State of the Discussion

Heh, only accidentally; it's definitely not the core mission.

Mostly because that's a Motte/Bailey argument... for every past societal wrong that we all agree is a societal wrong and is being addressed through ordinary culture, there's 1000 imagined societal wrongs where the imaginers are wrong and are forcing wrongness via institutional capture -- that's a form of liberal totalitarianism.

What if the special investigator comes back and says "I'm not sure we can try Biden... he'll come across as an elderly man with memory problems"?

Because if that happens, it'll be to the benefit of Trump's argument.

Why are you denying that Trump said these things?

"Um, I'm not?"
"Well, I'm now going to argue against you as if you were."

Here's a link to what Trump said.

If your argument is that we still don't know whether Trump *ACTUALLY* said that or if he just had one of his staffers write it on his behalf, yes.

That is the fundamental argument here. Yes. Exactly.

This is probably one of those things that doesn't constitute fraud prima facie as Trump seems to imply; *but* is probably one of those things that we either need to put very strict controls around verifying that the eSignature is executed directly by the Executive via a secondary validation - like video.

So, eSignatures could be a legitimate 'tool' for signing things, but the tool can't be automated to the extent that we're not sure that each and every signature was reviewed by the executive at the moment of signature.

To be clear, the signature can't be 'delegated' to a batch of things... each thing has to be signed, the button has to be pressed each time by the person authorized to push the button.

Anything else is something we should put explicit checks around (if we haven't already). So, I'll wait for statements as to how the process is actually managed before passing judgement.

Yea I would say there is a fundamental failure to understand that the strongest bulwark against the kind of authoritarianism experienced in the 20th century is well functioning liberal institutions.

The money quote from the essay:

"So here’s where we get to my bill of indictment, based on my own lived experience (ahem) of these debates way back in the 1990s. In those days, when I was in college and grad school at Berkeley, a standard normie liberal critique of poststructuralism was that the anti-Enlightenment epistemic radicalism of the left, while overtly trained against the complacencies of small-l liberalism, would eventually “make space” for right wing critiques of liberalism.

This was a point that Jurgen Habermas made over and over again in his many debates with the likes of Hans-Georg Gadamer, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Niklas Luhmann, and others. Having been raised in Hitler’s Germany, Habermas understood very well the risks associated with abandoning discourse ethics and embracing epistemic relativism, cynicism, or even nihilism. Habermas argued that the ideas these men were promoting, allegedly “from the left,” were sapping the epistemic foundations of democratic practice, which depended on the “regulative ideal” of reasoned, good faith discourse as a mechanism for achieving a “fusion of horizons.”

I already shared my big spending on the Spring Sale. However, neither game really works on the Steam Deck, so I have not played either much. My time on the actual PC has been spend on MH Wilds with my wife. We have one last hunt and we will be finished with the High Rank Story, then on to whatever end game farming we decide to do.

Most of my remaining game time has been spent on Persona 5 Strikers, which I got during the Winter Sale. It's made by the same folks that make Dynasty Warrior (and Hyrule Warriors, and a Fire Emblem version). This game is a little bit different, though. In those games, you are heroes with an army of regular soldiers fighting against another army and controlling different map points. With Persona 5 Strikers, you are a party of four, though you still fight against large groups of minions and occasional bosses, and it is a dungeon crawl with no shifting control of objectives.

It takes place four months after Persona 5 Royal. The Main Character has come back to Tokyo, but there is some more weirdness going on. At first, it seems similar to the events of the original game, but as you explore there are differences. Instead of taking on the owner of a Palace, which crumbles when the owner is defeated, the Phantom Thieves are infiltrating Prisons where the Monarchs are stealing people's Desires. When the Monarch is defeated, the desires are freed and returned, but the Palace still stands.

I first started playing a while back, but the game did not click. I was losing frequently, and I got annoyed and took a break. When I came back to the game, it started to make sense. One of the issues is that the original game trains you to do everything you can during a single visit to a Palace. Every visit advances time, and the game has a limited number of days (with individual deadlines for each Palace). In Strikers, you can enter and leave as often as you want, and time does not advance. Time only advances with the story. This means you can go in, fight, leave, heal up, and go back in. The enemies will respawn, but you can fast travel to unlocked checkpoints. The shops will also restock after visits to the Jails. This makes it possible to farm XP and money, making it easier to power up the characters. On top of that, I managed to figure out the real time combat and generally got better at it.

Now that I understand the game, I really enjoy it. I'm probably about 1/3 of the way through. I will probably just play straight through, or I might end up revisiting my Wrath of the Righteous game (which alternates between enjoyable and tedious for me).

Here are the qualifications for holding the office:

"No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States."

Here is the pardon language: "...he shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States..."

The language is unequivocal. Calling plain language "controversial" is nonsensical.

If Biden didn't know about it and didn't sign it... is it still a presidential pardon?

While reasonable people all know that the answer is "yes, because we believe that if Elon put a pardon for himself in the machine and pressed the button that it'd be a real pardon", there are unreasonable people out there who think that an Elon Pardon that Trump didn't know about and didn't sign wouldn't be a real pardon.

"too little, too late"

And unevenly distributed. There are folks who look around and cannot even comprehend why something like this might be necessary even as others, such as the NYT, realize that they're in the middle of a five-alarm fire.

"If academia is full of a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites, why do we want them debating medical treatments?! "

And yet if they have the Wrong Opinion regarding these treatments then that's terribly important and we need to make sure everyone knows about it (and punishes them for it).

Although you're right, in a sense, that this isn't debate; it's more of an excommunication for profession of heresy.

See? The obvious conclusion is that there shouldn't be debates!

It makes you wonder why the New York Times is printing stuff like this in the first place. Are they trying to distract us away from... DONALD TRUMP?!?

Thinking about this, it really is weird that an op-ed that is written about how academia is actually not behaving well and needs to talk to more people, or however you want to phrase..

... Is, at the exact same time, arguing that academia needs to start debating medical treatments?

What an oddly contradictory position to have.

If academia is full of a bunch of out-of-touch liberal elites, why do we want them debating medical treatments?! What if they decide that, I don't know, putting shunts in people's hearts is... Cultural appropriation or something?!

What does the president of Wesleyan know anyway? Wait, lemme google "Wesleyan"... it's probably a Christian thing... yep. Named after John Wesley. OH! A Methodist to boot!

Yeah, he can probably be dismissed along with anybody who agrees with him or has any sympathies whatsoever to his point about insular thinking in the academy.

What are the legitimate questions about medical treatments?! I assume by academia, we don't mean medicine, right? We're talking about 'professors and university administrators', right?

So, um, why does non-medical academia have positions that they wish to _debate_ on any sort of medical treatment? Do they even _know_ enough to debate how specific treatments are done?

'I, as a professor of literature, think instead of the traditional way of doing this heart surgery, you should open the incision more to the side and put drainage over here. This will allow easier access to the area you need. Also, unrelated, I think the dosage of Edoxaban should be lowered, but taken more often. No, I have no medical knowledge whatsoever, why do you ask? Let's have a professional debate on this!'

Yeah, I can see why doctors would not be willing to debate various medical treatments with random guys who teach a class in Early American poetry! They probably do get pretty rude if you keep trying.

Also, looking at that, I just noticed they said 'gender transition treatments', specifically, which is weird, because almost all those treatment are used for other things. Hormone therapy is hormone therapy, and the goal of which is basically the same regardless of what it is treating. Plastics surgery is plastics surgery.

Also, that's not the right term for that. Not to nitpick, but it's kinda important in medicine. The term is gender-affirming treatments, not gender-transition treatments. Transition would imply you change when you do it, which...would have people flipping back and forth every time they took a pill? What?

I don't think _this guy_ knows anything about medicine either! Why does he want to debate doctors about medical treatments?!

You'd think that there'd be a sherbet or something, though... lemme google.

It's apparently the name of a strain of weed.

Okay, there are a couple of pinky-extended small-batch artisanal places that make it. But it ain't common. Get rainbow instead, I guess.

You know, it's really funny when an exact hypothetical comes true. Like, a week ago, I asked the question, which no one answered: Would it be DEI for a webpage about a medal winner to mention the fact he was gay and was only able to join the military after Don't Ask Don't Tell was repealed?

You know, a webpage that had a person mention the basic factual information that the military had policies against homosexuality for a while. Not promoting any sort of 'diversity', but 'This used to be true, and no longer is'. Should that webpage be removed?

Turn out, my hypothetical was even softer than what actually happened (Softer in the sense that homophobia still is more accepted than racism.): The military is removing pages that mention that _Black people_ didn't have equality in the service.

I guess the only question is: Is this just general bigotry, or is it a deliberate attempt to rewrite history? Or is that a false distinction?

The protesters weren’t disrupting the University over settlements, they were upset the Jews won’t tolerate terrorism and were fighting a war.

The protest was literally over the fact that the university was investing in companies that profited off the conflict.

You can't just invent what the protests were over. And, also, protests of a university are about the behavior _of the university_. People do understand that, right? When someone protests an entity, it's because they want _that specific entity_ to do something different. Otherwise, it's just a rally.

We have an actual list of demands...which no one seems to have bothered to reprint and the websites removed, so let me instead like to the _response_ to these demands, where it's made extremely clear everyone understands what the protestors are asking for:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/college-pro-palestine-protest-demands_n_662c2672e4b0c2fde1a5b467

I don’t see why the openly genocidal Palestinians should be assumed to have good intentions.

But you're fine with the openly genocidal Israeli government, which is literally, at this very moment, talking to other countries about removing Palestinians from Gaza?

Urban warfare is “genocide” if Jews do it, but not if anyone else does.

Urban warfare is extremely prone to causing violence against civilians, a fact which is very well know. Which is why almost no country actually does it, and the ones that do generally don't use any of the sort of tactics Israel does, like long-range bombing, and instead focus more on close-quarter battles.

The ones that do bombing like that are places like _Syria_. Which, last I checked, was also roundly condemned for it.

Israel shouldn’t be an ethnostate because ethnostates are bad, however all non-Jewish ethnostates get a pass.

Get a pass from _who_? Who do you think are defending ethnostates? Which ones?

Saudi Arabia? Do you think it's the _left_ saying that we should work with Saudi Arabia?

And you do understand there is a difference between an ethnostate as a general concept, and one that is _actively holds territory containing people it does not extend rights to_, right?

Do you know what the last ethnostate like that was? Apartheid South Africa. And if you look into for ten second, you might realize it's the same people defending Israel, and that Israel itself was a huge defender of that place. In fact, Israel is the reason it took so long to do anything about that place!

Israel should put up with terrorism that non-Jews would never tolerate.

Dude, Islamic terrorists have killed, over the specific issue of Israel, more _Americans_ than Israelis in the past 25 years. They killed more on a single day! Granted, the US is larger so that's proportionally less.

But you know, here's the list of a general estimate of how much terrorism effects a country: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Terrorism_Index

You'll notice Israel is second (Now, after Oct 7th), but you'll also notice how many other countries are within spitting distance. Plenty of people who have much more restrained behavior, along with some psychopaths we don't have anything to do with or don't even have functional countries. (Does anyone even know what's going on in Burkina Faso?)

Do you know where Israel was _before_ Oct 7th? It was below the US. For 2022, we were 28th, they were 30th.

It almost feels like the level of terrorism couldn't actually justify any of their behavior at that point.

Israel is expected to deal with a generational Right to Return.

It really is amazing how people do not understand 'Abstract demands that exist as a resistance rally point and are used as opening for negotiation' are not the same as 'things people would actually need done to accept something'.

I have pointed out before how general cries of protest are interpreted as explicit demands by Palestine in a way that _literally no others are_. The same way that general talk of having a struggle against people is a holy war, because we've decided not to translate the word jihad so that being in a fight is called being in a jihad and literally all fighters are 'jihadists' And we've apparently completely decided to just invent a new meaning of martyr, despite that being an English word.

Waving keys around and talking about reclaim houses is a _rallying cry_, in the same way that 'pry my gun from my cold death hands' or 'give me liberty or give me death' is. 'Remember the Alamo' on Texas license plates is not a battlecry to go kill Mexicans, one hopes. And talking about 'continuing the fight' is not demanding violence.

--

Anyway, Israel is not 'expected' to actually let people return. What is expected is that the right of return will be used as _concessions_ in negotiation. That Israel will go 'We won't give you back your houses, instead we will pay for new houses' or something like that. And maybe, allow some small symbolic return of very historic communities it uprooted, or even trade some land and call that 'returning'.

But that would only work if Israel was, at any point, trying to fix this situation. They are perfectly happen with this situation, because allows them to continue their plans to end up with all of what they consider as their birthright.

DavidTC: Zionism is still an active political idea... constantly taking land in the West Bank.

The protesters weren't disrupting the University over settlements, they were upset the Jews won't tolerate terrorism and were fighting a war.

That makes sense if all of Israel is considered a settlement which seems to be where their heads were at.

DavidTC: It’s very interesting how you had to qualify the destruction ‘as a Jewish state’.

We have lots of examples in the surrounding states on what happens to Jews if they're ruled by Arabs. I don't see why the openly genocidal Palestinians should be assumed to have good intentions.

Full democracy combining the entire area isn't going to work because one side or the other will take control over the state and use it to repress the other.

The two state solution has thus far failed because the Palestinians refuse to give up the RoR, i.e. the right to destroy Israel.

DavidTC: Let me guess. You’re going to bring up examples...

I'll quote myself: Urban warfare is “genocide” if Jews do it, but not if anyone else does. Israel shouldn’t be an ethnostate because ethnostates are bad, however all non-Jewish ethnostates get a pass. Israel should put up with terrorism that non-Jews would never tolerate. Israel is expected to deal with a generational Right to Return.

DavidTC: justify the Nakba.

Normal countries are forgiven the crime(s) of their own creation, the Jewish one is not.

DavidTC: it took a good two decades for Palestinians to ramped up to even throwing-rocks-at-soldiers levels of violence, the first Intifada, in 1987.

The PLO was created in 1964 to destroy Israel. The stated goal of all of Israel's neighbors up until 1979 (when Egypt broke ranks) was to destroy Israel because it was Jewish.

From The Daily Mail: Labour minister 'rubbished' spy chief's secret dossier on Wuhan lab leak theory during pandemic despite Boris demanding probe... to 'avoid offending China'

A Labour minister was last night at the centre of an explosive row over claims he rubbished high-level intelligence pointing to Covid's origins in a Chinese laboratory.

The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a former spy chief submitted a secret dossier to No 10 early in the pandemic reporting that the virus had originated with a leak from a Wuhan facility.

But Lord Vallance, the science minister who was the Government's chief scientific adviser at the time, is accused of ignoring the report, possibly for fear of offending the Chinese or jeopardising research funding.

A classified dossier compiled by Sir Richard Dearlove, the former head of MI6, was passed to then-Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the start of the outbreak in March 2020 which stated: 'It is now beyond reasonable doubt that Covid-19 was engineered in the Wuhan Institute of Virology'.

We will soon be at "why are you still talking about this?"

All the good use cases for AI/ChatGPT seem to be the kind of Intelligent Assistant things that they imagined we'd have back in the late 1990s.