Quantumfreakonomics
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Quantumfreakonomics
7hr ago
Slow news week. The current thing is still Graham Platner.
NYT: Several Women Who Dated Graham Platner Recall ‘Unsettling’ Behavior
That's right, the New York Times hunted down as many of Platner's ex-girlfriends as they could to dig up dirt on this guy. It would be an exaggeration to say that the entire article is irrelevant high school-tier personal gossip, but gee there sure is a lot of irrelevent personal gossip. The one anecdote with teeth comes from a woman active in Republican politics.
But she said he regularly grabbed her by the shoulders — sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car.
During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was “calm.” Eventually, Ms. Fifield said, she fell asleep and left the next morning.
“It hurt,” she said. But she added: “It didn’t cause an injury, it didn’t break my arm.”
There are a lot of ways one could interpret those paragraphs.
He had what she described as a “warrior ethos” and would fantasize about killing people he deemed a threat, she said. She said he told her that rape was about power.
It was something that stuck with her through the years, Ms. Fifield said.
“He said this a lot: If anybody ever broke in here, I would rape them,” she recalled, saying that he added that it would not be in “a sexual way, not in a gay way.”
“He was like, I would rape them to show them that I’m dominant,” she said.
Ladies, never ask your man what he would do to a home invader. Unless you're into that.
This article confirms my earlier suspicion that Platner is getting the kind of hostile media coverage usually reserved for Republicans. The elephant in the room is that this is because Platner likes Nazi imagery (it is beyond serious dispute at this point that he knew for years it was a totenkopf) and dislikes the state of Israel. I am 90% sure that both of the authors are Jewish. It feels icky to break out the calipers for this (though I am not basing my assessment solely on their names and faces. I was able to find old articles linking them to synagogues), but I really do think it is relevant.
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
I know that, but why? Does Britain allocate immigration slots by lottery? Is it just whoever gets on a British Airways flight in Mumbai? Did they consider a merit system and decide against it, or did the issue never come up at all?
Quantumfreakonomics
1d ago
Violent crime committed by Indians in the United States is almost unheard of (even the people who hate Indians only ever accuse them of fraud or reckless driving). I know that the difference with the UK is almost certainly due to differing selection effects, but what specific policies cause that?
I don’t think we are ever getting an immigration moratorium, so that makes it vital to ensure that we never end up with European-style immigration to the United States. The first step to that is figuring out what European-style immigration even is.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Argentina is out of range of most land-based balistic missles from countries other than the United States (I think Russia has some brand new models that can do it.) There's a lot of ocean where a balistic-missile submarine would be able to hit both Argentina and the United States from a single position, but I don't think anyone expects an isolated submarine crew to faithfully execute Plan Exterminate Human Civilization.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
The thought was prompted by seeing public figures on Twitter who everyone here knows posting their new arrivals and being oddly consumed by the thought that I don't even know if it's their real child.
I figure that I ought to sort this out before I find myself in such a situation IRL.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
It hits differently when it’s your oil futures that get rugpulled by Axios.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
Argentina is one of the best places to be if the world goes to shit. There are no nuclear targets in South America. Prevailing wind patterns would prevent significant fallout from crossing the equator. Argentina has better demographics than Brazil and more space than Chile or miscellaneous Southern Hemisphere island nations.
Always good to be one step ahead.
Quantumfreakonomics
2d ago
When a gay couple has a baby, how rude is it to ask which one is the biological parent?
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
Barbeque-loving voters need to know where he stands on the Black's vs Terry Black's Lockhart feud in order to make an informed decision
Quantumfreakonomics
3d ago
"I'm not a vegetarian. It's just that my girlfriend is a vegetarian."
Oldest trick in the book. Texans will see right through him.
This is an image of Maine Senate candidate Graham Platner's profile pic on the messaging app Kik. Notice anything?
I know the real story is supposed to be the fact that he was sending sexually explicit texts to women while married, but I can't stop laughing at the picture. It's obviously no coincidence that his hand perfectly covers the giant totenkopf on his chest. This is art.
It is certainly enjoyable to see a Democratic candidate get run through the wringer the way a Republican would, but I must confess that I find his scandals to be endearingly relatable in a way. Prediction market odds for Platner in the general are collapsing, but I think this is less of a reaction to this specific leak and more of a realization that he is the kind of candidate who will have a scandal every other month all the way up to election day, and then a scandal every other year for his entire term if he wins.
EDIT: Additional unverified reports that I cannot vouch for but would be hilarious if true.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
I have only seen the film once, but I think the Wikipedia summary is an overly literal interpretation. In the context in which the monster is first fully revealed onscreen, it is a metaphorical extention of the frustration and aggression of Male Lead towards Female Lead.
Quantumfreakonomics
6d ago
Weighted by screentime, the majority of the film is about the aesthetics of 90s furniture stores. It's hard to convey this feeling by text, so I focused on the thematic subtext of class and relationships.
Having thought on it more, the one healthy relationship in the film is between Male Lead's two employees. They are both lower-middle class. They even have the exact same job!
Quantumfreakonomics
7d ago
Kino Review: Backrooms
Spoiler warning obviously.
Backrooms the movie is superficially based on the 4chan meme “the backrooms”, and yes, there are lots of fun found-footage scenes visually exploring the aesthetics of liminal spaces, but good horror movies are never about the monster, they are about what the monster represents. Backrooms is about the fear that no educated professional white woman will ever love you.
Male Lead is a black entrepreneur who runs a local furniture store. Female Lead is his upstanding attractive white PhD therapist. Male Lead is in therapy primarily because his financially dependent law student wife (who is also an attractive white woman) left him.
It is hinted that Female Lead is also lonely and wants children. From a purely narrative perspective, it might seem as if Male Lead and Female Lead are destined to get together at some point. Taking into account their respective biographies, HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA of course that wouldn’t happen. He is a schlubby loser from a lower social class and an unprestigious career. You can practically taste the ick she feels behind the professional facade in every scene they have together. It's great.
The twist is that Male Lead is the monster, and the climax is his grotesquely personified id rapaciously chasing Female Lead through a hellscape maze of his own creation. A surface-level analysis might fault the film for once again portraying male sexual frustration in a negative light, and yeah, that element is certainly there, but film (at least indie film) like all modern art is meant to challenge the viewer. On some level, one ought to reflect on how much of a monster one becomes on the inside when Stacy rejects you. I think the film earns it.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
It takes two people for that.
I'm not the one saying no.
Quantumfreakonomics
8d ago
Quantumfreakonomics
9d ago
"I don’t endorse female secondary school teachers getting pregnant by raping their male students"
On the off chance that I become an oyster farmer and run for senate 10 years from now, let the digital record unequivocally reflect that I am 100% in favor of attractive single female teachers """""raping""""" their male students to get pregnant.
Quantumfreakonomics
11d ago
The purpose is to use them in certain hypothetical situations. If there are no hypothetical situations in which they are to be used, then they are entirely useless.
Quantumfreakonomics
13d ago
The only openly trans person I have ever encountered IRL was a Cracker Barrel host(ess) in small-town Louisiana.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
Ken Martin insisted on Pod Save America that no money was spent on the autopsy. That is the only claim from him that was believable.
It also shouldn't be self-reflection necessarily. They should have brought in NTSB and USCSB alumni to do an deep-dive independent investigation the way you'd analyze a plane crash or plant explosion. Toes will be stepped on. It will be embarrasing. If you really thought that, "Democracy was on the ballot", and then Democracy lost, then none of that stuff matters.
Quantumfreakonomics
14d ago
There needs to be an autopsy on the autopsy report. I am 100% serious. Figuring out all the things that went wrong to allow this to happen would solve half of the party's problems. Reinterview witnesses. Reconstruct lines of thought and inquiry. Find the points of failure and conduct root-cause analysis.
The report is poorly written, unprofessional, and incomplete yes, but above all it is vapid. It doesn't even ask the questions that matter. The overwhelming majority of effort is focused on ad targeting and campaign spending.
"The pollsters were involved in discussions around the Trump attack ads – in particular the attack ad focused on the Vice President’s prior statements on transgendered Americans. They all recognized the attack as very effective, and felt the campaign was boxed – the ad was a video of her saying what she said, and it was framed as an attack on her economic priorities.
If the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response. The pollsters generally concurred with the opinions shared by campaign leadership - given the stakes and timing, the focus needed to be on attacking Trump."
Okay, what was the mistake then? What should be done differently next time around? Should the Vice President have changed her position or not? In fact, there is almost no discussion of issues in the report at all. A model of why anyone would want to vote for one party or the other is conspicuously absent.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
This was a clear violation of established civil rights and the victim deserves restitution.
But $835,000 is a lot of money. That is more money than I have made in my entire life. Even in the "good" endings, I shudder to look directly at the massive roulette wheel that is American tort litigation. A back-of-the-envelope calculation for what I think would be a fair settlement (all figures approximate):
Lost wages: $10,000
Physical discomfort: $100,000
Emotional distress: $15,000
Missing life events: $10,000
Legal fees: $50,000
This comes to a total of $185,000. I cannot imagine a fudge factor big enough to make up the extra $650,000. That's pure profit in my book. This isn't even particularly large for a civil rights settlement. Insane that we just accept this.
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
Real OGs remember that Trump was Freak of the Year in 2011
Quantumfreakonomics
15d ago
showing up in red/black shirts and then posing for a group photo in the "costumes":
The gendered tyranny of… spontaneously organized dress codes? Is that what is being alleged here, that jurors were pressured into wearing one of two colors of shirt?
What am I missing?
I feel bad for the lady’s husband. One day you’re married to a tradwife influencer, and the next day your wife’s sexual history is printed in the New York Times.
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