The main problem with the Noble Lie is that only a Philosopher King can know or sure that it is, indeed, noble. I have not, in my 77 years, noticed a surfeit of Philosopher Kings. In truth, we seem to suffer from a rather severe deficiency of such. OTOH, we certainly have a surplus of people who claim to be offering Noble Lies while apparently profiting themselves from the Lie.
As for evidence of stolen elections, I think the "trout in the milk pail" might be the Detroit 2020 vote (with which I am intimately familiar) with 107% of the adult population casting ballots. Not of the "eligible voters" (including those eligible but not registered) but of everyone over the age of 18 in the city. I regard that as strong circumstantial evidence.
The fact is not that there is no evidence but that no court ever allowed a case to be presented in which evidence could be proffered. And of course vote fraud exists. I grew up and livd in Illinois for over 50 years, and it's sure easy to find there. Sometimes some low level sort even gets tried and found guilty.
So the correct question is "How much fraud is there in X election?" We never know because for some odd reason no forensic examinations of potential vote fraud occur.
"As for evidence of stolen elections, I think the "trout in the milk pail" might be the Detroit 2020 vote (with which I am intimately familiar) with 107% of the adult population casting ballots. Not of the "eligible voters" (including those eligible but not registered) but of everyone over the age of 18 in the city. I regard that as strong circumstantial evidence."
It would be. Checking online
total votes in Detroit in 2020: 207,488
Population of Detroit in 2022: 620,376
That makes your claim unlikely. Why do you believe it?
More on point, the voting age population, what Jorg was referring to:"The total voting age population of Detroit, Michigan, meaning US citizens 18 or older, is 482,838. " from https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/detroit-michigan
43% turn out of the entire adult population (including felons and Robocop) seems a bit high to me, but then 2020 had bonkers high voter turn out relative to the past 50 or so years overall. Which is frankly itself a bit suspicious; universal mail in voting increases turn out no doubt, but it also increases fraud. I am inclined to suspect the latter increases a lot faster than the former, but then I have worked in enough bureaucracies where... creative ways of attaining desired outcomes let's say... are common place that I might be overly cynical.
Plus there is nonsense about poll observers being sent away, strange spikes in vote counts at 3 am, etc. Combined with all the election fraud in primary elections we saw this spring in the NE via mail in votes it seems likely that mail in votes have dramatically increased fraud opportunities for organized political machines.
Fair point. It is distressing how much people lie knowing that basic facts are easy to look up, and how many people fail to do that looking up.
(I wonder if there is some division of places that puts Detroit into a smaller space, and thus smaller population. From trying to do a little city based research myself some time ago I did find that there is a big difference between what we might think of as "The city of Philadelphia" and what is technically Philadelphia, and that statistics often use a variety of definitions and unstated assumptions.)
Agreed. I haven't looked into that Detroit claim, or even heard of it before he brought it up. I just like to bring up points about how hard it is even to know what people are defining as X when they claim some statistical fact about X when I can. Comes up a lot at work with metrics, and seemingly all the time discussing political things. "Gun deaths" vs "gun murders", or income inequality vs wealth inequality... the nasty way people who clearly know better slip between definitions is frustrating. Although in the "what definition of city are you using?" cases it isn't obvious people are doing it on purpose.
First, it appears you're correct. Let me 'defend' my late response.
Early Friday morning I and my son and his son, his son's best friend, and a very good friend of mine drove almost 7 hours to my cabin in Cheboygan County, MI. It is miles from any electricity or internet access. Basically 80A of trees and a rough cabin. We can occasionally use texting, but phone and internet don't happen. So I was offline through Monday night. It was great. Lots of ripe blackberries, Lake Huron still okay for the boys to swim, just a beautiful, restful place. Bush hogged the clearings and trails even though we don't hunt.
So late last night I saw your response. I slept in, but the spent considerable time checking your numbers and looking for my old files. It took a while, but I found the source of my numbers. Very early the morning after the election, the Free Press was reporting Just over 500,000 votes in Detroit. Since I was sue there weren't that many eligible voters in Detroit, I checked SEMCOG.org (regional govt data website) for demographic and found roughly 455,000 probable adult residents in Detroit, not all of whom were eligible to vote.
Then I looked at the State of Michigan data and found some 475,000 voters were registered to vote in Detroit. (As an aside, MI currently has an 18+ population of just over 8M and oddly enough just over 8M registered voters, per State data.)
The link I used is dead, so I searched the wayback machine. I couldn't find it, but here's where I think I went wrong. Probably the Freep was calling the Wayne County vote total the Detroit vote total. And Since I checked the Freep site that's what I found.
Given that I went to bed a 2 AM and Trump had what appeared to be an insurmountable lead with less than 5% of precincts to be tabulated, I was totally prepared to believe, given the history, that Detroit had over-voted. As far as I can recall, that set of numbers wasn't correct the next several days as I dug into other data. For instance, precincts that certified their totals apparently “found” something and “recertified” new numbers. That doesn't include Antrim County where the vote totals were swapped by a “software error.”
Anyway, You are correct, and I thank you for pointing out my mistake. Michigan voting, especially in Detroit, is still shady as hell. I had many students over the years from Detroit who readily told stories of small amounts of vote fraud they participated in (sometimes for small amounts of money, other times for other reasons) so the mistake was easy for me to believe.
Sorry for misleading anyone. I'll try to not do it again.
Maybe I should clarify those first answers about balancing costs. It's the old seen and unseen, opportunity costs, and all that (my economics educations comes from some of David's books, Henry Hazlett, Cafe Hayek, and others; I don't pretend to know the right terminology, or even the really "correct" usage, such as why rent-seeking is called that). Too many of those purist kinds of questions assume a world where the One True Question exists in a vacuum, and they seem no more useful than angels dancing on the heads of pins. I don't believe they shine lights on principles or educate us about our beliefs.
The paradox of believing in evolution which amuses me is that evolution-deniers usually have multiple children, who they will raise to succeed in competitive ventures such as football. The median person with a "Darwin" fish on his car will have zero or one children, and the child will be sheltered from any selective activity.
The people who reject evolution are reproducing plentifully and training their offspring to win competitions. The ones who espouse evolution are letting their genes die with them or having kids below replacement rate, and making their kids be hothouse flowers who'll die without parent protection. This contradiction between theory and practice amuses me.
I still don't see a contradiction between theory and practice. Is there some reason why someone who doesn't believe in evolution shouldn't have lots of kids or someone who does believe in evolution should? Evolution is a scientific theory, not a theory about what one should do.
While there are reasons to have lots of kids that have nothing to do with evolution, it remains true that if evolution is an accurate theory, then having lots of kids will lead to the success of your lineage. Meanwhile, it's possible to believe evolution is an accurate theory, but not want your lineage to succeed badly enough to have the kids it would require to preserve it.
So perhaps not a paradox, but an instance of irony. The mechanism of evolution is favoring a population that believes the mechanism is not accurate.
Evolution is a scientific theory, not a moral commandment. Believing in evolution doesn't imply believing that people ought to act that way, only that organisms, including people, tend to.
Have you read Dawkins _The Selfish Gene_? He points out that there is a conflict of interest between you and your genes, and things like birth control involve your sacrificing their objectives for yours. He analogizes it to sf stories where humans build robots and the robots revolt. We are the robots.
It was the police chief of Frankfurt, Germany, who ordered the abductor for ransom of a child to be threatened with torture. The tactic worked for the killer to give up the whereabouts of the boy but he had already killed him. The legal wrangling in the aftermath is interesting and can be found on Wikipedia under the murder of Jakob von Metzler. The state cannot be trusted with the power to torture. When it is being threatened in good faith, a cop has to be willing to receive punishment for a good deed and the courts have to show maximum leniency.
If one of my children were in danger and I could break one or more laws to save them from that danger (or even have a chance), I would likely do that. Murder of someone harming my child or torture to find out where my child is, for instance. I say this not expecting to get away with it, even if that means jail time.
After the fact, if I did actually act appropriately given the gravity, I might ask for or even expect leniency (maybe a reduced sentence). Society cannot afford to be too lenient, or maybe lenient at all, lest we cause more people to try out this option and end up in a worse overall situation.
"...so far as I know, that there is no evidence for Trump’s claims of election fraud..."
Actually there is copious evidence of election fraud, 2 minutes googling supports such.
The question however is was there enough fraud to affect the results?
Me, I'm not sure however considering that Biden campaigning from his basement and getting the most votes ever in the history of the Nation makes me consider the possibility in spite of assurances from the media and our, absolutely honest of course, government that such never ever happened.
Your 2 minutes of googling can find claims of fraud but how do you find out if they are true? I note that, elsewhere in the thread, a commenter makes a specific claim about fraud that is easily shown to be false.
Shown false by whom, government, media, courts of law, academia?
Whatever works for you fine, but sadly, in this age I would not fully trust the above or any combination thereof.
No I am not convinced ballot fraud great enough to change the election occurred but I am not convinced otherwise either.
I do put more trust in my own eyes and while videos and still pics of drop box stuffing, mail in ballot harvesting, boarding of windows viewing ballot counters, midnight deliveries of ballots, Midnight stop of vote counting for a water leak, electronic voting machines hacked on camera, these can, and I am sure often are, faked, but I still trust my own eyes more than the above and again. Biden campaigning from his basement and getting the most votes ever in the history of the Nation is rather hard to swallow.
In this case, shown false by two minutes of googling to check how many people voted in Detroit and how many people lived in Detroit. Do you think it likely that either figure is fraudulent?
What you wrote was that "there is copious evidence of election fraud, 2 minutes googling supports such." Googling doesn't find evidence of your eyes. What did your own eyes see that is evidence of voting fraud? If nothing, why are you confident that it occurred?
I agree that there are no sources of information other than one's own observation that one can fully trust — a point I discussed in the post. That is a reason you cannot be sure that there was not election fraud. But you, if I understood you, were claiming to be sure that there was. On what basis?
Biden running from his basement, received 81 million votes, the most votes ever received by a presidential candidate. No matter how many live in Detroit or how many voted in Detroit I find 82 million votes hard to believe.
I did say there is copious evidence of election fraud and in my opinion that's true. I did not say there was/is a copious amount of such, but I do wonder is that's so. Frankly, today, if 51 intelligence officials were to sign a letter telling me there is little fraud, I'd wonder even more.
The US population is growing and 2020 was an election which many people on both sides felt strongly about. Trump also received more votes than any past candidate, winner or loser.
You said that 2 minutes googling supports the claim that there is copious evidence of fraud. Googling can tell you that many people claim fraud, but how does it tell you whether those claims are true? 2 minutes of googling could also find lots of people claiming that the Hunter laptop was a Russian plot, or that Trump in 2016 won because of Russian election interference, neither of which I expect you believe.
My point is not about Trump. It is about people's willingness to believe what they want to believe.
Yep, I still say 2 minutes googling supports the claim, not saying it proves it. As I noted the pictures and videos presented by many those people claiming fraud that you mention, is evidence, not hearsay, not simply statements. However such may be true or false , as I noted such can be doctored, none the less, in my opinion, evidence of fraud.
Trump's claims of election fraud where that they were outcome determinative. Isolated cases implicating only a small amount of votes do not make his claims true. If Trump claims were true he would have been more successful arguing his case against judges. Often ones he himself appointed.
So you agree, as I noted there was election fraud.
I tend to disagree or at least think more review is needed that your; " If Trump('s) claims were true he would have been more successful arguing his case against judges."
My "solution" to torture is to balance out the restitution. Assume both can be proven, that the torture was worth one million dollars for medical care for the rest of his life, and one million lives were saved by the torture. He owes one million dollars per life threatened, and he collects one million dollars. Net effect, he owes $999,999 to everyone he threatened. It's the same way I resolve the two atomic bombings which may or may not have ended WW II; "reasonable" estimates are that the Japanese armies killed 200,000 enemies in each of the last four months of the war, presumably in China and Indonesia and elsewhere, and that 5-10 million Japanese would have been killed in an Allied invasion lasting a year, in addition to a million Allied casualties. That's far more than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it's all speculation anyway, and my "reasonable" figures don't make a whole hill of beans difference to judging hindsight actions that were taken with real deaths in the balance. Wars suck; trying to make them fair is beyond my comprehension.
It's similar to the two famous libertarian purist thought experiments. You fall off your tenth floor balcony, grab onto the ninth floor balcony, and the owner says your trespassing. Do you let go on principle or hang on and defile your conscience? Do you steal the 25 cent part which can fix the rocket which can deflect the comet, or do you say sod it, bye bye?
I don't worry about those fantasies of discovering some hyper bomb which is better suppressed; what one person can find, so can others, and suppression is impossible. It would be more realistic to worry that some worker at the donut shop had a bad day and pissed in the dough.
Climate change? The supporters have lied more and more baldly than Fauci, and people don't lie like that when they have truth on their side.
"Do you steal the 25 cent part which can fix the rocket which can deflect the comet, or do you say sod it, bye bye?"
If you are Russian you absolutely steal the 25 cent part and you use it to buy vodka so you are drunk when the comet hits. At least based on what we see thanks to the Ukraine invasion that's what a Russian will do
Regarding the nuclear bombs. I am sure that, on balance, they saved lives. A lot of lives.
I don't find the bomb example persuasive: there is likely to be significant benefit in propagating knowledge of how to build such a thing. If one person can discover it, others can too, and knowledge of what is required for it can be used in implementing countermeasures against its construction. Suppose it requires some rare element, one only found in a few places in the world. Now with knowledge of its importance, those sites can be secured when previously they would have been considered uninteresting.
An aside, but since you brought it up: Here is the case that the 2020 election was stolen and should have been overturned. (A podcast episode, which runs 11 minutes, by the attorney who wrote the plaintiff's complaint in the Georgia election challenge.) On YouTube --https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvB_K4A3U6s
"The answer, both mine and Marshall’s, is again the case vs rule distinction. In any particular case — the standard example is a change that benefits a rich man by a hundred dollars, injures a poor man by ninety — an increase in economic efficiency might be a decrease in total utility. But unless there is some reason to expect most decisions to be ones for which the gainers value money less than the losers, a rule of making changes that increase efficiency, avoiding ones that decrease it, can be expected to raise total utility."
The obvious solution to me is to proceed with the change and couple it with a transfer of 95 dollars from the rich man to the poor (assuming transfers are very cheap, of course, including the costs of identifying the parties and making the transfer). This ought to raise both efficiency and utility above not performing the change, unless I've missed something.
I imagine this is discussed in Marshall, but I don't know where, exactly. I see several YouTube videos, and five works listed in his WP article. Any of them look like they might address whether there's anything wrong with this solution, but it's not easy for me to tell. Would anyone happen to know?
That's the "potential Pareto" aka Hicks Kaldor solution. The problem is that the expectation of that transfer affects the incentives of the people concerned, eliminating the efficiency gain.
The example I discussed in an earlier comment thread is abolishing an auto tariff and compensating the auto workers and stockholders for their loss. Think about the effect of the knowledge that when the tariff is abolished they will get paid what they would have gotten if it wasn't on decisions of those people, such as whether to invest in an auto factory or work in one.
"Hicks Kaldor" was the magic phrase, so thank you for that!
At first glance, I wouldn't have expected the efficiency to disappear - only lessen. In the example you discussed, if I suppose a tariff on foreign cars means about C additional domestic cars are sold at tariff-price PT, and there are W workers and stockholders benefitting, then each one is getting on average C*PT/W. To make those cars worth buying, the tariff T on each foreign car has to be enough to raise its price (PF) above PT, so PT-PF<T. (This doesn't seem quite right, as if I'm not handling marginal cost properly, but I'll venture on.)
The beneficiaries will oppose any drop in tariff unless they are compensated for at least C*PT in total. The tariff drop means those cars sell for a total of C*PF, meaning consumers save a total of C*PT - C*PF = C*(PT-PF) which is less than C*T. Sure enough, it appears the system lost!
It seems like it ought not to. If it did, then tariffs should indeed be making everyone (in that nation) better off, on average, but that's not what tariff opponents say. I imagine the money saved by consumers can get put into things other than carmakers for more gain, and that's the missing bit, but I'm not sure. I'll try searching on Hicks Kaldor and see what I find, when I have time.
If people had the research skills to be more convinced by accurate disagreements with statements made by high government officials than inaccurate ones, why would they be convinced by inaccurate objections to statements made by election officials? I saw a lot of rumors about both things, and in both cases they overwhelmed the truth (dissident and consenting alike) in number and sharing.
The rule I have long advocated on torture, based on the considerations you bring up is that torture should be forbidden and strictly punished.
People who think they can prevent a million deaths by torturing someone will sometimes decide that they should do it anyway. My model of the efficacy of torture, and the frequency at which such suspicions are correct says that they will usually fail to learn anything useful, and they should be punished. Occasionally the torturer will be correct, and they can take the fact that they were right with them to prison. Sometimes a jury will fail to convict.
I believe that technically, the United States constitution does not prohibit torture as such. It bans cruel and unusual punishment, so the bomber could not be drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake, even if the bomb went off. And it bans self-incrimination by compulsion, so anything the bomber said could not then be used in trying them. But I'm not sure it would be illegal to compel them to reveal the bomb's location, if they were thereafter immune to prosecution based on what they revealed.
Whether that's a good policy, and whether it's compatible with libertarianism, could be questioned. But it seems to be a possible position and one that merits examination.
The main problem with the Noble Lie is that only a Philosopher King can know or sure that it is, indeed, noble. I have not, in my 77 years, noticed a surfeit of Philosopher Kings. In truth, we seem to suffer from a rather severe deficiency of such. OTOH, we certainly have a surplus of people who claim to be offering Noble Lies while apparently profiting themselves from the Lie.
As for evidence of stolen elections, I think the "trout in the milk pail" might be the Detroit 2020 vote (with which I am intimately familiar) with 107% of the adult population casting ballots. Not of the "eligible voters" (including those eligible but not registered) but of everyone over the age of 18 in the city. I regard that as strong circumstantial evidence.
The fact is not that there is no evidence but that no court ever allowed a case to be presented in which evidence could be proffered. And of course vote fraud exists. I grew up and livd in Illinois for over 50 years, and it's sure easy to find there. Sometimes some low level sort even gets tried and found guilty.
So the correct question is "How much fraud is there in X election?" We never know because for some odd reason no forensic examinations of potential vote fraud occur.
Speaking about noble lies , you write:
"As for evidence of stolen elections, I think the "trout in the milk pail" might be the Detroit 2020 vote (with which I am intimately familiar) with 107% of the adult population casting ballots. Not of the "eligible voters" (including those eligible but not registered) but of everyone over the age of 18 in the city. I regard that as strong circumstantial evidence."
It would be. Checking online
total votes in Detroit in 2020: 207,488
Population of Detroit in 2022: 620,376
That makes your claim unlikely. Why do you believe it?
A little googling found a 2020 news story on the claim, which was made by Trump and some of his supporters at the time:
https://apnews.com/article/fact-checking-9742674804
More on point, the voting age population, what Jorg was referring to:"The total voting age population of Detroit, Michigan, meaning US citizens 18 or older, is 482,838. " from https://www.biggestuscities.com/city/detroit-michigan
43% turn out of the entire adult population (including felons and Robocop) seems a bit high to me, but then 2020 had bonkers high voter turn out relative to the past 50 or so years overall. Which is frankly itself a bit suspicious; universal mail in voting increases turn out no doubt, but it also increases fraud. I am inclined to suspect the latter increases a lot faster than the former, but then I have worked in enough bureaucracies where... creative ways of attaining desired outcomes let's say... are common place that I might be overly cynical.
Plus there is nonsense about poll observers being sent away, strange spikes in vote counts at 3 am, etc. Combined with all the election fraud in primary elections we saw this spring in the NE via mail in votes it seems likely that mail in votes have dramatically increased fraud opportunities for organized political machines.
The question is whether Jorg was committing a noble lie, which seems unlikely in this context, or believing one.
I didn't intend to. ;-)
Fair point. It is distressing how much people lie knowing that basic facts are easy to look up, and how many people fail to do that looking up.
(I wonder if there is some division of places that puts Detroit into a smaller space, and thus smaller population. From trying to do a little city based research myself some time ago I did find that there is a big difference between what we might think of as "The city of Philadelphia" and what is technically Philadelphia, and that statistics often use a variety of definitions and unstated assumptions.)
If there is a defense of Jorg's claim along those lines he is free to offer it, but so far he has been silent.
Agreed. I haven't looked into that Detroit claim, or even heard of it before he brought it up. I just like to bring up points about how hard it is even to know what people are defining as X when they claim some statistical fact about X when I can. Comes up a lot at work with metrics, and seemingly all the time discussing political things. "Gun deaths" vs "gun murders", or income inequality vs wealth inequality... the nasty way people who clearly know better slip between definitions is frustrating. Although in the "what definition of city are you using?" cases it isn't obvious people are doing it on purpose.
I looked them up at the time. See my comment above.
First, it appears you're correct. Let me 'defend' my late response.
Early Friday morning I and my son and his son, his son's best friend, and a very good friend of mine drove almost 7 hours to my cabin in Cheboygan County, MI. It is miles from any electricity or internet access. Basically 80A of trees and a rough cabin. We can occasionally use texting, but phone and internet don't happen. So I was offline through Monday night. It was great. Lots of ripe blackberries, Lake Huron still okay for the boys to swim, just a beautiful, restful place. Bush hogged the clearings and trails even though we don't hunt.
So late last night I saw your response. I slept in, but the spent considerable time checking your numbers and looking for my old files. It took a while, but I found the source of my numbers. Very early the morning after the election, the Free Press was reporting Just over 500,000 votes in Detroit. Since I was sue there weren't that many eligible voters in Detroit, I checked SEMCOG.org (regional govt data website) for demographic and found roughly 455,000 probable adult residents in Detroit, not all of whom were eligible to vote.
Then I looked at the State of Michigan data and found some 475,000 voters were registered to vote in Detroit. (As an aside, MI currently has an 18+ population of just over 8M and oddly enough just over 8M registered voters, per State data.)
The link I used is dead, so I searched the wayback machine. I couldn't find it, but here's where I think I went wrong. Probably the Freep was calling the Wayne County vote total the Detroit vote total. And Since I checked the Freep site that's what I found.
Given that I went to bed a 2 AM and Trump had what appeared to be an insurmountable lead with less than 5% of precincts to be tabulated, I was totally prepared to believe, given the history, that Detroit had over-voted. As far as I can recall, that set of numbers wasn't correct the next several days as I dug into other data. For instance, precincts that certified their totals apparently “found” something and “recertified” new numbers. That doesn't include Antrim County where the vote totals were swapped by a “software error.”
Anyway, You are correct, and I thank you for pointing out my mistake. Michigan voting, especially in Detroit, is still shady as hell. I had many students over the years from Detroit who readily told stories of small amounts of vote fraud they participated in (sometimes for small amounts of money, other times for other reasons) so the mistake was easy for me to believe.
Sorry for misleading anyone. I'll try to not do it again.
Thanks.
There are three problems with the noble lie:
1. The lie you tell might not be noble, have bad effects instead of good ones.
2. A policy of telling noble lies is likely to sometimes produce lies with bad effects.
3. A policy of telling noble lies means that people can’t trust what you say, will doubt it even when true.
My post was about 2 and 3. I may do another about 1 for the particular noble lie I was mostly discussing, perhaps for two.
Maybe I should clarify those first answers about balancing costs. It's the old seen and unseen, opportunity costs, and all that (my economics educations comes from some of David's books, Henry Hazlett, Cafe Hayek, and others; I don't pretend to know the right terminology, or even the really "correct" usage, such as why rent-seeking is called that). Too many of those purist kinds of questions assume a world where the One True Question exists in a vacuum, and they seem no more useful than angels dancing on the heads of pins. I don't believe they shine lights on principles or educate us about our beliefs.
The paradox of believing in evolution which amuses me is that evolution-deniers usually have multiple children, who they will raise to succeed in competitive ventures such as football. The median person with a "Darwin" fish on his car will have zero or one children, and the child will be sheltered from any selective activity.
Why is that a paradox?
The people who reject evolution are reproducing plentifully and training their offspring to win competitions. The ones who espouse evolution are letting their genes die with them or having kids below replacement rate, and making their kids be hothouse flowers who'll die without parent protection. This contradiction between theory and practice amuses me.
I still don't see a contradiction between theory and practice. Is there some reason why someone who doesn't believe in evolution shouldn't have lots of kids or someone who does believe in evolution should? Evolution is a scientific theory, not a theory about what one should do.
While there are reasons to have lots of kids that have nothing to do with evolution, it remains true that if evolution is an accurate theory, then having lots of kids will lead to the success of your lineage. Meanwhile, it's possible to believe evolution is an accurate theory, but not want your lineage to succeed badly enough to have the kids it would require to preserve it.
So perhaps not a paradox, but an instance of irony. The mechanism of evolution is favoring a population that believes the mechanism is not accurate.
Evolution believers letting their gene line go extinct is a failure to practice what they preach. I do see a contradiction there.
Evolution is a scientific theory, not a moral commandment. Believing in evolution doesn't imply believing that people ought to act that way, only that organisms, including people, tend to.
Have you read Dawkins _The Selfish Gene_? He points out that there is a conflict of interest between you and your genes, and things like birth control involve your sacrificing their objectives for yours. He analogizes it to sf stories where humans build robots and the robots revolt. We are the robots.
It was the police chief of Frankfurt, Germany, who ordered the abductor for ransom of a child to be threatened with torture. The tactic worked for the killer to give up the whereabouts of the boy but he had already killed him. The legal wrangling in the aftermath is interesting and can be found on Wikipedia under the murder of Jakob von Metzler. The state cannot be trusted with the power to torture. When it is being threatened in good faith, a cop has to be willing to receive punishment for a good deed and the courts have to show maximum leniency.
If one of my children were in danger and I could break one or more laws to save them from that danger (or even have a chance), I would likely do that. Murder of someone harming my child or torture to find out where my child is, for instance. I say this not expecting to get away with it, even if that means jail time.
After the fact, if I did actually act appropriately given the gravity, I might ask for or even expect leniency (maybe a reduced sentence). Society cannot afford to be too lenient, or maybe lenient at all, lest we cause more people to try out this option and end up in a worse overall situation.
"...so far as I know, that there is no evidence for Trump’s claims of election fraud..."
Actually there is copious evidence of election fraud, 2 minutes googling supports such.
The question however is was there enough fraud to affect the results?
Me, I'm not sure however considering that Biden campaigning from his basement and getting the most votes ever in the history of the Nation makes me consider the possibility in spite of assurances from the media and our, absolutely honest of course, government that such never ever happened.
Your 2 minutes of googling can find claims of fraud but how do you find out if they are true? I note that, elsewhere in the thread, a commenter makes a specific claim about fraud that is easily shown to be false.
Shown false by whom, government, media, courts of law, academia?
Whatever works for you fine, but sadly, in this age I would not fully trust the above or any combination thereof.
No I am not convinced ballot fraud great enough to change the election occurred but I am not convinced otherwise either.
I do put more trust in my own eyes and while videos and still pics of drop box stuffing, mail in ballot harvesting, boarding of windows viewing ballot counters, midnight deliveries of ballots, Midnight stop of vote counting for a water leak, electronic voting machines hacked on camera, these can, and I am sure often are, faked, but I still trust my own eyes more than the above and again. Biden campaigning from his basement and getting the most votes ever in the history of the Nation is rather hard to swallow.
In this case, shown false by two minutes of googling to check how many people voted in Detroit and how many people lived in Detroit. Do you think it likely that either figure is fraudulent?
What you wrote was that "there is copious evidence of election fraud, 2 minutes googling supports such." Googling doesn't find evidence of your eyes. What did your own eyes see that is evidence of voting fraud? If nothing, why are you confident that it occurred?
I agree that there are no sources of information other than one's own observation that one can fully trust — a point I discussed in the post. That is a reason you cannot be sure that there was not election fraud. But you, if I understood you, were claiming to be sure that there was. On what basis?
Biden running from his basement, received 81 million votes, the most votes ever received by a presidential candidate. No matter how many live in Detroit or how many voted in Detroit I find 82 million votes hard to believe.
I did say there is copious evidence of election fraud and in my opinion that's true. I did not say there was/is a copious amount of such, but I do wonder is that's so. Frankly, today, if 51 intelligence officials were to sign a letter telling me there is little fraud, I'd wonder even more.
The US population is growing and 2020 was an election which many people on both sides felt strongly about. Trump also received more votes than any past candidate, winner or loser.
You said that 2 minutes googling supports the claim that there is copious evidence of fraud. Googling can tell you that many people claim fraud, but how does it tell you whether those claims are true? 2 minutes of googling could also find lots of people claiming that the Hunter laptop was a Russian plot, or that Trump in 2016 won because of Russian election interference, neither of which I expect you believe.
My point is not about Trump. It is about people's willingness to believe what they want to believe.
Yep, I still say 2 minutes googling supports the claim, not saying it proves it. As I noted the pictures and videos presented by many those people claiming fraud that you mention, is evidence, not hearsay, not simply statements. However such may be true or false , as I noted such can be doctored, none the less, in my opinion, evidence of fraud.
Trump's claims of election fraud where that they were outcome determinative. Isolated cases implicating only a small amount of votes do not make his claims true. If Trump claims were true he would have been more successful arguing his case against judges. Often ones he himself appointed.
So you agree, as I noted there was election fraud.
I tend to disagree or at least think more review is needed that your; " If Trump('s) claims were true he would have been more successful arguing his case against judges."
My "solution" to torture is to balance out the restitution. Assume both can be proven, that the torture was worth one million dollars for medical care for the rest of his life, and one million lives were saved by the torture. He owes one million dollars per life threatened, and he collects one million dollars. Net effect, he owes $999,999 to everyone he threatened. It's the same way I resolve the two atomic bombings which may or may not have ended WW II; "reasonable" estimates are that the Japanese armies killed 200,000 enemies in each of the last four months of the war, presumably in China and Indonesia and elsewhere, and that 5-10 million Japanese would have been killed in an Allied invasion lasting a year, in addition to a million Allied casualties. That's far more than died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But it's all speculation anyway, and my "reasonable" figures don't make a whole hill of beans difference to judging hindsight actions that were taken with real deaths in the balance. Wars suck; trying to make them fair is beyond my comprehension.
It's similar to the two famous libertarian purist thought experiments. You fall off your tenth floor balcony, grab onto the ninth floor balcony, and the owner says your trespassing. Do you let go on principle or hang on and defile your conscience? Do you steal the 25 cent part which can fix the rocket which can deflect the comet, or do you say sod it, bye bye?
I don't worry about those fantasies of discovering some hyper bomb which is better suppressed; what one person can find, so can others, and suppression is impossible. It would be more realistic to worry that some worker at the donut shop had a bad day and pissed in the dough.
Climate change? The supporters have lied more and more baldly than Fauci, and people don't lie like that when they have truth on their side.
"Do you steal the 25 cent part which can fix the rocket which can deflect the comet, or do you say sod it, bye bye?"
If you are Russian you absolutely steal the 25 cent part and you use it to buy vodka so you are drunk when the comet hits. At least based on what we see thanks to the Ukraine invasion that's what a Russian will do
Regarding the nuclear bombs. I am sure that, on balance, they saved lives. A lot of lives.
I don't find the bomb example persuasive: there is likely to be significant benefit in propagating knowledge of how to build such a thing. If one person can discover it, others can too, and knowledge of what is required for it can be used in implementing countermeasures against its construction. Suppose it requires some rare element, one only found in a few places in the world. Now with knowledge of its importance, those sites can be secured when previously they would have been considered uninteresting.
An aside, but since you brought it up: Here is the case that the 2020 election was stolen and should have been overturned. (A podcast episode, which runs 11 minutes, by the attorney who wrote the plaintiff's complaint in the Georgia election challenge.) On YouTube --https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wvB_K4A3U6s
Same podcast on Rumble with commercials -- https://rumble.com/v5fpyxp-fact-check-what-actually-happened-with-all-the-trump-2020-election-lawsuits.html
I include both because YouTube has been known to delete posts that present this point of view.
"The answer, both mine and Marshall’s, is again the case vs rule distinction. In any particular case — the standard example is a change that benefits a rich man by a hundred dollars, injures a poor man by ninety — an increase in economic efficiency might be a decrease in total utility. But unless there is some reason to expect most decisions to be ones for which the gainers value money less than the losers, a rule of making changes that increase efficiency, avoiding ones that decrease it, can be expected to raise total utility."
The obvious solution to me is to proceed with the change and couple it with a transfer of 95 dollars from the rich man to the poor (assuming transfers are very cheap, of course, including the costs of identifying the parties and making the transfer). This ought to raise both efficiency and utility above not performing the change, unless I've missed something.
I imagine this is discussed in Marshall, but I don't know where, exactly. I see several YouTube videos, and five works listed in his WP article. Any of them look like they might address whether there's anything wrong with this solution, but it's not easy for me to tell. Would anyone happen to know?
That's the "potential Pareto" aka Hicks Kaldor solution. The problem is that the expectation of that transfer affects the incentives of the people concerned, eliminating the efficiency gain.
The example I discussed in an earlier comment thread is abolishing an auto tariff and compensating the auto workers and stockholders for their loss. Think about the effect of the knowledge that when the tariff is abolished they will get paid what they would have gotten if it wasn't on decisions of those people, such as whether to invest in an auto factory or work in one.
"Hicks Kaldor" was the magic phrase, so thank you for that!
At first glance, I wouldn't have expected the efficiency to disappear - only lessen. In the example you discussed, if I suppose a tariff on foreign cars means about C additional domestic cars are sold at tariff-price PT, and there are W workers and stockholders benefitting, then each one is getting on average C*PT/W. To make those cars worth buying, the tariff T on each foreign car has to be enough to raise its price (PF) above PT, so PT-PF<T. (This doesn't seem quite right, as if I'm not handling marginal cost properly, but I'll venture on.)
The beneficiaries will oppose any drop in tariff unless they are compensated for at least C*PT in total. The tariff drop means those cars sell for a total of C*PF, meaning consumers save a total of C*PT - C*PF = C*(PT-PF) which is less than C*T. Sure enough, it appears the system lost!
It seems like it ought not to. If it did, then tariffs should indeed be making everyone (in that nation) better off, on average, but that's not what tariff opponents say. I imagine the money saved by consumers can get put into things other than carmakers for more gain, and that's the missing bit, but I'm not sure. I'll try searching on Hicks Kaldor and see what I find, when I have time.
If people had the research skills to be more convinced by accurate disagreements with statements made by high government officials than inaccurate ones, why would they be convinced by inaccurate objections to statements made by election officials? I saw a lot of rumors about both things, and in both cases they overwhelmed the truth (dissident and consenting alike) in number and sharing.
The rule I have long advocated on torture, based on the considerations you bring up is that torture should be forbidden and strictly punished.
People who think they can prevent a million deaths by torturing someone will sometimes decide that they should do it anyway. My model of the efficacy of torture, and the frequency at which such suspicions are correct says that they will usually fail to learn anything useful, and they should be punished. Occasionally the torturer will be correct, and they can take the fact that they were right with them to prison. Sometimes a jury will fail to convict.
I believe that technically, the United States constitution does not prohibit torture as such. It bans cruel and unusual punishment, so the bomber could not be drawn and quartered, or burned at the stake, even if the bomb went off. And it bans self-incrimination by compulsion, so anything the bomber said could not then be used in trying them. But I'm not sure it would be illegal to compel them to reveal the bomb's location, if they were thereafter immune to prosecution based on what they revealed.
Whether that's a good policy, and whether it's compatible with libertarianism, could be questioned. But it seems to be a possible position and one that merits examination.