RexFavilla

Shouldn't have bad-mouthed Israel, buddy-o. To the CIA rape dungeon you go.

For the colonists as a whole, including the teens who were sent to die because of the war.

But while the decision eventually came to impact the colonists as a whole, the original impact was local and so they weren't taken into consideration. Besides, the colonies at this point were basically independent countries, they would be first confederated and then federated once the war was over. Why would a Boston merchant take into consideration the interests of a Virginian teenager bleeding out at Yorktown almost a decade later? Especially when choosing to participate in the rebellion was a decision later independently made by all the other colonies. The Tea Party may have forced the issue to a head, but each state who rebelled chose to do so independently.

So they were self-interested, that doesn't equate to being justified.

For the vast, vast majority of people, being self-interested is all the justification they need. You can't ignore human nature. This is why Machiavelli says you have to make laws assuming that men are as morally corrupt as possible, because if you don't, they will inevitably rise to the occasion.

No, there are plenty of good reasons to go to war. Like the Intolerable Acts. But the taxes issue could have been worked out without war.

I think that England had no intention to do so, and that granting the EIC a monopoly on tea imports was a clear signal of this. The economic ramifications of this were that the EIC could undercut any American merchant selling English tea or even smuggled Dutch tea, and this was done to save the EIC from bankruptcy - to the detriment of both American merchants and consumers. You could play this game with any decision (who would have budged/negotiated), but the central complaint of the colonies was 'taxation without representation' - that this pattern of completely ignoring the interests of colonists when making decisions would continue until they could express their grievances and exercise political power in Parliament. Even if the Crown had acquiesced on some small point, as long as they had no voice in Parliament they would renege on this as soon as they felt that they had the upper hand or felt that some problem (like the EIC facing bankruptcy) overrode the concerns of the colonists.

Well then look at what the people doing the protest could have logically anticipated. Something like the Intolerable Acts? Possibly. America becoming an empire? Pretty hard to predict, and the power structure of the world could easily have been set up better without a war most people didn't want.

Better for whom? Many of the Boston mercantile & professional classes who participated in the riot eventually came to occupy prominent positions. Their participation in the riots and their fomenting of revolution paid off very well for them. Boston became an important harbor - the Siege of Boston was rough, but human history is rife with cities and principalities gladly suffering through less than a year of privation to secure independence and remove the yoke of foreign taxation. If that sort of sacrifice wasn't 'worth it' in the long run everyone would surrender rather than go to war.

Yeah but there are still "optimal moves" even in game theory, just like a really complicated game of chess. And even though chess itself is complicated, it is possible to identify obviously bad moves. And I don't think we need to understand all of game theory to identify that the Boston Tea Party was strategically bad.

In a simple, on-paper game theory situation, sure. In the real world, with so many operators within so many systems, and such complex rules, I don't think we really can understand that absolutely. Game theory is in the end a model meant to simplify an infinitely complex world and make one aspect of it digestible. Manipulating/understanding a model =/= manipulating/understanding that which it models.

Predictability is actually pretty useful if we want stable international relations. Hard to trade or plan for the future if the government is gonna act in a totally random way.

But the international system isn't something that we can fiddle with and set the rules for to optimize it. It's an anarchic environment with multiple actors pursuing their own interests. And even within each actor within that larger system, there are other forces at play, going down and down several levels. The state is an emergent phenomenon acting at odds with other emergent phenomena towards ever-shifting goals and targets.

Except in the examples we're discussing, breaking the rules was counterproductive.

Was it? America eventually became the greatest empire the world has ever seen, for better or worse. Britain slowly rolled into the dustbin of history and is now being colonized itself. This is what I meant by fractal complexity - I don't think even the greatest supercomputer could predict the counterfactuals surround the Boston Tea Party rolling out several centuries to any degree of accuracy.

None of that makes the irrational response justified, it just means that Britain did a greater share of unjustified things.

This is the trouble with consequentialist ethics - it assumes rationality.

No, consequentialist ethics says you ought to anticipate the consequences of your actions, it does not assume people will. Is and ought are different things. If anything, a consequentialist would condemn the Tea Party precisely because it provoked an irrational response from Britain

That's the problem with it - because it's about predicting the actions of other people, you eventually get into game theory/wifom. The logic no longer becomes clear and knowable, it becomes in a sense fractal, like a game of go. In a system in which a powerful operator is attempting to operate in a consequentialist framework, becoming unpredictable suddenly gains great utility. And the more operators within a system adopt consequentialism, the more predictable they become to one another, and the more 'breaking the rules' and acting in an illogical matter presents a way to upset opponents. The logic of the system detaches from the logic of the real world. I did an earlier post on Deleuze and Guattari's Treatise on Nomadology and this framework is what they were grappling with - 'royal science' (governed by known rules and consequences, rigid, predictable, stable - eventually becomes self-referential to a degree) vs. 'nomad science' (governed by reaction, fluid, flexible, unpredictable - more grounded to outside reality).

destroying the tea was a protest against extractive economic practices by destroying the property of a corrupt monopoly

Sure, but the effects of the protests were bad for the colonists, and I don't see what positive effects they could have been anticipating. So it was still needless destruction of property.

attempts by the Chinese to destroy the Sassoon Opium empire, which also had the military protection of Britain and was openly extractive and exploitative

A lot of morally questionable decisions were made by China there, like preventing the sale of food to the British, leading to the Opium Wars (which were bad for China). So I accept it as a parallel but it largely proves my point.

This is the trouble with consequentialist ethics - it assumes rationality. But pushed to a certain point, people behave irrationally, and it's not rational to ignore that possibility to make the way the world works fit into a nice, neat, easily understandable system. In my view, the revolt of the colonies was a predictable possible consequence of the post-French-Indian war taxation scheme. This meant that implementing this taxation scheme had a chance to result in the revolt of the colonies and a significant loss of British power on the world stage. In my view, it was the responsibility of the British to recognize that and adjust action accordingly, not to plow ahead and assume that the colonists would remain meek and acquiescent because it was 'rational'. Once the more powerful party neglects their duty as rulers and fails to comprehend or acknowledge the dangers of squeezing their own people too far, it's on them.

The same logic applied to Gaza and October 7th. It was the responsibility of the Israelis to recognize that if they kept squeezing incessantly on the Palestinians there would be a dire backlash. Any population behaves in a way which seems irrational when backed into a corner because, to the people being backed into the corner, there is no rational escape, there is only fight a hopeless battle or be destroyed. This is why in military strategy it is considered a dire error to back your enemy into a corner with no escape, what Sun Tzu called 'putting them on death-ground'. On the other side of this coin, a general who was outnumbered and was intent on holding off a superior force would intentionally back his own forces against a river or some other natural obstacle to trigger this suicidal aggression response. Not to derail the issue, but it's my personal opinion that the current hardline government of Israel is trying to put both the Palestinians locally and Jews globally on 'death ground' simultaneously, and that both eliciting the October 7 attacks as a predictable backlash and then allowing it to happen uncontested served this purpose, as does the ongoing, incredibly public genocide which is causing an absolute groundswell of global antisemitism.

Once again, the same argument also applies to the British/Sassoon alliance and China. They just kept squeezing, and the end result was the collapse of the Qing dynasty and the rise of Communist China, which solved the opium epidemic in short order - one of Mao's greatest public relation coups was framing the Nationalists as allies with drug lords and foreign powers due to their ties with opium traders in the south of China. The Opium Wars weren't about the Chinese denying food to the British any more than the American Civil War was about the Confederates firing on Fort Sumpter. The Opium wars were about the fact that you cannot survive as a country with the majority of your population addicted to narcotics, and Britian as a foreign power was putting their finger to the scale to prevent China from addressing this serious internal problem, along with bleeding silver back into British coffers. China did not have a choice to sit quietly - it was either fight or be destroyed. Most people when given that choice will choose to fight even if the chances of winning are vanishingly small.

The most cogent defense imo is that the tea belonged to the EIC, which was granted a monopoly by the Crown, so destroying the tea was a protest against extractive economic practices by destroying the property of a corrupt monopoly. A good moral parallel would be attempts by the Chinese to destroy the Sassoon Opium empire, which also had the military protection of Britain and was openly extractive and exploitative, leveraging their druglord money to invest heavily in Shanghai real estate.

It's essentially a ploy to test the legal strength of the decision which established birthright citizenship. It was always meant to end up in court. I've personally always found the reasoning shaky, as the wording is ambiguous with wiggle room in 'jurisdiction thereof'. To err on the side of 'an amendment passed in the aftermath of the Civil War to make it impossible to refuse citizenship to freed slaves and their progeny was meant to let some 8 months pregnant Chinese woman take a flight to Guam and get citizenship for her child' is insane.

If 'subject to the jurisdiction thereof' excludes the children of diplomats, why would it not also exclude those on tourist visas or illegal aliens?

Okay but you would still rather exist than not exist, because here you are. Like you still eat/choose to continue living which I would agree is a logical thing to do.

This is the correct answer to this retarded, emo antinatalism. "The Simplest Argument To Refute A Moral Nihilist Is To Kill Them" joke can also be applied to antinatalism - every second of their choosing existence is a refutation of the idea that nonexistence is preferable to existence, just as any appeal to a higher principle to prevent their own murder on the part of the moral nihilist is a refutation of moral nihilism.

Rent tax writeoffs will run into the same problem that student loan financial aid did - the rents/tuition will just increase to take into account the altered market pressures. The financial entity with the leverage will reap the benefits on the taxpayers' dime. It will in effect be a subsidy for landlords. Public assistance has a similar effect on wages - paying workers an unlivable wage and then allowing them to survive off public assistance is just a roundabout corporate subsidy, as the corporation and its shareholders are the ones benefitting from the lower costs, padding the profit margins while the taxpayers effectively pay the rest of their workers' salaries.

Homeownership should be encouraged over renting because it gives the homeowner leverage. They build equity by writing off interest. And once the loan is paid they now have a store of personal wealth.

I think it should be eliminated for second homes, with heavier property tax burdens placed on second homes while being reduced for primary residences, escalating for third homes and beyond. Corporate residential property ownership should be taxed at exorbitant rates. The mortgage interest writeoff should be eliminated for noncitizens and non-resident aliens should be completely unable to writeoff anything associated with rental properties, which they can now do under ECI.

You need to undercut demand to fix the housing market, and it will be a painful correction.

The world survive Hitler. The Jews survived the Holocaust. Move on.

I don't think I'm a member of the group that's having a lot of trouble 'moving on'.

Well, if women are now adopting ChatGPT at higher rates you're kind of helping his point, because only knuckle-dragging mongoloids outsource their thinking to an LLM.

I also think that stat is outdated because men are more competitive than women and they know that a high IQ means you're respected more than 60 years ago, so men I think now have higher IQs than women because they put in more effort and women simply do not want to put that amount of effort in. Anytime a woman writes a very long response, I assume she just went to Chat GPT. I don't use Chat GPT to argue.

This is nonsensical. IQ is largely genetic; it's not something that you can exercise like a muscle. The most effective way to increase it is through proper nutrition during childhood, and that has a ceiling. Since you need a man and a woman to reproduce, the IQ of their children will always necessarily fall to the same average, due to each man and woman having DNA from both parents, one a man and the other a woman. Male and female IQ are biologically coupled, necessarily.

Were you rejected by a bunch of white women or something? This is a serious hangup.

Men arent smarter than women on average. Women have more midwits, with less morons and geniuses. The IQ distribution for men has fatter tails, with more geniuses but also more total retards. But the average is the same. There are way, way better ways to select for intelligence than gender. And its debateable if intelligence is even the metric you want - a group or person with high IQs and bad character can simply use that intelligence to cause greater collective harm for their personal benefit.

Stanford Prison experiment was largely pop psychology bullshit with awful design and controls.

Why not emulate them?

Because if you want to live in a high-trust society, you need to punish and ostracize people who behave in retarded, low-trust, third-world ways. That's what a pump and dump scam is. You have an online space created to share info among hobbyists to help navigate the world of crypto and scammers ruin it by lying about new coins and then dumping their stock once the price rises. People no longer trust the advice being shared in that space, and the utility of that space has thus been destroyed. Being a scammer in a high trust-system is only good (in the short term) if a minority is doing it. If everyone tries to do it, the high-trust system collapses and everyone is worse off, and then the scam ceases to work.

Take the instance of a 'trust stand', a rural farm stand which is left out with produce and a box in which people leave payment. If everyone abides by the trust system, you can have farms which offer cheap, extremely fresh produce because they have little overhead. But if one person starts going to the stand and taking everything without paying, then the farmer needs to start selling their produce to a middle man who sells it at a secured location, paying stand fees and transporting their produce to markets, or investing in their own secured retail infrastructure, making produce more expensive for everyone. This raises prices for everyone, simply because a handful of people refused to abide by the 'trust system'.

This is a severe problem with the culture among recent Indian immigrants - it's caused huge problems in Canada with food banks, where Indians who don't need charity at all will show up and raid the food banks simply to save money, forcing the charities to invest more resources into policing who comes in and doing background checks on them. And when this sort of behavior is widespread enough, it also makes it harder for Indians to get jobs - many, many people i know will simply hang up if someone calls them and they hear an Indian accent due to the prevalence of scams among the overseas Indian communities. Whether they will admit it or not, this sort of mass consumer behavior produces pressure on employers when hiring people with an Indian accent. Most people want to live in a high-trust society, not in a derelict, dysfunctional shithole where nobody trusts anyone else. And many (not all) Indians seem to not understand how important it is to police people within your group who behave like this if you don't want your entire group to get a bad rap.

Sapiosexuals are just dumb people who make thinking that they're smart their whole personalities.

Does it break mafia rules to past mafia chats into threads here while a game is still active? Rex did so.

Lmao you're such a worm it's genuinely funny.

Plus, if I were scum, voting for you would come off as a transparent attempt to bait a townie into following my lead so my scummate could quickhammer you.

It's the same tired, butthurt spiel you drag out anytime I say anything about anything. It's incoherent and unconvincing to anyone except yourself. I'm not wasting my time responding to it again. You also seem to not understand that criticizing something does not mean that you support the polar opposite. I've criticized Trump and his admin substantially more than most of the people who spend every waking second of every day impotently seething at the man.

This site will get sued big time later or.banned in all non US nations and US states worth their salt in morality, at leasst formthose under 18.

Time will tell.

If I was law enforcement this would already be under investigation but I am not and its why I can even dare debate on it. Yoy are entertaining illegal chats.

I can only hope. I often get that sinking feeling in my stomach. The gut-wrenching sense of unease that, as I cheerfully tap away on my little keyboard and sip my tea, I'm speaking not to another warm-blooded man but a snaggle-toothed, slick, pallid creature - the so-called Br*tish 'man'. This is a great sense of worry for me, that the shadow of Perfidious Albion has managed to darken my digital doorstep.

But if what you've said is true, I can banish them with a simple post. I just need to devise a British version of the Tiananmen Square copypasta:

Maybe you can help me. Do you think this would work:

'We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents', British police are child rapists, Pakistani immigrants are child rapists, 'Small islands, not capable of protecting themselves, are the proper objects for government to take under their care', 1776 WILL COMMENCE AGAIN, colonialism improved India, 'The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants. It is its natural manure', free speech, right to bear arms, King Charles is a libtard, 'If the British soldiers at Normandy who went to the beaches in 1944 could see what is happening today, they would not have gone 40 yards up that beach'

I think that might bring the bobbies crashing into the door of any britoid who committed the dire crime of having such a concentrated block of wrongthink flash across its monitor. Do you think there is any way I can jazz it up to make it even more effective?

Why does every MAGA woman look like a lot lizard that's been beamed up to the mothership to be given two hits of the ole ovipositor to the face? What is going on here? Why are these otherwise attractive (or not, in Loomer's case) women transforming themselves into, to quote our Eternal Leader, 'horrorshows'?

Watching John Kasich eat has convinced me that he's some kind of cephalopoid alien species wearing a human skinsuit. If he were President, I think we'd all be dead, except for the few unlucky souls kept on ice to be eaten alive on their orbital space station as a delicacy.

My point is that you're hysterical and historically illiterate - not just in the long term, but in the short term. The 'imperial presidency' is a longstanding political trend, and I'd agree it's worrying, but Trump is not a unique iteration of it. I personally remember liberals justifiably, in my view, mockingly referring to George W. Bush as 'King George', while conservatives hurled the equivalent moniker at Obama. There are plenty of things that Trump is doing that I object to and places where he oversteps. But to inflate him into some unique threat to 'democracy' is loony and dangerous when the real threat is this long-standing trend in American legal structure which Trump is merely taking advantage of. It implies that if Trump goes away the threat is gone because it originates in his person, and so I view it as an attempt at redirecting an important discussion into misleading partisan hackery. I also view it as disingenuous when the same people trumpeting about it were so often silent during the Biden years - it's just another iteration of both sides screeching about how tyrannical the other is when they are out of power, only to crack down on the opposition as hard as possible and excuse it once they're back in the driving seat.

Much worse threats have existed. Lincoln dragged a prominent sitting Ohio legislator before an army court for publicly expressing opposition to the Civil War and had him exiled from the country (Clement Vallandigham, who was exiled to the Confederacy after being denied a writ of habeas corpus and then moved to Canada). Lincoln then wrote an infamous letter, the Birchard Letter, to several Ohio Democrats in which he offered to suspend this exile order of their faction leader if those Democracts would move to support his war effort, essentially using his exercise of extraconstitutional and extrajudicial power to bend the arm of the opposition party.

Lincoln also had newspapers editors imprisoned in Fort Lafayette for criticizing the war. Woodrow Wilson threw socialists publishing in Yiddish in jail for opposing the draft during WWI. FDR attempted to pack the Court because he refused to accept the court limiting his power. Andrew Jackson flat-out ignored the Supreme Court. Lincoln used a military court to try Vallandigham specifically to avoid the possibility to the Supreme Court exercising judicial review over the case, which is exactly the reason that they cited when Vallandigham appealed his restoration of habeas corpus. Obama and Bush have both also undermined habeas corpus. All of these are way more dangerous than anything Trump has done.

Finally, I'd argue that the most dangerous things that he's doing are continuations or escalations of Bush-Obama-Biden policies which have become thoroughly normalized. These things are often not the focus of the ongoing protests, or if they are they are undermined by the perceived hypocrisy of the accusers. It's why what is needed is not a hyper-partisan 'anti-Trump' movement but a collection of principled free speech, rights of the accused. etc. movements.

Signing executive orders that blatantly violate the constitution,

signaling that he might not follow SCOTUS orders,

federalizing troops and sending them into US cities over the objections of those states governors and mayors,

flagrantly weaponizing the DOJ against his political opponents while pardoning not only his allies but people who committed political violence on his behalf,

threatening to withhold funding against his political opponents if they don’t do his bidding, threatening universities and law firms that do not acquiesce to his political agenda,

taking away due process from millions of person’s in this country

No one is saying the president shouldn’t be “allowed” to step in if necessary but he has absolutely no place getting involved in individual charging decisions because he is not a prosecutor, his motivations are purely political which is the opposite of the foundational principal of justice.

And the idea that the cases having no merits and ultimately failing means the DOJ isn’t capable of serious harm is wrong. DOJ investigations and charges are intrusive, expensive, and can eat up a great deal of one’s time and energy for years. The chilling effect that has on people to get them to comply with whatever the administration wants is not something that can be shrugged off. Ask anyone who has ever lived in a country that lost their democracy.

I'd agree that political prosecutions are an awful development and don't bode well for the country's future. But I'd argue that Trump didn't start this trend and actually tried to stem the bleeding. He ran on a promise to indict Hillary Clinton, and then decided to not go through with it despite severe pushback from his base because it would be 'bad for the country'. He was absolutely right - weaponizing the justice system to go after political opponents is a big can of worms. Then once he was out of power Democrats across the country took every opportunity to go after him doing precisely that, with the most farcical case that I can remember being the real estate value case. If you try to be the bigger person and not use your power to go after your political opponents, sure that can word if they also agree to bury the hatchet. When they instead bury the hatchet in your back as soon as it's turned, well then you get the current iteration of Punished Donald who doesn't really give a fuck anymore. Yeah, letting Presidents skate on a lot of bullshit to avoid the slippery slope of political prosecutions is an important tradition to preserve civilian control over the justice department. Trump tried to maintain that norm during his first term, it was the Democrats who failed to maintain it during the Biden presidency. Once they made that choice the right had to take the gloves off or basically commit political suicide. Once you bring a gun to a knife fight, if you don't land a killing shot the other guy isn't going to bring a knife for round two unless he has a death wish.

The justice department is not a fourth branch of government. It is supposed to be under civilian control - under the control of the executive, who is elected by the population. The alternative to the president calling the shots is that you have a branch of government with zero accountability to the democratic process. So, if the president says 'prosecute this case' and the person in charge refuses, of course they would be fired. If the case has no merits, that's what the actual judicial process is supposed to determine.

I'd support nuking Israel if this could be proven but 9/11 occurred before the problem of mass immigration as did the olympic bombings and other terrorist plots. I think Thomas Jefferson had to go to war with them once because they were randomly attacking American trade ships and when they had power they were literally enslaving Christians and their views have not evolved since those time periods

Ultimately the Islamic world was defeated by breaking up the Ottoman Empire and turning the pieces against one another, which meant that they spent all their time fighting one another instead of expanding. Israel is a problem because it unites them. If Israel had never existed we could have continued to turn the Islamic countries against one another, but Israel and its national pastime of barbequing small infants for shits and gigs counteracts the region's natural centrifugal forces and gives all the Islamic countries something to agree one. Take Iran and the Saudis for example. Ideally, we would play these two regional powers against one another. Actually, Iran is the more natural ally. Iranian funded terror groups pretty much exclusively go after Israeli targets or military targets in the region, they don't really operate in Western countries. All the terror attacks that actually target American and European civilians are much more Saudi-affiliated (al-Qaeda &ISIS are both Salafist).

Yet we are allied with the Saudis because they are more friendly towards Israel, and we have weakened Iran so much that they can no longer effectively counterbalance Saudi interests despite them not sponsoring terror attacks in our countries. This is in Israel's best interests; it is not in ours. Actually, if Iran and the Saudis both had nukes it would ensure that you would never have an Islamic empire to rival those in the past ever again because they two countries could never enter a 'total war' conflict in which one or the other was absorbed due to MAD.

I suspect kicking jews out of the region would just cause muslims to start expanding and start flocking more to the united states and other western countries doing more october 7th type shit

Doubt that. Palestinians seem like they are the only Muslims that want to stay in the sandbox. The Israelis on the other hand would cream their pants if they got to pack them all up and fedex them to Europe and America so they can expand their territory. Always thought it was bizarre and insane how people on the right in the US look at Israel and think that they have American's best interests at heart when they would swamp us with third world fanatics at the drop of a hat to rid themselves of their problems. If Israelis got finger-snapped to another plane of existence tomorrow like the Dwemer in Elder Scrolls and all that land was empty you'd definitely see less Arab immigration to the West. Not to mention the large amounts of displacement fueled by Israeli foreign policy goals causing conflicts and destruction in the region.

Most of the Muslim immigrants swamping the UK for example are from Pakistan anyway. They aren't even from the Levant, many people who come from the Levant are Christians looking for better living conditions or fleeing Israeli oppression.

On the Kimmel thing, most of these late-night shows are dying because their audience is literally dying. There's a reason that they're seen as passe, stale, and unentertaining - the only people still watching them are entering the twilight of their lives, and the show caters to whatever audience still has cable in 2025. Humor is evolving at a whiplash pace, with memes going through ten permutations online before Kimmel can wrap is mind around the first. The world has moved on.

On that shooting thing - are we really still pretending that Israel didn't have at least something to do with it?

The President is allowed to shitpost on twitter.

God Bless America!