> What I find amusing is that when the Snowden leaks happened and I would discuss it, when I said something like "let's pretend for a moment that we can't trust every single person in the government" I would usually get an agreeable laugh.
> But using these same arguments with ICE + Palantir, these same people will say something like "ICE IS ONLY DEPORTING THE CRIMINALS YOU JUST WANT OPEN BORDERS!!!". People's hypocrisy knows no bounds.
"THE CRIMINALS" is doing a lot of work here. Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported. Many people are politically sympathetic to these illegal immigrants, often because those people do in fact politically support open borders, but that doesn't change the fact that they violated the law in entering or remaining in the US.
Whether a given person is a US citizen or legal resident isn't private information that the US federal government only knows because of illegal spying. It's a matter of public record, that I leak about myself in a thousand different ways all the time to all sorts of people and institutions. If there was a public database that let anyone in the world look me up by name and determine whether or not I'm a US citizen or legal resident, I wouldn't care at all.
In fact, the main reason why people would like to treat US citizenship or legal residency data as a secret that one part of the government can't legitimately tell another part of the government, is precisely to make it harder for the government to detect and deport illegal immigrants.
> Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported.
There are an estimated 100K illegal immigrants in Minnesota,[1] and about 2M in Texas.[2] With 900K in Florida, 350K in Georgia, 325K in North Carolina, etc. [3]
Why doesn't ICE concentrate on fishing where the fish are… but of course that would mean doing stuff in red states.
Without going into a long tangent talking about each point, I would like to point out that ICE doesn't actually seem terribly concerned with whether or not the people are illegal aliens or criminals. The last two people they murdered were US citizens, there are many US citizens, some natural born, that have been detained.
If they have access to all this information that was volunteered, then why are they so utterly incompetent at actually deporting illegal aliens?
That said, the disturbing part of Palantir and ICE isn't just that they are reading my driver's license or my legal status, it's the fact that they know everything.
You are absolutely, unequivocally incorrect that anyone in any significant numbers wants "open borders". I know this is a meme, but it's a meme that isn't true.
> Are you annoyed corn farmers get subsidies for growing corn?
Yes we should immediately end these subsidies.
> It feels like the US can’t have nice things because people are hell bent on others not having nice things.
The US as a whole has lots of nice things. And sometimes the things the US has are not as nice as they could be because an unwise subsidy is paying for something inferior, and a small group of people who financially benefit from the subsidy advocate politically against changing it.
It's not zero sum but different physical layouts of energy generation do have different captial and operating costs. Rooftop solar power goes into the grid but maybe not at the most ideal time and scale for the grid operators, which justifiably affects what price they're willing to pay for that power, which justifiably affects the ROI for homeowners with rooftop solar panels.
Maybe I'd prefer to spend the same public money on building nuclear power plants, or gigantic solar panel arrays in the desert, rather than subsidizing individual roof-owners being able to save money on their electricity bill and not mine.
The US doesn't have a free market in either health care or electricity generation. An actual free market in solar power would probably result in more or less what we are seeing with the actual highly regulated market in electricity, namely extremely cheap prices for additonal solar energy in the middle of the day when the sun is shining, higher prices for additonal solar energy in the evening when demand is high and the sun has gone down, and some fixed cost to pay for physical electric grid infrastructure that needs maintenance regardless of whether it is being used at any particular moment.
Oil and gas don't buy polticians more than any other industry does, but voters do get particularly angry at politicians when the price they pay for energy suddenly spikes.
The price is signaling that additional solar power production during the day isn't very useful; and additonal solar power production in the early evening when demand is high and the sun isn't shining and you need a battery system to have already been accumulating energy during the day is useful, albeit more expensive and complicated to build and run.
With falling battery prices this should be an addressable problem. Soak up the locally generated excess energy and sell it later in the day when the need is there. Electrical arbitrage seems like a win/win solution for the utilities their customers.
Yes that constitutes being data driven, why wouldn't it? It's tautological that if a person who works as a porn actress and prostitution puts out polls on Twitter, the population of people who answer those polls will consist of people who follow a porn actress and prostitute on Twitter, but why does that affect the quality of the data? How can you evaluate whether someone counts as a "gooner" or not based on whether they follow a specific person on Twitter or answer a poll about sex?
If I poll only insurance company executives on whether the country should do away with private insurance and switch to universal healthcare, I haven't really done anything "data driven", have I? Taking a fat shit in my toilet "generates data", but I wouldn't call that visit to my bathroom "data driven", would I? Collecting sex poll responses from people who follow porn stars who specialize in rape and similar fantasy porn does not collect any data except what extreme porn consumers think about sexuality, which is of little use to making generalizations.
>How can you evaluate whether someone counts as a "gooner" or not based on whether they follow a specific person on Twitter or answer a poll about sex?
Following porn stars is absolutely gooner behavior, so yes, it makes a person a gooner.
Regardless of whether or not your assessment of her internal mental state is true (and I think this is a very hard thing to be sure you're assessing correctly), I don't think that anyone is harmed in any meaningful way by reading her discussions about hypothetical sexual situations, even if you personally find them distasteful.
>I don't think that anyone is harmed in any meaningful way by reading her discussions about hypothetical sexual situations
She advocates for the value of AI generated CSAM, and her hypotheticals are attempts at deluded rationalization, the rationalization of could easily sway the actions of others. When I read her rationalizations and hypothetical moral scenarios, I am just reminded of the arguments from the New Left, including many of the voices of the French petition to remove the age of consent, that offered specious sophistry to not just sway others into allowing them to prey on children, but to encourage others with similar predilections to do so without moral qualms.
A good specific example was the placing of orphans in the homes of known sex offenders in East Germany, with the rationalization that it's better than the orphans endure a bit of sexual impropriety than to suffer negligence, which is a very Aella style argument.
You think Aella lived in East Germany? Obviously I was giving an example of a different situation in which her kind of specious moral reasoning resulted in the enablement of child sexual abuse.
If you cannot see the shared characteristics of the two cases, then I really have nothing to say to you. It would be impossible to sufficiently simplify the analogy.
In the future, if you don't understand, ask for clarification rather than wasting my time with a disingenuous question that requires a full comment round trip to get past.
> She advocates for the value of AI generated CSAM, and her hypotheticals are attempts at deluded rationalization, the rationalization of could easily sway the actions of others.
You have no idea how many men are going to find this and be emboldened by it. Men seek permission from women when it comes to pushing sexual boundaries.
I don't care what her mental state is. She needs to be banned from the Internet.
Ignoring that I think spending money on prostitutes is unethical as labor is coerced (either work or starve), meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this), the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children. I have said it elsewhere, but this kind of specious moral pondering was employed extensively by groups like NAMBLA and others in the 20th century to provide moral cover for themselves.
> meaning that sexual labor is sex obtained through coercion (there is a terser name for this)
In a world where all labor is slave labor, rape presumably isn't particularly frowned upon. If I'm going to accept your premise that basically everything I have in life is obtained through coercion, why would I object to obtaining sex that way?
> the things Aella likes to defend include things like AI generated CSAM, as well as trying to push the boundaries on what might be considered ethical ways to engage sexually with children
One of these is not like the other. People advocating for AI generated child pornography are generally doing so as a means of reducing the frequency of people actually having sex with children.
"AI generated CSAM" is an oxymoron FWIW, it's impossible to sexually abuse a child which does not exist.
Where do you think the training data came from, you pedophilic dolt? If you have kids and have posted their image online, some dude is cranking it to an image inspired by them, with your enthusiastic consent apparently. Bleak!
A previous post asked: "Is it OK to 'grok' out simulated undressings of small children because the image technically no longer depict them and instead are fantasy?"
And then YOU answered with the following:
> Why would it not be OK? There is nobody being harmed.
The problem with your argument is that you could have made the exact opposite argument in reverse as well, e.g. saying that all work is sex work, since the only goal of work is to reproduce.
The coercion framework is useless, because you don't actually care about coercion at all. If there is a parallel world without coercion but prostitution, you would probably still argue that prostitution is coercive.
This is because your argument fundamentally rests on the idea that you can just pick whatever situation has the fitting "moral consequence" and ascribe it to the thing you don't like to hide your own subjective opinion under the pretense of objectivity.
What reality tells us is that prostitutes don't need help getting their profession banned. They need help with switching careers and since society is built on musical chair economics, there aren't enough chairs to for them to sit on.
>If there is a parallel world without coercion but prostitution, you would probably still argue that prostitution is coercive.
If no one needed to work to survive and live a dignified life, then I would not think seeing a prostitute was an act of rape, yes, but I would expect a dramatic drop in people who choose to have sex with random strangers in exchange for resources without those motivating needs.
>This is because your argument fundamentally rests on the idea that you can just pick whatever situation has the fitting "moral consequence" and ascribe it to the thing you don't like to hide your own subjective opinion under the pretense of objectivity.
Aww, you've discovered the is-ought problem. Spoiler: Every moral judgment has this problem.
>They need help with switching careers and since society is built on musical chair economics, there aren't enough chairs to for them to sit on.
I guarantee that in developed countries, there are enough chairs. The main obstacles are mental illness (often as a result of childhood trauma) and substance abuse stopping them from engaging in the economy legally. Instead, they end up joining the lumpenproles, just like men in similar situations turn to various petty crimes.
>If no one needed to work to survive and live a dignified life, then I would not think seeing a prostitute was an act of rape, yes, but I would expect a dramatic drop in people who choose to have sex with random strangers in exchange for resources without those motivating needs.
If a prostitute is charging $1000 per hour, are they only being raped for the first couple of hours in a month?
No. They are being raped for the entirety of it. They need to not just make ends meet, but ensure they'll be able to survive the rest of their life when the prime earning years are past.
Even when they're spending most of their income on luxury holidays, designer bags, clothes and shoes? In my experience that better reflects the typical lifestyle of an higher-end escort.
Someone who's good can relatively easily manage a 20 year career at well above $500k/pa, it's really not that unattractive gig. A big chunk of that will also tend to go unreported and remain tax-free.
I don't believe for a second that any high-end escorts are doing the job to "survive", those girls will be charging far less.
I would not call the people who ran Twitter before Elon Musk bought the company and took it private "decent people". I think that Musk purchasing the company and running it in a way that a lot of previous userbase objected to was ultimately a huge boon for software freedom - because without that, the large number of people who stopped using Twitter and went to the ATProto ecosystem instead would have been happy to continue using completely-proprietary Twitter. A lot of people were suddenly and viscerally faced with the downsides of building a digital "home" on someone else's platform.
You should explicitly state who those people are, what illogical things they have written, and why they are illogical.
I think it's very likely that people who can plausibly be considered "heroes of the rationalist movement" have written illogical things. But I don't know which specific people and which specific things you mean by that, so I don't know if I think you in particular are correct in your judgement or not.
Using first principles thinking and steelmanning are just rhetorical techniques for persuasive thinking and writing. Even people who are unfamiliar with those particular pieces of terminology do them.
> But using these same arguments with ICE + Palantir, these same people will say something like "ICE IS ONLY DEPORTING THE CRIMINALS YOU JUST WANT OPEN BORDERS!!!". People's hypocrisy knows no bounds.
"THE CRIMINALS" is doing a lot of work here. Every single one of the tens of millions of people who have illegally immigrated to the United States over the past few decades is a criminal who can be legally deported. Many people are politically sympathetic to these illegal immigrants, often because those people do in fact politically support open borders, but that doesn't change the fact that they violated the law in entering or remaining in the US.
Whether a given person is a US citizen or legal resident isn't private information that the US federal government only knows because of illegal spying. It's a matter of public record, that I leak about myself in a thousand different ways all the time to all sorts of people and institutions. If there was a public database that let anyone in the world look me up by name and determine whether or not I'm a US citizen or legal resident, I wouldn't care at all.
In fact, the main reason why people would like to treat US citizenship or legal residency data as a secret that one part of the government can't legitimately tell another part of the government, is precisely to make it harder for the government to detect and deport illegal immigrants.
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