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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 9th, 2023

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  • How exactly is an individual supposed to determine which cops will be good and which will abuse their power?

    Just as we can’t make a general statement that all cops are definitely bad, you can’t make a general statement that all cops in any particular country or town will be good.

    From a basic risk management viewpoint, it doesn’t make sense for anyone to accept the risk that any given cop won’t abuse their position, even if we were willing to accept that very few would actually do so.

    Cops have an extremely privileged status in society and the amount of damage that a bad one can do to an individual - on purpose or even by accident - is incalculable, including setting up an innocent person for capital punishment as we’re seeing unfold in Missouri right now.





  • Yeah… I’m all for compassion and understanding, but if someone is missing the voice in their head that says “Hey, we shouldn’t be killing people” then their circuitry is broken, no matter what age they are or what their circumstances are. And that broken circuitry poses a real and present danger to everyone in that person’s orbit.

    I don’t support punitive incarceration, but the general public has the right to exist with a reasonable degree of certainty that they’re not likely to encounter a cold blooded murderer on any given day, and part of ensuring that is to incarcerate people who are known to kill others, at least until such a time that we can have a high degree of confidence that they won’t be doing that again.

    The person being a child doesn’t really change that part of the social contract. I promise you won’t be any less upset if someone you love is murdered by a child than by an adult.


  • One thing I’ve noticed among friends and family, who lean quite left compared to the general public and would be generally supportive of progressive policies, is that there’s a belief that progressive policies are unpopular outside of our circle and therefore in the primary they must vote for a candidate who triangulates in order appeal to the majority in the general election. Because a centrist from the Democratic Party is better than anything we can hope for from the Republican Party.

    I try to show them statistics that progressive policies are broadly popular across both parties as long as they are not presented with labels of “socialism” or “progressivism” but the reality that we all need to contend with is that we cannot easily escape the unfair baggage that these labels carry in our society where the big media cartel controls the narrative.

    I think if we got rid of FPTP and got rid of primaries we’d see an enormous swing in favor progressive candidates. In my mind that electoral reform is the key thing to pursue. Well that and literally anything related to mitigating the climate crisis because that one really can’t wait.




  • People just don’t want to believe that China can win at capitalism because it undermines all their internal narratives around the innovation power of liberalism. I say this as someone who does not personally like China and its authoritarianism.

    The fact of the matter is with a population of nearly 1.5 billion people, you’re statistically guaranteed to have enormous pools of talent to draw on. Even a relatively modest per capita investment in education, focused on key objectives and funneled into the portion of the talent pool that they’ve managed to identify, will be able to yield massive innovation.

    A lot of people will suffer under this authoritarianism. The people from these talent pools will be exploited and burnt out at a young age. This is already happening in China. But as a nation, it will be able to position itself extremely well technologically and economically, and this is a reality the rest of the world needs to be prepared to deal with.



  • Which is exactly the position that the Rust for Linux devs have understood and accepted for themselves, and yet they still get yelled at (literally, in public, on recordings) by C Linux devs for existing.

    Oh and they get snidely told that introducing the Rust language must be a mistake because suggestions to introduce other languages to the kernel turned out to be mistakes and obviously Rust is the same as all those other languages according to C developers who, by their own admission, have never used or learned anything about Rust beyond a superficial glance at some of its syntax (again this was recorded from a public event).