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Comments by Dark Matter*

On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous

(combining two posts)

You seem to be assuming there are two distinct groups of protestors, my expectation is that it's more like shades of grey. So people can switch sides, and WTO protests saw that. Anarchy and defying the man is fun.

Further, the purpose of some of these protests is to "create" a police response. You can much more easily claim to be a victim if the police are beating you, and what you did to earn that beating can be forgotten.

MLK picked the stupidest most brutal sheriff to march against because he wanted images, those images did great things for his moment and only cost a few bruises.

The police could, I don’t know, try *not* arresting people who are not causing any harm to anyone, and whose worst crime appears to be loitering.

I know it sounds crazy, but it Just. Might. Work.

It works if there actually is a difference between the good protestors and the bad ones. And if the two groups don't support each other. And if people don't switch from "good protest" to "loot/burn" on the drop of a dime. And if the good protestors don't view part of their mission to deliberately fire up a fight with the police.

And if the police can tell the difference between the two. And if there really is a difference.

There's also something to the idea that if you're hanging out with arsonists and helping them break the law, then maybe the police aren't obligated to treat you with kid gloves and you're part of the problem.

"

For the most obvious and relevant one, they, like workplaces, are not allowed to have hostile environments.

"hostile" seems to mean "anything any snowflake disagrees with".

A lot of these accusations seem to be more about projecting power than protecting people. Like how any GOP guy running for Prez is accused of racism until the definition apparently means "not a Dem".

if the college *does* allow access to the room, they are supposed to allow it *equally*…but saying they can’t have other restrictions (as long as those restrictions apply *equally*) seems dubious.

Saying you can use it as long as you don't offend any SJW seems inherently unequal.

On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees

3) People who are going out, and they’ve decided the person to blame is actually *an entire group of people*, and they turn into mass shooters or terrorists.

Not always "blame". IMHO many of these just want to make a name for themselves. It's probably related to why young men often do stupid things that get them killed.

Unfortunately "make a name" can also be "get the largest body count ever", which can mean "head to a gun free zone and start shooting".

And then we have ideology, if you're a massive screw up then your only chance at heaven is to kill your way into it.

On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous

one senator

He's the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, very well situated to carry out the actions he laid out.

didn’t follow up on,

He didn't have the opportunity because none of the Supremes died.

As a matter of policy, it actually makes a lot of sense. The Senate's personal election chances go up by putting their guy on the court. Politicians are unlikely to go out on a limb to help an opposing Prez tilt the Court the "wrong" direction from the standpoint of their constituents.

That was doubly true in this case because a fair bit of the GOP ran on the platform of reigning in Obama, and their election was more recent than his. And yes, I understand that this rule was only supposed to be used to prevent Republican Presidents from making Supreme choices but whatever.

The interesting question is "was Biden correct"? Did past Presidents in this situation avoid painting themselves into this corner? Looking at a graph... I don't think so, although I don't think the issue comes up a lot. However this is the fifth time a nomination has been killed via lack of action.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsuccessful_nominations_to_the_Supreme_Court_of_the_United_States

On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees

it’s pretty hard not to notice that the outcome depends 100% on whether or not you start your impartial data-driven analysis on 9/10/2001 or 9/12/2001. Statistically dangerous or statistical nothingburger?

All of my comments on numbers allowed them to avoid that day.

...although we really shouldn't. It's tempting to ignore outliers because they're not "typical", but really bad outliers affects the total risk of the system.

This is true in Wall-Street, i.e. "picking up pennies in front of a steamroller" like "Long-Term Capital Management" did. And it's also true for things that risk war or natural disaster or whatever.

Moving us back on topic, the numbers posted don't adjust for a tiny population percentage.

On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous

Many ethical systems have serious problems on what to do about "evil" and make the mistake of thinking it will go away if they wish really hard.

Assume the group of violent "protesters" aren't thinking in grand concepts and aren't meta about police brutality and such.

Assume they just like setting fires, breaking things, and stealing stuff, and they can do that in a protest.

Now all of a sudden, if the police back off, the mob gets out of control and stuff burns.

"

Behavior of one group of idiots who should all be arrested does not mean the College Republicans should be allowed to break rules by proxy.

I'm not convinced these "rules" should exist, i.e. that the value they create is worth the cost they inflict. The rest of society functions reasonably well without snowflake protection. Forcing colleges to set up their own parallel legal system seems like a power grab to remove various protections and processes which we've spent centuries creating.

The usual things which are illegal or banned should be illegal or banned. High on that list is violence, what the College GOP is doing (or even what Milo is doing) isn't comparable to setting fires and breaking stuff.

Assume Milo's supporters are correct and he's not that bad, and the Left is just going nuts because making unsupported accusations and using mob violence to shut people down is fun and powerful. That would put a lot of this in a different light... and I haven't personally reviewed his act so maybe we're actually there.

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Where does it say the will of the voters regarding Supreme Court justices is bound to the electoral college (rather than, say, the popular vote)?

The Constitution.

That's the legal document which lays out how the President is elected and how many Senators each state gets.

"

And Sessions was deemed to racist to become a judge in the freaking 80s.

I spent a minute or two checking on this and he was Borked. The "racist" thing was while Sessions was attempting to put to death a Klan member for killing a black man, Sessions told a gallows humor joke. Everyone in the room knew exactly how heinous the Klan was and exactly what Sessions thought of them.

That's the context of Sessions' "racism". So the charge is a lie. The Left always trots out the racism charge and that you're repeating it says more about you than about him.

No one has ever picked a less qualified secretary of state.

Obama's first Sec of State's big qualification was being married to a successful and popular politician.

On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees

As for terrorists travelling *here*…they have, oddly, been spectacularly incompetent in wildly improbable ways, except that one time they were super-competent in pretty improbable ways. It’s a bit weird, and makes risks hard to judge.

At the moment, it's *easier* to get into Europe, so that's the low hanging fruit. You don't need to be faster than the bear, you just need to NOT be the slowest guy he's chasing.

Note this is actually a pretty grim answer, it suggests sooner or later we'll see something news making until these groups are destroyed, which might be a century or two.

I suspect everyone is *underestimating* how much vetting already happens.

Given how many years it takes, my expectation is that it's already a LOT.

Refugees…haven’t been a hole.

Unclear because at the moment, we basically don't allow them in. We let in maybe (tens of?) thousands compared to other countries millions.

And I have a feeling that Trump…is just making stuff up.

Sure. He's playing on the crowd's emotions.

Yeah. I kinda wonder how we’d see other sorts of terrorism if, for example, every white supremacist yelled ‘For the KKK!’ during their attack. (Even if their ‘connection’ to the KKK was ‘reading a website’.)

What did Chip's link suggest? Maybe 40 bodies over the last 15 years, with the Islamic groups doing about the same (before that gay bar). It's cherry picking to avoid 911 but whatever.

But you basically have to slap two zeros, x100, to adjust for size of population. So call it 4,000 bodies. We just went from there not being a problem at all to there is a problem and the Left is determined to ignore it for the sake of political correctness.

To be fair I'm not sure what the answer is. I'm a guy who wants to solve most immigration problems by handing out green cards, but Trump's emotional manipulation has a basis in reality. My feeling is we let them in and they assimilate to the same degree as everyone else, that Europe does a bad job with this just because they've always done a bad job.

However there really are bombs being both dropped and thrown.

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Jaybird: But 49 were killed at Pulse Nightclub.

What’s going on?

To be fair that link is to a report written before Pulse. However wiki suggests it's numbers are off even with that. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Islamist_terrorist_attacks

Of course the biggest problem is it's not adjusting for population percentage.

On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous

Don Zeko:
His nomination is, however, the first time a sitting President has been unable to confirm a nominee to a vacancy to the Supreme Court before the end of his term.

That's right, the Senate invoked the "Biden Rule", created by Vice President Joe Biden back when he was a Senator.

Mr. Biden, then the chairman of the Judiciary Committee, said there should be a different standard for a Supreme Court vacancy “that would occur in the full throes of an election year.” The president should follow the example of “a majority of his predecessors” and delay naming a replacement, Mr. Biden said. If he goes forward before then, the Senate should wait to consider the nomination.

“Some will criticize such a decision and say that it was nothing more than an attempt to save a seat on the court in hopes that a Democrat will be permitted to fill it, but that would not be our intention,” Mr. Biden said at the time. “It would be our pragmatic conclusion that once the political season is underway, and it is, action on a Supreme Court nomination must be put off until after the election campaign is over.

“That is what is fair to the nominee and essential to the process. Otherwise, it seems to me,” he added, “we will be in deep trouble as an institution.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/us/politics/joe-biden-argued-for-delaying-supreme-court-picks-in-1992.html

"

Haven't you gotten into enough trouble by ignoring the voters?

"

Garland is hardly the first, nor will he be the last, Judge to fail to be confirmed by the Senate. There's a lot to be said to send the balance of the Court to the voters to decide. The voters appointed Obama in 2012, and they appointed the GOP in 2014 to stop him.

Think about what happens if Trump sends Garland in there right now. We have a party line vote saying "no", and then Trump goes back to his list.

"

Personally, I find the distinction, “Speech is OK, hitting people over speech is not,” a lot easier to adjudicate in an objective and consistent manner than, “Your speech was used for bad ends, so it’s not protected.”

It's not about speech, it's about power.

The Left *wants* to be able to riot, burn down buildings, and claim it's because the Right is violent and hateful.

"

And we haven’t heard boo from principled conservatives.

You mean, other than "never Trump" and the 3% (ish) of the GOP voted for Hillary. Awkwardly this was balanced or outweighed by the Dems who voted for Trump.

But now he's in office, and we'll see how he does. It's possible my vote against him was a mistake and I shouldn't have judged his words so literally. Maybe he'll do good things. It's also possible we're in the middle of a great reshuffle which will end with me flipping parties.

He must actually be the Antichrist.

Or the media could be having a melt down and exaggerating yet again.

On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees

Almost every time, someone clearly snaps, and goes out *looking* for a cause to murder people for. That is what is *actually* happening here, not ‘terrorism’.

Well put, and agreed about this covering pretty much every lone wolf shooter.

However there are groups of problems it doesn't cover. The 19 attackers from 911, ISIS, and the mass sex assaults in Germany on new years. And it is very easy to confuse the lone wolves with ISIS with both of them proclaiming they're one and the same.

"

which is one of the arguments against Trump’s executive order.

You lost me. What has he done that's comparable? His order is basically against the countries we're bombing that don't have effective governments plus Iran.

On “Stop Feeding Milo Yiannapolous

So what speech does Milo fight for? Simply this: the right to harass transgender people, to mock fat people, etc. In other words, his free speech is the freedom to be a bully.
Gee, you all on the right should sure feel proud.

I don't see how Milo's behavior is different from Serrano's "piss Christ". He's deliberately offensive for the purpose of attracting attention. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piss_Christ

The part I don't get is why you'd go to one of his shows. You know who he is, you know what he does, it's presumably pay-to-go. There's a disconnect between you claiming you're a victim because of what he's saying to you and you paying to hear it.

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...but now that I am seeing actual far-right figures take power...

...It doesn’t mean you don’t call a spade a spade but I recognize I made a mistake in employing that type of language inappropriately.

How many dead bodies are these far-right figures responsible for? How much domestic terrorism? How much violence? Is anyone on the Right endorsing violence? Say, claiming Dylan Roof is misunderstood and should be let go? Has Trump written a book somewhere calling for mass murder?

As far as I can tell you're still screaming wolf.

The Left needs a violent genocidal villain to justify how violent the Left itself is, and there is nothing around like that short of ISIS.

There are policy differences, opposing open borders, opposing free trade, endorsing school choice, etc, but screaming wolf worked so well for so long that it's a reflex.

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Jaybird: Don’t see it as “the liberals are worse” but that “the rioters are worse”.

Because, in this case, both sides are bad.

I'm not sure. I've gone to listen to people I disagree with, just to hear them talk. I'm pretty sure they were invited to talk by people who didn't agree with them.

And what this guy is doing seems more like performance art than serious political speech.

What he's doing is bad, but imho whatever college conservative group brought him isn't sullying their name all that much and the Left is shown to be violent and intolerant (which btw is a bigger problem).

My "bad" meter for the College group doesn't ping all that much. Now it would if they said they supported him, but he's enough of a caricature that seems unlikely.

"

So my question is what happens when Mrs. DemTrump voter goes down to PP to get her thrice-yearly abortion, and finds the doors locked and doctor arrested.

She's probably rich enough to have one without public money. The poor will suffer until some women die in back alleys and that goes public, but that's a different issue.

Or Mr. DemTrump voter loses his health insurance because he had kidneystones a few years ago, and now can’t afford his chemo.

Without health care reform (as opposed to insurance reform) no one will be able to pay for anything.

Or the school that Junior DemTrump goes to closes down, and they have to pay a small fortune to Barron Trump Academy Elementary School.

Charter Schools are public schools. BTW having a charter around is *amazing* at keeping the public school in line. If take the kids charter then I'm taking them "out of the district".

On “Trumpwatch: on prioritizing Christian refugees

The Christian community has been complaining for years that there's a slow motion Christian genocide going on in some Islamic nations. Under ISIS that has become a lot more explicit and faster.

So, would it have been "unconstitutional" to prioritize Jewish refugees during WW2?

On “Morning Ed: Muslims {2017.01.30.M}

You've got two types of answers here.

First, that the protesters didn't do the violence, it was groups unrelated to them and unrelated to the protest. Second, that the protesters were provoked into violence by the police.

The police were incompetent at handling the protesters, and at handling Brown's death. The later is somewhat excusable, it's a very small town department, they've got roughly one murder a year. They don't have their own medical examiner, etc.

Brown got shot after 12:02. The St. Louis County detectives were notified at 12:43 p.m. and arrived about 1:30 p.m., with the forensic investigator arriving at about 2:30 p.m. The medical examiner began his examination at around 3:30 p.m. and concluded about half an hour later.

Four hours doesn't seem like an unreasonable amount of time for a police involved shooting where there's a two and half hour wait from bringing in experts from another city.

what would have happened if Brown had been shot, and then, you know, taken away in some reasonable amount of time,

What would have happened if the police had skipped multiple investigative steps and just proclaimed their guy innocent? Probably bad things.

then had a dog urinate on his memorial and then drove over it.

This sounds similar to, but less well investigated than, Brown being shot in the back.

The police *always* escalate first

Granted that the police competence here was limited to writing traffic tickets. However the "first" escalation was lying to investigators and the public about Brown's shooting in an effort to get someone convicted of murder.

And as long as we're talking about who stepped up or called for violence, when Brown's father was screaming to burn things down, who was he talking to?

Oh, look, instead of everyone peaceable going home as ordered, some of them started confronting the police, and others started looting. Who could have guessed it?!

Ok, Full stop. Are you claiming that if I get upset with the police, it's ok for me to loot and burn your house? Upset people just naturally steal stuff and burn buildings down? We should simply expect it? Does that happen with the Right, or is it just the Left that is naturally violent?

I go down this list of what you say the police did and I ask on each point, "if true, is this sufficient provocation for someone to burn down my house when I'm not involved?" The answer is always "no".

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Dark Matter: “…had to be put down.”

Kazzy: Disgusting.

Yes. But unfortunately also accurate.

Brown's actions were brutal, criminal, and insane.

He kept increasing the level of senseless violence until someone died.

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