Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Two Sides of the Same Coin
I think it's possible that he (and/or the portions of his base who subscribe to the "deep state" idea) may have a differing idea of which people are the ones who need dealing with.
But if you have sources to indicate that most (and/or the most important) of the non-elected public servants who persist across administrations and provide institutional knowledge, et cetera, are still there, I'd be interested to learn of them; it would be positive news, from my perspective.
First, I think you're misreading the sentence; as I read it, it doesn't say that the truth depends on who is writing the history, it says that one's definition of 'truth' depends on who is writing the history.
Second, I think your stated definition of truth misses the mark.
The way I usually put it is that "facts are about observation, truth is about understanding". Think about your classic detective story: the detective observes the available facts, and it is only in understanding what those facts mean that the truth of what happened is identified.
Truth must be based in/on fact, and a truth once understood can become a fact on which to stand in reaching further truths, but to equate truth and fact is to foreclose on an IMO very useful nuance of the concepts.
I think the line of "reasoning" is something like "YouTube is free to make the choice -> YouTube is within their rights to make the choice -> YouTube is not wrong in making the choice -> YouTube is in the right".
Each step seems small enough and close enough to be within the margin of error, but when you look at the whole chain, the endpoints are clearly far enough apart that the conclusion should be rejected.
(ITYM Todd Akin? King defended him, and Phil Gingrey later backed up Akin's assertion, but it was Akin who made the "legitimate rape" comment.)
To be fair, that comment seems to have been almost universally misinterpreted; most people seem to read it as an attempt to assert that rape can sometimes be legitimate, i.e., OK / acceptable / what-have-you.
Per Wikipedia, the actual quote is "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." - where "that whole thing" is, apparently, pregnancy.
As I understand matters, this is not an attempt to claim that "some rapes are OK"; it was "sexual interactions which legitimately qualify as rape rarely if ever result in pregnancy", with the distinction being versus e.g. "consensual sexual interactions which the woman later falsely claims were rape". Which is plainly idiotic, to a level I'd hope we wouldn't want in our elected representatives - but at least doesn't argue that rape is ever OK.
But that's my point: are you sure he pledged to get rid of the Wall Street types? I don't remember him doing it in unambiguous terms; he may have, but at the very least I don't remember it being one of his major campaign talking points. (The closest I remember him coming is words to the effect of "I've abused the system so much for so long that I know better than anyone else how to fix all the problems that I've abused", which he has certainly abandoned.)
I don't think talking about "draining the swamp" was talking about getting rid of big-business Wall-Street types at all.
I think it was talking about getting rid of the "deep state" -the entrenched "muck" in which policy-change efforts sink - and that he defines that in the way I described.
And although I agree that cleaning out the people who know how things work and keep things running is a (potentially catastrophically) bad idea, he does seem to have been effective at doing that.
"Hypocracy" would be a form of government - at a guess from the meanings of the elements of the word, probably something like "rule by the underclasses", which takes quite a bit of stretching in order to make something other than a contradiction in terms.
I'm advocating for ranked-preference voting, in which your vote consists of a list of the candidates in order from the one you prefer most to the one you prefer least.
No votes get shifted, that way.
(And, no, we can't meaningfully prevent a two-party system without changing the voting system. Over the long term, the structural incentives of the single-choice first-past-the-post voting system cause it to inevitably devolve towards a two-party model.)
Are you sure he's done nothing about the Deep State?
He's certainly been doing a reasonably decent job of cleaning out career public servants from various government departments, and it's my understanding that that is exactly who the Deep State is supposed to be: the people who remain in place across changes of administration, and (according to the reasoning) are therefore in position to block whatever reforms the new administration wants to put in from having meaningful effect.
I suspect that the "deep state" is also what was being referred to by mentions of the "swamp", and that cleaning it out is exactly what he was promising to do when he said he'd "drain the swamp".
The Department of Homeland Security was formed by bringing several previously-independent agencies under one roof.
One of those agencies was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who are responsible for - among other things - customs; that is, they are responsible for making sure that import/export restrictions are adhered to.
Apparently (and, I think, intuitively), among those import/export restrictions is a restriction on bringing counterfeit merchandise into the country.
Naturally, the job of enforcing this restriction falls to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
And because that agency is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, that means that the job falls to the Department of Homeland Security.
Entering the US illegally is certainly a crime, but from everything I've heard to date, *being in* the US illegally is not a crime.
"Returning illegally after being deported" would constitute entering illegally, and so would be a crime - but it would be the act of entering, not the fact of being in, that would be criminal.
If you have a citation to the contrary, I'd be interested to learn of it.
The idea of a university being multidisciplinary, and a college focusing on a single discipline, is by no means unique to Germany. Growing up in the USA, I remember learning fairly early on that the distinction between a college and a university is that a college only covers one subject ("discipline" as you put it), but a university is made up of multiple colleges. (Or as I think it would once have been put, "collegia", although I was too young to be expected to know that word at the time.)
The conversation in which I learned this was about the college where my father attended, which was at the time called Anderson College, but has been succeeded in the intervening years by Anderson University. I rather suspect that a broadening of its scope is exactly the reason underlying the name change.
To be fair, I think those who believe it happened believe that he ordered it despite its being illegal (and other people carried out those orders, because he was the President) - that the fact of what Obama is alleged to have done would be so illegal only makes the offense of his having done it more egregious.
Trump himself has described it as "illegal surveillance" or similar, IIRC - and it probably fits with the level of "people do as the President orders without concern for legality" obedience he thinks he should receive.
So proof that it would have been illegal to do does not constitute sufficient proof that it did not happen, at least not in the minds of those who need it proved to them at this point.
Those aren't taxes on money, though; they're taxes on the purchase of specific products.
As I understand matters, the idea of "double taxation" only really comes into the picture when the same transaction is being taxed twice. (E.g., a federal income tax and a state income tax both target the same transaction: the transfer of money from your employer to you.) If this weren't the case, any later tax on money which had been subject to an income tax would be double taxation.
With a gas tax, the transaction being targeted is the purchase of the gas. The same thing applies to a liquor tax, luxury tax, cigarette tax, or what-have-you; in each case, there is a specific transaction which is being taxed.
It doesn't prevent people from getting into the game, no, but I think there's a colorable argument (or the analog thereto outside of the actual field of law) that the sheer magnitude of the relative advantage does mean the chance of someone new being able to compete meaningfully with the established giant(s) is significantly slimmer than is the case in other industries - potentially so much so as to be generally negligible.
Once we start looking at actual hard numbers, I suspect that that argument would begin to fall apart, but on the vague and handwavy general-impressions first look it does seem to hold together.
XP, maybe not high, but Quake? People still play Space Invaders, and other games from the same early period; I imagine the interest in playing old games, particularly early establishing classics like the original Quake, will still be around a century from now.
(Even more so if you allow for remakes using updated engines for better graphics, et cetera, but the same level data and so forth.)
Even the OSes may get some interest, to the extent that they are needed to provide the environment necessary to run old software of other types, including games.
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Re:
On the post: A Bunch Of Politicians Who Complain About Trump's Authoritarian Tendencies Just Gave Him 6 Years To Warrantlessly Spy On Americans
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Two Sides of the Same Coin
But if you have sources to indicate that most (and/or the most important) of the non-elected public servants who persist across administrations and provide institutional knowledge, et cetera, are still there, I'd be interested to learn of them; it would be positive news, from my perspective.
On the post: Funniest/Most Insightful Comments Of The Week At Techdirt
Re: Re: Writing the history
First, I think you're misreading the sentence; as I read it, it doesn't say that the truth depends on who is writing the history, it says that one's definition of 'truth' depends on who is writing the history.
Second, I think your stated definition of truth misses the mark.
The way I usually put it is that "facts are about observation, truth is about understanding". Think about your classic detective story: the detective observes the available facts, and it is only in understanding what those facts mean that the truth of what happened is identified.
Truth must be based in/on fact, and a truth once understood can become a fact on which to stand in reaching further truths, but to equate truth and fact is to foreclose on an IMO very useful nuance of the concepts.
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Re: Re:
Each step seems small enough and close enough to be within the margin of error, but when you look at the whole chain, the endpoints are clearly far enough apart that the conclusion should be rejected.
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Re: Re:
To be fair, that comment seems to have been almost universally misinterpreted; most people seem to read it as an attempt to assert that rape can sometimes be legitimate, i.e., OK / acceptable / what-have-you.
Per Wikipedia, the actual quote is "If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down." - where "that whole thing" is, apparently, pregnancy.
As I understand matters, this is not an attempt to claim that "some rapes are OK"; it was "sexual interactions which legitimately qualify as rape rarely if ever result in pregnancy", with the distinction being versus e.g. "consensual sexual interactions which the woman later falsely claims were rape". Which is plainly idiotic, to a level I'd hope we wouldn't want in our elected representatives - but at least doesn't argue that rape is ever OK.
On the post: A Bunch Of Politicians Who Complain About Trump's Authoritarian Tendencies Just Gave Him 6 Years To Warrantlessly Spy On Americans
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Two Sides of the Same Coin
I don't think talking about "draining the swamp" was talking about getting rid of big-business Wall-Street types at all.
I think it was talking about getting rid of the "deep state" -the entrenched "muck" in which policy-change efforts sink - and that he defines that in the way I described.
And although I agree that cleaning out the people who know how things work and keep things running is a (potentially catastrophically) bad idea, he does seem to have been effective at doing that.
On the post: The Constant Pressure For YouTube To Police 'Bad' Content Means That It's Becoming A Gatekeeper
Re: Hypocracy.
The word you want is "hypocrisy".
On the post: A Bunch Of Politicians Who Complain About Trump's Authoritarian Tendencies Just Gave Him 6 Years To Warrantlessly Spy On Americans
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Same Coin
No votes get shifted, that way.
(And, no, we can't meaningfully prevent a two-party system without changing the voting system. Over the long term, the structural incentives of the single-choice first-past-the-post voting system cause it to inevitably devolve towards a two-party model.)
On the post: A Bunch Of Politicians Who Complain About Trump's Authoritarian Tendencies Just Gave Him 6 Years To Warrantlessly Spy On Americans
Re: Re: Re: Two Sides of the Same Coin
He's certainly been doing a reasonably decent job of cleaning out career public servants from various government departments, and it's my understanding that that is exactly who the Deep State is supposed to be: the people who remain in place across changes of administration, and (according to the reasoning) are therefore in position to block whatever reforms the new administration wants to put in from having meaningful effect.
I suspect that the "deep state" is also what was being referred to by mentions of the "swamp", and that cleaning it out is exactly what he was promising to do when he said he'd "drain the swamp".
On the post: A Bunch Of Politicians Who Complain About Trump's Authoritarian Tendencies Just Gave Him 6 Years To Warrantlessly Spy On Americans
Re: Re: Re: Feinstein
Eugene Volokh would like a word with you.
On the post: Homeland Security's Over Obsession With Counterfeits Now Harming Innocent Buyers Of Counterfeit Goods Online
Re:
One of those agencies was Immigration and Customs Enforcement, who are responsible for - among other things - customs; that is, they are responsible for making sure that import/export restrictions are adhered to.
Apparently (and, I think, intuitively), among those import/export restrictions is a restriction on bringing counterfeit merchandise into the country.
Naturally, the job of enforcing this restriction falls to Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
And because that agency is now part of the Department of Homeland Security, that means that the job falls to the Department of Homeland Security.
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Re: Re: Re: 8 USC 1324
Entering the US illegally is certainly a crime, but from everything I've heard to date, *being in* the US illegally is not a crime.
"Returning illegally after being deported" would constitute entering illegally, and so would be a crime - but it would be the act of entering, not the fact of being in, that would be criminal.
If you have a citation to the contrary, I'd be interested to learn of it.
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Re: "technical high school"
The conversation in which I learned this was about the college where my father attended, which was at the time called Anderson College, but has been succeeded in the intervening years by Anderson University. I rather suspect that a broadening of its scope is exactly the reason underlying the name change.
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Re: Wow!
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
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Re: Re: Citation for the proof?????
To be fair, I think those who believe it happened believe that he ordered it despite its being illegal (and other people carried out those orders, because he was the President) - that the fact of what Obama is alleged to have done would be so illegal only makes the offense of his having done it more egregious.
Trump himself has described it as "illegal surveillance" or similar, IIRC - and it probably fits with the level of "people do as the President orders without concern for legality" obedience he thinks he should receive.
So proof that it would have been illegal to do does not constitute sufficient proof that it did not happen, at least not in the minds of those who need it proved to them at this point.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:
Those aren't taxes on money, though; they're taxes on the purchase of specific products.
As I understand matters, the idea of "double taxation" only really comes into the picture when the same transaction is being taxed twice. (E.g., a federal income tax and a state income tax both target the same transaction: the transfer of money from your employer to you.) If this weren't the case, any later tax on money which had been subject to an income tax would be double taxation.
With a gas tax, the transaction being targeted is the purchase of the gas. The same thing applies to a liquor tax, luxury tax, cigarette tax, or what-have-you; in each case, there is a specific transaction which is being taxed.
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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Capacity costs vs. market constraint.
Once we start looking at actual hard numbers, I suspect that that argument would begin to fall apart, but on the vague and handwavy general-impressions first look it does seem to hold together.
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Re: Re: Oh, a down side of technicalities, eh?
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Re: industry support
(Even more so if you allow for remakes using updated engines for better graphics, et cetera, but the same level data and so forth.)
Even the OSes may get some interest, to the extent that they are needed to provide the environment necessary to run old software of other types, including games.
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