Reasons to Hate

Started to post this to a friend, then I decided maybe it wasn't really relevant to what she was going through, and I was trying to delete the text I'd typed and then I hit a wrong key and posted the beginning of the post, and since she might have gotten a response notice and see the weird beginning before it got deleted, and then wonder where it went, and, ..., well, anyway, this might not be relevant.

And I don't remember who I've already told this about me or not.

When I was seven going on eight, I found myself facing a decision whether to be baptized or not.

I thought I was already in the enemy camp about church. I was already working out some of the standard concepts of atheism, some of the apparent contradictions, the old problem of evil and such; and I was already seeing lots of hypocrisy at church. I had already decided I didn't like the way God was doing things, and because of that I thought I was going to not believe in Him. Out of spite, by the way, because I still remembered Him. 

My dad told me I couldn't fight from the outside, but I wasn't sure i wanted to fight the bad stuff going on at church. I was thinking I would just rather to do other things.

My mom suggested that I work out my ideas, write them down, and we could discuss my alternate ideas for how the world ought to operate. My mom later told me she doesn't remember telling me this. But I took the idea seriously, even though I didn't actually start writing. I just started thinking the arguments through. Including the problem of evil.

Both of my parents told me that baptism was ultimately my decision -- timing, or whether to get baptized at all.

While I was working out my ideas for how the world should be run, I kept finding myself coming to conclusions that matched, not what I (thought I) was being taught in Sunday School or Primary, but what I was finding in the scriptures. I'm not claiming to be a scriptorian at eight. I just learned how to use the concordance and index.

It would be several years later that I made the connection to prayer, but I was essentially talking with God about the hypocrisy, and about who writes the rules and who writes the real rules, and about other such things.

God impressed on me at that time, that other people's hypocrisies were not my problem, and not my responsibilities. God also impressed on me that the hypocrites at church were all converts from somewhere (Even the life-long members have to be converted at some point.), working from what they understood, trying to prepare and teach lessons while they were themselves trying to make time to study what they were supposed to teach, while they were at the same time trying to pay rent, put food on the table, get the kids to school, do the laundry, keep the house clean, etc. And that I really should give them a break.

Yeah, lay clergy has a down side. The only thing worse is professional clergy. I figured that out why that is, as well.

The lying spirit was also working on me at the same time, still telling me that God was a bully for making life so hard for so many people and such. Oh, best not to dwell on what the lying spirit was saying, but I probably should note, -- I don't remember who all I have mentioned this to before -- that I had been groomed before I was five by friends of the family (neighbors, the family of my "best buddy", who were not members of the church) into queer and bisexual points of view, behaviors, and ways of thinking, and groomed to sexual fantasy. I had put the bi behaviors on hold by the time I was seven, but I was actively closet queer.

I hadn't fully formed my political ideas at eight, of course, but I was already reading science fiction that the teachers thought was middle school level, and that included the usual progressive/liberal authors. I was definitely leaning towards communist and democratic/socialist ideologies.

We had friends of the family who had runs-in with INS (back when it was INS). I had very negative opinions of laws limiting immigration. Also, the idea of bringing people into the US to teach them how to be free was a very attractive idea to me. Still is, to a certain extent.

This is not really a change in subject, but I have always struggled with budget issues and with deadlines. So much of the evil in the world has always seemed to me to derive from artificial (pseudo-Malthusian) assumptions of limits.

I'm rambling.

There is much to hate in this world, limits, particularly artificial limits being among the big ones.

But I spent the latter half of my third decade in this world essentially shoving all the limits aside and postponing them so I could do some fundamental research in computer science. My parents were kind enough to give me a place to live in my grandfather's house and enough money to get my own food.

Lack of limits allowed me to explore the need for limits and other such esoteria -- including reading scriptures several hours a day sometimes. It was useful in many ways, even if I was not able to do what Linus Thorvalds or Theo de Raadt did. 

But the lack of limits was actually the reason I was unable to do what Linus Thorvalds or Theo de Raadt did. No boundaries to my research meant I had no reason to get my feet on anything solid. I did learn some things that were useful to me, but I have never been able to turn what I learned to the sort of profit that would pay my rent.

Limits are important. 

My sister lived there as well, and we had room for some of our newly married cousins to have their own apartments at really good rent while they got their feet under them. One of the couples, the husband was a not-fully-documented alien and the wife was a foster daughter of one of our cousins. Really nice couple, and the cheap rent allowed them to get on their feet and move forward.

For a number of reasons, I am not natively inclined to be happy about the idea of kicking people out of the country just because they failed to successfully complete some paperwork. 

Nor am I naturally inclined to try to tell people how they have to deal with their sexuality. (If they ask and I think I can help, I may make some suggestions from my own experience, but I do not care to dictate to people about their sexuality/gender)

But there are limits that have been crossed in both immigration and in the gender wars.

Too many of the immigrants have been too willing to fail to respect basic boundaries -- too willing to appropriate anything that is not tied down. Too many are here to move and deal drugs. Too many are destabilizing factors like the guy who stabbed Iryna Zarutska. Trying to deal with them requires ICE to present a show of force, and it does require them to forcibly detain some people. 

I'm not going to argue motivations, but the liberal/Democrat insistence on de-funding ICE is making it triply difficult to take care of people in custody. It leaves ICE with the dilemma of deciding whether to fight judges who release guys like Iryna's attacker back to the streets, because if they waste time and legal fees trying to keep criminals from being released back on the streets, that's fewer resources with which to take proper care of the people they have in custody.

I'm not going to argue here that the stories about wormy food are false, even though I think i have plenty of evidence that they are mostly less than true. There will be cases when the resources are not enough to take proper care of everyone. 

But fighting over funding will increase the number of such cases.

Yeah, if we could figure out who is safe to release back into society immediately, we could release them immediately and go after more real criminals, but the courts that should be helping figure that out are being hamstrung by people who don't have even less information than the courts and ICE. And some of the courts that should be helping are deliberately hindering.

Most of the people, even the MAGA people, who want the illegal immigrants out of the country, will be plenty happy to just get the criminals out as much as possible.

Concerning the anti-trans movement, please understand that allowing self-id gives the worst sort of men license to use self-id in ways that I sure didn't intend when I used to say, let people self-identify. 

And I hope that you don't intend to give such men such license. 

I did used to say that. I did used to assume that biological men who thought they were women would not be inclined to harm women. Assuming that they are sincere in believing themselves to be women, they should be motivated to refrain from harming women or causing women to fear.

Some trans women are, indeed careful to avoid using their trans-ness to intimidate people around them.

But it turns out that many are so focused on their right to find happiness in their own way that they don't seem to care whether people around them are intimidated or harmed. 

You may have heard that it's all fake news, but I have seen long lists of names of men in prison for violent crimes, including sexual violence, who have self-identified themselves into women's prisons, and done serious violence to their cell mates there. This includes resulting in roommate pregnancy -- rape, and often violent rape. I've seen the lists, I've looked up some of the news reports that the names are taken from. 

I can't conclude that the lists are fiction.

I have also participated in discussions among ostensibly alpha male men -- military officers, police officers, top-level business management -- who have decided to transition, and in somewhat overlapping groups where wives of such men try to help each other figure out what to do next.

A common thread in these discussions is that the men are addicted to pornography. Somehow, that addiction doesn't magically go away when they transition. Maybe in a few cases it gets better, but It often gets worse.

I don't have the right, I suppose, to judge, but it is apparent to me, in watching these discussions, that the alpha male men who are transitioning have never been quite able to learn how to earn a woman's real trust, and therefore have never known real intimacy. Surface intimacy, yeah, but not the deep kind humans need. 

That's why they have turned to pornography, which just exacerbates the problems. And now we have this idea of self-identifying, and the men are thinking, this looks like a good short-cut to the intimacy that they haven't been able to find.

But it does not lead to intimacy. Of course it doesn't. 

You can't force intimacy. When people are forced, they quickly build up walls to protect themselves, and those very walls prevent the intimacy they are reaching  for.

It tears marriages apart. Because self-identifying doesn't really magically make the men understand that women think differently from men, and that even alpha males have to let what happens happen. 

Among other such preconceptions that have been the actual source of the problems. We have this thing, this assumption, that if God is good, power must be right.

No, it's not right to make things harder for people than they have to be.

But trying too hard to make things easier sometimes backfires spectacularly. Often backfires. Sometimes spectacularly. And that is basically where we are as a society right now.

Hate.

Hate takes energy.

Sometimes, you need hate to motivate you to do things that are hard.

But hate usually takes resources away from better things that we could be doing.

I could, when I was a kid, have gotten stuck on hating the hypocrisy at church. I might have done better to have done more hating the hypocrisy, enough to get me to find ways and times to talk somewhat privately with the hypocrites and try to help them overcome their hypocrisies.

But God told me to focus first on getting past my own hypocrisies.

It was easy enough to think I would behave generously in a situation that I didn't know how to get myself into, but I needed to get myself into those situations before I could say for sure what I would really do. Otherwise, my liberal theories were hypocritical.

Sometimes I've hated God because the puzzles They gave me were just too difficult. I think you know how that ends?

Well, okay, it never ends the same, because each time is different. Except that God keeps trying to give you the best that God can give you. 

In my patriarchal blessing, God told me not to focus on the things I have done wrong. Lately I've been doing what looks, from the outside, like exactly that. I've been working on alternative reality fiction where a fictional version of myself makes all the "right" decisions and finds himself in real trouble because of it. World-destroying trouble. (The parts that I've published in my blognovel blog hasn't gotten anywhere close to there yet, just for the record.)

In the process of writing these stories, I find that many of the things I want to think I did wrong were not as wrong as I want to think they were.

Hate. Constructive hate can be love.

Anyway, I find that if I focus more on loving the people around me who need loved, God will help me find ways to hate constructively those who need to be hated constructively.

Fallout from Liberty Justice v. Trump

If I had millions of dollars to burn on activist suits, I would sue the Supreme Court to clarify its ruling in Liberty Justice (VOS Solutions) v. Trump and explain why the ruling does not illegally conflate taxes which apply internally with tariffs, which apply at borders, and explain how taxes are not illegally separated from other regulatory tools in the ruling.

If taxes are not regulatory in function, then all of the "federal" welfare regulation enabled by the income tax should be declared null and void, and the 16th Amendment itself should be declared non-functional, because it requires breaking parts of the Constitution that are not addressed in the Amendment. And the power to tax individuals should be returned to the individual states or below.

I personally don't like Congress giving the president powers like this, but Congress did. 

The decision, it it is valid, should limit itself to suspending further application of the law in question until Congress can fix it by removing the supposed ambiguity.

That would eliminate the post-facto legislative effects that the decision in its present form seems to incur.

It is not the responsibility of the courts to rewrite law.

Looking at Taxing the Ultra-RIch

I am not in favor of having lots of ultra-rich people around. Really, once you've got enough in the bank to retire twenty times over, I think you should -- and get out of the way of others who haven't gotten there yet. 

That aside, which is more deserving of being taxed:

(1) A man whose net worth is a trillion dollars, but actual disposable income is only a million a year, but operates ten or so companies employing 50,000 people?

(2) A man whose net worth is only a hundred million, but whose disposable income is only a million a year, a significant portion of which is made through investments that he made after being elected to or appointed to some political office some twenty years ago?

(2A) Does it make a difference if person (2) persistently votes to be liberal with tax money, but not his own?

For the record, this hypothetical does not match anyone in particular.

To make this a little more concrete, say the proposed tax is a one-shot 5% net worth tax.

Let's calculate the taxes on (1):

5% of $1,000,000,000 would be fifty million dollars.

Is it clear that he doesn't have enough disposable income to pay that? 

He would have to sell off a bunch of stock, likely resulting in companies being taken over in hostile transactions, to be drained dry for somebody else's profit, before being shut down. 

Now, let's calculate the taxes on (2):

5% of 100,000,000 is five million dollars. 

Is it clear that he also doesn't have enough disposable income to pay that with a year's wages?

He would also have to sell off some stock.

But that stock isn't likely to be the controlling stock for some company that employs thousands of people.

It would still make waves in the stock market. 

In point of fact, with a whole bunch of rich people being put in the position of having to sell off, short-selling investors are going to push the prices down, punishing both (1) and (2), as well as the market in general.

But the real answer is that we don't have enough information to know which of the above is more worthy of being taxed, unless our answer is that the punishment to the market indicates that neither of them should be suddenly hit by a tax, and that five percent sounds small but isn't.

(2) may need to be kicked out of office. Or not. Depends on lots of things.

(1) may need to retire and turn things over to a new generation. Or not. Depends on lots of things.

The other real answer is that taxes are stupid. We should not be depending on the government to do our good deeds for us.

FACE (the Access Act) and What It Says about Sex and Religion

The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act (FACE) is nominally about making it a crime to use force or intimidation to block access to abortion clinics.

Looking at the FACE act, it would be easy to assume and conclude that the inclusion of protections for places of worship similar to those provided for women trying to access abortion clinics was just a matter of a bargain, to get votes from Congresscritters who otherwise would oppose it.

I'm going to suggest that it actually points out a rather odd connection that we continually sweep under the rug:

For a large part of the human race, sex is at least a significant part of their religion. 

For many, sex is their sacrament and their god.

There is a reason for this.

Sexual stimulation is one of the most direct means of stimulating a lot of the "feel-good hormones". Those hormones have sometimes been compared to drugs, and it is not being excessive to note that their effects can be as powerful as some of the most powerful drugs known. 

(There is good biological reason for this, as well.)

Religion is another of those most direct means of stimulating those feel-good hormones. 

What are some other effective means of stimulating those feel-good hormones?

• Daydreaming, philosophy, ... 
• Also, any work that clearly produces something of value -- which includes acts of service, ...

 Religion and sex tend to be the nearly universal quick and easy methods, however.

Where Does Congress Come Up with Names Like FINCEN, FBAR, and ICE, and Why?

No. Seriously.

If you want me to take the enforcement of financial law and the punishment of financial crimes seriously, does naming the financial criminal law enforcement network "FinCEN" make sense?

(That's FINancial Crimes Enforcement Network.)

Am I the only person in the world who's going to read that "finkin"? 

"Fin-sen" doesn't really make sense, since the "C" in "crimes" is hard.

And if you want me to take my legal responsibility of reporting my foreign bank accounts to the US government seriously, does naming the report "FBAR" make sense?

(And that is Foreign Bank Accounts Report.)

I'm pretty sure the first time you saw FBAR, your brain wanted to insert the "U" between "F" and "B". 

Yeah, I tend to lean to the idea that the current US government is Fouled Up Beyond All Recognition. Trump is a loose cannon, but we need a loose cannon right now, particularly after the total mess of the Biden non-administration.

But Congress is digging in their heels.

Another stupid acronym -- ICE.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Okay, it sort of makes sense, until you realize that the natural tendency to associate freedom of movement with freedom itself tends to give the Immigrations department a bad image no matter what you call it. 

So something nondescript like INS (Immigration and Naturalization Services) was actually a good name, in spite of the minor irritant of the sometimes situational irony in the word "service". 

ICE, on the other hand, is just not going to inspire anything but contempt. Or perhaps temporary comic-book admiration, followed by contempt. 

Not respect.

Not confidence.

Not cooperation, ultimately. 

What is it with the government using such names? Are they trying to inspire contempt and worse?

When you read the laws behind these, the laws themselves are so confusing as to  undermine any confidence in the law that had been left beyound

I think there are, in fact, some members of our government -- no, many members of our government -- who intend to do exactly that, intend to destroy American confidence in their government, so that there will be a revolution, in the which they think there will be a vacuum that they can step into.

Before, we assume, the hundred thousand other wannabee little Napoleons can shove into the gap. 

It's hard for me to think of any other reason for such naming.

Now, before you go blaming Trump for this, it all happened before he even started talking about running for president. 

The people to blame for this have been around for a while, a lot longer than the current administration. Many of them would have been in Congress about the time of the original "Patriot Act". They would be the same people who gave you plenty of other reasons to be confused about what the role of government is or should be.

We are being played. 

SNAP MUST BE TRUMP's FAULT!!!

I am given to understand that, during Trump's first term, he actually used the allocated emergency funds during a government shutdown, considering it an unforeseen emergency. But using them left some funds available for other emergencies that time.

During the Biden administration, SNAP enrollment skyrocketed. The reasons for that can be set aside for the moment, but the emergency allocation did not match the enrollment. Enrollment significantly outstripped the allocations.

The numbers I hear are USD 4.7 billion in the funds, and just a month's worth of SNAP is going to be more than USD 8 billion.

Remember that Democrats started off October block-voting against a simple budget continuation bill that would have allowed SNAP and basically all the government to continue to function while Congress continued haggling over the details. The required threshold for the continuing resolution was 60 YES. Or 61, I'm not clear which.

All but 1 Republican Senators voted YES. All but 1 Democrat Senators voted NO.

YES got the majority, but, at 55 to 45, it was not enough to pass it.

This has been the result a total of 14 times over October. 14 times, the Democrats voted against continuing things essentially as they had been at the beginning of October. I'll let you ask them why.

This is not an unforeseen or unplanned emergency, and that was the question Trump was waiting on.

I am given to understand that Trump has, in fact, authorized using what funds there are as a stop-gap, but it's only enough to last a couple of weeks. And there is nothing to replace it. We're going to be facing the same question again, with no emergency funds, in two weeks.

And the continuing resolution has expired, so it's back to the House.

Are Capitalists Thieves?

Mamdani is apparently saying

Taxation isn't theft, capitalism is!!

Well, he's got a sort of point. Too many capitalists are not paying their workers what they are worth.

Setting aside the concept of paying workers more than they are worth, which is a management concept that bears exploration -- 

When a business owner refuses to pay his employers what they are worth, we can say he gets what he pays for.

Or we can say he doesn't get what he doesn't pay for.

Or we can say he often doesn't (even) get what he pays for.

But we have trouble saying he gets what he doesn't pay for.

If he does get what he doesn't pay for, it's only temporary, and he eventually pays the price for it. How far down the road it is before he pays the price determines how many others have to pay, too.

The trouble with applying that analysis to Mamdani's claim that capitalists are thieves is that we know some capitalists are thieves. Not all, but we do know there are some stupid capitalists who seem to enjoy polluting the very marketplace where they make their money.

But we also know all socialists are thieves.