Thiel has a Girardian worldview, at least in part.

Say what you want about Thiel, but Girard is one of the most influential Christian thinkers of the modern era.

>His supporters demand that he be treated with the same humanity that he denied others.

Speaking of the total post, no one could have written a much better refutation of the article's premise.

I missed that part of the Western Constitutions. It is likely missing because it is a false and self-serving axiom, as well as flirting with being the opposite of democracy. Mostly, it is totalitarian regimes that invoke education as being necessary for their citizens.

Is it only democracy and not a downward spiral when democracy moves in the direction that you prefer?

You might have to accept that democracy works, and that if nothing else democracy is the individual freedom to decide on what is true.

The second that you start restricting that freedom of information and individual decisions pertaining to it, impacting elections for example, you can no longer appeal to democracy.

Personally I think that more subjects are deceptive than either they or you likely know. But I'm not so debased as to call for restrictions on your information. You're free to believe in and seek out your deceptions, as a matter of democracy.

Perhaps fewer and fewer people believe let alone like to have your patter as their internal monologue.

Which amounts to an agreement to have your extremist / alarmist voice forever in their heads lest climate change leads to the H word. I think that I have that about right, if your post is to be believed.

>This is a really bad-faith reframing of the parent comment.

How so? Very respectfully, perhaps you should read with more care.

See here:

>those strips were even periodically reallocated to keep things fair.

Which stands alone as an argument for feudalist customs, but I also argue that it frames the rest as an argument-in-favor. Such as this, seemingly positively highlighting community "customary rights".

>In feudal Europe, land could only be “owned” by a lord, and even then it was bound up in obligations both to their superiors and to the peasants working it. There were all sorts of customary rights layered on top:

Critique my answer, but accusing a bad faith argument doesn't hold up.

No one who reads for comprehension would credibly interpret the post as anything but an argument for feudalist customs. To be generous: even if the over-arching intent possibly is to change modern legal customs via any necessary argument.

That may be, but highlighting feudalism is a morally perilous way to go about it.

I disagree with the perspective entirely, but if someone is going to advocate for it then they should find a less morally backwards method than highlighting the ostensible fairness of the feudal era.

Gaslighter

>Sometimes the riot happens because people whose humanity isn't being respected choose not to respect your property.

A psychopath's excuse to harm innocent people.

People who want to destroy property will always claim that their "humanity isn't being respected". Psychopaths commonly play the victim to justify harming people who have nothing to do with them.

>The neat thing is all 3 of those can be true at the same time.

Pseudo-intellectualism.

Moving on.

Perhaps they didn't riot.

Whereas we know that a lot of actual riots in the past six years weren't treated enough as such. Allowing the populations that they affected to be terrorized, sometimes over an extended period of time.

What a crazy tactic to switch blame from the City of LA's total failure, to prevent and stop the fire, to the environment.

Everyone knows that California is dry. Everyone knows that everything West of the Mississippi is dry. For how long? Much longer than industry has existed.

I'd consider it to be a failure of environmental advocacy to be so ham-fisted so as to drive people away from policy support because you can't fight the impulse to abuse the issue to absolve the guilty.

You can't bar anyone from cities. You can't bar them just like they can't bar you. It isn't policy that's driving anyone out. It's pricing, which is above the control of any one person or even group of people.

Some people will be forced out due to pricing. The local economy of every city is going to be unworkable at some income floor. The more expensive the city, the higher the floor.

If that floor is higher than what you make, it doesn't mean that no poor people live in SF. It just means that they feel poor even at a relatively higher income.

To illustrate, 80k per year is still a decent income in some towns. But it is definitely poor in NYC.

The SAT is weighted. If you are going to complain until it completely overwhelms anything else, then you're going to be in for a disappointment.

And if the goal is to get it to overwhelm everything else until mostly lesser advantaged kids are admitted, you're going to be more disappointed still because elite kids can be elite and hard to beat even just in terms of SAT scores.

Which is where the well rounded aspects of their profile come in.

When that's the case for public school admissions, they also get in. But admissions usually well knows what the competitiveness of their classes was in whatever public school they attended. All are not equal, as it goes. Complaining after having taken non-competitive academics isn't honest in the national discussion.

Less competitive but still competent wealthy students generally end up at a private liberal arts college.

> The big corruption of the process is when these qualified students are displaced by decisions that aren’t meritocratic.

You have no way of knowing that this happens often, and the PR and DEI incentives seem to be against it.

Last, a factor in all of this is college-by-college capacity for tuition assistance. At a certain point in admitting any class, tuition must be paid by a proportion of students. Endowment capacity differs from college to college, but it isn't helpful to act as if these colleges exist solely to educate every promising lower SES student who can't pay. "Promising" being a relative measurement.

I don't, because it doesn't matter what the authors of that paper assert / wishcast in regard to decades old admissions standards.

The only people that take virtually any social science paper seriously are people without science training. Or people with an agenda who are willing to overlook the fact that the so-called science is garbage.

There's no way that these authors were able to meaningfully statistically parse that elite school non-academic credentials / athletics are negatively correlated to outcomes in comparison to low income SAT only students. How you know is that they aren't even parsing the "three key factors" to arrive at their conclusion.

The other part of this that you are missing is that public school academic credentials and private school credentials are in no way 1:1.

As someone from a poor background I went to an elite prep school when the academic standards were still as high as ever, but attended a public college that was known for its academics. Prep school was much harder than college, and college was no cakewalk.

Good students, most of whom went Ivy and who were about 15-20% of my graduating class, had estimated IQs in the 140s and all were athletes. As the school had a sports participation requirement. Two sports per year until high school, at which point it dropped to at least one sport per year. I played three sports per year. The top students had estimated 150+ IQs, though it gets hard to estimate at that level. Also athletes.

You aren't dealing with dumb jocks in the Ivy league. You're dealing with hyper-smart, well-rounded leaders who deserve to be there. Because everything that they've done since kindergarten has made them impressive people by high school. And not just in the classroom.