mrangle

You may like Girard. I recommend his 5 part series on youtube.

One of Thiel's intellectual mentors was Rene Girard.

Thiel has a Girardian worldview, at least in part.

Say what you want about Thiel, but Girard is one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern era.

I have found the vast majority of the coverage around his death to be extremely one sided.

His supporters demand that he be treated with the same humanity that he denied others.

Speaking of the total post, no one could have written a much better refutation of the article's premise.

A democracy is only as effective as its people are educated

I missed that part of the Western Constitutions. It is likely missing because it is a false and self-serving axiom, as well as flirting with being the opposite of democracy. Mostly, it is totalitarian regimes that invoke education as being necessary for their citizens.

Is it only democracy and not a downward spiral when democracy moves in the direction that you prefer?

You might have to accept that democracy works, and that if nothing else democracy is the individual freedom to decide on what is true.

The second that you start restricting that freedom of information and individual decisions pertaining to it, impacting elections for example, you can no longer appeal to democracy.

Personally I think that more subjects are deceptive than either they or you likely know. But I'm not so debased as to call for restrictions on your information. You're free to believe in and seek out your deceptions, as a matter of democracy.

Reads like the very news feeds have been giving people mental health issues for decades and decades.

Perhaps fewer and fewer people believe let alone like to have your patter as their internal monologue.

Which amounts to an agreement to have your extremist / alarmist voice forever in their heads lest climate change leads to the H word. I think that I have that about right, if your post is to be believed.

Then, you're arguing for feudalist land ownership customs?

This is a really bad-faith reframing of the parent comment.

How so? Very respectfully, perhaps you should read with more care.

See here:

those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair.

Which stands alone as an argument for feudalist customs, but I also argue that it frames the rest as an argument-in-favor. Such as this, seemingly positively highlighting community "customary rights".

In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top:

Critique my answer, but accusing a bad faith argument doesn't hold up.

No one who reads for comprehension would credibly interpret the post as anything but an argument for feudalist customs. To be generous: even if the over-arching intent possibly is to change modern legal customs via any necessary argument.

That may be, but highlighting feudalism is a morally perilous way to go about it.

I disagree with the perspective entirely, but if someone is going to advocate for it then they should find a less morally backwards method than highlighting the ostensible fairness of the feudal era.

The comment under discussion was the one psychopathically lamenting that well-off peaceful protestors "with babies" weren't met with force. In contrast, no one thinks that the recent LA riots were peaceful.

Sometimes the riot happens after the teargas and rubber bullets.

Gaslighter

Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property.

A psychopath's excuse to harm innocent people.

People who want to destroy property will always claim that their "humanity isn't being respected". Psychopaths commonly play the victim to justify harming people who have nothing to do with them.

The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.

Pseudo-intellectualism.

The USA is far and away the hegemon country. Pointing out verbiage from nuclear powers doesn't change that.

Maybe the current system is the historical balance.

Of course people with babies didn't riot, and of course rubber bullets can't be fired near them. What are you suggesting?? There's some truly "weird" stuff on HN as of late.

Moving on.

Perhaps they didn't riot.

Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.

"which even a Calabasan could suffer sudden and catastrophic environmental injustice."

What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.

Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.

I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.

Swiss banking hasn't been legally feasible for Americans since the GWB era, famously and if memory serves. I'm pretty sure that it isn't offered to Americans.

Even more so that he doesn't govern the local fire services.

That's not happening and there is no strategy.

You can't bar anyone from cities. You can't bar them just like they can't bar you. It isn't policy that's driving anyone out. It's pricing, which is above the control of any one person or even group of people.

Some people will be forced out due to pricing. The local economy of every city is going to be unworkable at some income floor. The more expensive the city, the higher the floor.

If that floor is higher than what you make, it doesn't mean that no poor people live in SF. It just means that they feel poor even at a relatively higher income.

To illustrate, 80k per year is still a decent income in some towns. But it is definitely poor in NYC.

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What you're missing is that elite prep school admissions to Ivies (for example) virtually all smoke the SAT and are well rounded.

The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment.

And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores.

Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in.

When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion.

Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college.

The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic.

You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it.

Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement.

Yea "probably". lol

Hm. I guess you'll need a new excuse.

I don't, because it doesn't matter what the authors of that paper assert / wishcast in regard to decades old admissions standards.

The only people that take virtually any social science paper seriously are people without science training. Or people with an agenda who are willing to overlook the fact that the so-called science is garbage.

There's no way that these authors were able to meaningfully statistically parse that elite school non-academic credentials / athletics are negatively correlated to outcomes in comparison to low income SAT only students. How you know is that they aren't even parsing the "three key factors" to arrive at their conclusion.

The other part of this that you are missing is that public school academic credentials and private school credentials are in no way 1:1.

As someone from a poor background I went to an elite prep school when the academic standards were still as high as ever, but attended a public college that was known for its academics. Prep school was much harder than college, and college was no cakewalk.

Good students, most of whom went Ivy and who were about 15-20% of my graduating class, had estimated IQs in the 140s and all were athletes. As the school had a sports participation requirement. Two sports per year until high school, at which point it dropped to at least one sport per year. I played three sports per year. The top students had estimated 150+ IQs, though it gets hard to estimate at that level. Also athletes.

You aren't dealing with dumb jocks in the Ivy league. You're dealing with hyper-smart, well-rounded leaders who deserve to be there. Because everything that they've done since kindergarten has made them impressive people by high school. And not just in the classroom.

Yes, that's what it means.

More rich people tightly correlate with a broad increase in quality of life for everyone. Almost everyone trusts them more than anything that approaches a revolutionary government (the "soon to be rich" government).

Since most people are lower income, and therefore a high-market share low unit price gas-station drink company like Monster will by definition have to have its largest customer base be from the largest ie: poorer demographic, the only slightly revelatory information is that the demographic is younger, male, and leans Hispanic.

This doesn't imply that people in higher income brackets don't drink it, even most of them (though probably untrue).

Also pertinent is that the data is specified for Monster Green, which is their full sugar product. Monster Zero is a pretty big product as well, and could have a slightly differing customer base.

Your response ignores my points and sounds very North Korean, in defense of a North Korean style voting system.

I do disagree.

You aren't quoting a "they", you are quoting one man.

Last, by your logic, eliminating voter ID is about winning elections for the democrats.

The problem is that private elite colleges never used just SAT scores for admissions criteria, and no amount of assertion that they did or should will change that fact.

Focusing on SAT scores advances a false narrative, and serves to try to exert outside influence on adjusting admissions criteria to be more robotic.

While I admit that legacy and donations can be a factor as they always have been across all institutions, admissions always have been predicated on finding students who are most likely to find true high level success in the real world. This means finding well rounded students: those that excel in leadership positions, extra curriculars, and athletics as well as in the classroom.

What that means is that these students are more often found in elite prep schools. But what is also true is that never in the modern history of elite colleges have they refused entrance to a truly high level candidate coming out of public schools.

Though I agree that there is definitely a common difference of opinion as to what such a candidate's profile looks like. If one doesn't have much experience in the Ivy competition pool, for example, it's hard to understand your specific competitiveness.

No. One has to be publicly seen to not-vote for the "not-voting" to be a protest.

The protest is in the visible lack of turnout, and more relevantly in the lack of turnout of voting blocks that have historically shown up. Still agree?

I know that this is hard for you guys.

So I'll simplify it with an example scenario, which also tests your democratic moral logic.

Which is more democratic?

An election of Kim Jong Un in North Korea with 100% compulsory turnout. Or

An election of Kim Jong Un in North Korea with 5% non-compulsory turnout?

The answer, very obviously, is that the scenario with 5% non-compulsory turnout is more democratic.

This is the correct answer because the 95% that did not show up to vote would be seen by the world as a protest vote against a corrupt system. This is a necessary and valuable democratic mechanism. As it deprives Kim Jon Un's corrupt government of democratic legitimacy.

As it stands, North Korea has 100% voter turnout.

Do you want to veer toward or away from North Korea's model of "democracy"?

What you have in Australia is publicly visible compulsory turnout, period. Aside from whatever you might do privately in the election booth.

You can claim that Australia is a model of non-corruption. Maybe it is.

But compulsory turnout sure is a large step in corrupting elections, and one could argue a hallmark of corrupt elections. As well as a highly unusual shared characteristic with the most corrupt governments in the World.

You aren't following the conversation, and your own rhetorical examples are becoming confused beyond comprehension as a result.

I disagree in regard to your assertion as to what voter ID is about.

Thank you. I see your point.

Colleges, let alone Universities, used to be much fewer in number.

It used to be more widely known that the better Colleges, that is mostly the Ivy League and the top Liberal Arts colleges, were the only educational institutions that mattered in terms of imparting the vaguer yet more elite type of education of which you are likely thinking.

That is, the institutions who reliably facilitate the fuzzy process of becoming an educated person who can think like one. In the elite sense of these things.

What we've lost to an extent, in the multi-decade long taxpayer funded college degree bonanza, is that it is these elite institutions which are still seen as the only colleges that matter in the sense that I think that you are implying.

Other colleges are not truly valuable in this sense. So what are they good for? They are good for work training and certification pathways.

Universities have no problem charging obscene rates, which is hard cash, for something that they too would like to be only distastefully associated with money when debating the merits.

If it isn't translatable to money, then make it cheaper. Or keep the value firm and high, but also let's talk about what is being sold.

Is the counter argument that Australia has compulsory voting and that you think it's a fine place? I don't dispute the right to an opinion. You can think that Australia is great and compulsory voting is great and "works". Go in peace.

Whereas my arguments are referencing democratic logic. I'm attempting to speak to a general logical framework of principles, rather than to (too much) give specific place opinions.

I took your "counter argument" statement about the existence of Australian compulsory voting as fact.

I'm not sure what the point is of returning to, what, partially contradict me on the details of Australian voting and where it isn't exactly totally compulsory?

Truly with all due respect, I think that you're having an argument with yourself at this point.

That doesn't change the discrimination logic.

No one imagines that everyone is just fine with what is implied to be the same level of discrimination in accessing air travel that they state is going on when voter ID requirements are in force. And yet.