No, sorry, this is as close to objectively ugly as just about anything can get. Man has a natural desire to tame the spaces near him, probably because on some innate level we know that this can conceal predators. But, whatever the reason, there is nearly universal agreement that this looks like shit and neighborhoods should not be held hostage to the eccentrics who like it. I have seen yards full of wildflowers and the like that look pretty decent, but what these hippies never get is that that requires a lot of work. If you just let the yard do its thing naturally, then that always in every single case looks like complete shit, like in this photo.

The people who have nice natural yards still put a ton of effort into making it look nice

So one of the most common arguments for more natural yards as an alternative to turfgrass — it’s much easier to maintain — is actually completely and totally incorrect. Turfgrass is far, far easier to maintain. You just mow right over the top of the motherfucker. You can’t imagine less maintenance. Anybody who thinks they’re cutting back on maintenance by going natural is going to end up with a yard that looks like shit — just like this one.

This is a neat statistical trick. When immigrants have kids in America, they're Americans, so you don't count them in the immigrant numbers, but in the native numbers, even though *obviously* they're on the welfare rolls because of immigration.

https://twitter.com/ODonnell4NH/status/1800889662602637822

Cato doesn't dispute that immigrant households use more welfare benefits; they just argue that that's the right way to calculate it.

This is actually a perfect example of the claim I made earlier this morning about how progressives are now the people holding public office who are most likely to believe their role is fundamentally illegitimate. This county attorney identifies with the criminals in her city and says that she, to paraphrase, wishes they would stop doing crime, but totally understands why they do. She refers to the criminals themselves as, “at risk.”

What about the victims? When I hear about a violent crime, I identify immediately with the victims. I feel compassion primarily for the victims. I think it’s the victims who are at risk. I feel emotions about the victims.

But this county attorney in Minneapolis feels bad primarily for the criminals and thinks it’s, you know, too mean to refer to them as, “predators.”

She wants her role in this machine to be something it’s not. She is fundamentally opposed to the system functioning as it’s designed to do. A point I’ve made before is that you can tell a lot about a person by their gut reaction. You hear somebody describing a violent crime and in the process of doing so they refer to the criminal as a predator. What’s your immediate reaction to that? Are you focused on the harm to the victim? Or are you distracted by the term “predator?”

You kind of can’t control which of those two things it is. When I hear about a violet crime, I am drawn immediately to the victim. I can’t control that. I didn’t decide to do that. It’s just what I’m actually drawn to.

When she hears about a violent crime described in that way, her reflex, and it is a reflex, is to recoil at the term predator. She similarly cannot control that. It’s just who she is. It’s just what she cares about all the way down in the deep unconscious recesses of her brain.

You need these people as far from the levers as possible. And in my view you cannot support Democrats so long as they wink and nod at the existence of people like this in politics.

I am a pretty ordinary liberal in the sense that I think it’s fine to tax people and use the proceeded to do good things, but I think the idea that a lack of money is a primary impediment to government improving outcomes at this point is completely risible

https://twitter.com/jeffhoogland/status/1792952156334510443

Like, we already have free public schools, for example, and we already spend a ton of money making sure nobody starves. These are, like, solved problems.

https://twitter.com/moreperfectus/status/1792949234947518682

I got pulled over once when I was in my early 20s. The cop took my ID, which I still don't completely understand, but whatever, he took it. I went to the DMV and got a state ID that same week. I was a dumb 20-something who had no idea how the world worked, but I easily obtained a replacement ID. "Some people don't have IDs"

Then they should go get one? I really just don't understand.

These articles get posted every time I say something about the uneven distribution of traffic fatalities, but obviously it's just wishful thinking. I assure you, the driving is more dangerous in poor neighborhoods than in rich suburbs and that one stupid study about luxury cars not yielding to pedestrians in the crosswalk doesn't change that. "First result in a google search."

I think it’s difficult for progressives to conceptualize that I feel about the BLM riots basically the same way they feel about January 6, which is to say that anybody who winked in their direction, anybody who offered anything except a full throated and categorical condemnation, anybody who wants to do anything except arrest and prosecute the people who participated, etc., etc., is to my mind completely disqualified from consideration for office. And, further, anybody who did not categorically denounce their colleagues who winked and nodded and excused the riots is similarly disqualified from public office.

I knew the sensible liberal view is supposed to be that Democrats didn’t support the riots, silly, but I think if you look at the standard I’ve laid out here you’ll find that it disqualifies quite a lot of the Democratic Party. This is just basically the liberal standard for January 6. You’re supposed to say that it was the worst thing that ever happened, qualify that in no way, and call out any member of your party who supports anybody who doesn’t do that.

That’s how I feel about the riots.

Reminder: we should spend significant resources inundating kids with pro-capitalist propaganda throughout the entirety of their schooling

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1791455002235396185

We should do this with clear eyes and full hearts, secure in the knowledge that we are correct and our way of life is superior to all alternatives.

It took me a long time to realize that communists really do have these extraordinarily stupid emotional reactions to ordinary reciprocal relationships. Like, I just couldn’t get it for the longest time, but eventually I just had to accept that, no, they really do feel these emotions for some reason.

Like, they enter into the same kinds of transactions that you and I do every day, but they feel extremely used and abused and manipulated by them. It’s absurd and childish and embarrassing, but in some sense I guess they can’t help it that those are the specific emotions they feel every time they trade with another person.

This is why you can’t really fight communists with “facts and logic.“ It really has nothing to do with it. What you have to understand is that when they engage in ordinary kinds of trade, they walk away feeling resentful and manipulated and taken advantage of.

That’s just how they feel.

It’s probably an atavistic, vestigial emotion that was functional and adaptive when we lived in small tribes and some certain percentage of the population is unable to filter those feelings through the realities of modernity.

It’s kind of sad in a way. They feel these strong emotions, which were adapted for a time and place that no longer exists and there’s nothing they can do about it. They have to spend their entire lives fighting for the stupidest possible economic arrangements, because they are a slave to obsolete emotional reflexes. Like, just try to imagine that, say, being greeted on the street felt like an insult to you. Really try to put yourself in that frame of mind. You’re walking down the street in the morning on your way to work and somebody says hello and emotionally it feels like an insult. You’re upset by it. You feel embarrassed. You feel hurt and attacked.

And you have to imagine in this scenario that you really, truly, earnestly believe that it is an insult. And so you would try to convince everybody you know to stop letting people greet them in the street. Don’t you feel insulted? Don’t you realize you’re being demeaned, abused? How can you let people treat you this way? You’re being walked all over!

This is actually how communists feel about markets and ordinary reciprocal relationships. They feel extremely insulted, demeaned, and take advantage of by a scenario that does not remotely justify those emotions.

But there’s nothing they can do about it! They feel those emotions! They can’t logic themselves out of it.

I am listening to Matthew Yglesias’s podcast and he’s going through this thing where he’s saying that he can’t understand why anybody would care that Joe Biden is old, can’t see how it matter, and that it just seems to him like a disingenuous, fake complaint. This is just, man — I actually find it really difficult to express how this makes me feel in a way that isn’t knee-jerk reactionary. Like, stuff like this makes me want to vote for Donald Trump just as kind of a fuck you. I’m not saying that’s a good emotion. In fact, I’m saying that it’s something I have to actively resist. But I’m also saying that that’s my genuine, emotional reaction to that kind of talk. I think Mathew Yglesias is extremely smart and I also think he’s honest, so if he says he can’t see why this would matter to anyone, then I’m inclined to believe him. Like, I’m inclined to believe that he has gotten himself to that position.

What else do you think is true is that it’s an extremely silly thing to believe.

She's literally saying that those stereotypically black traits and behaviors are not what makes somebody black.

This is further evidence for something that always amazes me with progressives. They would much rather look stupid than appear to violate any social justice taboo.

https://twitter.com/garydunion/status/1790379559461781717

I'm willing to consider that maybe they're just actually that stupid.

These claims are getting bolder and bolder — this person is claiming a direct link between the size of this truck and “huge numbers” of parking lot deaths — but they’re never accompanied with data, which as far as I know doesn’t exist

https://twitter.com/elleryklein/status/1789618232476783052

I have never seen data for pedestrian fatalities broken out by vehicle type/size. I’m not even sure it exists. They’re just making it up.

Palestinians and their supporters do this thing where they see their high school bully in a restaurant 30 years later and run up and sucker punch him in the head and then when the former bully kicks the shit out of them they scream that they’re being mistreated because the bully started it (but then later you learn that their bullying story is pretty weak, too) The Palestinian supporters’ claims hinge on the belief that there’s no such thing as a discrete and concluded event, but that’s just simply erroneous. Those old wars are over. They have finished. You lost. You don’t get to sucker punch the bully 30 years later and claim it’s self defense.

Housing is expensive in the United States on purpose, so that Americans can economically segregate themselves from disorder. This country is absolutely full of cheap housing. You’re just scared to live in it.

https://twitter.com/whiskeypunk1/status/1782461644234272942

Leftist YIMBYs are right that homeowners like high property values, they’re just wrong about the reason, because they think everything has a material explanation and homeowners are merely greedy. They’re not greedy. They’re willing to spend. They just want their housing to cost too much for most people to live there.

The important thing to remember here is that these people aren't (just) dumb. They have different values. They *know* that some percentage of the people they let out will reoffend, but they imagine that to be a kind of statistical truism with no solution. They think of it like this: everybody reading this is free and some percentage of *you* will commit a crime this year, too, so should we lock everybody up?

The move that makes this work is an unwillingness to consider that criminals might in any way be different from everybody else. On this view, recidivism is just the price of a free society. And it's actually worse than that, because they cite data showing that prisons are criminogenic to justify the position that we sort of have it coming. It's no good to repeat, "but don't they know that these people they're releasing are going to commit more crimes?!?!" over and over again until the sun burns out. Of course they know that. They think it's just the price to pay for living in a democracy, etc.

The body-cam backlash is beginning, because the use of body worn cameras did not turn out the way activists had hoped propublica.org/article/how-po… The thing about activists is that they’re going to say exactly the same thing after every shooting no matter what, so thank God for the cameras in this latest case which clearly exposed their lies. What good do cameras do the activists here? A man is shot by police and the activists are going to say the exact same words about that no matter what the footage shows. They are insane liars and ignoramuses who benefit in no way from evidence that is so often inconvenient.

This would have been obvious to the activists from the beginning if they weren’t such stupid people.

This is a core tenet of my philosophy. On some level, debate about whether it should be legal for people here on foreign visas to chant, “death to America” miss the point to an almost unspeakable degree.

You literally cannot police every aspect of human behavior with laws. On some level we’re just assuming some bounds on human behavior, on the beliefs of the citizenry and its guests, outside of which I wish you the best of luck, because you’re going to need it. Many such cases.

So many of our “culture war“ arguments are exactly as intractable as they seem to be, because there is a level on which you literally cannot argue about this stuff. It can’t be policed. You either live in a society where people don’t behave that way or you live in one where they do. And if you live in one where they do, then I honestly just don’t know what to tell you.

What you see in quite a lot of progressive politics is revulsion at the idea that anything related to human beings can be measured. Like, do individual human beings differ in intelligence? Aggression? Friendliness? OK, and if you measured those differences would you be able to coherently group them into quintiles?

Take a breath. There are no *obvious* or *necessary* implications of this. It's just measuring things. If some people are are more aggressive than others then there will be by definition exist a top and bottom quintile for aggression. That's just literally what a quintile is.

The thing you really can't explain about progressives, even if you take their own stated positions seriously, is why they'd be *so much more angry* about and feel *so much more contempt for*, say, a TERF than a gangbanger. If the gangbager is just a product of his environment and can't really be expected to rise above his situation, then surely this applies similarly to the TERF? But just on a base, gut, instinctual level the progressive feels deep antipathy for one and not the other. I think there's something deeply weird about feeling pure contempt for somebody who is pro-life and simultaneously an impulse to explain away the actions of vicious murderers, but that's *just literally* progressivism.

I really can't tell you how much contempt I have for this stupid, lazy argument that everything around you, including your own preferences, is the result of *systems* you don't understand -- that you're being tricked! Yes, even your preferences are mistaken! It's true!

But don't worry, here's an article ready to provide you with the correct opinions about which kind of stove you like cooking on.

And this from people who practically never question even the tiniest aspect of PMC orthodoxy. It's so boring and stupid and lazy. And my god do people eat this shit up. Here's Anil Dash saying that this story should *radicalize you*, even.

It's a "conspiracy."

You thought you had an ordinary preference for one thing over another, but actually that's the result of a *conspiracy*.

Oh Christ, if he’s not going to stop, then I guess I have to say the obvious: the only person who has ever claimed there is a “mall gene” is Will Stancil when he invented that strawman to try to associate the banal and scientifically uncontroversial fact that there are on average some personality differences between men and women with what he imagines to be the most disreputable views about race One thing you can definitely say about Will Stancil is that he is not a measured or careful or deliberate person. He is firing cannons not sniper rifles and in doing so he doesn’t really give a shit who he drags through the mud or whose views he misrepresents. It’s gross and I would appreciate it if he would knock it off.