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956 Worldwide

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Everything posted by 956 Worldwide

  1. The White House,Capitol, and Supreme Court are specifically exempt from the National Historic Preservation Act. Presumably to streamline needed repairs, upgrades, security to the three most important federal government buildings. A non-binding commission reviews major changes. So essentially you’re correct: he doesn’t need permission because no one imagined a POTUS might want to fuck up the White House. Our universe has no meaning to MAGA.
  2. ā€œI got drunk on shore leave in Croatiaā€ is a plausible explanation for an accidental SS Totenakmpf SS tattoo. Not having covered it up before a senate run many years later is incredibly dumbshit behavior if that’s what you’re rolling with. One must be simply be prepared that political enemies might use a massive SS tattoo against you.
  3. Independent of this specific tattoo: if there is ever a debate over the relative Nazi-ness of a tattoo, tchotchke, or accoutrement; ā€œI got it in Croatiaā€ is almost never exculpatory or mitigating.
  4. I’ll try to engage this in good faith. I think only bullets two and three are placed where the feds behave any grounds to intervene based on federalism and public policy. - I welcome any movement to rein in higher ed costs and make tuition more affordable to lower income students. The feds, as the biggest guarantor of student loans that fuel spiraling costs, are well placed to intervene and to introduce favorable conditions for federal funding to encourage affordability. - Since the feds control and administer immigration policy, its well within their interest to ensure that student visa use advanced national interests. I think that a ā€œforeigner capā€ is a misguided, ā€œdon’t grow the pieā€ approach. I would welcome an thoughtful effort to link SEVIS issuance eligibility to a formula that uses foreign full-tuition revenue to offset costs for U.S. students. The rest of this is just culture war bullshit that contaminates anything useful.
  5. Probably not, most of what I’ve seen suggests an ā€œover-policed, under-protectedā€ set of issues. Long term the interventions are what you’d expect: better education, better employment opportunities especially for young women, better health services across the board, and an improved and healthier physical environment. All of which I’ve argued for across this board. There’s some good evidence that in the short term, a surge of police presence to impact areas helps— IF they get out of cruisers and take a ā€œprotect people and property, don’t focus arrestsā€ approach. Too many surges don’t do that and it usually isn’t an issue of too few overall cops. All of which can be combined with incapacitating obstinate offenders via incarceration.
  6. I think that it’s undeniably true that Americans commit more crimes than Finns or Danes, and the thesis ā€œthere’s more crime because of higher incarceration ratesā€ strikes me as ā€œhigh interest in trains causes autismā€ type reasoning. I think I can point to countries that have extremely low crime rates while having overly harsh—cruel even (Singapore)— penal systems that I wouldn’t want to model. So you’d need to look at them as well as the friendly Nords. America’s general lawlessness as compared to other developed societies has been remarked on for centuries, since before we were a country. There are likely some society-level interventions that might help that, but I am wholly unpersuaded that the focus should be incarceration rates and in a lot of ways addressing basic safety and security will be a prerequisite to success in other areas.
  7. I have never seen an agreed upon, demonstratively effective definition of rehabilitation although shorter and fewer sentences are nearly always assumed to be desirable. I question that assumption. I think the data which shows how relatively few offenders are responsible for an overwhelming amount of arrests and offenses points to the idea that longer, targeted incarceration can be very effective. Like I said— three strikes could easily be five or eight. It’d capture that population.
  8. A low success rate means future victims. Empathy for habitual criminals is cruelty to their future victims.
  9. I really do think that rehabilitation of habitual and serious criminals is mostly a useless endeavor. (I am removing purely drug offenses from this convo, which I am happy to discuss elsewhere). Especially as practiced. I think that things like three strikes laws (tbh, you can increase this to five strikes or eight strikes) mostly capture that population and that while inevitably it won’t be perfect, it will be better than leniency at removing the most disruptive and predatory elements from society. And yes— white collar predators, I lump in with this. My bit of Texas lore is that I am related to Billy Sol Estes. Not like a core relative, but he did appear at some family events. He was incorrigible. He had no other way of life, no conception of existence, other than via scamming and stealing from people. He was a con artist to the end and belonged in jail for life. I’m very interested in age-based data, because I think it will show that people don’t rehabilitated— they age out of certain behaviors. Releasing that population with support I can get behind. For certain serious violent and sexual crimes I am one hundred percent fine with ā€œone strike.ā€ I think all convicted rapists should go away for life. I think if you kill a cop or a child, you should never walk free. I am uninterested in the circumstances that led you there.
  10. Downloading, looking at, trading, and creating sexual abuse material is an inherently irrational act. The ancients would correctly frame people who do it as allowing their passions to control them. Outrage and fear is a natural and healthy reaction to irrational, harmful behavior when demonstrated by others.
  11. Yes, criminality does incur a social cost and on balance I prefer to pay the costs associated with incarcerating criminals and protecting future as opposed to the social costs of serving criminals interests. This stuff always cracks me up. Oh, now society is on the hook for the upkeep of a habitual thief who is in jail? Ok, well, society was on the hook for him anyway. It’s not like a productive career got derailed. Picking up trash on the side of the road in exchange for three hots and a cot is a net win. Yes, I reject ā€œJustice involvedā€ and all similar attempts to center criminals— thieves, rapists, murderers, etc— instead of their victims and to frame them as passive recipients of the criminal Justice system. It’s a neat rhetorical trick that I completely refuse to engage in. No one is a character in a script that’s being written and it’s not a travesty to ascribe to people the ageny they demonstrate through their actions. I won’t play the game.
  12. See here’s the thing, someone else being an an alcoholic or having addictions isn’t affecting me. As long as it’s not spilling over and harming people who haven’t volunteered to be a part of it, I’m indifferent to it. But yes, if someone drives drunk and kills someone then I’m wholly unconcerned with giving them a second chance. And the thing is, the moral preening and saying things like ā€œJustice involved peopleā€ instead of ā€œcriminalsā€ is the cheapest kind of empathy. It comes at no actual cost to the people who engage in it. The chances are minuscule that an individual drunk driver who gets short probation crashes into the judge or prosecutor. But the cost to the family he kills is—everything. The judges and prosecutors who kept letting that guy go in North Carolina had no skin in the game. They weren’t going to encounter him on a subway at night. Their empathy was cheap to them, because Iryna Z and her family footed the bill. And that’s how I look at all of this stuff. This guy in Celina, if I was told— in two years, he’ll be next door to you. How would I feel? This drunk driver, his route home from favorite happy hour overlaps with your teenager’s route home from soccer practice? How do I feel? If I wouldn’t want it for me, its cheap empathy to give it to people I don’t know.
  13. I generally favor much longer sentences, not sure about life. And for sure once someone has more than one conviction. The data back me up: most crime is done by a small number of people over and over. And, mass incarceration brings with it reduced crime rates. I don’t really believe in rehabilitation. It’s entirely theoretical to me. You are either capable of punching a woman in her face for a handbag or you aren’t. You either see robbing houses as a life choice or you dont. You either want to film young kids in the shower or you don’t. I do think people generally age out of certain types crimes. I could get behind some data that had age-based released dates. The thing is I don’t give a shit about predators and criminals, I truly don’t. Mercy to them is all too often injustice to the innocent. They aren’t owed anything at all. If hear someone has a life sentence for his third robbery, it never crosses my mind to care about what he’s feeling. When I read that some guy traded kiddie porn on the internet and got 38 years in the federal pen (happened to someone I worked with briefly), I don’t even pause for a moment. I’m really glad he’s gone somewhere and I don’t have to think about what he might be up to. That, to my mind, is the point of incarceration: stashing the predators somewhere far away. It’s not retributive. I just heavily bias my own safety and well-being far, far beyond the well-being of anyone who has demonstrably violated rje social contract.
  14. Counterpoint: the feds are exactly as harsh as they need to be. I truly don’t get the desire to let people like this rehabilitate in our communities. Truly glad if they are sorry and changed; you can demonstrate that in prison.
  15. Almost no coaches got fully guaranteed contracts till the 2010s. And for that matter, almost no NFL players get fully guaranteed contracts. You put an early termination clause in that is agreed to. That’s why so many players try to front-load.
  16. Fully guaranteed contracts are relatively new. Coaches and schools were willing to forgo that in the past because it was understood both sides might want to make a change midstream. Mack’s last contract had a 3.5 million buyout that went down every year he remained at Texas. https://amp.foxsports.com/stories/college-football/texas-approves-brown-contract-extension
  17. You want us to go in together on a compact? Yeah, we can likely help with a down payment. You’re thinking what, a Civic? Corolla?
  18. (Somewhat) oddly tear gas and riot control agents are banned on the battlefield for escalation reasons but not for civilian riot control use. The U.S. and most countries use it for riot control. Not that I trust modern ICE with it, but under other admins I wouldn’t blink an eye.
  19. I did a bit of a search on this and can’t find anything but this Substack as a source and I’m frankly really skeptical. The United States does not posses or produce chemical weapons. It’s unclear what missiles the warheads would go on and what platform they’d be used with. There’s no missiles in the DHS inventory to use.
  20. We gotta do better than ChatGPT Facebook posts.
  21. Tortilla throwing was fun and cool. I was a kid at the 1995 Cotton Bowl and the tortillas and the Song Girls were deeply memorable. They should let them have a dedicated tortilla throw time. Every step to suck the uniqueness and fun from CFB is bad.
  22. I mean, we will see how long this lasts and what it means long term. I see a bubble that will explode. A lot of athletic departments would be distressed assets if state institutions weren’t ultimately on the hook here. Its like NIL, which was sold as ā€œlet the kids do car commercials but morphed into ā€˜pay the backup TE 300 dollars directly.ā€ I think it’s all headed for a crash landing. But maybe Saudi PE is the answer, PE works everywhere!
  23. Yes. At this point, if you don’t have to fire your corch you should wait. Cignetti came up from the FCS ranks. But that worked because it was IU.
  24. Counterpoint: The revenue comes from people buying tickets and making donations and those costs are spiraling to where bringing up the next generation in the stands is cost-prohibitive to families on a reasonable budget.
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