What do people think of the “Trump Humiliated By Health Care Failure” and “Health Care Rejection Shows Trump Is Already Lame Duck” and “Paul Ryan: Worst Speaker Of All Time?” discourse?

Most people I trust seem to think the health care bill was crap. Blaming people for writing a crappy health care bill seems fair enough.

But there seems to be more of an element of picking on them for being too weak to pass the bill, as if now they’re losers and we can never respect them again.

Can we just say something like “Elected officials should propose bills that they and their constituents want, give the rest of the country a chance to weigh in, and if the rest of the country says no, that means democracy is working and they should come back with something better”?

Like, this is complicated because I don’t want Republicans to pass a health care bill right now. But if this were actually important legislation, I would want the government to say “Good thing the American people made their voices heard,” roll up their sleeves, and then write a better bill.

Whereas now it seems like the incentive is to never propose anything that doesn’t have a 100% chance of getting passed the first time. And the other incentive is to desperately try to steamroll your legislation over everyone’s opposition and never admit you’re wrong, because if it fails (even for good reason) everyone will make fun of you.

Or am I missing something important here?

One of the most fun parts of writing Unsong is seeing things come together that I didn’t intend. And so far the most impressive such “coincidence” has been Malia Ngo’s backstory. I usually don’t like revealing too much of where I’m coming from, but this one is too good not to share.

(spoilers ahead for Chapter 65)

Keep reading

Today I learned: Ten-year-old Ayn Rand was best-friends-forever with Vladimir Nabokov’s little sister, and they would meet at Nabokov’s mansion and have adorable ten-year-old-girl political debates with each other.

My latest post was linked from a couple of big blogs and news sources, apparently copying from each other, with the quote/summary:

Slate Star Codex: “The problem is that there’s some weird tribe of fact-immune troglodytes out there, going around refusing vaccines and voting for Brexit, and the rest of us have to figure out what to do about them.“

(example)

That’s the opposite of my argument. I’m using it as a straw man in order to knock it down. I don’t understand how people could quote that and then attribute it to me with no further explanation. This happens every time I try to deal with a controversy responsibly. People take the most inflammatory thing in the post, even if it’s the opposite of what I believe, and try to convince everyone it’s my opinion. I don’t know if this is some sort of passive-aggressive campaign against me, or some sort of terrible law of media dynamics, but it’s so annoying.

Maybe this is completely obvious to everyone else and I’m totally crazy, but a question:

William Blake in one of his letters described the sun as appearing about the size of “a guinea”. From this description I assumed a guinea was about the size of a quarter - and checking Wikipedia, I was right. The sun just objectively appears quarter-sized. If someone asked me to draw the sun exactly the size it appeared on a piece of paper, I would draw a circle about the size of a quarter. And if I heard someone say the sun looked the size of a pinhead, or the sun looked the size of one of those really big Eisenhower dollars, or the sun looked the size of one of those circular coasters you get for drinks at a restaurant, I would assume they were aliens talking about a different sun.

I don’t understand this. We’re obviously not talking about its real size, since that’s hundreds of thousands of miles across. But what does it mean for its apparent size to be the size of a quarter? A quarter has a different apparent size if it’s held right up to your eyes versus seen on a table all the way across the room. A quarter X feet away from me is the same apparent size as an Eisenhower dollar Y feet away from (where Y is further than X). So how is the sun’s apparent size equal to one, but not the other?

Remember that post discussing signs that Trump might be a time traveler?

A few days ago: Trump said we needed to be more concerned about Muslim immigrants because of “what’s happening in Sweden right now”. Everyone made fun of him because nothing was, in fact, happening in Sweden at the time.

Today: Muslim immigrants riot in Stockholm, set cars on fire.

The moral of the story is: if you value your life, get out of Bowling Green, Kentucky right now.