pretty

You monster!

Trump did experience more racial discrimination in housing than most black people ever will.

https://clearinghouse.net/case/15342/

Yes. Anything other than a new law or new decision by the Supreme Court is subject to the whims of the current administration.

Without the courts, the law stands. The Supreme Court is not the problem here. The Republican legislature is. The Supreme Court is supposed to be a check on the legislature; and their failure to do that is a problem.

Also, this case is not about women’s rights, it is about trans rights. Trans men are impacted too.

The Israeli government has no idea what it is doing. Literally. The current government was a barely held together coalition prior to October 7. In the direct aftermath, they formed a unity government and war cabinet that collapsed last week.

Their prime minister has been indicated on corruption and bribertmy charges, which are currently on hold for obvious reasons. By most indications his primary motivation in this matter is to stay in power himself, with Israel’s national interests being secondary.

Individual members of IDF leadership have called Israel’s stated objectives “unachievable”.

Israel simultaneously wants to live in peace as a liberal Jewish state without commiting any form of ethnic clensing; and achieve its manifest destiny of establishing a Jewish theocracy across Judea and Samaria.

These are deep questions that get to the core of what Israel is and stands for. Questions that are to be answered by the Israeli constitution in the 50s. That never happened because Israel was never able to agree on a constitution [0].

Right now, Israel is just reacting, without any long term strategic vision. Various factions are trying to use that chaos to advance their own long term vision.

[0] Which led to the big judicial reform constitutional crisis that was a giant political crisis before October.

Because the thing people refer to when they say “linux” is not actually an operating system. It is a family of operating systems built by different groups that are built mostly the same way from mostly the same components (which, themselves are built by separate groups).

For now. Unfourtuantly, that is not the way wars work.

First of all, Hezbolla is part of the Lebanese government (and has a more powerful military than Lebanon proper), so the chance of Lebanon supporting an Israeli campaign against Hezbolla is effectively nil.

Second of all, Israel is clearly on an escalatory ladder since October 7, and has shown no interest in getting off. The conflict between Israel and Hezbolla has been a thing since Hezbollas founding, and has escalated to wars before. However, this latest round of conflict is clearly an escallation of the war in Gaza. An escallation that both Israel and Hezbolla keep poking at.

Unless Israel changes its stance, this is not going to end with a war in Lebanon. Remember Iran? Back in April, Israel launched a largely unprovoked attack on Iran in Syria, killing a fairly high ranking member of Iran’s military (along with others, including some Syrian civilians).

In addition to being a potential war crime (they bombed a diplomatic building, although there is an argument that the details make it allowed under intetnational law), this was also simply an act of war against Syria and Iran. 2 countries that Israel is not at war with, and which are clearly not interested in going to war.

Syrua let Israel off with a finger wagging. Iran let Israel off with a telegraphed missile strike that they knew had a high chance of being completely intercepted. Or at least they tried to, But Israel couldn’t take the win, and so launched another strike against Iran. Similar to Iran, Israel calculated this one to be limited. However, unlike Israel, Iran took the opportunity to back off.

Netenyahu specifically has been trying to start a war with Iran for decades, and is now actively escalating with Iranian proxies.

From the US perspective, this is frustrating because this is exactly what we have been warning Israel about, and exactly what Israel has been ignoring us about. You could argue that October 7 and the subsequent war are a consequence of decades of Israeli policy combided with a tactical/intelligence failure allowing the specific attack to succeed.

However the current round of escallation with Hezbolla is a direct and predictable consequence of the strategic decisions that Israel has made in responce to October 7. Strategic decisions that the entire world had cautioned them against. Strategic decisions that senior IDF leaders have admitted cannot possibly achieve their objectives.

When this escalates into a full scale regional war with Iran, that will also have been a consequence of Israeli strategic decisions. And the US will again be asked to bail them out

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axiom_of_choice

The axiom of choice asserts that it is possible to pick an arbitrary element from every set. Most of mathametics accepts this. However constructivist math does not.

Life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 190 years, and the defendent waves almost all of his appeal rights. All of that without needing to go through the efforst, expense, and trauma of a trial. The prosecutors were only able to get this deal because the case against them was so strong.

Blaise Pascal is famous for 2 things:

1. Pascal’s triangle. This describes how to expand expresions of the form (a+b)^n as well as to compute how many ways there are to pick k objects out of a set of n (ignoring order.

This triangle is computed by starting with 1 at the tip, then having each element be the some of its 2 parents (except the diagonal edges with only one parent, which remains as 1)

2. Pascal’s wager. This is a theological argument for a belief in god that goes “if you believe and god doesn’t exist, nothing happens. If you don’t believe and he does exist, you suffer for eternity. The logical choice is therefore to believe”

The natural conclusion is therefore to believe in all gods. If procelatizing happens in just the right way, and no one realizes people are talking about the same god, you end up with a triangle of polytheists, where the number of gods they believe in is given by Pascal’s triangle.

Edit: gid -> god

https://youtu.be/j4MMEs9BTqM?si=6teer9Q2f_lsYI_m

2:20 Trump speach

5:17 Trump tweet followed by mob chanting “hang Mike Pence” with a gallows setup on the lawn.

At this point, protestors have already breached the capital and entered the building.

Congress evacuated, and Mike Pence was waiting with Secret Service outside of his car. Secret service wanted him in the car, but he refused on the grounds that they would evacuate him off site, and he felt it was important to stay.

Line item vetoes are one thing (which I oppose, but can understand).

The veto in question turns “2024-25” into “2425”

Looking the the Wisconsin constitution, there seems to be 2 relevant sections:

The first is the authority for partial vetoes.

Appropriations may be approved in whole or in part by the chief executive officer.

In my opinion, this already does not authorize, the type of creative vetoing the governor tried.

However, the constitution goes on to clarify:

In approving an appropriation bill in part, the governor may not create a new word by rejecting individual letters in the words of the enrolled bill, and may not create a new sentence by combining parts of 2 or more sentences of the enrolled bill.

It would take an obtusely literal reading of these provisions to allow for striking individual digits and puncuation marks to create new numbers.

https://docs.legis.wisconsin.gov/constitution/wi_unannotated

The entire logic of the Court’s opinion rests on the fact that bump stocks still use a seperate trigger action per shot. They just cause the trigger to automatically trigger against a stationary finger instead of the shooter needing to manually actuate their trigger finger.

Is this an obtusely litteral reading of a law that was clearly intended to be more broadly interpreted? Probably. But it is a reading with a majority support on the court, so we are stuck with it until congress amends the law.

There is plenty of room to debate tradeoffs in patient care. However, the policy was to perform a check every 15 minutes overnight. Not great for sleep quality and, all else being equal, a net negative for mental health. However, it does prevent a long tail of serious negative outcomes (such as, potentially, this death). There are a bunch of healthcare circumstances where sleep quality is sacrificed in favor of other concerns.

In this particular case, in addition to all of the normal concerns the facility would have, this girl was:

• on a new medication
• nauseous
• unwell enough that she cut a phone call short to go to bed early (which sounds like was out of character for her)

Those are all red flags that her condition should be monitored closet than normal.

Hamas is a terrorist organization that “we” have almost no leverage over.

Israel is a democracy that we have significant leverage over.

Put another way, the “serious” calls for harder policy from the US to Israel is to condition some of the military aid. The reasom no one is calling for something similar with Hamas is that we are not giving Hamas military aid.

The only aid western countries are giving to Gaza (and, by nessesity Hamas) is humanitarian aid. And international law is very clear that conditioning that is not acceptable.

If you are Iranian elite reading this, then you have no business blaming Israel, since Hamas is the one in your sphere.

Every movement has a canon: the core principles behind it, a mythology about its history, and the textbook statement of its objectives.

Every movement also has a reality. Thousands or millions of people with their own ideosynchratic beliefs forming a complex social web. Within this web, a vibrant biosphere of memes [0] develop, spread and evolve on this social web. A movement is simply a name we give to a cluster of memes within this complex web. It is not any of the myths we tell about it; those are merely particular memes holding the cluster together.

The author of this article is a self described liberal feminist. She identifies a change that occurred within her bubble of feminism, where it became increasingly anti-man.

To be clear, that is not all the author says. Once she gets to the “Let’s talk about how the patriarchy harms men and boys” section, she stops the meta conversation about the movement itself, and spends the rest of the article discussing mens issues directly.

However, to your comment, and the first part of the article, maybe we need to stop hiding behind the mythology we tell ourselves about feminist; and start recognizing that the “feminist” portions of the social web are still susceptible to anti-feminist memes.

[0] in its original sense; as a direct analog to the genes of biology.

It is 34 counts, but still only a single crime. It is more analgous to robbing a single house once, but taking 34 items. Given how the bussiness records law are written, each false record is a seperate crime, but they were all done as part of the same scheme.

This is pretty common in criminal law. It is suprisingly difficult to commit only 1 crime.

Only anti-semite would acuse Bibi of lying.

Just ask the Israeli attorney general who, in 2019, indicted him on bribery and fraud charges.

And Israel obviously has the most moral military in the world. Just ask their minister of national security: convicted criminal Itamar Ben-Gvir. Specifically, he has been convicted of supporting a terrorist organization. He also never served in the IDF, because the IDF thought he was too extreme.

The US has largly privatized regulation. Where most countries would have a government agency enforce the law, the US tends to give individuals the right to sue to do so. This means that the rewards need to be high enough to both incentize lawsuits, and make up for the cases that don’t get brought.

In this case, according to the appalet court [0], the compensatory damages were only $175k. The rest of the judgment cane from $4m in punitive damages, and about $560 in attorney’s fees.

[0] https://mediaassets.kshb.com/NWT/Sam/Opinion_WD85778.pdf

Just because someone says something does not make it true.