aaa
14d ago
TIL that religions removed by centuries and thousands of kilometers from christianity worshipped satan because some internet christian believes their mythology is actually real.
aaa
16d ago
satanic religions of old
There is no old satanic religion. Satanism was invented in the 60s by a topless bar manager.
aaa
24d ago
as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers
Your ideological prejudices are wrong, the increase in trans youth has been concentrated mostly in females:
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth
(...)
In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities.
(...)
The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.
For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.
aaa
27d ago
I disagree with this characterization. Nick Fuentes has always run a vibes based group, his main victory was telling Ben Shapiro he wasn't conservative enough. He's also been calling himself a Christian Nationalist for years. Milo used to be a politically incorrect technocrat back when Allum Bokhari was ghostwriting for him but after getting cancelled by the mainstream conservatives and joining Fuentes (and then leaving Fuentes) he's publicly renounced his gayness and can be seen walking around with a breviary.
Despite their faith being obviously fake and ignorant I would still consider them part of the religious conservatives, although distinct from the main religious conservatives on account of being younger, antisemitic instead of philosemitic and almost completely irrelevant.
aaa
28d ago
I don't understand. You consider Milo Yiannapoulos and Nick Fuentes (I assume that's who you mean, I can't find any relevant David Fuentes) to be politically incorrect technocrats?
aaa
1mo ago
At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated
The complexity of the ballot is yet another weakness of the US electoral system. Having so many questions on a single ballot means that an attacker can deanonymize it and use this information to commit fraud. Complex ballots like that should be split into separate ballots, both because it makes counting faster and because it makes certain kinds of fraud impossible.
aaa
1mo ago
How are they lower? That link says it's 9% the 2017 study puts 10% muslim around 2035 in the "high immigration" projection. It looks much higher to me.
aaa
1mo ago
Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.
aaa
1mo ago
It's strange that people feel this way given that galenic temperaments and astrology were inextricably linked for centuries. They have the same origin (Aristotle making shit up, misunderstood by Galen which is misunderstood by arabs which are misunderstood by medieval translators) and the main purpose of astrology, for pretty much all its history save for the last 100 years, was to inform galenic physicians in how to fix humors.
aaa
2mo ago
There is a lot of sexual frustration, yes. However, while females committing mass shootings are rare, they are not unheard of. So you would need at least a few more datapoints.
aaa
2mo ago
There isn't anything damaging but if it came out close to the shooting, when everyone had their attention to it they would be all over Paige. Was it worth it? Probably not, but maybe it seemed so to the people who did it.
aaa
2mo ago
PS. I strongly suspect that the reason the diary wasn't released until today was to protect Paige from undue attention, given how prominently she is featured in the diary. There was no conspiracy.
aaa
2mo ago
There was some talk previously, here, about the "manifesto" of Audrey E. Hale, the 2023 Nashville Elementary School Shooter. The shooting happened in 2023-03-27 and the FBI hid the "manifesto" for well over a year, with only a few select pages leaking here and there.
Because the shooter was trans (female to male specifically) people speculated that the "manifesto" contained all kinds of nefarious ideological reasons.
Well, it's all out now. You can get it from The Tennessee Star or, if you don't want to give them your email, from the Kiwifarms.
Basically, there's nothing interesting to it. Alas, the mystery box strikes again: fantasy was better than reality.
A few observations in no particular order:
- the "manifesto" is really just a diary
- Audrey was 28 years old but reading the diary you would probably guess 14 instead, it's really immature (the spelling isn't great either)
- she initially wanted to do it on 1/17, then 2/17, then 4/17, then 3/17 and then finally settles on 3/27.
- she got scammed on the internet while looking for freelance designer work (think logos, illustrations), multiple times
- she hated her father, and also her mother, but mostly her father
- she wanted to have anal sex with a black girl but couldn't because she didn't have a penis, nor a black girl
The backstory is that she was in love with two (black) girls, Sydney Sims who died in a car crash in august of 2022, and Paige Averianna Patton, who is a local radio personality (as Averianna The Personality). Syd never reciprocated, Paige only briefly in high school. On the 27th of february Paige had her first live show (I'm not sure what kind of live show that would be), which coincidentally was also her birthday, so that's probably why the shooting happened on 3/27. This is what Audrey writes about said live show:
She knows who she is, and all the rest of the world in time will too, she's famous to me; a star to many, little does she know how we will soon share the same fate. She will live a legend and I will die a shooter - hopefully to become infamous (I will make history too). No one will forget neither of us. She will be the blessing, and I will be the horror to inflict pain.
aaa
2mo ago
The 10th percentile Swede enjoys a style of life far more comfortable and luxurious than the 90th percentile Nigerian, but Nigeria's birth rate is way above replacement.
You are thinking about this the wrong way. The relevant variable is not how much money you have but how much does a child cost. Nigerian children are cheap but a Swedish couple doesn't want to raise their child like the average nigerian does (and they can not because it is illegal).
aaa
2mo ago
Mongolia and Georgia are very different from the average western country. Both countries:
- have a large rural population (30%-40% compared to the 20% or less of western countries)
- almost everyone who is not rural lives in a single city (50% of mongolians live in ulanbator, 30% of georgian live in Tblisi)
- they both have net negative migration in living memory
- they both have low life expectancy at birth
Additionally Georgia's population growth has been negative for the past 30 years, if you don't count the bump they got in the last two years from the war in Ukraine.
In my opinion the fertility crisis is 100% economic in origin, it would be interesting to see where the increase of fertility is happening in Georgia and Mongolia. If it's concentrated in rural/low density regions then all it's doing is convincing a few people that live in very-low-child-cost areas (in the case of mongolia possibly in negative-child-cost areas) to have more. If that is the case trying to do something similar in the west will yield no result at all.
If you were going to increase the birth rate how would you do it?
What I wouldn't do is:
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No child subsidies. We're never going to be willing to spend the kind of money needed to make them work. Plus they are dysgenic, to make them not be dysgenic you'd have to make a regressive social program (rich people get more) and those are taboo.
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Taxing the childless. This is the exact same thing as 1 just framed as to appeal to conservatives. The only positive thing is that you can make this not be dysgenic.
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Less schooling. Schooling is a big driver of child cost so reducing it seems to make sense. Ideally you wouldn't just get rid of college but bite into secondary education as well. Most people should be, by age 16, out of school and into a paid apprenticeship that offers a career path (so, not tomato-picker-forever type things). I think our world is too complex for this to be possible, we wouldn't be able to decide who's worth putting the apprenticeship training into.
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Push religion onto people. Religion is positively correlated to fertility so we can trick people into taking an economically bad deal (having more children) by brainwashing them into believing god wants them to. I think the correlation of religion and fertility is a mirage, more religious people just tend to live in lower-cost-of-child areas (living within an extended family both provides free child care and also makes people opportunistically religious). This is too long to explain but I think religion by itself suppresses fertility.
I don't think the problem is actually tractable. It's intractability is likely the true reason behind the big push for immigration we've seen in the past 20 years.
My extremely long shot proposal is this: socially normalize and encourage women to have children while in college, out of wedlock and with no expectation that the relationship will last and then dump the child on their grandparents (of the woman). After the first 3-6 months she's not going to see the child at all outside of holidays and a few sundays. This places the economic burden of children on people that are better positioned economically to handle it, who can live in less dense areas of the country (because they don't have to be near a job), it mostly removes the negative impacts on career (because she's still doesn't have one) and child subsidies can be added to the pension system and thus be regressive, because the pension system is the only social security system that is allowed to be regressive (hopefully nobody notices that we are doing this).
There is a strong social stigma against having children before finishing school, that it will make you forever poor (because it currently does do just that), so this is extremely unlikely to work.
aaa
2mo ago
As western capitalism trends closer an closer to a command economy through mergers, acquisitions and consolidation you will have a harder and harder time arguing against communism.
About 5 companies make all beer. About 6 companies make all media. It's hard to really argue that single digit values of competition produce the level of innovation that a state run monopoly could never rather than simply producing collusion. It's hard to believe that internally the level of competence will not steadily trend towards that of the DMV.
aaa
2mo ago
It seems to me that hollywood is currently ongoing somewhat of a hangover moment: a lot of people there got really high on ideology in 2019-2021 and now that the high has subsided they're scrambling to fix the mess. Hence the acolyte getting canceled, borderlands and the marvels getting dumped without advertising, snow white, blade and captain america getting long delays and reworks, etc...
But it doesn't mean they won't get high again in the future. In fact I would say that for movies at least, it is guaranteed: they codified their DEI in the academy awards rules. What are they going to do? Make movies that can't get an oscar? I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie-making side of hollywood is just going to slowly die and become more and more woke in the process.
Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever
Season 2 is actually way worse. I was actually of the opinion that season 1, for all its faults, showed promise. Season 2 is terrible. It gets better with season 3, actually, season 3 is even good if you don't think too hard about some things. If you ever reconsider, skip season 2.
aaa
2mo ago
I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
aaa
7mo ago
It's about Natural Law. The problem is, moderns confuse the natural in "Natural Law" with natural as in "what happens naturally, what happens in nature, anything that happens that nobody tried to make happen on purpose" and that's the wrong kind of "natural".
Metacommentary: I wouldn't pursue this line of argumentation. At best your interlocutor will be utterly confused and think it's complete nonsense. At worst you'll have to end up defending extremely shoddy concepts of teleology.
aaa
7mo ago
I have no idea what is going on
What you are looking at, probably, is amplified noise. They display three models of increasing statistical complexity, the simplest one (model 1) got them almost no results, with almost all their results coming for the most complicated one. None of the models is explained in any great detail and this wasn't a pre-registered study (AFAICT) so who knows how many models they even tried.
aaa
7mo ago
The guy is probably old and doesn't want to run a landscaping business anymore. Now he takes what he can get. Because that is what the market will bear.
Oftentimes in those cases the guy running the business is the business. Once he leaves the business is essentially worthless, existing clients will re-evaluate who they are buying from: you spent a million dollars and you would be in the same position if you had started your own landscaping business in the same area.
I did look into some of those:
These are true.
This is true but highly misleading, they want Israel to surrender, basically.
This is unclear, Israel says they did, Qatar says they didn't.
This is true but they say it after every election.
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