Just like the American Office is a much more popular adaptation of the British original, the Haitians eating cats thing is really just a rip-off of Bangladeshis eating serving cats in their curry houses.
Or maybe it was gypsies eating swans.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Almost all of their hard news comes directly from the newswires. They are no more or less reliable than any other paper that gets their news from the Associate Press et al, which is most of them, most of the time.
Their reputation comes from their populist-right editorials and trashy features like this. Right-wing politics plus celebrity gossip puts them in the firing line of the British PMC.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Ahistorical. He had never said such a thing about the Poles/Slavs.
He may not have used that exact quote, but he wasn't secret about his views about the Slavs.
Nowhere in Mein Kampf or in any of his private or public remarks does he hint at a plan to subjugate Poland.
He talks extensively in Mein Kampf about subjugating the entirety of Eastern Europe. More to the point, he actually did it.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Attacking enemy combatants while in conflict with the organisation they fight for isn't terrorism, attacking civilians to create spectacle and fear is.
I don't think it's uncharitable of me to suspect that you're making this false equivalence because you hate Jews, Mr SS.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I'm less sympathetic to modernism than most, but I can agree that I'd be basically fine with it if it was limited to a handful of high profile buildings in city centres. There's always the small chance that such a building becomes iconic, like the Sydney Opera House or the Eiffel Tower.
But building this when we could just as cheaply and easily build this is an affront to God.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Architecture is another common example.
Architecture has certainly got worse in the last 100 years, but in the last 15, I'd say we've probably seen an improvement. New Traditional Architecture is picking up steam as a movement. Governments and developers are realising that building nice-looking buildings isn't an esoteric mystery lost to the sands of time. I predict in another century people will looking back on C20th architecture with embarrassment.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Ally with a power whose leader considers your people to be 'life unworthy of life' and brags about how he's going to conquer your lands, kill everyone and move his own people in? Seems unwise.
Of course, we know with hindsight that the Soviet Union would also end up conducting genocides on its subject peoples (like the Holodomor and similar genocides that Stalin carried out).
I can't say I blame them for choosing none of the above.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Has anything improved in your life?
There's a bias Steven Pinker talks about in Enlightnement Now. In surveys, respondents will predict that the average person in their country will get poorer in the next few years, while simultaneously predicting that they themselves will get richer.
Do you earn more money now? Live in a bigger house or have more savings? Multiply that by most people on the planet.
Crowstep
2mo ago
As said already, Neil Gaiman was MeToo'd recently. So individual cases are still happening.
As for the wider 'movement', I think it's just the fact that outrage is exhausting, particularly if your goal (no sexual misconduct or hurt feelings ever again, anywhere, but people still couple up somehow) is impossible. Noahpinion has written about this quite a lot. Basically, the Great Awokening (God bless whoever came up with that designation) is winding down, as it was always destined to do. Humans can't do permanent revolution.
Scott has also written about this. New Atheism got replaced by pop-feminism which got replaced by Kendi-style antiracism as the very online left-wing topic of choice. Not sure what will come next, or if anything will come next.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Tons of the emojis I see used at work are varying shades of brown, completely unlike the actual people who populate the office.
It's an odd choice, because you have to actually select the skin tone modifier. The default is emoji yellow.
Hang on a sec, didn't Unicode introduce skin tone modifiers a few years ago? What was the point of that if they were going to replace them all with generic human beings?
EDIT: This is why
I also found this amusing piece from a month ago. Apparently Elon Musk reintroduced the pistol emoji (it had previously been replaced on Twitter by a water pistol, in line with Android and iOS). In response, a former Twitter employee said that:
fascism is given the pass of open carry rules
Crowstep
2mo ago
I had pretty much the same belief about marijuana in my teens. Then, having seen a few friends waste away to apathy on it, I've changed my view. I'd be happy to see it legitimately criminalised.
It seems pretty obvious that this is a selection effect and nothing more. If those Kenyan immigrants were representative of their home country, then Kenya would be a very wealthy country. You see a similar thing in the UK, with Nigerians (very selected) outperforming Jamaicans (unselected). The latter have outcomes that are pretty similar to African Americans.
Of course, if African migration to the US continues to be hyper-selective, then those migrants probably will end up with similar or better outcomes to the current Americans. But the group of Haitians in Springfield do not seem to have been selected for their high IQs (most of the Haitian elite left during the Duvalier dictatorship, as I understand it).
Crowstep
2mo ago
Why would they be incentivised to refuse to share their identity though? It's not as if Harvard has now decided that it has too many and will start penalising them like it did to Asians before.
On the other hand, Asian and white students who know that Harvard wants to penalise them (because it has strenuously defended doing so in the highest court in the land) may still suspect that it will try, even if it does so while tiptoeing within the law. John Smith or Emily Lee could plausibly be African American, even if they're not, so why reveal their hand to an institution they know wants to treat them unfairly?
Crowstep
2mo ago
I mean, wasn't the whole Supreme Court ruling about the fact that it doesn't matter what percentage of the population a group makes up, all students have to get in on merit. The Supreme Court didn't say that Harvard should get more white people because they're the majority, the Supreme Court said that Harvard should stop discriminating against Asians in spite of their high academic achievement. Given well-documented racial differences in intelligence and grades, we shouldn't expect a purely meritocratic Harvard to be representative of the makeup of the country.
That said, it doesn't look like Harvard has pivoted to meritocracy just yet. It looks like the school changed their measures (no doubt deliberately) but this article does suggest the AA share has reduced from 18% to 14%, while the white/other share has increased from 29% to 32%. Asian enrolment hasn't changed and the proportion of students who refuse to share demographic identity has doubled from 4% to 8%, therefore the new figures are only based on those students who did give their ethnicity. I would assume the non-sharing group is mostly white or Asian which might explain why the Asian share doesn't seem to have increased.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Would you not consider the importation of millions of Africans during the slave trade to be a similar 'roll of the dice'? I would say these Haitain migrants (being quite literally African American, in the sense of being Africans who have lived in the Americas for hundreds of years) are much more similar to America's current AA population than they are to the Jews, Irish or Italians of yesteryear.
This isn't Reddit so we can say these things explicitly. Subsaharan Africans have very low IQs (85 for AAs, 76 for Haitians). This can be compared to European IQs of around 100 or East Asian/Ashkenazi IQs of around 110. With this knowledge, can you really say that importing tens of thousands of Haitians to be a 'roll of the dice'? It seems pretty obvious to me that we can predict what will happen.
Crowstep
2mo ago
That's an interesting observation. I wonder whether it's something about village life that makes people care about their reputations (see C20th British housewives scrubbing their doorsteps to keep up appearances). African cities look pretty filthy from what I've seen.
That said, I assume somedude was more talking about crime. In that case, the relationship is much clearer.
Crowstep
2mo ago
Harsh polarization between men and women gets worrisome - this is how women end up with actually curtailed rights and the legal status of property of male relatives. Again - the worst victim of feminism is women.
This seems unlikely (and as far as I'm aware, has never actually happened, although I'd be interested to hear if you have examples).
A more likely outcome is the situation in South Korea. Young people retreating from dating and socialising, spending more and more time looking at screens (whether at work or in their leisure time), collapsing birth rates, relentless pursuit of status goods and focus on the self.
Certainly bad, and (within a long enough timeframe) civilisation ending. But no Handmaid's Tale.
Crowstep
2mo ago
At what point do you expect African Americans to assimilate (that is to say, start getting outcomes around the US average in terms of crime, educational attainment and earnings)? Why do you think that Haitians will be more successful than they have been?
Crowstep
2mo ago
Does that undermine your arguments about blacks?
No, because we have actual scientific evidence. There actually are racial differences in IQ, in brain size, in reaction time, in educational attainment and we can measure these things objectively. What anyone thought in the past is irrelevant. The fact that one group of people in the past believed (correctly) that there were racial differences in intelligence doesn't mean that another group of people in the past believing that Jews were unusually greedy or sneaky (without evidence) is correct.
You may want us to talk about the past because making an anti-HBD argument is easy that way, because everyone in the past believed a mixture of true, false and crazy things and its easy to pick and choose. But the only thing that matters is hard evidence. If someone presents actual evidence that Jews are greedy or that all racial groups are equally intelligent then I'll update my beliefs. But if you are (I assume) trying to convince me away from the hard-HBD position, telling me that I'm obligated to hate Jews as a consequence of that belief isn't very convincing.
I think what weakens the 'Jews really are greedy' hypothesis is that every market dominant minority has been accused of being greedy. Chinese in southeast Asia, Indians in former British colonies, Boers in South Africa, Parsis in India, Igbos in Nigeria.
The complaints are exactly the same ones that medieval European peasants and Confucian scholars made about merchants generally. That they were greedy middle-men who didn't charge 'fair price' and who didn't produce anything themselves. Sometimes the targets of these complaints were an ethnic group, sometimes they weren't. But the root of the complaints seem to always be envy, and the fact that humans prefer moralistic condemnation to the cold, impersonal reality of the forces of economics.
I should admit I am somewhat taking the piss here, I don't believe that HBD is true in the way it is typically presented. But I find it difficult to argue, using HBD premises, that antisemitism is ridiculous and unscientific.
Honestly, it sounds like you're just trying to tar HBD by association. What you've written suggests that you're uncomfortable with the reality of racial differences in intelligence, and so you want to associate it with the primitive Jew-hatred of the past.
Crowstep
2mo ago
I feel similarly when people tell me that HBD is obviously true, because "evolution didn't stop at the neck;" then are shocked Pikachu when people start dusting off the conniving greedy Jew stereotype and say "no no no we were just talking about IQ!" Maybe, but before iq tests were invented the differences you purport to notice existed, why can't other metrics exist even if we haven't found how to measure them yet?
How would you even measure 'greediness'? My experience has been that it's basically just a word used enviously. If I'm a tenant who can't afford rent, then landlords are greedy. If I'm a low-paid worker, then my boss is greedy. If inflation is making food more expensive, then supermarkets are greedy.
Antisemites don't think Jews are greedy because they've observed it, they think Jews are greedy because Jews are rich, and to the envious, rich=greedy.
By contrast, it's pretty easy to notice intelligence effects dispassionately. Even blank slatists notice that Asian kids do well in school.
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FPTP punishes smaller parties, meaning that the breadth of political belief in a country cannot be truly expressed. You'd better like the red or blue rosette parties, because nobody else really matters.
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If you vote for a smaller party, this punishes whichever of the main parties you support most. If you vote hard right, you get a left wing government, if you vote hard left, you get a right wing government.
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Governments can easily get 1/3 of the votes and 2/3 of the seats.
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FPTP rewards separatists, nationalists and regionalists disproportionately. The Nowherestan independence party can get 2-3% of the country-wide vote, and 10% of the country-wide seats because all their voters are concentrated in one region.
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Conversely, smaller parties with support that is spread out evenly across the country are punished. A party can get 20% of the vote and 1% of the seats.
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FPTP leads to major parties setting their opponents up to fail. In countries where coalition governments are normal, ruling parties have an incentive to act in the long-term interests of the country, as they could well be part of the government governing it for decades. In FPTP countries where power switches sides every few elections, ruling parties have an incentive to leave things in as bad a situation as they can, so that their opponents get blamed for it.
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FPTP leads to safe seats, which leads to individual MPs having less incentive to work hard or keep their views and policies responsive to the public.
I purposely used generic examples, but all of these things have happened or do happen in the UK.
Do trampoline nets reduce the incidence of serious injuries? (I don't really care about minor injuries like sprained ankles).
This study states that, of children taken to hospital due to trampoline injuries, there was no difference between those whose trampolines had nets and those who did not in terms of the percentage who received severe injuries. Therefore
There is no difference in the severity of the injury regarding trampolines with or without special safety measures. Safety nets do not reduce the risk of severe injury.
But reading it makes me think of this famous picture about selection bias. Could it simply be that many children who would have received injuries, serious or not, didn't get injured because their trampoline had a net?
The again, this study suggests that the introduction of safety features like nets and pads didn't actually make any difference in the number of different categories of injury (at least during the study period). Amazingly, this includes falling off, which you'd think is the one thing that nets would prevent.
I grew up with a net-less trampoline (although it did have cushions covering the springs) and I'd like my kids to enjoy the same, but I can imagine my wife being pretty pissed off if we get an old-fashioned trampoline and someone breaks an arm. I'm not sure how amenable she'd be to the 'risky play is necessary for healthy psychological development' argument if our child has a bone sticking out of his arm.
Pop culture is definitely much more atomised (at least for men, apparently Swiftdom has taken over like 80% of the female population). I assume it's a case of there simply being far more media, and with the distribution channels changing from central to algorithmically personal.
Young people don't build their identities around music any more. When I was a teenager, what you listened to mattered in a social sense. Now kids just have their own perfectly-tailored Spotify playlist with songs from many eras and genres.
Cinema is dead as the medium of importance, replaced by TV. But even TV is much more atomised. I'm trying to think of pop-culture quotes from the past five years that I could say in a crowded room and assume that everyone would understand. All that comes to mind is 'Hi Barbie'.
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