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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • Laws constantly need to catch up.

    I’m not sure what law would be an improvement though. The courts tend to frown on laws that are directed at specific groups of people so you probably couldn’t have something as specific as, “When a man says YBMC to a woman she’s allowed to consider it a rape threat and knee him in the nuts.” It also wouldn’t be terribly effective since those people would likely find some variation that skirts the law but carries exactly the same message. That’s so common a tactic we even have a name for it, “dogwhistles”.

    The most general form is a “stand your ground” law. Ie we don’t question the motives of the “defender”, we just assume they were right. That has some obvious issues too.

    There might be something between those two that would work, but I don’t know what it would be.


  • People are confusing moral and legal rights.

    Women absolutely have the moral right to nut-knee someone who says that to them. I wouldn’t stop them or testify against them.

    People generally don’t have the legal right to do that. If someone tries that and gets sued, it will be up to them to prove that there was an imminent credible threat. If the guy is still alive, they’ll be able to claim that YBMC is just a joke and it would be up to the victim to prove that it wasn’t.



  • I just read that law and it’s far from clear that it requires any aid to Israel at all.

    Section 1 just defines the title.
    Section 2 provides a statement of findings.
    Section 3 covers US policy towards Israel. This is the closest I could find to something requiring assistance. Policy statements don’t bind the president. At best they serve as guidelines for future legislation.
    Section 4 talks about actively defending Israel but brackets the whole thing in “should”. That has a specific legal definition that includes, “but it’s not required.”
    Section 5 simply extends some deadlines that were going to expire.
    Section 6 mandates some reports.
    Section 7 defines terms.

    The language in the Leahy Act is considerably stronger and more explicit. “No assistance shall be furnished under this chapter…”





  • Not rude at all. The original question is why certain people behave in a certain way.

    The first point addresses the direct reason why some voters would refuse to vote for Harris due to her stance on Israel. When people believe they are being harmed they tend to focus all their attention on the immediate harm. It’s not a logical choice but people don’t act logically in these circumstances.

    As an example of this, I’d offer our response to 9/11. The entire nation came together to pass the PATRIOT act and start a war in Afghanistan. There’s no logic in passing a bill that was so long that no one in congress could have read it before voting on it. It’s hard to argue for the logic of invading Afghanistan. There wasn’t really an objective (besides “get OBL”, who we later ended up assassinating in an other country) and in retrospect it’s certainly clear that it caused far more harm than good. But we were in an emotional state. The people watching their relatives getting bombed in Gaza are in a similarly emotional state.

    The second point addresses why Democrats attempts to convince them are failing so spectacularly. Getting someone to vote for your preferred candidate is an exercise in persuasion. Much has been written about the art of persuasion and “insult your audience,” isn’t generally a recommended technique. One counterexample is “pickup artists”. They theorize that by insulting or “negging” women they can motivate the woman to counter the insult by seeking the mans approval. While this does work on some small percentage of women, the vast majority are more motivated to find their mace.








  • I get the feeling of discomfort but it’s basically the same feeling we get when someone breaks a pencil

    There is no evidence that a mosquito is capable of feeling the kind of despair or horror that a human would feel in a similar situation. It’s unlikely that mosquitos can form emotions at all.

    At the same time, a huge portion of human-animal interactions involve the human controlling the animal in ways that they animal can’t even comprehend. A dog has no idea you’re doing operant conditioning to change their behavior. Pigs have no idea they’re being fed just so they and their children can be eaten.

    The only way to avoid this kind of thing is to turn off your big human brain and go back to ape tier. We might need to go farther down the tier list than that though https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gombe_Chimpanzee_War






  • That seems unlikely, since the constitution doesn’t really include safeguards against someone like Trump.

    The founding fathers were afraid of a King (at least some of them were). They put all kinds of limits on the power of the executive but they assumed people would follow those rules. They never really considered the possibility of a private citizens gaining so much power that they can ignore government.