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https://twitter.com/Tcho76521726/status/1839497475742167476

More from @wanyeburkett

wanye

@wanyeburkett

Dec 4

This image going around purporting to explain two-lane roundabout usage nicely demonstrates why these intersections are confusing and dangerous.

The image says that the right lane is for turning right and the left lane is for turning left, but that *either* lane can go straight, suggesting that the blue car is allowed to t-bone the red car when it turns across its lane.

In fact, it's much more typical that the right lane *must* turn right, as can be seen in the markings on this real-life two-lane rotary in Warwick, RI.

This obviously makes way more sense and the image is just simply confused about that which it is attempting to explain.

The problem with this is that you'd have to be a maniac to turn right across that outer lane so long as there's a car there, because as we've just demonstrated, people have no idea how to use these things, and even if they did, you'd always have to worry that somebody not paying attention would run right into you.

So it's just a dumb construction.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Oct 30

The messaging around hiding your vote from your husband is of a kind with arguments against home schooling, because it can conceal abuse, or arguments about having parents leave the room when kids are at the doctor, so that the doctor can find cases of abuse, and so on and so on.

In each of these cases progressives want to rudely insert themselves into an existing relationship -- a primary relationship, the kinds of relationships on which you build a society.

This is extremely rude and presumptuous and insulting and also, yes, it will catch some predators, but at the cost of inserting yourself where you don't belong millions of times for every serious case of abuse you uncover.

Liberals are of course *entirely* aware of this dynamic and *accept my point of view uncritically* when it comes to defending the rights of criminal suspects in literally every other context.

It's just marriages and parent/child relationships that they're willing to subvert in order to get tough on crime and abuse.

Amongst my worst critics are a handful of cretins and liars who seem to simultaneously hold the view that it's critical to defend the rights of somebody who almost certainly committed a serious violent crime, but also that they just can't understand why anybody would be against routine intrusions into the lives of parents against whom no credible evidence of abuse even exists and that my doing so implies something nefarious about me.

They are *only* ever passionate about eliminating due process to stop crime when it involves damaging marriages or parent/child relationships. There's basically no other context in which they insist on preventative violations of privacy.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Oct 18

The deeper point revealed by this obvious truth is that we're all individuals, not avatars for our group identities. "You can't have that job, because people who look like you have dominated in that role for the last 100 years and it's time to give somebody else a chance" is basically incoherent, because I'm just a singular individual and either I get the job or I don't. Whether people like me did or didn't get the job in the past and whether people who look like you did or didn't get the job in the past collapses into a single point where one of us gets the job and one of us doesn't.

American individuality is fundamentally at odds with social justice. It's zero sum. They make opposing, incompatible claims about the world. Either you and I are individuals who should be treated as such or we're pawns in a bigger game. You can't have both.

In the individualist model you address past wrongs by eliminating unfair rules and practices and treating everybody as equals to the best of your ability going forward. This is maximally respectful of the individual, but obviously, since past wrongs can have lingering effects, it won't immediately generate equal outcomes.

In the social justice model you address past wrongs by adjusting the rules of the system to generate equal outcomes, even if that means treating individuals differently on the basis of their position in hierarchies created by those past wrongs.

These two models of the world are in opposition to one another.

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wanye

@wanyeburkett

Oct 12

https://twitter.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1844835702753619974

The country literally devolved into riots and practically every institution, from your local PTA to the largest corporations and government agencies, remade itself in response to the lie that police hunt minorities for sport

https://twitter.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1844835702753619974

I’m sorry, but that happened. That all happened. It just happened. Not a long time ago. It just happened. Yes it’s also true that some people recently said some things that are untrue about FEMA. To what end? What were the consequences? What burned down? What was looted? What institution that you are part of completely remade itself in the image of this lie? How many television ads were premised on this line? How many moments of silence at sporting events asked you to reflect on this lie?

What this obviously demonstrates is that if you get laws that limit speech there will be some lies that you can still tell and some lies that you can’t. You won’t solve misinformation. That’s ridiculous. It’s just that the big, popular lies, the lies the elite either agree with or are too afraid for various reasons to oppose will still be allowed. And other lies won’t be.

Read 4 tweets

wanye

@wanyeburkett

Oct 5

One of my most strongly-held is that beliefs are developed primarily from emotion and that if you felt the same immediate, knee-jerk, emotional responses that your opponents feel on any given issue, then you would believe as they do. You happen to feel different emotional responses, so you’ve developed commensurate beliefs.

Conservatives aren’t particularly good at this, either, but it’s particularly funny that the “veil of ignorance” understanders, who spend 75% of their time on this website talking about how empathetic they are, seem completely unable or unwilling to grant this.

A good exercise to go through is to create a table with three columns labeled, “issue,” ,”my position,” “my emotional response to that issue” and see if you can come up with even one thing for which your emotions do not match up with your preferred policy.

You probably won’t, which is strong evidence that emotions are driving your beliefs, not reason, not data. I think exposure to enough new information, new facts, new data can in the long run change your emotional affect. But the key is getting over that tipping point with the emotional response. That’s when you’ll fully accept the new position. You won’t accept the new position so long as you’re still feeling the old emotional response. You’ve got to get over that hump.

Read 5 tweets

wanye

@wanyeburkett

Oct 5

Libertarians were wrong about this. Prohibition decreased alcohol deaths. This is obvious and straightforward and really shouldn’t be controversial. We legalized marijuana and usage went up. We made opiates more available, more people died. When alcohol was prohibited, fewer people drank it and we had fewer alcohol related deaths.

This is very simple stuff.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1842550795298079138

Obviously you can still oppose prohibition for other reasons. But this is right. There’s a lot of dishonesty about some very basic aspects of drug and alcohol prohibition.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1842550795298079138

I don’t know how anybody can still hold onto those old libertarian ideas about drug legalization in the wake of the opioid crisis. Here we’re talking about drugs that are literally prescribed by a doctor, in many cases, drugs that are manufactured and sold by large pharmaceutical companies with stringent quality control processes.

And what happened? Total disaster. An explosion of overdoses. People graduating to harder drugs like heroin. Life expectancy gains literally reversed.

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