Does treatment ever speed up death? Given that chemo is super hard on the body I imagine it could? That might just account for your use of “mostly”, though.
It would depend on the treatment. In my case I had neoadjuvant radiation followed by chemo, then surgery, capped off with more chemo to kill any cancer cells that might have tried to make a dash for it. I would assume that while the radiation treatment elevated my risk for future cancers, the greater risk was my 10 hour surgical procedure.
Absolutely, we may have a depressed rate of CRC where ultramarathoners just get back up to the historical baseline. Who knows, but we don’t know it isn’t that.
If it could happen to 100 people per month, it could happen to anyone. This is of course a way to weaponize the system against dissent.
I am a naturalized US citizen. If I want to critique the administration, this is a message to me -- am I sure? What if they decide to make an example out of me? Maybe I'd better keep quiet.
Literally any law could be used to silence dissenters who have broken that law. That's not an argument against enforcing laws that have been on the books for over a century.
This administration, to put it mildly, does not have the trust of most Americans when it comes to fair enforcement of the law. That's the consequence of their own behavior.
I see your comments in all these threads, and I see that your take is generally, "these are the laws and laws should be enforced." I think there's a disconnect between this argument and what other people in these threads are unhappy about.
Question: have you never broken any laws? Maybe a technical error in a tax filing? Have you ever driven faster than the speed limit? If not you, how about the people you care about?
Do you think it's okay for the administration to go after you or your loved ones on the basis of these violations, simply because you spoke out against them? For example, the "mortgage fraud" allegations against Lisa Cook, which is something Trump himself is alleged to have done. Most people get off scott-free, but some people get the book thrown at them, and the only difference is they're on the wrong team. It's a separate conversation whether it's legal to go after that person, or if the law that's being used as pretext is or is not a good law. What I'm specifically curious about is whether you endorse lawfare, the weaponization of the legal system against political enemies.
The reason the "stripping your citizenship" thing particularly gets to me is that it's a way to destroy someone's entire life. Like, okay, maybe they go after you for the "mortgage fraud" and you end up owing fines or something, but life can generally continue. If they strip your citizenship, you have to leave your job, community, and any possessions you've accumulated, and start over somewhere else -- unless you're detained in an El Salvadorian gulag. Okay, maybe this is a tools been available to past administrations -- I haven't looked into it. I do think it's a bad tool. More importantly, I know it's a tool that's being wielded not by impartial administrators of justice but by corrupt political hacks. I submit this is... not good. What do you think?
So there are definitely large negative impacts on people affected by enforcement, and the fact that the enforcement has been so haphazard over the years has created second order problems.
If we model the national policy as a person, the person would be totally insane and basically heartless and possibly schizophrenic. Like you let somebody into your house for years, and they benefit from being in your house and they get used to it, and you may threaten every now and then that you are going to kick them out, but they can tell you aren’t serious. But then one day blam, you kick them out with no warning and you don’t even check if they have somewhere to go.
But if we think about the policy as the output of the desires and actions of a bunch of competing factions in America and not as a person, the faction that wants the people kicked out now has wanted them kicked out since they got here. They never stopped wanting them kicked out. The only thing that changed is that now, for whatever reason, the dominant politician is aligned with that faction. If that faction were in charge the whole time (not this particular politician, mind you, the faction of people who wanted them kicked out the whole time), we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place. So to them I think saying things like “it’s terribly bad for the people being kicked out”, they just go: I didn’t want them to be in that situation, I wanted them gone the entire time, and I’m not responsible for them having been here this long.
A framing I heard that doesn’t seem to have gotten traction (yet?) is that these people are “victims of migration”. The faction who wants them to leave isn’t harming them, per se, they are harmed by the totality of the migration policy situation over the last many decades. I think that makes a lot of sense
On your specific point: I think analogies to other law violations and what the consequence should be for those is not applicable, because they aren’t being removed from the country as a punishment. They are being removed because the violation is that they are here, they violated laws about being here. So the real equivalent would be: if you messed up your taxes, is it fair for the government to ask you to fix them?
Yeah with as much accuracy as the current ICE aktion on US inhabitants... In a perfect system maybe you can justify this, but when the system is ship them off and let them try to appeal that the government had no evidence from overseas then the law is effectively "cost people their job, their lifestyle, and their support system and keep them out of the country for a year or two (or permanently if they don't have savings), if they do anything I don't like"
I don’t like Trump, but he’s the first guy in a long long time to actually do things and not just talk about doing things. I don’t think that’s what institutional rot usually looks like? Now mind you I don’t think he’s going to fix anything and I’m also not sure he isn’t controlled opposition, but that would be some adversary and not institutional rot.
This is a fantastic comment in response to this article since it exemplifies the criticism of the article.
Once upon a time (ie 2 years ago) the President following the law, living up to both implicit and explicit agreements made with foreign nations, not wanting to plaster their own name onto everything, not lying about the citizens of the country, etc would be considered a good thing.
Today, doing the opposite is considered praiseworthy because “at least he’s doing something”.
This is exactly the “anything goes” mentality the author is critiquing.
> don’t like Trump, but he’s the first guy in a long long time to actually do things and not just talk about doing things.
Have you really never heard the phrase "it's much easier to tear things down than build them up"? Is the manifest obviousness of that phrase really not obvious to you?
Yes you too can
1. Talk about blowing up buildings
2. Blow up buildings
So he's not the first of anything in any length of time because this is what assholes all around the world do every day.
> he’s the first guy in a long long time to actually do things and not just talk about doing things
The problem is that the things he’s doing are using his office to become an actual billionaire and tearing down protections against abuse and fraud. You don’t fight “institutional rot” by enshrining the principle that loyalty trumps following the law or that policy outcomes can be purchased on the blockchain. Lying about the law and actions by his predecessors similar is building, not lowering, institutional rot by encouraging the idea that cheating is okay as long as you win (c.f. continued lying about election integrity or awarding government funds and jobs based on political affiliation).
The article frames the focus on grifting, not institutional rot. I would say that institutional rot enables grifters. But also grifters in leadership positions set examples encouraging others to grift. Heck, this current crop of grifters we've got "leading" us will outright airlift prominent up-and-coming grifters right up into their ranks, Gervais Principle style.
I'd say that institutional rot would be a much better framework for analyzing the situation of all these disabilities being claimed, but that is not where this article goes! Rather the only thing it seemingly offers is that we're just supposed to feel bad and aim to be more like the single person in the one example given, even as our societal leaders crassly do the exact opposite.
(As far as Trump "doing things" - yes, he's doing a lot of grift at the expense of our country. That's kind of the problem, right? Bureaucratic malaise was bad, and this is worse)
You like Trump a lot more than anyone who is informed about the things he is actually doing should like him.
But regardless, the same point could have been made about the Republican party in general for decades.
See The Baffler's article titled "The Long Con" for a history. It opens with a now shockingly unshocking list of all the lies Romney told and the prescient claim that this was necessary for Republican voters to like him.
> Mitt Romney is a liar. Of course, in some sense, all politicians, even all human beings, are liars. Romney’s lying went so over-the-top extravagant by this summer, though, that the New York Times editorial board did something probably unprecedented in their polite gray precincts: they used the L-word itself. “Mr. Romney’s entire campaign rests on a foundation of short, utterly false sound bites,” they editorialized. He repeats them “so often that millions of Americans believe them to be the truth.” “It is hard to challenge these lies with a well-reasoned-but- overlong speech,” they concluded; and how. Romney’s lying, in fact, was so richly variegated that it can serve as a sort of grammar of mendacity.
[...]
> All righty, then: both the rank-and-file voters and the governing elites of a major American political party chose as their standardbearer a pathological liar. What does that reveal about them?
Should according to whom? According to you? The more straightforward way of phrasing this is “I don’t think you should like this person at all”. Okay, and?
He is after all a rapist, thief, liar, conman, bully, grifter, authoritarian, gangster, racist, sexist narcissist who may very well end the American empire and democracy, and with your help it seems.
Which seems on topic for an article about America becoming a nation of grifters.
> By then, Mr. Epstein was already a convicted sex offender, having pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution from a minor in 2008, but Coinbase took his money all the same
I don’t get why people keep saying things like this.
If a person is convicted of a crime and they are out of jail, it is everyone else’s right to interact with them as if they had done nothing wrong. Isn’t that how the whole system is set up?
I think the reason it feels weird is because his sentence was ridiculously short and should have been much longer. But that is not up to everyone else to compensate for. Can we instead start focusing on how shocking it is that he spent so little time in jail, and then discuss why that happened?
he got a slap on the wrist and did not serve meaningful time.
if I was a shareholder I would not want money flowing to a pedophile and would certainly not want money flowing to them as they continued to molest kids even after their sentence.
I think a person who willingly cavorts with someone who trafficked underage girls is of poor moral character to say the least. (Unless there is evidence of true contrition and reform.)
Yeah I generally agree, my point is that as a society I thought that we used “not being in jail anymore” as a proxy for that.
And, at the time of people dealing with Epstein before the second arrest, I thought he had “only” been convicted of a very reduced charge of something like “soliciting an underage prostitute”, not trafficking at all.
There are a number of ways to get to a high trust society. Europeans aren’t the only ones who achieved it.
I think people want to move to European derived places because of a) the positive long terms side effects of a society being high trust and b) a greater openness to outsiders among high trust societies, compared to e.g. East Asians, probably due to Christianity being a universalist religion. Like Japan is as nice if not nicer than most European derived places in terms of high trust-ness, but historically they haven’t really allowed people outside their ethnic sphere to move there in large numbers.
Universalist meaning they allow and want outsiders to become Christian and accept them as part of the in group once they convert.
Crusades and inquisition are perfectly compatible with that.
I’m an atheist by the way, I know once you express some position everyone tends to assume you have whatever standard package includes that position. I also don’t think this universalism has been a good thing long term. It united Europeans too quickly and destroyed their various separate identities while replacing it with something that is essentially a blender (in the sharp blades destroying things connotation, not the delicious fruit smoothie creation connotation).
I think whether the economies of scale and profit incentives get fucked up depends on the size of the before and after markets we are talking about.
For these to collapse, I believe we would need the international market for US oil specifically to be substantially larger than the entire domestic market for any oil. Is that true?
Do your kids randomly run into the road? I was worried about that but then mine just don’t run into the road for some reason, they are quite careful about it seemingly by default after having “getting bumped into by a car” explained to them. I’m not sure if this is something people are just paranoid about because the consequences are so bad or if some kids really do just run out into the road randomly.
Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. Other kids run in with a clear purpose, not at all randomly, and sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways. Kids are not cookie cutter copies that all behave the same way in the same circumstances (even with the same training).
> Some kids really do just run into the road seemingly randomly. ... sometimes (perhaps very rarely, but it only takes once and bad luck) forget to look both ways.
Just this week I was telling my law school contract-drafting class that part of our job as lawyers and drafters is to try to to "child-proof" our contracts, because sometimes clients' staff understandably don't fully appreciate the possible consequences of 'running into the street,' no matter how good an idea it might seem at the time.
I'm more worried about the Teslas hitting my kids when they're on bicycles or Teslas swerving off the road into the yards. Regardless, it sure would be nice if technology controlling multi-ton vehicles on public roads were subject to regulations, or at least had clearly define liability.
Kids will randomly run into the road. They might run behind a ball or a dog so that it doesn’t end up on the other side or runned over or are simply too excited to remember your stern road safety talk.
The first thing I was taught when I picked up a car was: if you see a ball on the road you stop immediately. This valuable lesson has saved one kid (and my sanity) with me on the wheel.
Yes it does happen. Otherwise smart kids will do dumb stuff sometimes. Like see their friend across the road, but at that moment someone on a motorcycle is accelerating out of their driveway, kid runs across, dead
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