walruz
16d ago
Much of the industry is just really, really worried about underestimating Trump for a third time in a row, and as such they might be overcorrecting.
There is no good indication that any of the major polls underestimated Trump in any previous elections.
If you estimate that Trump has a 30% chance to win, and he wins, you weren't wrong. You'd have been wrong if Harrison Ford, estimated as having a 0% chance of winning, had won.
There haven't been enough elections in which Trump was eligible in order to say much about whether his chance of winning was underestimated.
walruz
7mo ago
and expanded NATO to include almost all of Eastern Europe
If Russia didn't invade and ethnically cleanse their neighbours every chance they got, their smaller neighbours would be way less eager to join NATO.
That Russia's last hundred years of foreign policy is such a spectacular failure, having accomplished roughly zero of their aims, can hardly be said to be the fault of the US.
walruz
10mo ago
One thing (removing pride flags) is similar to the other (removing digital representations of clothes) in that they are both 100% harmless. Producing child porn is bad on the basis that in order to produce child porn, you must commit crimes against some child. Characters in video games are not sapient, and nothing done to them can constitute an immoral act or even have a moral dimension.
walruz
11mo ago
Tricia Helfer is also, notably, not the actress playing Kara Thrace. Katee Sackhoff plays the fighter pilot, Tricia Helfer plays the toaster in high heels.
walruz
11mo ago
If a parrot and grass both evolved to be green, that seems to undermine "evolution" significantly.
walruz
1yr ago
For example a different framework could be: "Moral is that which makes my village survive the winter and makes my tribe/family/progenity thrive".
Of course, all of these instinctive revulsions are shaped by the ancestral environment, just like your genetic traits. The ability to store fat that served your ancestors well in the savannah is causing you obesity and diabetes. A moral preference that served your ancestors perfectly well in a nasty, brutish and short life as hunter-gatherers or tenant farmers may well be counterproductive today.
walruz
1yr ago
The demographic race against one's neighbours has never (except, maybe, for very brief periods of time when both populations were decimated by some calamity) been contained by reproduction, but constrained by carrying capacity of territory (as evidenced by the fact that starvation were common in all parts of the world until the 1800s).
If Adam and Bob had zero children together, when they would previously have had X in expectation, it just meant that Charlie and Delilah had X more children survive to adulthood.
walruz
1yr ago
Lolita was considered a classic
And Stephen Spielberg is obviously a nazi - he made Schindler's List.
Or, alternately, there is a difference between not only portraying something in media, but portraying it as a bad thing, and being in favour of that thing.
walruz
1yr ago
Everyone who estimated trump's chance of winning as being above 0% chance, was right. Things with a 30% chance of happening, or a 1% chance of happening, still happen. Nate Silver and all the other pollsters would only have gotten their comeuppance if Harrison Ford had won.
walruz
1yr ago
Random data is indistinguishable from data encrypted by a good encryption scheme. You cannot prove that a set of random data isn't actual data that has been encrypted, apart from trying all possible decryption algorithms with all possible keys and showing that none of them yield legible results.
walruz
1yr ago
You can't "threaten" suicide towards a bunch of strangers who will never know who you are. This is a threat in the exact same way that words are violence, and you're 100% allowed to say ridiculous things for dramatic effect on the Internet, regardless of what The Algorithm (tm) and various dystopian Community Guidelines (tm) says.
walruz
1yr ago
I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.
walruz
1yr ago
The inverse, how many women can you hookup with without raping one?
By rape I don't me beat up, drag into an alley and wrestle to the ground while she screams and fights, I mean women who really wasn't into it or ended up getting something different than she expected.
About as many as people you can say meet without murdering them (and my murder I don't mean deprive of life, I mean slightly inconvenience).
walruz
1yr ago
Suicide attempts that fail because of incompetence (a good metric for mental health) and suicide attempts that fail because they're not honest attempts (which are not) are impossible to disentangle.
Women realising that a failed suicide attempt is a great way to get a bunch of sympathy points/attention/clout would be upstream of the choice of method in this model.
walruz
1yr ago
I don't understand what the relevance of the number of false accusations in expectation is.
If I claimed that got shot at with a man-portable particle cannon yesterday, you would dismiss the claim out of hand without some compelling corroborating evidence, because the base rate of getting attacked with sci fi weapons is very low for all segments of the population.
If I claimed that I was shot at with a RPK machine-gun yesterday, and you know me to be an office worker in Paris, you would place a very low level of credence in my claim because the base rate of getting shot at with military weapons is very low for the French middle class.
If I made that same claim but you know me to be an infantry soldier in Ukraine, you'd probably just take me at my word because the base rate for being in combat is quite high for infantry in a warzone.
The base rate determines the level of evidence necessary to evaluate a claim as likely to be true.
walruz
1yr ago
Both your "believe in aliens" and the linked article's headline "believe in UFOs" are really the wrong question to ask.
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It is perfectly reasonable to believe that extraterrestrial life exists without believing that they routinely visit earth just to put stuff in the butts of truckers and schizophrenics.
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Nonbelief in UFOs implies either that one believes that flight is impossible, or that everyone has perfect information about every single aircraft, flock of birds and cloud formation, at all times.
walruz
1yr ago
I think the left qualifies it in a sort of paradox-of-tolerance way: you don't get to excuse intolerant views by claiming that they are part of your religion.
This is by no means limited to "the left" unless you can show that "the right" generally had nothing against 9/11, or would be in favor of bringing back human sacrifices, or being in favor of polygamy. Everyone thinks that religious freedom is fine as long as the exercise of that freedom doesn't impinge on someone else's rights to a sufficient degree.
Yes, you can be Muslim, but you can't jihad skyscrapers to the ground regardless of how sincere your religious conviction is. You can revive asatrue (or whatever one might call the aztec state religion), but you can't raid surrounding villagers for prisoners to sacrifice. Yes, you can be Mormon, but you can't have a harem of child brides, etc.
walruz
1yr ago
Are you as sympathetic to burning down random buildings owned by indigenous Canadians? After all, their ancestors certainly genocided conquered tribes a bunch of times throughout their history and prehistory.
walruz
1yr ago
This line of reasoning proves too much. The phrenology department has never produces anything of any value, so surely that should get even more funding than the humanities?
walruz
1yr ago
Or maybe you could encourage the Baltics to be more tolerant to its Russian-speaking minority?
If Russia didn't want russophones in neighboring countries expelled, they should stop using the existence of Russian speaking people in other countries as a casus belli.
walruz
1yr ago
We're discussing whether a southern jury would behave in a certain way because southern society may be or not be broadly racist, and someone brings up a case where the white assailants get a light punishment due to (implied) widespread racism.
"The case does nothing to show widespread racism but rather only shows racism from a single actor (I e the judge). The judge is likely racist not because of widespread hate of Asians in the society he lives in, but because he was out in a concentration camp by Asians." seems like a perfectly valid retort.
Dogs who bite people who attack their owners are well-trained dogs.
And people do care, at least to the extent that they make fun of the police, when the police shoot a chihuahua because they were "in fear for their life".
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