Kurzweil's drones forecast from 2009 is perhaps not *that* uncanny. I was in Afghanistan as a young soldier (British) in 2008/9 and drones were being used very prolifically indeed for all sorts of types of surveillance, but also to kill. In fact they were overwhelmingly the weapon of choice/necessity for the strikes the US carried out for quite a few years in western Pakistan - the ones the Pakistanis protested about publicly but privately were very happy about. I remember the Taliban called the drones 'buzbuzak' cos of the rather mosquito-like noise they would make. I am out of the loop now (two Afghanistan tours was plenty thanks) but it was clear to me even aged 22 back in 08/9 that this is the way things were going. Back then attrition was very high - these drones would inexplicably fall out of the sky about a third of the time. But what footage I have seen from Ukraine shows a sort of industrialisation of drone warfare, no doubt. I suppose the obvious next thing will be drone autonomy, maybe a thing the size of a bluebird will autonomously deploy to anywhere in the world to blow up in the face of a target it has been programmed to find and fix.
There were other non-drone technologies which I found rather more interesting, actually. I heard that the Israelis were working on modifications to the way explosives behave so that - forgive non-technical language here, it's hard to explain - a missile would detonate in the immediate proximity of a human target, who might be in a crowd, turn him into mist, but then the tampering would mean the radius of the explosion would be almost nothing, so no-one else would be hurt. Obviously, by the way, this is not the endeavour of a country which wants to kill all the Palestinians.
I also remember the US killing an al Qaeda target in Syria using a non-explosive projectile. This was maybe 2020. As the missile hurtled from the sky to its target spinning blades would emerge from the missile and slice him into ribbons. This was called the Hellfire R9X I believe. I'm sure the event I'm thinking of put a perfect hole into the roof of the car the target was inside, dealt with him, but left the guy alongside him in the front seat absolutely untouched. And now just quickly googling this, it seems Zawahiri was killed in Kabul the same way.
Anyway all of that is rather a digression, but there it is.
The Constitution grants the power of adjudicating who is eligible to be President to only one body in the entire govermental apparatus of the United States- Congress. That power is not granted to any court, executive officer, or state officer. The Supreme Court should return a 9-0 decision overturning the Colorado court's usurpation of power, but probably won't- will probably be 6-3 or 7-2.
Wallison wrote: "In 2021, Trump tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the Constitution—or at least the constitutional means for electing a president—by pressing his Vice President to set aside the electoral votes of several states that Mr. Trump falsely claimed he had won in the 2020 election." This statement is false. President Trump, with legal advice, did not seek to have Pence "set aside the electoral votes" but sought to have him refer questions of the validity of electors back to state legislatures which had been unconstitutionally bypassed by Democratic judges and administrators who unlawfully imposed their own rules for voting. These legislatures were Republican controlled, but could not act because they were out of session, and the Democratic governors would not call them back to address the issue. Had Pence referred the question back to them, that might have forced their coming into session, and they might have found that the supposed electors were not valid and approved other slates. Or, conceivably the matter would have had to be resolved in the House, voting by delegation, not by members. A majority of the House delegations were Republican, so this might have led to the result sought by Trump, all under legal constitutional procedure. A similar situation emerged in 1876 in the Hayes - Tilden election, which was eventually resolved by negotiation after some delay. Nobody then attempted to mischaracterize the dispute as an attempt "to overthrow the Constitution."
"Recently, [Donald Trump] told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that he believes he would have the power as President to direct Seal Team Six to kill a political opponent..."
A gross misstatement of the actual exchange. A liberal judge posed a sound-bite generating hypothetical to one of Trump's lawyers and demanded a yes-or-no answer.
It was a clarifying question. Trump has repeatedly said he must have “complete and total immunity.” An extreme position like that invites extreme questions.
Yes, apparently the notion of "equality" is deeply contentious. For centuries people have had to explicate themselves with disquisitions on its semantics. Rather than engaging in willful self-serving asymmetric insight into what other people may or may not mean when they use the word, it, in all likelihood, absent clear evidence to the contrary, it is safe to assume that a normal person using the word casually is probably using it in the same sense that John Locke did in his 2nd treatise:
"§. 54.
Though I have said above, Chap. II. That all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality: age or virtue may give men a just precedency: excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level: birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others, to pay an observance to those to whom nature, gratitude, or other respects, may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the equality, which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another; which was the equality I there spoke of, as proper to the business in hand, being that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man."
This certainly seems what Madison had in mind: "Equal laws protecting equal rights, are found as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty, and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony and most favorable to the advancement of truth."
One wonders if Winegard agrees with either Locke or Madison?
We encounter countless sources pettifogging on and on about what a miserable word "equality" is really ought to just be clear what they are talking about. It is especially cringy when people say inane things like "people are not equal, some are smarter than others." Nobody is disputing that. What matter is what consequences there ought to be in the operation of government as a result of such differences. Do the quibbler object to one-person, one-vote? I give credit to the many who are up front about this with their claims that the votes of the best educated among us should count for more. Do they want to restore feudalism? I give credit to those who are open and honest about this being their goal. What I don't believe deserves credit are bad faith efforts to project obfuscation onto others.
Bo Winegard seems to actively trying to not understand the Moral Equality argument, or is so committed to the notion that there is no free will that he doesn't notice that he is committing himself to claiming that he can see the future of someone's behavior and be justified for punishing them ahead of time. Effectively claiming pre-crime is valid.
I think your example of the babies is apt. Even better if you posit that the babies are observably equivalent, just two babies whose backgrounds and genetics are not obvious, same color whatever. Their charts and names are missing, so you don't know which is which. Can you choose meaningfully, or are you just flipping a coin?
In other words, we might have guesses about people's potential, but potential isn't what we care about so much as actual outcomes. Which is why we spend so much time testing potential and cultivating what we find. In the end, however, we care what people do, and treat them accordingly. Which is roughly what moral equality demands, even if people tend to be willing to shade things a little one way or the other based on known potentials.
As a very secular atheist, the Israeli baby would have the highest probably of contributing to humanity though there is a finite probability he could be a religious nut case. The Palestinian child will probably be religious nut case memorizing the Quran with a very low probability of doing anything that will benefit humanity as a whole.
I dislike most of the woke values, but their goal are for human flourishing are good even if there actions appose that outcome. The religious value system of the Palestinians is to create a state where all non-believers in their silly god are killed and that is much worse than woke.
Woke versus being killed for being a non-believer is quite stark. Yes I'd agree with you there, but as it stands non- Muslims are not being killed in Gaza for merely being non-Muslims. That's a rather outrageous prediction. There were secular parties operating in Palestine for years, as well.
The 800,000 jews in Arab countries didn't leave without real threats. They had business and friends. More Arabs stayed in Israel (20%) after the first war when Israel was founded. No right of return for the Arabian Jews.
Hamas showed what its intentions are on 10/7 as they raped and murdered Israeli citizens and anyone else they could. They also have it written in their charter and pay terrorists to kill Jews Their actions defined the rules of engagement. Their religious documents that they actually believe also discuss killing non-muslims and it is a good idea to believe what they say.
"Hey did you know that if you *aren't Muslim* in Palestine, they just kill you?"
"Really? Whoa!"
^ is what you claimed happens and would happen, and then you pivoted to talking specifically about Jews across Arab countries.
And everything that followed the day of 10/7 could be used to make the case of genocidal eliminationism from the other end, as could relying on the verbal statements and documents of an explicitly religious state formed in 1948.
I like that Winegard delineates different ways of defining equality because, as he says, the “polemical strategy of conflating different conceptions of equality is surprisingly effective and therefore lamentably common.” However, I disagree with his preference for political equality as the preferred way to make moral distinctions. Why? Because human choices of what constitutes good versus bad behavior are human constructs, subject to the humans (society) making the rules. So, there will always be differences of opinion about what any given society will define as their accepted mores. There is even disagreement on “universal” principles of morals. Winegard defers to common sense in the cited passage – and who has this common sense? We all should, but we don’t!
Wallison might even be correct that different policies by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might have prevented the 2008 Financial Crisis. But who cares?
If the Fed had been on its toes the Crisis would have been over in far less time, approximately zero, than the COVID recession. Inflationary expectation do not fall much below target if it is clear that the Fed does not intend to LET inflation fall much below target and indeed intends to engineer as much inflation as it takes to facilitate real adjustments to the financial sector shock (although in fact there probably was not a lot of adjustment to be made, so not much over target inflation to be engineered.)
Kurzweil's drones forecast from 2009 is perhaps not *that* uncanny. I was in Afghanistan as a young soldier (British) in 2008/9 and drones were being used very prolifically indeed for all sorts of types of surveillance, but also to kill. In fact they were overwhelmingly the weapon of choice/necessity for the strikes the US carried out for quite a few years in western Pakistan - the ones the Pakistanis protested about publicly but privately were very happy about. I remember the Taliban called the drones 'buzbuzak' cos of the rather mosquito-like noise they would make. I am out of the loop now (two Afghanistan tours was plenty thanks) but it was clear to me even aged 22 back in 08/9 that this is the way things were going. Back then attrition was very high - these drones would inexplicably fall out of the sky about a third of the time. But what footage I have seen from Ukraine shows a sort of industrialisation of drone warfare, no doubt. I suppose the obvious next thing will be drone autonomy, maybe a thing the size of a bluebird will autonomously deploy to anywhere in the world to blow up in the face of a target it has been programmed to find and fix.
There were other non-drone technologies which I found rather more interesting, actually. I heard that the Israelis were working on modifications to the way explosives behave so that - forgive non-technical language here, it's hard to explain - a missile would detonate in the immediate proximity of a human target, who might be in a crowd, turn him into mist, but then the tampering would mean the radius of the explosion would be almost nothing, so no-one else would be hurt. Obviously, by the way, this is not the endeavour of a country which wants to kill all the Palestinians.
I also remember the US killing an al Qaeda target in Syria using a non-explosive projectile. This was maybe 2020. As the missile hurtled from the sky to its target spinning blades would emerge from the missile and slice him into ribbons. This was called the Hellfire R9X I believe. I'm sure the event I'm thinking of put a perfect hole into the roof of the car the target was inside, dealt with him, but left the guy alongside him in the front seat absolutely untouched. And now just quickly googling this, it seems Zawahiri was killed in Kabul the same way.
Anyway all of that is rather a digression, but there it is.
the forecast was from 1999 *for* 2009. not from 2009
The Constitution grants the power of adjudicating who is eligible to be President to only one body in the entire govermental apparatus of the United States- Congress. That power is not granted to any court, executive officer, or state officer. The Supreme Court should return a 9-0 decision overturning the Colorado court's usurpation of power, but probably won't- will probably be 6-3 or 7-2.
Wallison wrote: "In 2021, Trump tried unsuccessfully to overthrow the Constitution—or at least the constitutional means for electing a president—by pressing his Vice President to set aside the electoral votes of several states that Mr. Trump falsely claimed he had won in the 2020 election." This statement is false. President Trump, with legal advice, did not seek to have Pence "set aside the electoral votes" but sought to have him refer questions of the validity of electors back to state legislatures which had been unconstitutionally bypassed by Democratic judges and administrators who unlawfully imposed their own rules for voting. These legislatures were Republican controlled, but could not act because they were out of session, and the Democratic governors would not call them back to address the issue. Had Pence referred the question back to them, that might have forced their coming into session, and they might have found that the supposed electors were not valid and approved other slates. Or, conceivably the matter would have had to be resolved in the House, voting by delegation, not by members. A majority of the House delegations were Republican, so this might have led to the result sought by Trump, all under legal constitutional procedure. A similar situation emerged in 1876 in the Hayes - Tilden election, which was eventually resolved by negotiation after some delay. Nobody then attempted to mischaracterize the dispute as an attempt "to overthrow the Constitution."
"Recently, [Donald Trump] told the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit that he believes he would have the power as President to direct Seal Team Six to kill a political opponent..."
A gross misstatement of the actual exchange. A liberal judge posed a sound-bite generating hypothetical to one of Trump's lawyers and demanded a yes-or-no answer.
It was a clarifying question. Trump has repeatedly said he must have “complete and total immunity.” An extreme position like that invites extreme questions.
Yes, apparently the notion of "equality" is deeply contentious. For centuries people have had to explicate themselves with disquisitions on its semantics. Rather than engaging in willful self-serving asymmetric insight into what other people may or may not mean when they use the word, it, in all likelihood, absent clear evidence to the contrary, it is safe to assume that a normal person using the word casually is probably using it in the same sense that John Locke did in his 2nd treatise:
"§. 54.
Though I have said above, Chap. II. That all men by nature are equal, I cannot be supposed to understand all sorts of equality: age or virtue may give men a just precedency: excellency of parts and merit may place others above the common level: birth may subject some, and alliance or benefits others, to pay an observance to those to whom nature, gratitude, or other respects, may have made it due: and yet all this consists with the equality, which all men are in, in respect of jurisdiction or dominion one over another; which was the equality I there spoke of, as proper to the business in hand, being that equal right, that every man hath, to his natural freedom, without being subjected to the will or authority of any other man."
(https://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/hollis-the-two-treatises-of-civil-government-hollis-ed#lf0057_label_255)
This certainly seems what Madison had in mind: "Equal laws protecting equal rights, are found as they ought to be presumed, the best guarantee of loyalty, and love of country; as well as best calculated to cherish that mutual respect and good will among citizens of every religious denomination which are necessary to social harmony and most favorable to the advancement of truth."
One wonders if Winegard agrees with either Locke or Madison?
We encounter countless sources pettifogging on and on about what a miserable word "equality" is really ought to just be clear what they are talking about. It is especially cringy when people say inane things like "people are not equal, some are smarter than others." Nobody is disputing that. What matter is what consequences there ought to be in the operation of government as a result of such differences. Do the quibbler object to one-person, one-vote? I give credit to the many who are up front about this with their claims that the votes of the best educated among us should count for more. Do they want to restore feudalism? I give credit to those who are open and honest about this being their goal. What I don't believe deserves credit are bad faith efforts to project obfuscation onto others.
Bo Winegard seems to actively trying to not understand the Moral Equality argument, or is so committed to the notion that there is no free will that he doesn't notice that he is committing himself to claiming that he can see the future of someone's behavior and be justified for punishing them ahead of time. Effectively claiming pre-crime is valid.
I think your example of the babies is apt. Even better if you posit that the babies are observably equivalent, just two babies whose backgrounds and genetics are not obvious, same color whatever. Their charts and names are missing, so you don't know which is which. Can you choose meaningfully, or are you just flipping a coin?
In other words, we might have guesses about people's potential, but potential isn't what we care about so much as actual outcomes. Which is why we spend so much time testing potential and cultivating what we find. In the end, however, we care what people do, and treat them accordingly. Which is roughly what moral equality demands, even if people tend to be willing to shade things a little one way or the other based on known potentials.
As a very secular atheist, the Israeli baby would have the highest probably of contributing to humanity though there is a finite probability he could be a religious nut case. The Palestinian child will probably be religious nut case memorizing the Quran with a very low probability of doing anything that will benefit humanity as a whole.
On the other hand the Israeli is more likely to grow up with woke values.
I dislike most of the woke values, but their goal are for human flourishing are good even if there actions appose that outcome. The religious value system of the Palestinians is to create a state where all non-believers in their silly god are killed and that is much worse than woke.
Woke versus being killed for being a non-believer is quite stark. Yes I'd agree with you there, but as it stands non- Muslims are not being killed in Gaza for merely being non-Muslims. That's a rather outrageous prediction. There were secular parties operating in Palestine for years, as well.
The 800,000 jews in Arab countries didn't leave without real threats. They had business and friends. More Arabs stayed in Israel (20%) after the first war when Israel was founded. No right of return for the Arabian Jews.
Hamas showed what its intentions are on 10/7 as they raped and murdered Israeli citizens and anyone else they could. They also have it written in their charter and pay terrorists to kill Jews Their actions defined the rules of engagement. Their religious documents that they actually believe also discuss killing non-muslims and it is a good idea to believe what they say.
"Hey did you know that if you *aren't Muslim* in Palestine, they just kill you?"
"Really? Whoa!"
^ is what you claimed happens and would happen, and then you pivoted to talking specifically about Jews across Arab countries.
And everything that followed the day of 10/7 could be used to make the case of genocidal eliminationism from the other end, as could relying on the verbal statements and documents of an explicitly religious state formed in 1948.
I like that Winegard delineates different ways of defining equality because, as he says, the “polemical strategy of conflating different conceptions of equality is surprisingly effective and therefore lamentably common.” However, I disagree with his preference for political equality as the preferred way to make moral distinctions. Why? Because human choices of what constitutes good versus bad behavior are human constructs, subject to the humans (society) making the rules. So, there will always be differences of opinion about what any given society will define as their accepted mores. There is even disagreement on “universal” principles of morals. Winegard defers to common sense in the cited passage – and who has this common sense? We all should, but we don’t!
Wallison might even be correct that different policies by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac might have prevented the 2008 Financial Crisis. But who cares?
If the Fed had been on its toes the Crisis would have been over in far less time, approximately zero, than the COVID recession. Inflationary expectation do not fall much below target if it is clear that the Fed does not intend to LET inflation fall much below target and indeed intends to engineer as much inflation as it takes to facilitate real adjustments to the financial sector shock (although in fact there probably was not a lot of adjustment to be made, so not much over target inflation to be engineered.)