> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
Here’s another, referring to the roughly ⅔ of London residents who aren’t white:
> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third.
I think Wilhoit’s law[1] is also a major factor: these guys appear to have taken things like codes of conduct as a personal affront because in many cases it was the first time penalties started being applied to people they identified with as fellow in-group members. You can see this in lots of cases - e.g. compare SV elite reactions to the alleged shoplifting epidemic to the way the same people feel about cheating on taxes or misleading investors for orders of magnitude more money.
1. “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition … There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect”
It’s definitely noticeable and he has ties to politically-aligned tech billionaires - for example, when about a third of Basecamp employees resigned, Marc Andressen kept them solvent:
I don’t think you can approach it from a rational economic perspective because that’s not how it started: it’s a dominance power play and what we’ve seen with China and the EU is that standing up to a bully is the only thing which causes them to back down. If you accept the offer, people like that see it as a sign they could’ve asked for more.
The companies who are forced to raise prices are politically well-connected, mostly as part of his party, and I’m sure the Canadian government is banking on their executives and his laid-off voters pushing him to cut a deal.
The Roberts court is nakedly partisan and makes rulings as necessary to expand and protect Republican power (e.g. they protected Trump’s reelection with rulings with carveouts allowing them to decide the other way if a Democratic president tried a similar argument in the future). You should not bet on a reinterpretation of existing law here moving in a direction you’d like.
Interesting. What, then, do you make of the extensive rulings that the current court has issued to block or overturn Trump's actions?
How do you reconcile your 'nakedly partisan' theory with the court rulings that, for example, overruled Trumps attempt to use the AEA for immigration enforcement, overruled his attempt to deploy the National Guard without the consent of state governments, overruled his attempts to unilaterally impose tariffs, overruled his attempt to restrict birthright citizenship, and so on?
Note the use of “Republican” in the comment you’re replying to: they are trying to walk a fine line between protecting the guy who gave them the votes needed to do things like Roberts’ career-long goal of rolling back the VRA while protecting the core of the party (e.g. the inconsistent logic used to protect the Federal Reserve, which all of the monied interests wanted, but none of the other independent agencies; or the tariffs, which are deeply unpopular with most businesses) or permanently grant powers they don’t want a Democratic president to use (e.g. deploy the national guard over a governor’s wishes).
Things like birthright citizenship are a good example of that latter concept: the law is extremely clear there so they ruled against him because the only alternative would be declaring outright that the President is not bound by the constitution, but in many other cases they’ve made quite unusual actions to preempt lower courts before either finding a new executive power or, where the law is clear, stalling to allow things like deportations to proceed in the interim before ruling against.
That’s repeating the misunderstanding: the conviction rate is high because the government voluntarily drops or reduces charges when their case is weak. You have to think of it as “80% of the cases the government thought it would win” rather than “80% of all cases ever considered”.
What does lead to pleas is the expense of defending a case: if you acknowledge some guilt, you might decide to accept a lesser charge rather than exhaust your finances with no guarantee that you won’t get that lesser charge anyway.
It is that simple for most people. Millions of people do this every time they buy a new iPhone and in practice it means waiting a bit while things download and logging into their banking app.
It’s harder for people who don’t use cloud services and have to do things like copy TOTP seeds, but in this scenario you want those to live on a Yubikey with a PIN anyway.
There’s a massive confound around vehicle size, too: EV buyers are less likely to get massive trucks and SUVs because that extra bulk drives cost up and range down, and when you’re comparing tire particulates the numbers will be more favorable for a EV sedan compared to an ICE SUV.
EVs aren’t a panacea but they’re a lot better than a 10% improvement. You still have tires but losing engine particulates, fumes, noise, and heat is a huge win in a city - bike or walk near one and you can feel the difference.
> When wolves get out of control, you shoot them. When gypsies take over public spaces, you deport them. This isn't hard, it isn't cruel. It's the basic logic of self-preservation.
Here’s another, referring to the roughly ⅔ of London residents who aren’t white:
> London is no longer the city I was infatuated with in the late '90s and early 2000s. Chiefly because it's no longer full of native Brits. In 2000, more than sixty percent of the city were native Brits. By 2024, that had dropped to about a third.
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