I just checked on Gutenberg and was surprised to find that Hornblower doesn't use the word! But the second sentence of the first Sherlock Holmes book (A Study in Scarlet) introduces Watson as having been a member of the Fifth Northumberland Fusiliers.
Dealing with this right now. Got some people whose devices are set to display dates as dd/mm/yyyy and the janky pay submission form records it verbatim rather than translate to its internal mm/dd/yyyy format. If it's invalid date it will reject, but a guy submitted for August 4 and got denied for the system recording it as April 8. Spreadsheet MS Forms nonsense. Nobody cares.
The judicial branch is part of the US democracy, this was not subversion of the democratic process.
Judges are elected/nominated depending the jurisdiction and in this case the decison of a District judge (nominated by George W Bush, through indirect democracy) stands: that proposition is unconstitutional, and the people who tried to appeal that decision in upper courts had no standing to do it (they suffered no personal and concrete injury from this decison).
would love to live in a society where past harms and mistakes could simply be forgotten because the law has moved forward. I imagine a lot of low-level drug possession charges would be forgiven under that ethical conceit
but since we're a long ways from that reality, the least we can do is to look for accountability from influential people with the same strictness we have for the poorest and least powerful
It'd be tough to phrase it right. Imagine that The Ones Who Ban Things decide to write something interpretable as essentially "nobody is allowed to inform others about things". The process of distilling any ad banning law into applicable testing of that law would be pretty scary to me
yeah 30 N Gould is a registered agent. We registered a US entity mainly for stripe + dmca since users upload stuff which content tons of restriced contents. it was the cheapest way to do it without a US office.
What happened to the rule about steelmanning? I know it's chic to post super hot takes about what we assume a persons intentions are, and I know there are plenty of "if you can't see how bad they are you're the problem" type justifications; I know the supposed goal of empathy is tossed aside at first hint of disagreement whether real or perceived, and I know there is "evidence" of justification for hatred/dismissal. Yet still there is self-righteous presumption bandied about in a negative way that violates that steelman rule. Justified of course by the idea that there are no negotiations with terrorists, no association with Nazis, no forgiveness or understanding given to the Other.
Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country? Does this blame go for the rest of the year, decade, or century?
Does giving aid in the first place automatically trigger this? If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> If I gave $500 to kids cancer research every year for 5 years, and then I don't give this year, do I have blood on my hands every time a kid dies of cancer from now on? And if you didn't ever donate, you don't?
> How does this work?
Okay, since the topic at hand is steelmanning, that is, replying to the strongest possible argument, let's practice that.
I invite you to watch this video, which is a short lecture that indeed exposes the strongest argument for this exact proposition.
There were a lot of voters who didn't want those cuts. So they complain. Is that what swing voters thought they were getting?
The government spends like 1000 billion on the military, a couple/few 10s of billions on aid is just being charitable. And projects soft power, buying good will. And was probably well used by the cia.
And then there's the philopher Peter Singer, who would say that not helping other people is immoral. Most people wouldn't go that far, but some do. Some religions ephasize such things.
> Wait, you think not giving additional aid = responsibility for whatever happens in the developing country?
This, and your $500 cancer donation, is an absurdist reduction of the problem.
The USAID contributions weren’t anything like your $500 example. It was the entire infrastructure for medical care and immunizations that people relied on.
The proper way to wind these programs down, if it was appropriate, was to give an off ramp so their governments and other organizations could minimize a plan to fill the void by a certain date.
If you take responsibility for something medical on a large scale, doing a sudden rug pull has predictable consequences. Those predictable consequences cannot be separated from the person who made the decision.
I think these terrible analogies about donating $500 indicate that you don’t understand the problem.
I don’t know, does global cancer research shut down when you stop giving the $500? Do kids immediately stop receiving treatment?
USAID literally ran ambulance systems that shut down due to lack of diesel. They delivered lifesaving drugs that stopped.
We made commitments to communities to run these services, then suddenly killed them off. We didn’t try to find other countries to step in. We didn’t try to get the local governments to take over.
We did jack shit to try to preserve lives in this transition process.
But if we never had, those deaths would have been happening that whole time, wouldn't they?
Unless you're saying that the aid being there in the first place was actively discouraging any self-sufficiency by the sovereign governments who are actually responsible for those areas... in which case I can see why some people (both in the West and the developing world) oppose foreign aid in the first place. Even if we passed the baton around to other countries, the band-aid will still have to be ripped off at some point.
I'm actually not anti-foreign-aid entirely, I think in addition to the humanitarian benefits which I do value, when done well it helps project soft power, giving normal people a concrete counterpoint when extremists like Islamists try to claim "America is an evil empire that hates you and wants you to die." So in that way I don't endorse eliminating USAID... I admit that mainly it was a circus trick to try to hand supporters a concrete W for the vibe of "America First" and/or "Saving Money"
Maybe the deaths would have happened, or maybe these places would have become self sufficient or received aid elsewhere. There’s really no way to know.
But we committed to providing this aid. Even if we think it would be better in the long term for others to do it instead, there’s no excuse to cut it off suddenly without making reasonable efforts at a transition.
Imagine you’re the long term caretaker for a family member, then just decide one day you’re tired of it, so stop. You make no attempt to find somebody else to take over, you simply stop bringing them their meds/food or whatever.
Do you think your family should then forgive you after grandma dies? I don’t think so.
You make a pretty fair point there. It would have been better to announce a timeline even if it's like a year. If nobody wants else to help, at least we would have forced our allies and enemies to all go on the record that they won't.
The people at risk witout the aid, though, are more comparable to a drug-addicted teenager who has criminally negligent parents than a truly-disabled grandma. Hopefully we can save a little bit of the blame for those local kleptocrats, who have been absorbing aid from all available sources and failing to properly govern since the creation of most of these countries. (Yes, I agree with you that our current iteration of government are mostly kleptocrats themselves).
I don't think that one USAID tracker website is very reliable, sadly. I also believed this. A bunch of programs were rolled into the state department, and for instance mortality stats for South Africa are significantly upwards-diverging from their model. Now SA is an unusually well-put-together African state, but the study could have modeled this and didn't, so I don't think it should be taken as gospel until more countries report in.
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