sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
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User ID: 636
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
16d ago
Not really. I still think that "It's Time to Build" was largely correct, and I've generally enjoyed listening to his appearances on CWT. If by "lost credibility" you mean I don't take his word about fluoridation, well, he never had it to begin with - that's not what he's for.
He's proven to be intelligent and has a reputation to protect.
Being wrong about this would have zero impact on his reputation. Haters would put another hop in their gish gallop against him. Fanboys would ignore it or find some plausible deniability ("all he did was post a screenshot of a news article!").
Did Andreessen lose credibility when, despite having published "It's Time to Build", he hypocritically implored the city council not to build more housing? No. It is, as they say, already priced in.
So a level of 1.5 is still well below the EPA limit. This could be a crisis on the level of lead paint and leaded gasoline.
Only 0.6% of the population is on a water system with 1.5ppm or more of fluoride. Lead paint this is not.
Imagine if we were putting lead in the water to prevent cavities, and then just assuming that the amount delivered to the consumer was the perfect amount to prevent cavities without causing negative effects.
And water systems with such high levels of fluoride have it not due to fluoridation but due to groundwater with high concentrations of fluoride.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
16d ago
Originally you said race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. Even if there's no objectively correct size of the category, it doesn't prove what you originally said. If there's a lot of joints, one person can cleave slightly to the left of how another would do it, and they'd both cleave at the joints.
This is an extremely pedantic point to make, but sure, I can agree that the metaphor I chose was perhaps not totally correct.
The broader point I made was that there isn't one correct way to define "white" (which you seem to agree with) and therefore who is white and who isn't is socially constructed.
This is before getting into cultures that conceive of race very differently from anglos, like the Latinos who invented about thirty races for different admixtures of black, white and native, or the Romans who (from what i can remember from my reading) did not have a notion of white/nonwhite and instead considered themselves quite different from the various peoples they conquered, even their next door neighbors the Etruscans, who did they not grant citizenship to until hundreds of years after the conquest.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
Okay, I guess I should have known that there are people making that claim. However, I'm not trying to steelman it because I think it's dumb.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
Once you sort groups by similarity, you can draw a rough boundry around them. You can call that category "white" or you can call it "blorgoschmorg" but it will consist mostly of the same people, especially if you ask the sorters to draw boundaries of the same size.
The size of the boundary is exactly what makes it socially constructed.
If you put them next to each other, quite possibly so. Especially relative to other groups.
If you get someone to put two groups close to each other, they'll think of them as close to each other? Is that the claim here?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
what content is the sentence "color is socially constructed" even carrying.
That the assortment of bands of the electromagnetic spectrum into color words is socially constructed.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
Nobody is saying that the similarity of colors to each other is socially constructed (or at least I've never heard this claim).
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
The precedence defense is confusing considering how many of these cases contradict each other.
If you ask people to sort ethnic groups by how closely related they are to each other, I'm pretty sure it will match the genetic clustering.
Your claim is that "white" is an objective category, not that people's perceptions of ethnic group closeness matches reality (which I find highly dubious to begin with, do you think people think of e.g. native Americans as related to Siberians?)
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
I haven't encountered the notion that Indians are an edge case before.
that doesn't mean that they aren't basically capturing real and useful information and describing somewhat natural categories.
Neither is calling it socially constructed. Colors are a great example - the set of colors in English is totally arbitrary. Some languages have more, some less, some as few as two. There's no natural law that there should be exactly 11 basic color terms as English does. Nevertheless, the English words do convey useful information.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
Okay, let's see the clustering.
I hope it considers that all Mexicans are white (as a federal court did in in re Rodriguez), that people who are half white and a quarter Japanese and a quarter chinese are not white (in re Knight), Syrians are white (in re Najour), Afghans are white (in re Dolla), Armenians are white (in re Halladjian), Indians are white (United States v. Balsara), Syrians are not white (Ex parte Shahid), Indians are not white (In re Sadar Bhagwab Singh), Afghans are not white (In re Feroz Din), Arabs are white (In re Ahmed Hassan) and that arabs are not white (In re Ahmed Hassan).
If it conflicts with the above in some way, it would seem that the term "white" used in ordinary language and society doesn't always conform to what you might see on a multidimensional genetic chart. That you can define "white" in a way to be defensible via the chart doesn't mean that's how it's always or even typically used. Hence, "socially constructed".
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
The steelman of "race is a social construct" is that the usual notion of race doesn't cleave reality at the joints. You say that whites are superior weightlifters (already a dubious claim), but Bulgaria has 13 gold medals in olympic weightlifting and Finland has 1. Yet both Finns and Bulgars are white (don't @ me). The steelman is that the category "white" (or "black" or "Asian") contains a variety of different ethnicities with different characteristics and the way that ethnicities are assorted into broad racial categories is not a fact of nature, it is indeed socially constructed.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
It's more like, you heard tenth-hand that there are people wearing burkas in a town you've never visited, and there's somehow no photos of said burkas.
That's before we even get into questions about the base rate of burka wearing vs dog eating.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
I'm not sure I see the relevance. Obviously Trump isn't an immortal. Winning the election was not guaranteed, and neither is taking office, and neither is achieving any policy goals or staying in office very long. I only mean that I have seen a lot of introspection from the people who thought Kamala would win on the merits and zero introspection from people who thought that Kamala would win via subterfuge. They have simply moved to bailey.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
17d ago
I'm afraid the best you can expect is the goalposts moving to "the deep state won't let him do anything anyway". (Which, maybe, but why wasn't that the initial line?)
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
While black women are as committed as ever to the Democratic party, black men may be edging towards the exit.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
Ddhq estimates a 92% chance that the house will be republican, securing a Republican trifecta.
https://decisiondeskhq.com/results/2024/General/US-House/
To the extent that this election is a referendum on Biden's term broadly speaking, the strength of the reaction is almost beyond belief.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
IME I'm seeing stuff more like OP than 2rafa, and it's why I expect Trump to win going in to election day. Several of my colleagues are not coming in to work today due to emotional distress.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
I doubt they'd do an independent audit just for the sake of proving their launch costs, and I don't expect they'd have another reason to do so.
How long do they have to keep this up before you stop insisting that it's dumping?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
Headlines failed to materialize.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
I straight-up don't believe them.
What would it take for you to believe them?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
18d ago
As of 01:26 ET, decision desk hq has called the race for Teflon Don.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
19d ago
Yeah, we've got a lot of people unironically advocating for open defection here in the states as well.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
19d ago
Referendum voting is terrible, and often saddles legislatures with impossible choices.
A legislative veto is one thing but rewriting the referendum is just ridiculous.
Legislatures are usually the ones proposing spending related referenda anyway IME, so it's kind of a case of "stop hitting yourself".
The number is between zero and 2-5, assuming no hormesis. Based on Cremieux's arguments here, I lean towards closer to zero.
Far be it from me to compel people to buy index funds. Let a thousand flowers bloom. For my part, I'm not convinced that there is a there there at all, and I don't see anyone making any argument that would suggest that the scale of the problem is anywhere near spewing lead from every tailpipe.
There also has to be someone buying puts for the market to function, after all.
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