Ben Cates

I'm a web developer. I develop webs. He/him.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@rev_avocado "A republic, ma'am, if you can keep it"

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@Authw8 @opinonhaver I mean, part of the point of property taxes is to encourage people who own scarce assets to either do something economically useful with those assets or sell them to someone who will.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@revhowardarson It'd be nice to have some intellectual consistency. No, past participation in a military does not make you a combatant in that military's current operations, nor does who you voted for or where your tax money goes.

Apply that standard evenly and we might start to get somewhere.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@opinonhaver @ettingermentum Lots of folks from more extremist backgrounds too who haven't worked past the implicit premise that hardcore fundamentalism is the only strain of theology worthy of serious consideration.

[Sam 👁️ @SamtheNightOwl]

the real nuclear option re: the supreme court is to just say that marbury v madison is fake

we'd officially enter the cool zone after that

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@golikehellmachi It's mostly standard issue "RETVRN to tradition" fare just with folks who grew up in an urban, cosmopolitan, secular environment.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@GregPacknett @aklingus @zhandlen Do you believe the majority would have reached a substantively different ruling but for the existence of those two documents?

[Godspeed You! Woke Moralists @DrWallkick]

@merrittk it's genuinely wild to think that the natural state of things was what I grew up with in the late 90s and early 00s and the slow concentration into five websites was purely a speculative bubble that just ran out of time

[John Ganz @lionel_trolling]

yeah that’s the whole ballgame

[William B. Fuckley @opinonhaver]

dumb left wing ideas on crime come from miscalculating the relative weight of the often very complex political and policy tradeoffs involved, and dumb right wing ideas on crime come from being children who think action movies are real.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@golikehellmachi Well, not that much lower. It's kind of like a submarine: there's some depth past which it will rapidly and permanently cease to function. I don't know what the magic number is but I do know there aren't really any good ways to find out.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@thejb_stan Most of the actual children I know are pretty egalitarian. They don't really seem to have the maturity to internalize the misconception that everything is zero sum deeply enough to have built up a reflex that good things happening to strangers must somehow be bad for me.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@revhowardarson Murc's Law, international relations edition

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@essex7927 @PropterMalone Those two are not mutually exclusive...

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@yvonnezlam Feels like they had a lot of decisions that could've made sense in a different context.

Like, using an off the shelf video game controller as your primary input device is totally fine, now please tell me about your secondary and tertiary input devices.

[(((Matthew Lewis))) cults & consequences @mateosfo]

I've lived through 2 decades of Silicon Valley hype cycles, here's the pattern.

Things that are real (cloud computing, SaaS, biz process automation, health/biotech) fade into the background & become "quiet core" of tech economy, things that are fake (crypto, autonomous vehicles)

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@swolecialism Charitably, https://t.co/h5nHEW0Eoa.

The problem isn't that in principle some things are more important than personal corruption, the problem is that once someone's negatively polarized enough every election becomes a "vote for the crook: it's important" moment.

[Ben Cates @Ben_Cates]

@rev_avocado @opinonhaver He suffers from the all too common tragic flaw of believing that Democratic party messaging needs to be targeted at the median persuadable Twitter profile. Other than that he's fine.