wnoise

They cannot. It requires a simple majority in the House followed by a 2/3 majority in the Senate. This is basically impossible to achieve.

They do not create binding precedent. They can create so-called persuasive precedent -- something other courts (and the same district in subsequent opinions) can and do cite when they don't disagree.

Because no one made it illegal?

I think I agree nearly 100% with this. The tricky part is always selective-enforcement:

> But if you criticize only Israel about some issue, and grant a free pass to everyone else on that same issue, that's when things become problematic.

I do believe that (a) in aggregate, Israel has far more vitriol directed towards it for any given action vs comparable actions by other nations. However I also believe (b) that there aren't actually any materially more significant penalties attached to them than other nations.

I also believe that (c) most of (a) is due to Israel having a higher salience. People get informed more about Israel's bad actions than comparable ones in other nations. When informed of comparable things, people are generally upset about those in similar amounts. Further (d) Other nations should get a lot more complaints about their bad behavior. Finally, (e) comparisons to other nations in these discussions is useless, because it's whataboutism. The bad behavior of Israel is indeed often bad, but saying someone else does it too isn't a good response unless you actually think the standard is wrong. That has to happen in another discussion.

If that standard were universally applied, even purely defensive wars could not be done.

Unless you're speaking about the high overhead rates, that's really the wrong framing. The public funds at issue are buying things like research, or hospital services.

Depends on what you mean by anti-Zionism. It's not a natural congregation point -- even those that don't think Israel should exist don't generally call themselves anti-Zionist. As a label from the outside, it's thus very flexible. A lot of mere criticisms of Israeli actions gets labeled anti-Zionist.

So not a comparable situation.

In this intra-elite competition, the previous winners might deserve to lose. The current regime and its allies absolutely cannot be allowed to be winners.

> How about violating bright red line laws/norms of the society you're in?

Isn't the word for that "criminal"? You can add intensifiers like "serious", "hardened", "deadly", etc to emphasize how bright the line violation is.

> Okay but surely you agree that "I want abortion but my state bans it" is not the same kind of "disagreement with societal opinions of morality" as executing a CEO because you vaguely have grievances with the healthcare system?

There certainly is a greater consensus for it; 50-50 is quite different than what I would guess is about 85%. And I'm for that consensus. This kind of violence becoming common would be disastrous. But that consensus certainly seems to be a lot less solid than it was a year ago, especially when you look at the youth. (I think there are several things contributing to that, but that consensus breaking down does not mean that 41% of 18-29 year olds are insane. That's just not what insane means.)

https://www.axios.com/2024/12/17/united-healthcare-ceo-killi...

Arguing that Mangione is _criminally insane_ is arguing that he shouldn't be legally punished, that a mental disease prevented him from having the necessary mens rea to actually have his act be criminal. Are you sure that's what you want to argue? (Confinement while he remains criminally insane is certainly justified, of course.)

> For example, you think that the crime that you facilitate is "justice" for perceived wrongs but in reality it is only the execution of an innocent man with a family. Such a delusion is the definition of criminal psychosis.

"justice" and "innocent" are not facts about the world but societal judgements. Having different opinions about these is moral disagreement, not insanity, nor delusion. Expecting society to agree with you and maintaining that expectation even against evidence afterward would be delusion. Sometimes societies don't have fixed judgements. Is an abortion a medical treatment or an execution of an innocent child? Although I agree with one stance, and disagree with the other, neither is a delusion. It's a moral disagreement that remains one whether I live under laws that treat it one way, or the other.

> Very seriously, see a skilled therapist. Tell them what you wrote. Hope that they are able to begin to help you.

Don't be a dick.

Accurately describing other's morals is no reason to see a therapist. It says nothing about my morals or my sanity that I recognize a large fraction of fairly normal people do value lots of things above others' lives. Conformity and fitting in often enough, as witnessed by Hannah Aredt's phrase "the banality of evil". To the best of my knowledge I haven't contributed to excess deaths beyond the externalities of living in a first-world country, participating in its market economy, and the actions its government takes funded by the taxes I pay. I do actually value lives, so I am unlikely to attempt to take them except under extreme circumstances (and I most likely would not have the instincts to do so effectively; never been tested, and hope to never be).

Societies in general certainly don't treat lives as infinitely valuable, nor even equally valuable. They regularly make economic tradeoffs (and incoherent ones at that) that it's okay to take actions that increase the death toll as long as enough money is made from it. Society is happy to use and endorse violence -- so long as it's done by the right people to the wrong people.

I haven't set a definition and really don't intend to, only saying the line must be quite far from where you are drawing it.

Tying it to willingness to kill for some goal cannot be it -- not every soldier, cop, and security guard is insane. There has to be some degree of break from reality, not disagreement with societal opinions of morality. (And of course all societies do endorse violence -- from the proper authorities, and against the right targets).

Osama bin Laden was a religiously-driven warlord. But not only was he not insane, he was quite effective for quite some time, and had significant support from the societies he was part.

The Unabomber absolutely could plausibly be argued to be insane -- his attorneys certainly pushed for it (though he rejected that attempt). And the psychological experiments he participated in could certainly have contributed to such a break. Throw in the standard trope of living as a hermit in the woods with limited social contact (which can both be a result of insanity and decrease mental stability), and there's enough there not to reject the label. But his bombing campaign just makes him a criminal, a problem for society, not insane.

Oh, yes, highly unusual.

So are startup founders. Many of these fail, precisely because they too did not have rational plans that would get them to their end goals.

"Criminally insane" and "psychosis of maniac" are incredible hyperbole.

The only reasonable word there is "criminally". Of course assassinations are criminal.

One doesn't have to be insane, psychotic, or a maniac to kill someone, or to let someone die. All it takes is valuing other things above the life taken. This is not that uncommon.

Now, you can think Mangione is wrong about the effects, that he did not have a rational plan that would get him his desired end goal. I think that's obviously true even. But that's just how most humans act most of the time, and is not insanity.

> not the government protecting people from each other.

That's literally the purpose of both criminal and civil laws.

The DoSes are AI-for-training-data, not AI-for-automation. AI-for-automation is for the time being going to be the same order of magnitude as standard activity.

He also created the Githzerai/Githyanki, so other ways of creating cults seem easier.

Though the Deus Ex Machina is indeed a Deus Ex Machina, even when signposted.

New job limits the damage a lot though. Until tenure is overstating things.

Yes, but k-token lookup was already a thing with markov chains. Transformers are indeed better, but just because they model language distributions better than mostly-empty arrays of (token-count)^(context).

Got it, I should use Rankine.

False dichotomy. Yes, you can broadly split people who find vulnerabilities into those who want to use or sell them, and those who want to get them fixed. And those who want to use or sell them will never tell the victim.

But those who notice a problem do have some point of aggravation past which they'll just go "I can't be bothered; fuck 'em". You really do want to make it as easy as possible for them to report. (And alsp make it seem as safe as possible; having a reputation for suing reporters is also terrible.)

Now, in practice, I don't thing security.txt is a particularly useful way of doing this, but it is pretty easy to add.

Perhaps. But I think we can agree that this is indeed not the usual case.

The majority of what he's doing is "merely" unheard of norm violations. But much of the authority he's exercising do not clearly appear to be legal, or constitutional. There are tendentious arguments for much of it being legal, of course, but they're not slam-dunks -- precisely because they would put the entire the executive branch effectively above any law or constraint.

In any other organization it would be clear that even when the head gives you an illegal or an ultra-vires orders, you're not supposed to actually follow them.

Yes.

It would be completely paralyzing were the executive largely staffed with those that wanted to paralyze it. Usually that's not the case.

I don't think that'd be case unless the orders were completely outrageous, in which case, yes, we absolutely want them disobeyed until adjudication could happen.

See, the thing about Arsenal is they always try to walk it in.

The "gunshow" loophole is really a "private sellers" exemption. If you don't regularly sell guns, then you don't need an FFL to merely sell a small number, and don't have to do background checks (indeed there's no process such that you _can_ do firearms checks).

Now, it might be reasonable to remove this exemption, but the only way it's a "gunshow" loophole is that gun shows are a place where gun fans wanting to buy are going to meet gun fans wanting to sell.

Making it trivial for someone to do firearms checks seems like an easy thing that everyone should support, but alas no one in power seems to actually want such a thing.

Normally to be covered under "incitement", it has to be a call for imminent unlawful behavior.

This is true, but only by definition of murder as a wrongful killing. There are plenty of killings that aren't murder.

You're not wrong.

But in theory, agreement and buy-in is a one-time thing, while actually writing the code and reviewing the PRs are constant things.

Depends how far east or west you are...

Nah. It's just the natural semantics -- he added stuff to C, but returned something that wasn't actually more advanced...