darawk

77 ms·

811.
by darawk 6y ago
It's not that I think they won't abuse it. I know that they'll abuse it. The question we have to ask is whether their abuses will be worse than the consequences of total inaction on their part. And I think that balances in fa
812.
by darawk 6y ago
Relative to what? We have no idea how much terrorism there would be without the FBI.
813.
by darawk 6y ago
That's true, interesting and important. But I don't think it addresses the intent of my point, which was that there are plenty of odious organizations that are abiding by the letter of the law in public, but may well have members
814.
by darawk 6y ago
I agree in spirit here, but in practice in order to get probable cause of criminality or criminal intent, you need to do a little bit of surveillance/monitoring first. And it seems to me that a good compromise is "monitor publicly
815.
by darawk 6y ago
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trump-cant-designate-antif... Fortunately our legal system doesn't operate on the basis of Trump's tweets.
816.
by darawk 6y ago
How should they determine when a group is about to commit a crime though? Usually that's done via pre-emptive surveillance. If they are not allowed to surveil groups that they merely suspect might one day commit crimes, it will be very
817.
by darawk 6y ago
Well if you're willing to accept that the government should not keep tabs on racist organizations or militias, then I guess we've cashed out our disagreement to terminal values. We'll just have to agree to disagree.
818.
by darawk 6y ago
Sure. Just to pick one out of a hat, American Renaissance, run by white supremacist Jared Taylor, has never lynched anyone: https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-hate/extremist-files/grou... I can't directly cit
819.
by darawk 6y ago
https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/trump-cant-designate-antif...
820.
by darawk 6y ago
I'm not saying that the KKK is not a terrorist organization. I'm just saying that they are not legally classified as one, because of the first amendment. The courts consider it unconstitutional to label any domestic organization
821.
by darawk 6y ago
Of course not. But not every racist group has engaged in lynchings. Do you think the government should refrain from surveilling racist organizations until they do their first lynching?
822.
by darawk 6y ago
I am thinking about it. Think about what you are proposing. Do you really want to take the position that the government cannot monitor any group until it commits a crime?
823.
by darawk 6y ago
It's not though. Not in any legal sense.
824.
by darawk 6y ago
There is no such thing as a 'domestic terrorist organization'. It is illegal to classify any domestic organization as terrorist. That's why the KKK isn't one, and it's why Antifa isn't one either, Trump's
825.
by darawk 6y ago
My point is that they are both engaged in protected activities of free association and speech. If the standard is that the government should not surveil people engaged in those activities, then the KKK would have to be exempted too. Or, alt
826.
by darawk 6y ago
> The first obvious point is that protesting is a constitutionally protected activity, as is any political speech on Twitter, and this is interpreted extremely widely - so why are public institutions in the business of surveilling this l
827.
by darawk 6y ago
So, it's certainly not the case that charters are uniformly better in every case. There's quite a bit of variation. The basic idea behind charter schools is that they eliminate the union (that's almost literally their entire
828.
by darawk 6y ago
It's in the studies, but the gist is that they try to compare 'matched students'. So, they try to remove the selection effects by comparing comaprable pupils in each school type. I'm sure it's possible to quibble wi
829.
by darawk 6y ago
I think it's more about options. Charter schools have the freedom to experiment with new ideas, which means their outcomes are likely to be more variable. Some will be better than traditional schools, some will be worse. But over time,
830.
by darawk 6y ago
That's a strange way of framing things. Anyways, here's some actual evidence: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies/charter-school-studies Be sure to read it carefully, and disaggregate the online charter school
831.
by darawk 6y ago
This is a super politicized issue, but my understanding is that the evidence that they're better is actually pretty good. Here's a fairly comprehensive set of studies by Stanford: https://credo.stanford.edu/studies
832.
by darawk 6y ago
The point though is that unions, wherever they are present in the public sector, tend to create uniformly sub-pair service. This is true for teachers, it's true for cops, and it's true basically wherever public sector unions are t
833.
by darawk 6y ago
There are millions of dollars of additional distribution risk, though.
834.
by darawk 6y ago
That's definitely the case. They always quote street values, which is ridiculous. But 2000kg is still a lot.
835.
by darawk 6y ago
No. Read Scott's own reasoning on the situation here: https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/06/22/nyt-is-threatening-my-... In short, he's not worried about dedicated antagonists finding him. He's wo
836.
by darawk 6y ago
It seems more like it's saying that people deserve to receive the benefits associated with the test score that they actually got.
837.
by darawk 6y ago
I hate the redesign so much. It just seems objectively worse to me. But maybe that's because I don't primarily look at pictures? I continue to use old.reddit.com and I will for as long as they offer it.
838.
by darawk 6y ago
They can be, although often community members are willing to do the work for free. An example of this working well is the slatestarcodex community, the blog that recently canceled itself because of the NYT piece that was coming out on it. I
839.
by darawk 6y ago
Pseudonymity in my experience tends to lead to less cruelty than anonymity. I think the cruelty problem is solved reasonably well by strict moderation and intentional, reputation-based communities. When people care about the reputation of t
840.
by darawk 6y ago
The point of his use of those statistics was to say that this phenomenon, while bad, is a small part of what the United States is. I didn't read it as minimizing the issue, as such. It's certainly one of the biggest issues we face

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