AMA (YYW)

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@coal
Will you be surprised if this thread reaches 1000 posts?

7 days later

Tejretics
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@coal
Hey, just in case you needed a reminder, post #504.

No hurry or anything.
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@coal
Also, thoughts on Pete Buttigieg?
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@coal
Do you like coal?
coal
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I see there are many questions.... I'll answer them in time.  Meanwhile, keep asking away. 
coal
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@Earth
>Thoughts on incels?

I'm tired tonight so this is going to be a stream of consciousness response.  Hopefully, it makes sense.  

Before I give you my thoughts on incels, I want to be clear on what we are talking about when I say "incel".  The term as it is used to describe boys and men who cannot find members of the opposite sex (as the overwhelming majority of them are heterosexual) with whom to engage in sexual relations.  So, they're usually horny teenage boys and sexually frustrated young adult males who don't have a lot of, or any, romantic prospects.  There's a pretty wide spread between them in terms of their attitudes towards women, but they range from vaguely sexist to outrightly anti-woman, if not anti-human.     

Overall, a person who self identifies as an incel is going to have problems, though; be it socially, romantically, interpersonally, economically, and any and all of the foregoing and other problems.  In passing, I've joked before that the only boys who grow up to become incels are the ones who weren't spanked enough as children, because they grew up thinking that they were due something from the world in general and women in particular that they simply aren't owed. That's not good.  More generally, there are a couple of different pathologies that tend to manifest with incels.  They're usually highly self-absorbed, they usually were not properly or meaningfully socialized as young children or teenagers.  They're usually socially outcast from their peers.  Part of the problem with the internet is that it has enabled these similarly situated boys/men to connect with each other, and then develop something approximating a philosophy of what you might call "sexual entitlement", whereby they develop wildly idiotic ideas about what relationships ought to be, how women ought to be subservient to men, or any number of other stupid things. 

Your typical incel at 16 is going to be the kid who goes to school, sits alone at lunch, has maybe three friends but rarely hangs out with them, plays a lot of online video games, has very little social engagement outside of school, is not meaningfully involved in extra curricular activities, does not play sports, and probably is going to get mediocre grades or worse.  He's got serious self confidence issues, that underlie everything he does.  This is the kind of kid who got started on a bad path from an early age, most likely.  It could be that his mother was distant, or maybe his dad was abusive.  Maybe his dad walked out and the mother's boyfriend hit him a few too many times, or it could be that the parents were never around and never involved themselves in his life; provided no direction, and generally no guidance.  There are any number of factors, but their common denominator is "not good".  By this point, however conceited or arrogant this kid may be, he's probably not beyond redemption, and he probably won't be beyond redemption until he's about 23-25.  

Your typical incel at 23-25 is a much tougher nut to crack.  This is the guy who either did not attend college, or attends college and has never been able to "score" with a girl; not even always because he's not physically attractive enough, but because more commonly than not he never had the self confidence to ask a girl out, he never formed a meaningful or committed relationship with a girl and now that he's an adult he is seriously emotionally and sexually less mature than most of his peers.  He likely has the attitudes and mannerisms of what you'd expect from a fairly immature 17 year old, and by now he has a seriously negative view of all women.  But, the reason he's got this anti-female bias is likely to be a lot less to do with women, generally, than with his own subconscious awareness of the fact that he wasn't "man" enough to even ask a girl out.  So that sense of shame, being projected onto women in general, is how we get to your typical 23-25 year old incel. There is still some hope of unfucking a 23-25 year old incel, but not much.

After 25, there's almost no hope, because by then they've developed an ideology around their experiences and an identity to match it. 

Now, there are more forces in play than just individual pathologies; the social and environmental conditions which in many respects cause those pathologies are very much a part of this picture as well, and ignoring them would be at the peril of anyone who wanted to understand who incels are and why it is that they are what they are.  The emphasis on girls' achievement to the exclusion of any interest being placed on boys advancement, the emphsis on integrating girls into historically boys' activities, and the absence of similar efforts to integrate boys into girls activities, from elementary school through college all come into play.  The reason is because when girls compete with boys on the same level, boys stop playing the game.  Good or bad, when girls and boys are on the same playing field, boys stop showing up.  That's why women outnumber men in colleges by 3:2 and why women outnumber men in grad school by 2:1.  

If you conceptualize a scale of harms of the breakdown in gender roles, not all boys are equally harmed and so there's a scale from least harmed to most harmed.  At the least harmed would be the boys who get socialized, who are meaningfully engaged, and who have good and committed parents.  They can sort themselves out and navigate through the world.  Closer to the pole of "most harmed", you find incels.  That is not to imply that women's rights have caused incels.  But it is to say that the reworking of gender roles in the society has changed how those most vulnerable to the effects of that change find their place in society.
KingLaddy01
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@Tejretics
Thoughts on Pete Buttigieg 

I asked that
Vader
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@KingLaddy01
hey you're back. sad you left the discord team.

are replacement trial mod faked his suicide, #BringBackLaddy

also RM made some stupid shit up about a keto diet
KingLaddy01
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hey you're back. sad you left the discord team.

Not really. This site and the discord has very little to offer since they are obviously contingent on user activity. 

#BringBackLaddy

Evidently, a select few could not contain their menstrual cycles over the slightest indication/misinterpretation of negative thoughts coming their way, so I have no intentions of recommitting to this community. I also was a corruptevilracistfuckwitnazibastardcocksuckingcunt with little to nobody to rule as a discord mod so I have lost my part here. 






coal
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@Tejretics
>Why did you prefer Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election? Would appreciate a detailed answer (since you asked to specify whether I wanted you to expand on anything), thanks.

I preferred Bernie to Hillary in 2016 because Bernie was moving the ball forward on universal health care, which is an issue I care deeply about.  That, student loan forgiveness, and improving the social safety net are my three primary domestic policy concerns.  They are not my only concerns, but they are my primary concerns.  

Hillary Clinton did not have solutions to health care, and she did not have a reasonable way to solve many of the social safety net issues that the country faces.  What I expected from her was more or less what we got in the 1990s, which was very little for people and a whole lot for corporations.  After all, the Clinton era of Wall Street deregulation is almost wholly to blame for what happened in 2008.  

Worse, Clinton era labor market deregulation exacerbated the continual decline of the American middle class by creating the potential for "permanently temporary work".  It eroded many of the regulatory safeguards which had been in place to prevent worker exploitation since the 1930s, and then which were later instituted in the 1960s and 70s.  

Where I agree with Clinton is on foreign policy, which largely I expect Bernie Sanders would have agreed to if he was elected.  I knew that Bernie obviously wasn't going to get elected, but voting for Clinton in the primary wasn't going to move the ball forward on the domestic issues which were at the forefront of my concern then, and remain there now.

Tangentially, I would not support Bernie in 2020.  I do not like some of the positions he has taken on numerous issues, and there are other, better candidates who I would rather see elected than him.  Namely, Kamila Harris.  I'll vote in 2020 as I did in 2016 for the eventual Democratic nominee, but my preference for that would be Harris.  She is bar none the best in the field.

Pete Buddigeg is great too, but Harris is better. 

>Why do you support single-payer healthcare in the United States? I’m uncertain, but leaning against it at the moment.

The economics of privatized health insurance make no sense to any reasonable, rational person; because of the fact that preventative diseases and medical conditions that manifest later in life represent the overwhelming majority of costs incurred by Medicare once people become eligible for it when they turn 65.  

We must distinguish, however, between privatized health care and private health insurance.  Those are not the same thing. No one is saying that we should nationalize hospitals, doctors, and the like; just as no one is suggesting that we should abolish private health insurance companies.  However, there are compelling reasons for the latter (though not the former).  

I have more to say about this which I may do at a later time. 

>Why do you prefer a UBI to a negative income tax?

I'll address this later. 

Earth
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@coal
Thoughts on LASIK?
coal
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@Earth
I will probably get it one day. 

coal
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More questions are encouraged. 
KingLaddy01
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@coal
Thoughts on Tik Tok?

What is the greatest indicator of economic health? 

What is it that you like about being a lawyer, and for how long did you have the passion for law? 



Earth
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@coal
Thoughts on Venezuela?
TheRealNihilist
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@coal
Can you tell me how many days you think you have left in your life?

ethan
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@coal
Is the death penalty constitutional?

7 days later

coal
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I will get to all of these.  Meanwhile, more questions are encouraged!
Deb-8-a-bull
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@coal
Do you think a horse knows if it won a race?
Earth
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@coal
Do you talk to animals?

11 days later

SamStevens
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@coal
Do you believe in free will, the doctrine that the conduct of human beings expresses personal choice and is not simply determined by physical or divine forces?
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@SamStevens
If he does, it wasn't his choice to believe in it (proving the anti-free-will side true no matter what).

28 days later

Snoopy
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@coal
Why do the democratic and republican candidates seem increasingly polarized in comparison to the political climate before Barack Obama took office, particularly on societal topics, or the relationship of the people with their government? 
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@coal
Trump has less than 6 months before he is impeached, and once that happens the neocons will be back in power. 

Quote from about 6 months ago. Further thoughts?

11 days later

Snoopy
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@coal
What kind of healthcare solutions would you like to see in the United States?
Wylted
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What are your thoughts on Jordan Peterson. Don't know if this will be taken as an insult but you guys seem similar in a lot (not most or all neccesarily) ways. 







Club
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what's yyw

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@coal
I'd like to know if you have any opinions in mind on our current electoral system in the United States.  I believe Bernie Sanders is not a democrat, but he garners substantial support from factions with a limited pull in the democratic party.  He should have been allowed a fair shot to present his platform in the presidential debates. 
coal
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>Thoughts on Tik Tok?

It seems like a Vine knockoff, which is to say I have a low opinion of it.  The memes from there have been amusing, but no more amusing than what was on Vine.  

Overall, this seems to be one more addition to the collective destruction of our youth. 

>What is the greatest indicator of economic health? 

At what level of analysis?  As a society, what you want to see is the absence of a concentration of capital at the upper levels of economic wealth.  You want to avoid situations where capital returns are greater than the rate of inflation.  You want to see low unemployment and low under employment.  You want to have a maximum of about 5-10% of the labor force with part time work.  You want to see average savings at a level of at least 5% of annual income.  Stuff like that would be a good place to start. 

>What is it that you like about being a lawyer, and for how long did you have the passion for law? 


I like that I have a lot of autonomy in what I do, that I work in an office setting that has relatively little bullshit involved, and that I don't have a lot of oversight.  I like that the people I work with are fairly agreeable, and most of them are good people or at least seem to be while at work.

I like the competitive aspects of litigation, and especially the strategic and tactical considerations involved at every level of the game.  I see what I do very much as a game, that I get to play with other people who may not like the game as much as I do.  That makes winning the game better for me.

There are so many levels of strategy involved in what I do, from broad-based strategies for how I want the facts to unfold, the order in which I want facts to be disclosed, all the way down to how I walk in and present myself in a room.  

Here's an example: 

I represented a company about a year ago that was engaged in some really fucked up shit.  The company had probably defrauded a lot of people, and there was some evidence out there which could have been interpreted as proof of that misconduct.  But, there wasn't only one kind of fraud... there was a lot of different kinds of fraud, misrepresentation, and general mischief.  The plaintiff's attorneys were coming at us with the force of armies, and there were multiple classes of plaintiffs involved.  

I had two strategies, and both of these were my ideas.  The first strategy was to appear to comply in good faith with court orders with respect to class discovery, and we did that; but only with information that would have made it harder for the multivariate classes of what seemed to be similarly situated consumers to satisfy the procedural requirements for what is called "class certification".  However, I gave them a TON of documents.  It took their army of associates a while to get through them, if they even bothered.  

The typical asshole-defense attorney thing to do is to bury the smoking gun among a mountain of irrelevancy.  I didn't do that, mostly was because there were about thirty smoking guns.  So, I picked the least-smoking of the smoking guns, and the second-least smoking, of the smoking guns, and turned it over to the other side.  Then, we limited discovery to certification only on those issues, while I was selectively withholding more information that I'm fairly sure would have caused the plaintiff's to re-evaluate their strategy.  Then, we released more documents that by then had set the baseline of expectation with regard to overall litigation success.  I gave them what they wanted, but the other side only saw a fraction of what was out there. The plaintiffs believed this, because I made them work to figure this strategy out.  I sent them on a wild goose chase while I could keep from them that which was most damaging to my client.  Classic misdirection.

The second aspect regarded settlement.  We were engaged in "good faith" (lol) settlement negotiations the entire time that the games I described above were going on.  I acted like a beaten animal when we were talking global settlement for all classes in mediation, and gave the plaintiff's attorneys (idiots) the appearance of making it seem like there were massive conflicts between the general counsel and this team I was on, even to the point where the partner and I faked an argument on the phone (at elevated vocal levels) outside the central conference room where everyone was meeting up.  It was all a show.  

We settled, under terms where the plaintiffs thought they put the screws to us  If the lawsuit had gone on, a post-certification settlement probably would have ended the company.  Instead, we kept the client, and this company stayed solvent (and the thousand or so people who worked there kept their jobs).  

coal
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@Earth
>Venezuela

Russian propagandists poisoned the well, with the disinformation strategy that Trump and company were staging a coup of Maduro with Juan Guaido.  This was obviously false, but it worked.  I am disgusted with how Trump handled the whole affair.