Tanista
9hr ago
He is a blank slatist who believes in magic soil.
I don't know how this can possibly apply to Caplan, given his stated views on IQ.
I’m an IQ realist, all the way. IQ tests aren’t perfect, but they’re an excellent proxy for what ordinary language calls “intelligence.” A massive body of research confirms that IQ predicts not just educational success, but career success. Contrary to critics, IQ tests are not culturally biased; they fairly measure genuine group differences in intelligence.
Tanista
3d ago
If the club is a money pit, that is the club's problem.
The clubs don't work like the US where they can be uprooted at will. They're privately owned but considered semi-public goods or at least important cultural artifacts. Maybe it's irrational, but it's not considered acceptable that anyone can buy one, vastly overpay (which makes life harder for their competitors) and potentially run it into the ground by leaving it with the debt from the higher expenditures when they lose interest.
One way to preserve this would be to insist on a fan-owned status for all of them. But this would obviously piss off a lot of owners. You could also lock out foreign owners, but then you miss out on their capital (and piss off owners, again). Salary cap would piss off players.
So you get this. This is actually the compromise that comes of the system being more capitalist than the US.
High class rape stories go viral.
The intersectionalists made a lot about how "MeToo" was first put forward by a black activist in the 2000s, but didn't take off until celebrity women used it.
In that case a lot of the lurid stories were true.
Tanista
6d ago
"Some people did something, as a certain Congresswoman said, but we're not going to cede the whole moral core of the faith by saying it's Muslims as such."
Funny, I was just thinking of this comment chain, and some claims I made because of this new CATO article
Data from the State Department through February 2026 show that the Trump administration has cut legal immigration by nationals of 45 majority-Muslim countries by 96 percent since December 2024. Monthly immigrant visa issuances and permanent lawful refugee admissions fell from 21,096 in December 2024 to 808 in February 2026.
The graph below shows that this outcome was not the result of seasonal trends since the drop from February 2024 was nearly as significant. Immigrant visas—primarily for family members of US citizens—were down 95 percent. Meanwhile, refugee resettlement—immigrants admitted lawfully based on threats of persecution abroad—was completely ended for majority-Muslim countries, dropping from 5,157 admissions in December 2024 to 0 admissions in February 2026.
I guess this is a win for @Iconochasm, because my take was that Trump had downsized the Muslim ban because of the problems with getting it passed. I had heard from family that he'd made processing for West African countries much harder (by requiring a large bond) but didn't think other nations were that impacted.
I don't quite know why this is the case
It doesn't seem that complicated. Any sort of reasonable standard for war crimes or violation of international law damns Hamas (and Hezbollah) as much as Israel and functions as a casus belli for Israeli actions against Hamas that would cost a ton of lives. You go this way and then you're just Biden and everyone else complicit in the "genocide".
Any rejection of moral standards turns this into an amoral contest of strength, which Palestinians cannot win. If they both suck, why not go with the richer, more competent, more militarily capable force and close your eyes and let nature take its course?
So the only response when faced with things done by the other side is to deflect, deny, minimize and hope that enough people have internalized the progressive stack enough to find those denials convincing.
It makes sense for the Palestinians to do this - though kind of sad that they've had to Christianize their jihadism - but why Westerners care is the strange thing.
tl;dr: They're pussies. Pussies cannot win fights, so pussies construct a moral system in which responding to their indirect or feeble aggression with the direct version is unacceptable (this has already been trialed in local contexts with the whole prescription against "punching down")
Tanista
6d ago
Is this not just the general pattern of how everyone handles instances of violence (or, more generally, violations of something they claim to be a principle they hold when they actually don't) against an enemy?
Without getting into whether all these deflections are equally credible, I suppose one odd thing is that liberal, secular Westerners are deploying tribal rationalizations for various Middle Eastern groups whose values are very different from theirs (or they outright swear hostility).
The Israelis and Ukrainians and Russians and everyone else who shrugs at reports of crimes from their own are at least behaving in a normal, if not morally upstanding, way.
Weinstein did take punitive action against those who refused him (on top of the reports of his generally violent and unpleasant behavior). So there was at least an element of coercion.
Tanista
8d ago
I actually went back to remind myself by skimming his Why I don't criticize Israel post.
It's more ambiguous on Zionism than I remembered. Basically: Zionism is wrong but understandable for Jews given the situation they're dealing with. Which is Zionist, we count those!
This is why slut-shaming is such a bad idea. Give women incentives to make false accusations of sexual assault, or even appear to do so, and women who have actually been assaulted will find the matter treated with much less gravity than it deserves; the perpetrators will then have the opportunity to victimise more women, who otherwise would have been spared such horror.
Yes, this is the feminist argument for not slut shaming. The problem is that other feminist reforms to the status quo make false accusations more likely. It's a difficult crime to prove. The feminist line that we should just believe women (or even shower some lucky ones with fame and attention for lurid stories no one can criticize) creates an incentive in and of itself. If women are people, not saints, this cannot be avoided.
The actual purpose of (male) slut-shaming wasn't just to deter inchastity. It was to create an incentive towards behaviors that would not create ambiguity about what happened to a woman in the first place, which was rational given that men were expected to take on the burden and risk of avenging the honor of their women if they had been raped. So the women is expected to take on the burden of not behaving in a way that both puts her at risk directly and implies that maybe she just was a slut who changed her mind and the blood feud/investigation wasn't worth it.
This obviously cannot work in a world where nobody follows those rules. If a woman can choose to get drunk and get a train ran on her and later claims rape, the ambiguity is much harder to resolve.
The only solution feminists have settled on that lets them have their cake and eat it is simply assuming the man is prima facie guilty. Someone is going to have to be responsible for some of these unfortunate cases.
Tanista
8d ago
The treatment of the two blend together because there's often no way to tell.
But rape was still seen as outrageous. The story of the expulsion of the last king of Rome could be legendary, but it's interesting then that they chose to have the whole thing kicked off by the rape of a noblewoman if seduction alone would suffice.
Don't think this is possible under Title IX (which is what I believed Obama used to get them to get more involved in these cases). Universities need administrators to manage compliance like any other business and the government will react to lobbying for more interference in captive institutions.
Tanista
8d ago
Viral story, sûre, but not actually much to see here.
It does tell us that there's only so long the media can resist before sticking its hand in the "lurid story about college men that may or may not be true" jar.
The UVA rape case was...twelve years ago? Mattress Girl was 11. So about a decade at max stretch.
Tanista
9d ago
Seems deeply unwise compared to letting them into a coalition and having them disappoint people through governing, like the Tories did the Lib Dems, and Trump is doing now.
But, hey, I'm a naive observer of German politics. Maybe in a decade this'll prove some genius move. Maybe Germans really cannot handle their liquor and even a sip of the far-right will be a jump off the slippery slope.
Tanista
9d ago
The whole Van Jones "character matters" critique of uncouthness is validated by Trump's later actions.
It's not like the man lied. He was quite adamant about refusing to even contemplate losing, or being transparent about certain things. Some people saw that as a game, while others argued that such a basic failure of character would show itself.
They actually have parties that challenge the orthodoxy, but that may make it worse. Germany's attempts to quarantine the AfD forces coalitions that cannot really be that ideologically coherent given the inherent compromise needed to neutralize the votes of a growing share of the electorate.
Tanista
9d ago
I can't remember who said it, but I once saw a quote to the effect of "if you tell me one of your political opinions, and I can accurately guess every other political opinion you hold, you are not a serious thinker".
It's a take Sam Harris used to hammer on about.
Not sure if he lived up to it, since his anti-Islam takes flow pretty well with his zionism and other commitments.
This was John Carreyrou's take in his book, and he wasn't very sympathetic.
It fits really well with the anecdotes littered in the book about her obsession with Jobs.
Christian and his friends were always ready and willing to do Elizabeth and Sunny’s bidding. Their eagerness to please was on display when news broke that Steve Jobs had died on the evening of October 5, 2011. Elizabeth and Sunny wanted to pay Jobs a tribute by flying an Apple flag at half-mast on the grounds of the Hillview Avenue building. The next morning, Jeff Blickman, a tall redhead who’d played varsity baseball at Duke, volunteered for the mission. He couldn’t locate any suitable Apple flag for sale, so Blickman had one custom made out of vinyl. It featured the famous Apple logo in white against a black background. The store he went to took a while to make it. Blickman didn’t return with it until late in the day. In the meantime, work at the company came to a standstill as Elizabeth and Sunny moped around the office, consumed by the hunt for the Apple flag.
Greg had been aware of Elizabeth’s fascination with Jobs. She referred to him as “Steve” as if they were close friends. At one point, she’d told him that a documentary espousing a 9/11 conspiracy theory wouldn’t have been available on iTunes if “Steve” hadn’t believed there was something to it. Greg thought that was silly. He was pretty sure Jobs hadn’t personally screened all the movies for rent or sale on iTunes. Elizabeth seemed to have this exaggerated image of him as an all-seeing and all-knowing being.
It all fits the image of a very immature , mentally ill person who thought she could just push through.
The real question is what the fuck Sunny Balwani was thinking.
Tanista
14d ago
NYT writer savior telling the principal that maybe they shouldn't let kids act rowdy. As if it never occured to them.
Dangerous Minds and its consequences.
Tanista
14d ago
Was funny to see the maneuvers Ta-Nehisi Coates went through in his most famous book to blame this - and the insistence that he stay disciplined do well at school from teachers - on white supremacy.
Even if black parents in America are reluctantly beating their kids so racist white cops don't shoot them, we have a bunch of natural experiments from dozens of countries that don't have the white man breathing down their neck.
Much like with prison you have to accept that, for some, the punishment is not to correct but to keep them away from people who can be corrected.
She had periodic bursts of energy (which the schools absorbed with apathy and meaningless validation) but then seemed to give up/assume the best based on the grades she was getting. I can only assume she didn't want to look at it too close precisely because she talked herself unto a hill. Once things seemed to be working out she was happy enough.
Tanista
15d ago
But if you can just separate all the poor people and put them in these schools over there, you don't care what happens to those kids in that school. A New York Times reporter in a high-poverty school changes the school, right? Okay. There are certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem, and it gets fixed immediately.
This is reminding me of The Exile's piece on Dworkin
Everyone in her circle knows that you say the right things and then fuck off with your kids because you're not gonna overcome institutional inertia and the consequences of disparate impact thinking. she was the one who actually believed it was just "resources" and that she could bully an entire school into shape.
How do you go nearly a decade without realizing your kid is learning nothing except how to avoid getting stabbed in the lunch room?
Besides being a stubborn narcissist and ideologue that knew she'd get this exact response if she quit these schools before her daughter was done schooling?
The schools seem to avoid any chance of being held accountable. By her account they didn't do any standardized (racist, she would have called them) assessments and it was pulling teeth to get them to do it, gave no homework (which would help parents get a benchmark) and at a certain point they were just passing her on effort in algebra.
Given most of the likely parents in that school, this would have served to satisfy people and draw no attention until it was too late.
She herself was almost certainly negligent despite her claims to have been open to tutoring her kids, but all of these factors seem to have made it worse.
In Caplan's eyes immigration is undoubtedly good for the migrants themselves, to a massive degree, while also benefiting the receiving country.
Imagine that Caplan believes that the benefits to the natives of avoiding immigration are not so great as to outweigh the damage done to various peoples who could be living better lives or the foregone economic growth , and is anything in his behavior incongruent?
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