It's really impossible to understand and determine before hand how the court would rule on any of these theoretical cases that may result as a consequence of this decision. It is up to further cases to actually establish was constitutes "official" versus "unofficial" capacities as President and we can absolutely not guess before hand what that entails. From the decision, it seems that only those duties constitutionally mandated would fall under the "official" capacity, with quite a lot of leeway for determining how to evaluate individual actions.
Also I think we should all be reminded that there is separation of powers for a reason. The President is ultimately largely beholden to Congress. The government cannot sink into a dictatorship without the explicit approval of the majority of Congress. It is Congress' duty to remove Presidents from office that it feels are a danger to the country.
All these checks and balances still exist and will still be enforced. The President can not unilaterally go off the rails as many of these extreme hypotheticals seem to be implying.
> It's really impossible to understand and determine before hand how the court would rule on any of these theoretical cases that may result as a consequence of this decision.
I've got a pretty good guess, and it will be based on the political party of the defendant.
> The President is ultimately largely beholden to Congress. The government cannot sink into a dictatorship without the explicit approval of the majority of Congress.
This is nonsense. The President can just assassinate all of their political rivals in Congress that would hold them to account. Before this ruling there was an assumption that any such actions would be prosecuted after the President was no longer in office (assuming they didn't have enough power to interfere with a free election). Now that can't realistically happen.
There's a reason why folks are saying this ruling, "paves the way to a dictatorship"!
If president has gone rogue and is assassinating members of congress (or rival candidates, why would they need legal immunity? Assassinating opponents is already the action of someone that refuses to relinquish office and has de facto immunity. They don't need the validation of the Supreme Court to do this; nobody is going to charge them in the case that it'll bring a death sentence.
Because there's a gap between here and there, and we don't want to make that gap narrower than it already is. The president can now do a whole lot of illegal shit that falls short of "assassinating anyone at any time," and face no consequences. By allowing one we inch closer to the other.
This is not really true though. Congress is responsible for granting authority to the President regarding valid military targets. This is why drone strikes are only legal against targets recognized by Congress as security threats. It cannot realistically happen for the President to start targeting individuals outside of Congressional authority.
For your hypothetical situation to arise, Congress would have to declare members of Congress themselves as valid military targets.
"As reported previously, United States citizens may be listed as targets for killing in the database. Suspects are not formally charged of any crime nor offered a trial in their defense. Obama administration lawyers have asserted that U.S. citizens alleged to be members of Al Qaeda and said to pose an "imminent threat of violent attack" against the United States may be killed without judicial process. The legal arguments of U.S. officials for this policy were leaked to NBC News in February 2013, in the form of briefing papers summarizing legal memos from October 2011."
It's an interesting read, but part of the argument was that there were Congressional checks and balances in place for security threat review and congress authorized force against the group in question which essentially gave the executive branch authority to add the specific targets in question.
The legality of the disposition matrix at large can still be tested and re-tested depending on the specific actions of the executive branch.
The judge ruled there was no violation of their constitutional rights, explicitly because Congress was involved in authorizing military action against the wider threat and specifically in this case Congress was in the approval process for authorizing individual targets.
There was no violation of checks and balances here. That is not to say other uses of the so-called "disposition matrix" might be challenged in the future, but at least in the cases of these individuals, the courts have ruled that no rights were violated.
AWS also recently ended support for Mysql 5, so if you had an RDS instance with that version running past the cutoff, your support costs ballooned exorbitantly.
Seems like I'm a lucky one. Neither using RDS nor MySQL. But seriously, ouch. I mean, I get why they want people to migrate to supported versions but ...
I wish we could implement this internally via chargebacks. The teams that refuse to upgrade their stuff should be forced to pay for the externalities they cause.
My main problem with Silicon Graphics (& have the same problem with Sun Microsystems) is that they just tried to do too much in propriety hardware and completely resisted standards. Microsoft & IBM "won" because they made computers with actual upgrade paths and operating systems with wide support among upgrade paths. With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing.
In this case, I think the market "chose right" - and the reason that the cheaper options won is because they were just better for the customer, better upgradability, better compatibility, and better competition among companies inside the ecosystems.
One of the most egregious things I point to when discussing SGI/Sun is how they were both so incredibly resistant to something as simple as the ATX/EATX standard for motherboard form factors. They just had to push their own form factors (which could vary widely from product to product) and allowed almost zero interoperability. This is just one small example but the attitude permeated both companies to the extent that it basically killed them.
The big exception here is that SGI took IrisGL and made it into OpenGL which as a standard lasted far longer than SGI. And OpenGL played a critical role preventing MSFT from taking over the 3D graphics market with Direct3D.
When I say "hardware graphics market" I'm referring to high performance graphics workstations, not gaming. There is a whole multibillion dollar market there (probably much smaller than games, but still quite significant). It's unclear what carmack's influence on the high performance graphics workstation environment is, because mini-GL left out all the details that mattered to high performance graphics (line rendering would be a good example).
In my opinion, Mesa played a more significant role because it first allowed people to port OpenGL software to run on software-only cheap systems running Linux, and later provided the framework for full OpenGL implementations coupled with hardware acceleration.
Of course, I still greatly enjoyed running Quake on Windows on my 3dfx card with OpenGL.
Well, put that way it is a market that runs on Windows with OpenGL/DirectX nowadays, or if using GNU/Linux, it is mostly with NVIDIA's proprietary drivers, specially when considering VFX reference platform.
> With SGI/Sun you were very much completely locked in to their hardware/software ecosystem and completely at the mercy of their pricing.
How is that in anyway different from Apple today with it's ARM SoCs, soldered SSDs and an OS that requires "entitlements" from Apple to "unlock" features and develop on?
You can buy a cheap Mac and easily write programs for it. You don't have to spend $40k on a computer, you don't have to buy a support contract, you don't have to buy developer tools.
Every time I’ve checked over the last decade (including today), you can buy a mac mini that supports the latest macOS for under $250 on ebay. You can also test your app using github actions for free if your use case fits in the free tier.
There is no way to do this for an IBM z16, which is the kind of vendor lock in that people are saying Apple doesn’t have.
Like a lot of language we use when discussing things at the universe scale, the word “expanding” operates as a placeholder with analogs in day to day life but isn’t a perfect representation of what we mean.
The “universe” itself is space and time. When we say “expanding” we simple mean that galaxies are observed to be moving farther away from each other. That does not at all imply some kind of “expansion into another space” - space itself is exhibiting this property and we are observing it. That’s all.
The “balloon” analogy and the usage of the word “expand” in this context are both imperfect metaphors for physical phenomena we are observing.
It is a bit like trying to discuss what happened “before” the Big Bang - there is no “before” - time was created.
There are many phrases you can construct which may seem like they “make sense” but are actually combining a set of word concepts in ways that are self-contradictory.
> Moreover, no one has succeeded in hatching living matter from non living matter and we must honestly say we do not know how this process came about or the faintest estimate of how likely it is to occur (despite much speculation
Just want to comment on this point. The research in this field is pretty esoteric. It doesn't really benefit us to understand how this process came about (ie, there is little practical gain here, no medical advancements or otherwise), and moreover it requires a simulation which can estimate behavior over hundreds of millions of years. The usefulness of cracking the early earth/life creation part of our history is really not immediately clear, and thus research is limited.
It seems only a matter of time before science can connect the dots along the rest of the hundreds of millions of years regarding this process to show the line between chemical young earth evolving to be biological.
As an aside, why do you think it is "important to remember" that we haven't found life or that we don't fully understand the process by which biology evolved from chemistry? Why exactly is it "important to remember" such things?
It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere, which sense of inevitability is totally unsupported. I may gently point out, your own post says “it is only a matter of time before science can connect the dots”, reflecting this (in my view) distorted sense. The abiogenesis research you cite is absolutely worthwhile, but it is not even clear if it is in the right direction and certainly far, far from successfully sparking the sustained chain reaction of life. To my eye, equally consistent (as some different research may suggest) is that a combinatorial needle must be threaded to the tune of p < 10^-23 per exoplanet, making it unlikely to happen again in our observable universe.
> It is “important to remember” precisely because these days people are not remembering this and speak with a sense of inevitability about discovering life elsewhere
Could you expand on this a bit. Whether someone speaks with a sense of inevitability or not, why is it important either way? Why is it "important" to remind people we haven't (yet) found life on other planets?
Why are the existing gaps in abiogenesis "important" to point out?
Well, first, I take it to be an axiomatic goal of science to believe that which is true, disbelieve that which is false and to be agnostic about things we have no evidence about; I.e to calibrate our model of world to the world as it is.
But, further, I’ve seen what happens when a subfield reports its findings in a way that misleadingly raises expectations of a titanic discovery just around the corner. When the discovery fails to materialize, over-optimism curdles into its opposite, over-cynicism. Better to calibrate expectations accurately — slow and steady wins the race.
This is assuming people's viewpoints don't evolve as they get older.
“Celui qui n’est pas républicain à vingt ans fait douter de la générosité de son âme; mais celui qui, après trente ans, persévère, fait douter de la rectitude de son esprit.”
A quick search shows the quote originating in the 19th century.
As a young man I was generally pro-Israeli, I can remember a teacher in high school telling us about how great Israel was the morning after 9/11, how they fought all those wars against Arabs who hated them (for no reason at all), Moshe Dayan's cool eyepatch, etc etc.
I'm 36 now, and things are different:
- I know who Netanyahu is, and what he's said.
- I know who AIPAC are, and what they've said.
- I know who the ADL are, and what they've said.
- I know how the British Mandate of Palestine ended
Younger generations will be finding a lot more of what I learned a lot more quickly.
As a younger person than you, I moved from being vaguely pro-Palestinian in the past to being staunchly pro-Israel now that I have learned more about:
- how Israel has repeatedly needed to fend off simultaneous attacks on its existence
- what the rules of war actually are, and what counts as a war crime or not, and how restrained Israel has been in this regards
- how Palestinians in the Gaza Strip are highly radicalized and even celebrated the 9/11 attacks on the very day of
I’m not claiming to be representative of people my age. I’m simply providing a counter example to you, to show that “learning the facts a lot more quickly” can lead one to different conclusions.
For me, I will unapologetically stand on what I perceive to be the side of civilization, against the forces of barbarism that we saw unleashed on 10/7. Others may perceive differently, or have different values. That’s fine, but it doesn’t make one perspective the obvious and objectively correct one.
AIPAC, the ADL and 1948 Britain (?) are not Israeli. We agree with some of what they do. The Israeli public is VERY conflicted about Netanyahu. It's like saying that since Trump got elected, America is a racist misogynistic country.
I am Israeli. I want to live without fear of being gunned down in my house or at a rave at 6 AM like the 1200 people who died on October 7th. I want to live without fear of a rocket fired from Gaza exploding on my house.
Am I allowed that right? If I am, pray tell, how do we get from October 7th to there?
It feels like everyone in the world is criticizing what the IDF does. Nobody seems to have an alternative. Hamas keeps repeating that they want no Jews between the river and the sea and they plan to commit October 7th-like atrocities again and again. What is the IDF and the Israeli government supposed to do?
I don't know what the solution is. People much smarter than me have tried to come up with one. What I can definitively say is large-scale civilian casualties in Gaza is unlikely to prevent another October 7th someday, and may well help cause another one.
Civilian casualties in Gaza are a tragic, unfortunate side effect. It's terrible. But October 7th changed things. 1,200 dead, 240 kidnapped, more than 100,000 still displaced. "Some problems are intractable" is not good enough anymore, our lives are in danger.
So Israel acts, with the goal of destorying Hamas's military ability. If you forcibly take away the other side's guns they can't shoot you anymore. That's not a syllogism, it's simple logic.
This is a solution with a terrible cost, brought about by Hamas's continued active use of their citizenry as human shield. Hamas can end this today by disarming and surrendering. The Gazans would get a functioning state and a better life for their citizens.
Israel doesn't have this option - right now it is do or die.
If there is a way to neutralize the threat from Hamas without civilian casualties, I'm all ears. If not, I assert that any reasonable westerner would act exactly the same. Go ahead and prove me wrong.
There's a huge difference. With Afghanistan, Americans living in Chicago or New York or Houston were halfway across the world. This is here. Gaza is 35 miles from Tel Aviv and 40 miles from Jerusalem.
I don't know what the goals were in Afghanistan. Short of ICBMs, I don't see how Afghanistan could ever threaten the US. The threat against us is local and immediate and has already proven to be real.
Rightly or wrongly, the US went into Afghanistan because of a "local and immediate" event in New York City in 2001. It serves as an illustration of how hard it is to change a population's ideology via force. The distance isn't really what matters.
Again, I don't doubt the threat. It's demonstrably real. I doubt the IDF's current response to that threat is going to be successful at neutralizing it. I strongly suspect the response to that threat is going to make things worse in the next few decades.
There's still a large difference. The Afghan government collapsed. The Afghan people, presumably, did not fear for their lives enough to stand up to the Taliban. Biden said "American troops cannot and should not be fighting in a war and dying in a war that Afghan forces are not willing to fight for themselves."
This is not about Israel protecting someone else. This is about physically protecting our home. We do this or we die.
Hamas rockets have the range to reach about 80% of Israel's population. They've shown willingness to amass and fire them in large numbers. It's not a question of "if", but "when". Again, would you sit and wait?
> The Afghan people, presumably, did not fear for their lives enough to stand up to the Taliban.
I would presume, as with Hamas, that it's the opposite; that fear for their lives is precisely why they do not stand up to violent extremist groups controlling their area.
> Again, would you sit and wait?
I'd start with fixing the intelligence failures that permitted the attack to proceed.
I'd also be investing a lot in expanding things like Iron Dome and border surveillance.
There are actions available that are not "flatten entire blocks of Gaza and displace a million people, generating the next generation of pissed off extremists".
First let's continue to distinguish between the PA, that's still functioning (for some definition of the word) in the West Bank, and the Hamas government of Gaza.
> I would presume, as with Hamas, that it's the opposite; that fear for their lives is precisely why they do not stand up to violent extremist groups controlling their area.
I can accept that.
> I'd start with fixing the intelligence failures that permitted the attack to proceed.
Of course they're doing that, and will continue to do that after the war ends.
> I'd also be investing a lot in expanding things like Iron Dome and border surveillance.
Here's the thing about Iron Dome and border surveillance. These are like watchdog mechanisms and monitoring systems for software. You can add as many of these as you like, at some point you're going to have downtime. You and I don't know of all the times significant attacks were planned and foiled. We do know of all the rocket attacks - of which there have been many over the years - and Iron Dome is not perfect.
> There are actions available that are not "flatten entire blocks of Gaza and displace a million people, generating the next generation of pissed off extremists".
You've suggested defense. I agree. We should be better at defense. We should fix as many bugs in our defense as we can. But as the quote goes, the bomber will always get through. Things will not materially change until the extremists on their side* are removed from power, both for Israelis who live in fear of attacks, and Palestinians who live in fear of Israeli retribution - but also in dire economic terms and without prospects, even well before October 7th.
* and ours, though their damage is generally directed at the West Bank for now
> Things will not materially change until the extremists on their side* are removed from power...
Agreed! Generating a bunch of new extremists in Gaza via 6,000 bombs (so far) and a land invasion that leaves a pile of rubble in its wake is not likely to accomplish this.
You continue to make the same logical fallacy; "we must do something, this is something, therefore we must do this".
I addressed that. Take their guns and they can't shoot you.
I'm not a general. I don't know if the bombing was militarily necessary. The IDF high command thinks it was, and has proof that every bomb targeted a Hamas asset.
Israel has called again and again for civilians to leave. The vast majority did. They're not doing great but they are alive and safe, at least from Israeli attacks. International aid has been brought in over the past week.
You seem to imply there is an alternative. I explained why bolstering defense is not enough. I explained why doing nothing is not an option. I explained why this action will remove the threat, however temporarily. I agree with you that more nonviolent action is needed, after the dust settles, to achieve a more permanent peace. But for now, how do we address the immediate threat?
It is not possible to stop people from becoming suicide bombers by any means other than convincing them it's a bad idea. There is no way to take away all the resources that can be used to create bombs.
You can make it a lot harder and through intelligence and direct action stop them periodically.
There's a big difference between a single person or a three-person group creating a makeshift bomb, and an organized 50,000-strong terrorist organization.
The gaza invasion is strengthening the resolve of the terrorists. There are millions of people in Gaza. You can't stop them all. You can't watch them all. The vast, vast majority of them want to see Israel destroyed and now are more willing than ever to sacrifice everything to even just inconvenience Israeli's.
Having spoken to Israeli Arabs, I know for a fact this isn't true. Like in any other conflict, the vast majority of Gazans just want to live their lives in peace.
Not saying we'll ever be best buddies but a mutually beneficial peace agreement is definitely possible - under the right conditions.
> "Some problems are intractable" is not good enough anymore
"some problems are intractable" isn't an argument here, it's a fact. You can't just say "this fact isn't good enough". The entire idea that an occupation of Gaza could possibly lead to a demilitarization of Gazans is incredibly naïve, Iran will never stop arming terrorists in Gaza. Occupying a hostile territory always leads to more terrorism, not less. There is no reason to believe that this occupation will make Israeli's safer, and many reasons to believe it will make them less safe. Obviously it sucks to be in this situation, but rejecting the reality of the situation doesn't help anyone.
Palestinians are not the only group with atrocities committed against them here. This situation is so sticky because both sides have legitimate grievances that allow them to make compelling moral arguments for their actions.
I don't "support Arabs" (or Israelis for that matter) - these aren't sports teams, they're groups of human beings. Nor do I get my Israel scepticism from "drive-by social media" posts. Much of it is from simply reading what prominent Israeli politicians and their allies in western countries have said from their own mouths, on their own websites and platforms, for all to see.
I'm not obligated - morally or otherwise - to support anyone in an ethnic struggle in the middle east.
The post you were replying to wasn't talking about moving from pro-Jewish to pro-Arab.
You can be pro-Jewish, but staunchly against what the Israeli Government is doing to Palestinian people. In fact, there are a lot of Israeli Jews who share this view as well.
If you break it down by religion and ethnicity, support for Israel in America is the highest among white evangelicals. Young white people are leaving religion in increasing numbers and aren't going back to it. Your average white evangelical church crowd today looks like a nursing home field trip (and this demographic trend is very much on their minds. They're trying everything they can think of to reverse the trend but none of it works.)
America's support for Israel will never recover to the heights it once enjoyed.
I would agree with you if the entire issue really did exist in a vacuum where "consenting adults" were truly the only variables, but as we've demonstrably seen from legalization efforts worldwide - legalizing prostitution is highly correlated with an uptick in sex trafficking.
Determining if two parties are actually "freely consenting" is notoriously difficult, given the way that sex trafficking rings operate - and as has been proven over and over again, determining if an individual is "freely consenting" is not at all a simple thing for law enforcement to figure out and making it legal does not make it easier.
So while I agree in spirit with "two consenting adults should be able to do what they want if they aren't hurting anyone else" - reducing prostitution to those terms is an overly simplistic way of looking at it and is ignoring mountains of evidence that legalizing it increases the rate of sex trafficking and sexual exploitation for those countries which made it legal already.
these are labor trafficking issues, both forms of trafficking is illegal in all of those countries as well
expanding access to labor rights, labor organizations, and the government prosecuting traffickers is a more productive use of resources than the rhetorical solution to the “mountains of evidence” you pointed out
> Determining if two parties are actually "freely consenting" is notoriously difficult
obsessing over that is odd, if you're not doing that in the rest of the employment market too.
yes, people that aren't sex workers behave wildly different regarding boundaries and discernment in who they engage with, while putting the onus on sex workers to prove why they are different, right now, is folly and ineffective uncalled for vicarious interest at best and discrimination at worst
a better use of energy to exercise any discomfort around possibly trafficked people is allowing sex workers access to the same labor avenues as the rest of the employment market allows them agency to better navigate everything you’re (ostensibly) worried about. even expanding what those avenues are.
> expanding access to labor rights, labor organizations, and the government prosecuting traffickers is a more productive use of resources than the rhetorical solution to the “mountains of evidence” you pointed out
Except counties that have legalized prostitution have tried this and failed. Again, there is evidence that legalizing prostitution increases the amount and scope of sex trafficking operations in said counties which have legalized. It isn't "Labor trafficking issues" - it is sex trafficking, and a very specific issue with legalizing prostitution.
> obsessing over that is odd, if you're not doing that in the rest of the employment market too.
Can you expand on why? Sex trafficking is a very specific form of labor exploitation which is tied up with prostitution - and it has been seen to demonstrably get worse after prostitution becomes legal. Why should this evidence be ignored or tied up with the broader umbrella of "labor exploitation"?
> a better use of energy to exercise any discomfort around possibly trafficked people is allowing sex workers access to the same labor avenues as the rest of the employment market allows them agency to better navigate everything you’re (ostensibly) worried about. even expanding what those avenues are.
I think advocates of legal prostitution like yourself like to say things about legalized prostitution that they wish were true, but reality tells a difference story. If it was better and easier for law enforcement and/or prostitutes to navigate sex trafficking when prostitution is legal, one would think we wouldn't see a marked increase in sex trafficking when prostitution becomes legal. What you keep doing here repeating "it's better for prostitutes to operate in a legal environment" is ignoring reality and sticking your head in the sand regarding the very real consequences for the 150$ billion a year sex trafficking industry which has very brutal and effective ways for suppressing/exploiting/manipulating their victims even in regions where prostitution is perfectly legal.
Again, I totally agree that two consenting adults who aren't hurting anyone should have legal recourse to do what they want, as long as that situation exists in a vacuum. If there are huge externalities involved, such as 150 billion a year sex trafficking industries that can capitalize on legalization and which no country in the world has figured out how to suppress after legalization - well, that should at least be considered in any effort to legalize.
what you’re missing is that I’m not disagreeing about the prevalence of sex trafficking, I never said anything that is the opposite of your observations and I don't know the advocates that you are grouping me in with that are doing what you’re triggered by.
I don't gauge efficacy of a public policy based on whether sex trafficking exists or not.
The other part I think is substantive to clarify is that there are far more similarities to all workers than there are differences. You don't need to rationalize to people why you are not being exploited, and it would be disingenuous if you tried to prove to everyone that you loved your job all the time. The reality is that sometimes it is fulfilling for you and other times it is a chore. If anything exploitative occurs there are power dynamics in play that compete with your willingness to address them. Labor rights issues that are completely valid to acknowledge and improve. The only thing being added is that sex workers should be equally included in that improvement.
Countries with more trafficking need to prosecute the traffickers and get better at that. I’m not willing to criminalize sex workers or make their life more difficult just because an area may be bad at finding traffickers. Criminalizing consumers is ineffective too and have been shown to be a primary confidant a sex worker confides in, unless the consumer cant report due to being criminalized, so I’m not willing to make their life difficult either. Any policy based on marginalizing sex work harms ability to access labor rights, if blanket statements like that bother you, I could be open to a currently unexplored combination of policies. I’m not open to pretending that a solution is a worker or consumer criminalization framework just because of a perception of less trafficking occurring, in comparison to a decriminalized or legalized framework.
I think our main disagreement is in the recognition of the fact that sex trafficking and prostitution are irrevocably linked, such that you cannot meaningfully tackle one without considering the other.
Your approach would be to consider both in a vacuum. Let us legalize prostitution because according to you it is axiomatic that a legal framework will necessarily be better for participants of the prostitution industry, and we can consider sex trafficking as a wholly separate independent problem.
I fundamentally disagree because based on available evidence, legalization of prostitution exacerbates the already existing sex trafficking problems which have demonstrable negative results in countries which have legalized prostitution.
I also disagree with shoe horning sex trafficking into the existing umbrella of "labor exploitation" since sex trafficking is at a scale where it demands it's own consideration for solutions and ways to contain it's growing influence, and yes, one of those techniques is to outright outlaw prostitution to stymie the growth of this cancerous industry in the world.
Fundamentally, you are making a trade off here - you are saying worker rights for prostitution trump stopping the spread of sex trafficking. You could argue it is a fair trade, but there is also an argument that it isn't on balance a societal benefit to make that trade off. Saying "we need to target sex traffickers better" isn't an answer, because countries are already trying and failing to do that - what is the magic secret sauce we can invent as a policy to stop it when there isn't an example to follow? Saying "we need to prioritize worker rights" isn't convincing, because if overall exploitation increases you are increasing the scope of vulnerable people being exploited, and it isn't a good trade off for society.
That is accurately summarizing my view, there are additional areas I think you are overindexing
basically you dont consider the experience of the non trafficked providers
their experience is not cancerous
and what are the “demonstrably negative results”? are you referring to just the trafficking?
and your solutions are false dilemmas, you consider my view an extreme in favor of your view at another extreme
you’re citing “evidence” as “failure” because the state has a poor implementation problem in the labor rights organizations, as if you were previously waiting for data instead of this all being window dressing for your view that all prostitution is inherently cancerous. I’m trying to avoid strawmanning here and this has been a good discussion, I will point out now that everything you wrote so far sounds like Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminism (SWERF) which is broadly discouraged because it silences other women. The hallmarks of it are a few core tenets such as not considering the consensual sex worker’s view and relies on women lacking agency, well not all women, just if they are sex workers. Allowing other people, ironically women, to speak over them as a rebuttal to an impossible standard where the sex worker exclusively must prove they like their job unlike any other laborer. and then discredit that person anyway.
challenging SWERF logic, the experience of non trafficked providers is valid, can be more prevalent, can disappear if nobody wants to offer that service without the government being involved in that at all, and their experience is marginalized and diminished by the criminalized framework you wish for them to exist in, where everything supporting your criminalization is based on criminalization such as the dangers of the environment, and the trafficking which is illegal in both extremes of legality. on the contrary, dealing with trafficking can be improved and those improvements will extend to all laborers. you’re latched in and doubling down on the state being incapable of policing trafficking because you found a study that matched your preexisting discomfort with prostitution existing at all and keep pushing the proposed policy into absurd territories.
Look, for an illustrative example we have immigrants working in fields right now, in the US, under bad coercive pretenses whether the immigrant is here legally or illegally. The coercive pretenses are already illegal and whatever exploitative aspect happens to be legal also needs to be addressed. The state’s inability or unwillingness to tackle that problem is a valid problem, the solution is to beef up the states task forces and attention to that problem. Thats the obvious answer in that field, nobody is seriously ever saying criminalize the agriculture industry, or criminalize contracting or employment because its proven to increase labor trafficking.
Yes, demand for sex for money (prostitution) increases people attempting to capitalize on sex for money (prostitution). Anybody coerced (sex trafficked) should have a way for help and whoever is doing the trafficking needs to be prosecuted and deterred.
The circumstances that support that are analogous to the circumstances around sex trafficking. Treating sex trafficking differently is solely based on a personal discomfort that has nothing to do with the government.
the idea that its lack of legal consequence encourages or endorses being a prostitute again plays into the logic that providers (overwhelmingly and synonymously women) lack agency in considering other choices. thats a community, parenting, and economic problem.
> basically you dont consider the experience of the non trafficked providers
I do consider the experience of non-trafficked providers, but legalization has implications for both that group and other groups - it takes a holistic approach and recognition of all the effects of a policy change to make an informed decision - you cannot make a policy change in a vacuum only considering one side of the coin.
> their experience is not cancerous
To be clear, you are straw manning my views. I do not assume a lack of agency of participants of the prostitution industry. I do not view prostitution itself as a cancerous industry. The cancerous industry is sex trafficking, which as has been demonstrated, has grown in countries which have chosen to legalize prostitution.
> you continue to cite “evidence” as “failure” because the state has a poor implementation problem in the labor rights organizations, as if you were previously waiting for data instead of this all being window dressing for your view that all prostitution is inherently cancerous
Do you or do you not recognize the fact that countries which have made prostitution legal have growing sex trafficking issues? Actually I would be quite happy with data which shows that legalizing prostitution reduces sex trafficking, that would be a feather in the cap of pushes to legalize prostitution and would silence what in my opinion is the largest argument against legalization.
In reality, the countries which have legalized prostitution have seen growing sex trafficking problems. So while you want to imply that I am the one who is insincerely waiting for evidence, it is actually you who are not dealing with the pragmatic reality in the world that shows legalization of prostitution is related to an increase in the size and scope of sex trafficking. Again, these two things cannot be tackled independently - they are intimately and irrevocably related.
If legalizing prostitution increases the size of the vulnerable population being exploited, then on balance it is not a benefit for society.
> on the contrary, dealing with trafficking can be improved and those improvements will extend to all laborers. you’re latched in and doubling down on the state being incapable of policing trafficking because you found a study that matched your preexisting discomfort with prostitution existing at all and keep pushing that into absurd territories.
Again, you are making statements that you wish to be true, but are not borne out by the reality of the facts. If dealing with sex trafficking is easier when the industry is legalized, why is it that countries are facing increasing problems with sex trafficking after making it legal?
Okay, thanks for the clarification we mostly agree then.
For the record, I do acknowledge that sex trafficking is both cancerous and increases in countries with decriminalized and legalized prostitution. (I would point out these are two distinct frameworks)
My view of this is that its like any other thing, lets take actual cancer. Without healthcare, people show up when there are emergencies that reveal they are in stage 4 and terminal. With broad healthcare and improved screening people are found in stage 2 and treated. The studies will show that there is an increase in stage 2 cancer and more resources go into prevention. Sick people from other markets without healthcare do medical tourism and gooses the statistics up even more.
The similarities here are numerous. The change was the expansion of healthcare, the solution is not rolling back the expansion of healthcare because countries with healthcare have spikes in stage 2 cancer, in this example.
Analogies compare dissimilar things with at least one common attribute.
If the bordering countries are operating under criminalization frameworks or economically lesser, then trafficking will be greater from those places. The solution isn't to rollback the legal status to criminalize everyone again. Or use those countries as an example in order to continue to criminalize everyone and make their life more difficult and dangerous.
That's not my experience at all. Having onboarded new engineers (new grads) from pre and post pandemic, I would actually say onboarding experience has improved with the advent of remote work. We use many more tools and techniques to keep communication open and get new team members up to speed. Through a combination of live chat, jumping on a video conference, and a feedback cycle of asking questions to improving documentation - the whole learning lifecycle has been improved by the elimination of that awkward "need to walk over to someone's desk and interrupt them in real time to get an answer" barrier that caused junior engineers previously to get stuck for indeterminate amounts of time.
I will say that the one complaint I do hear from this cohort is the lack of an "out of work" social environment, especially for those jumping directly from environments like University - they are missing that "second place" social environment, but I question whether this should ultimately be tied to the workplace itself or whether there is a more appropriate solution which we will converge on with the advent of remote work. Assuming that the workplace is the solution for lack of social exposure seems misguided to me, in the same way that tying the workplace and gainful employment to health insurance is wrong - the workplace was a default social environment due to circumstances that have changed. Instead of shoehorning the workplace into that role now that it isn't needed for that purpose, we can come up with a better solution, and as new grads/junior engineers have evolved in their approach to remote work over the years, I have seen the seeds of these solutions start bearing green shoots - social networks of people with common interests which have met and mingled outside the workplace to fulfill their social needs. Honestly it seems like a much healthier direction as a whole in almost all dimensions.
If Evan sold Snap to Facebook when Mark wanted to buy it, Snap would have been turned into what is Instagram today. Mark & Facebook really only have one trick when buying companies - turn them into a newsfeed and make everything public and push celebrities and public figures to use the platform.
Instagram and Snapchat today are two fundamentally different products, and Snapchat is estimated to capture more of the younger demographics in more markets.
Sure, you can say that Instagram today has about 100 billion valuation compared to 15 billion for Snapchat, but the race is far from over. Snap recently exceeded a 100 billion valuation as recently as 2021.
Also I think we should all be reminded that there is separation of powers for a reason. The President is ultimately largely beholden to Congress. The government cannot sink into a dictatorship without the explicit approval of the majority of Congress. It is Congress' duty to remove Presidents from office that it feels are a danger to the country.
All these checks and balances still exist and will still be enforced. The President can not unilaterally go off the rails as many of these extreme hypotheticals seem to be implying.