depends on the nature of the disagreement. Not to white supremacists like Charles Murray, no.

With your house keys you can walk into any hardware store and get as many duplicates as you like. With a U2F key that is prohibited.

U2F desperately needs a layer of indirection that doesn't currently exist.

The moment you lose your key, WebAuthN becomes terrible and the UX is atrocious. You may literally have to go to an office (in the middle of a pandemic!) to restore access to your account.

This is bananas. We absolutely should not be recommending them to normal people until security researchers come to their senses and fix this problem.

What Americans (including Hillary Clinton) have done in Haiti is despicable. The American empire deserves to be destabilized a bit too.

If a set of ideas can destabilize a racist, colonial power which as of 2021 still hasn't paid reparations to Haiti, that seems like a problem with the colonial power, not the ideas. The French republic deserves to be destabilized a bit.

Chinese imperialism isn't better or worse than European imperialism. Hong Kong would be best off as an independent, liberal democracy, under no one's "rule".

I wonder how happy the queer kids of those parents, both Americans and Bangladeshis, are.

The low rates of physical teenage sex in the west today are a result of a generation of social liberalism along with technological progress (enabling virtual means to explore one's sexuality). Social liberalism means having a healthy attitude towards sex and gender and being able to talk about them freely, not treating them as taboo subjects.

Low birth rates in the US and EU are a direct result of socially conservative public policy, where having kids generally means one's standard of living goes down. France has the best child support and consequently the highest birth rates in the EU.

Liberal gender and sexual norms are very clearly better for humanity and it is a moral imperative that the rest of the world adopt them. Social conservatism of the sort practiced in most of the world, including but not remotely limited to the Muslim world, is incompatible with basic human rights and freedoms. To be very clear: social conservatism is bad and social liberalism is good.

As someone not from the west, I hold these beliefs very firmly. The abuse and oppression I saw growing up was the inevitable result of patriarchal culture. Traditional gender and sexual norms are not worth saving. I hope some day they're seen in the same light we see feudalism or chattel slavery today.

So, yes, in that sense "born that way" is a compromise with bigots.

In general there are many things that are beneficial when used by good actors and harmful when used by bad actors. That's just the nature of power.

I'm really bothered by blanket policies that prevent beneficial uses of a tool because it can also be used to cause harm. Google and Amazon need to figure out how to disambiguate the two.

In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, that is how antitrust has been treated in US law, yes. But the law, including this definition of antitrust, is socially constructed, which means it can be changed.

This pandemic really has been hard on all of us. Take care.

Wrong on every count, bucko. Not young, not white, no making it up.