domain:farhakhalidi.substack.com?page=2?page=0?page=0
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
23m ago
Only in America.
It's why cases where people see what works in American society and try and replicate it in their own makes me wince more than anything.
Hopefully this doesn't come off as too pedantic, but doesn't that imply it's not only in America? I'm probably just as disturbed by their cultural hegemony as you are, but in my experience it's so great that trying to draw a distinction between, say, American and European woke causes is rather futile. Maybe there is more of a distinction between the broader West and the rest of the world.
clo
34m ago
Actually, what bothers me about them is the odd double standard where they demand recognition from our society, yet refuse to play by any of its standards
Only in America. Be all you can be and all that, tear down every fence and shatter every glass ceiling. If you're not who you could be, it's your fault, in the land of opportunity.
Oh, and you don't owe your fellow man anything. Why would you?
I share your disgust, but the targets are more broad. It's why cases where people see what works in American society and try and replicate it in their own makes me wince more than anything. The world has internalized their hegemony so hard that it genuinely believes the lies, often with awful results.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
1hr ago
There's an image by https://x.com/patrickjfl that shows there's been a realignment between 1996 and 2024, but it has no dataset attached. To summarize (summarizing a tweet, lol), the parties have switched places: the GOP is now relatively more popular with the plebs, while the Dems have become the party of choice for the PMC.
There's another chart in comments by Kyle Saunders, with even less hard data on it, that shows that the cleavage line on the good old political compass has been rotating since 1960: it used to separate socialists from capitalists, but now it separates progressives from conservatives, with the GOP/Trump side becoming slightly more pro-redistribution that the Dems.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
· Edited 1hr ago
I'm not so sure, I kind of doubt Social Media's broader impact on the conversation, because the testimony to it always seems one sided.
As a sort of one-and-a-half-sided attempt (i.e. I am opposed to SJ, but this is something that anti-SJ did via social media), I think Musk buying Twitter and gutting Trust & Safety is the likely key component of Trump's election win based on the demographic breakdown showing the swing being extremely concentrated among the young (which I hypothesise to be from the breakdown of the false SJ consensus created by silencing everyone who didn't fit).
EDIT: I didn't realise this was so old when I posted, although I'll leave it up as an example of "new evidence".
stuckinbathroom
2hr ago
Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy.
Wokey-wan Kenobi: It’s over, Elonakin, I have the high ground!
Elonakin Blueskywalker: You underestimate my power!
WK: Don’t try it!
clo
2hr ago
Miyoo Mini+ with onionOS is the best OOTB, you can pay a bit extra to have an SD card loaded up and preconfigured from sites like Litnxt. They also offer the Crossmix version of the Trimui Smart Pro similarly preconfigured.
The latest versions of the Anbernic 35XX SP (clamshell) are pretty dang good. And the Anbernic 40XXV is the only 40XX device I'd consider decent.
If people don't mind tinkering a fair bit to get everything to run right on Android, Retroid pretty much has the market cornered although the prices are significantly upwards.
roche
2hr ago
But isn't it more fun to find these truths yourself? If you figure everything out, you will be bored (this seems a bit like your current problem actually)
I'm not interested in truths, really, but results. Belief is cheap. So long as we're confined to the same outcomes as the ancients, it's hard to be optimistic.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
2hr ago
therefore any evidence against this theory must be wrong somehow.
What evidence?
I do understand the temptation to latch onto the hottest and most bikeshedd-y of all culture war items: the CICO thesis.
I didn't see anything especially notable in the post except for this wild claim I'd never heard of before of skinny people often putting away over five thousand calories a day in the past.
In any case, since I can't resist either, I will propose that higher body temperature provides a possible mechanism for people to burn a much higher (or lower) amount of calories than can be explained by the Mifflin-St. Jeor Equation.
There's obviously some degree of RMR difference between people (and the existence of people at the tails of the RMR distribution does not contradict CICO in the slightest btw).
However, it's notable that people are eating way more food these days than at basically any point in the past. That figure is a little rough since it doesn't actually measure what people are eating - those numbers show a similar story but they only seem to go back to the seventies. So it's a little hard to imagine that our ancestors had significantly higher metabolisms while eating significantly less. Small changes are possible and not that interesting to me.
JarJarJedi
2hr ago
That sounds contradictory. Giving people I-Bonds (or cash I guess) is the maximum materialistic gift - it contains the most material component and the least emotional/spiritual component. If anybody, Christians should know that material things can have spiritual meaning, and thus material things (like gifts) can be used to convey emotional/spiritual messages.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
2hr ago
· Edited 2hr ago
Musk buying Twitter was a crippling blow to SJ, to be sure, but it's far from dead and it still holds the high ground of the academy. I'm not saying it definitely will make a comeback in the next few years - it's no longer got either stealth or an aura of inevitability, and that's a big deal - but it's premature to definitively say it's peaked; I'll believe it's decisively defeated when the SJ party here in Australia (the Greens) either falls below 10% of the vote or recants its hair-raising "let's ban politicians from taking anti-SJ positions" policy (relevant part's on page 5).
Folamh3
2hr ago
I think Middleton is the exact guy I was thinking of when I posted this question.
Folamh3
2hr ago
About sixty pages into My Brilliant Friend. It makes Italy sound like Beirut.
RaiderOfALostTusken
2hr ago
I definitely get more bot friend requests post elon. There was a while that i was getting lots of fake messages right at first, that's about it
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
3hr ago
but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).
It sure didn't seem that way back when it was discussed on the subreddit during Trump's first term. Maybe they honestly changed their mind, but it just feels like they got quiet after seeing they won't make a lot of hay with it.
I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like
"The police are hunting down innocent, unarmed, black men like they were animals"? "Patriarchy"? "Rape culture"? "Systemic racism"? Before you try to do a motte-and-bailey on these, bare in mind that there's no shortage of people actually believing the bailey.
Also how do true conspiracist beliefs enter into it? Were people who believed in Epstein's Pedo Island For The Elites back in, say 2018, cranks? Am I a crank if a believe in a conspiracy of Queer Theorist clinicians and academics to normalize and promote various forms of body modification? Am I a crank for believing children walk into gender clinics identifying as inanimate objects, and gender clinics are happily affirming them with little to no pushback? Am I a crank if I believe some global elites are coordinating to promote LGBT acceptance, including putting pressure on politicians through private channels, if the the pushback from the local culture turns out to be too high for them to take a stand publically?
If the term "crank" includes true beliefs I have to question it's usefulness. If it doesn't, how do you handle cases where the truth of a given belief is uncertain? Are people who thought it's plausible for Imane Khelif to be male cranks? What about people who think Epstein didn't kill himself?
How do your resolve these questions in a way that doesn't boil down to "people who disagree with me are cranks"?
jeroboam
3hr ago
This is begging the question.
You assume that caloric consumption is determined almost entirely by activity level, and therefore any evidence against this theory must be wrong somehow.
My post of course, was about body temperature, not really about the causes of obesity, but I do understand the temptation to latch onto the hottest and most bikeshedd-y of all culture war items: the CICO thesis.
In any case, since I can't resist either, I will propose that higher body temperature provides a possible mechanism for people to burn a much higher (or lower) amount of calories than can be explained by the Mifflin-St. Jeor Equation.
Tits_Mcgruff
3hr ago
If not then what percentile human being would you say is doing menial supermarket work?
Where I’m from, most supermarket workers are a mix of 1st generation immigrants, highschoolers, and university students. Is this not the case where you live?
OliveTapenade
3hr ago
I was thinking of Robinson. I always remember an incident in his debate with Chris Rufo:
Robinson: But then I open the leading leftist magazine in the country, Jacobin, and I look at the headlines, and they are about things like the writers’ strike, or they’re about the fact that you can’t afford a one-bedroom apartment working full time.
Rufo: But would you say that Jacobin is representative of the—
Robinson: Of the left?
Rufo: Would you say Jacobin is the ideological force behind the largest movements of the left? I don’t think so.
Robinson: It’s the leading leftist magazine in the country. I think they’ve got a higher circulation than any other leftist publication.
Rufo: I don’t know about that.
This seems absurd, because it's obviously only possible to consider Jacobin "the leading leftist magazine in the country" if you have an extremely idiosyncratic definition of what counts as "leftist".
Whereas I'd say that most people would use the word 'left' to mean 'of America's two big political factions, the one that is further to the left'.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
3hr ago
It's no longer possible to read much of anything without logging in, which I suspect is a load shedding measure.
Lewis2
3hr ago
When I was younger, my normal body temperature was around 99.7. I ate a terrifying amount of food, yet even without any regular exercise other than walking, I had a BMI that was barely above underweight. I thrived in cold weather, my blood pressure was on the verge of being too low, and my resting heart rate was in the 50s. I’m also fairly tall, and, interestingly, also used to generate a lot more static electricity than most other people I knew (@Gaashk, are you aware of any connection between body temperature/metabolism and static electricity?).
Unfortunately for me, it seems there may be something to your theory. Not only do mice studies present me with a bleak picture of my future, but when I compare myself to my former classmates, I seem to be wrinkling much more rapidly than any of them, even though I generally have a vampiric aversion to the sun, while they spend much more time in it.
Perhaps I should just take this as a hint from the universe to stop procrastinating and do something more with my life before my time is up.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
4hr ago
While there are still serious concerns about how wishy-washy Trump is on Russia, that's a separate issue from "Russiagate" which was related to specific coordination possibly through blackmail. It might seem like any criticism of Trump's position on Russia is synonymous with "Russiagate", but when properly disambiguated I'd say not many Dems really believe in the crazier takes (e.g. Trump is a KGB plant).
I also think you're not really understanding what I (or the writers I linked) mean by "crank". A crank isn't just anyone who believes in stuff that isn't supported by science or evidence, it's specifically conspiratorial views like QAnon or "Bill Gates is microchipping us through vaccines" or "global elites want open borders to genocide white people". It's distrust of amorphous undefined "elites", who are perceived to have a secret evil agenda. Someone who believes in religion or astrology is wrong, obviously, but I wouldn't call them a crank.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
4hr ago
I'm asking you to summarize what the hard-liners who believe in a Jewish ethnostate believe, in terms they would agree with.
"Israel is the exclusive nation-state of the Jewish people. It consists of the lands that God agreed to give us in the torah (or talmud, not up to date on the specifics of jewish religious texts), stretching from the river to the sea. As God's chosen people, we are justified in conquering the lands he promised us."
That isn't what I meant by "stupid grunt shit," and I think you are being disingenuous in claiming that you think that's what I meant. I was thinking more of the videos of them making offensive jokes and raiding Palestinian women's underwear drawers.
Apologies for misunderstanding - there has been a recent (well not terribly recent but the process has stretched on for a long time) high-profile case in my country where someone was prosecuted for "stupid grunt shit" that turned out to actually be warcrimes. This included kicking a man in handcuffs off a cliff and giving the soldier that did it the nickname Leonidas, as well as multiple murders of civilians (look up Ben Roberts-Smith if you want more information) - that's the sort of behavior I assumed you were describing here.
I know that the Palestinians (and our resident Jew-haters) claim that Israelis are sniping Palestinian children for fun, but there's been no substantial evidence of this, and to believe that it's happening at scale requires, again, believing that Israelis are so psychologically different from most people, and so bloodthirsty, that "monsters" would be an appropriate description.
Actually, I don't think that this behavior marks them as being psychologically different from most people. Go back through history and you'll be hard-pressed to find a people that hasn't engaged in these kinds of brutal acts - you don't even need to go that far back at all when you look at Germany. It is eminently human to get caught up by powerful feelings of nationalism, ethnic chauvinism, esprit de corps etc, and take actions that will haunt you for the rest of your life. That is actually one of the pieces of information that went into forming my view on the topic - the (supposed) increased rates of suicide and psychological issues amongst IDF soldiers as a result of what has happened in Gaza. Take this article for instance - https://edition.cnn.com/2024/10/21/middleeast/gaza-war-israeli-soldiers-ptsd-suicide-intl/index.html
After Mizrahi took his own life, videos and photos surfaced on social media of the reservist bulldozing homes and buildings in Gaza and posing in front of vandalized structures. Some of the images, which were purportedly posted on his now removed social media accounts, appeared in a documentary that he was interviewed for on Israel’s Channel 13.
Here we have a man who gets radicalised by what happened on October 7, goes to fight in Gaza, commits atrocities and brags about it on social media (I'm sure you can see why my mind went to the place it did when you discussed stuff being posted to social media by Israeli soldiers)... then kills himself because he's unable to live with what he's done. I don't think this man was uniquely evil or some incomprehensible monster with alien psychology, and I can understand why he took the actions he did. But that doesn't excuse the fact that what he did was monstrous, and I'm not going to back down from the description of "blood-drenched" when we have an actual soldier who took part in those deeds repeatedly telling his family that "invisible blood" is coming out of his skin. I like to think that if I was in the same position I'd take a different course of action, but that's very easy to say when it isn't my relatives being kidnapped.
I have never claimed that the Israelis are non-human or otherwise incomprehensible. I believe that deeds like the ones Israel is committing are morally wrong, but also that they have an incredibly negative effect on the people who commit them as well. The stoics and the buddhists both view harming others as an act that harms the self as well, and I'm honestly inclined to agree with them. Bulldozing people alive in great numbers as you demolish their homes leaves a stain on the soul that is impossible to remove - but with that said, I'm going to be largely reserving my empathy for the victims.
Using the "Aparthead state" rhetoric kind of gives the game away,
Is Israel not an apartheid state? If you can provide some evidence that Palestinians and Israelis are treated equally under the law I'd be very happy to be proven wrong. But when I hear about laws that say things like "The right to exercise national self-determination in the State of Israel is unique to the Jewish people." I can't help but think of apartheid. I'm not a big fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates, but I think his description was right on the money.
I mean, have you read any other books? I haven't read Righteous Victims but I've read some of the other stuff by Benny Morris and the New Historians, and even they don't tell it that way.
I've read other books, yes. But some of those books are from the Palestinian perspective, and my view is informed by both.
If you think that terrorism and unending warfare is a "political consequence of their continued existence," though, then you apparently share the most pessimistic Israeli view of Palestinians.
I think that terrorism and unending warfare is a political consequence not of their continued existence but rather a reaction to Israeli policy. Change those policies, give them justice and a lot of that terrorism and unending warfare will vanish. I personally support a single-state solution with full franchise for the Palestinians and prosecutions for the minority of Israelis that were actually engaged in planning and carrying out the blood-drenched, bronze-age deeds that have rightfully garnered so much opprobrium from the rest of the world.
On the other hand, we're back to how you characterize "the lengths Israel has gone to."
I feel like I addressed several of the other points here earlier, but I'm basing this off widely accepted and reputable sources. I think the UN and ICC are worth listening to when it comes to questions of genocide, war crimes and ethnic cleansing, and even pro Israeli sources largely agree that the north of Gaza has been destroyed and the people who lived there displaced in order to let the settlers start moving in as soon as possible. Even if I go solely by the deeds actually announced by Israeli government officials, I still think that "the lengths Israel has gone to." are that bad.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
4hr ago
Do you have any evidence that wokeness is still peaking, or has not yet peaked in the short to moderate term? I've gotten a lot of pushback from people on this site claiming how ridiculous it is to think wokeness has peaked... yet they kind of just handwave that as an assumption. By contrast, people like Noah have pretty good evidence in articles like this (non paywalled version available here)
daguerrean
4hr ago
Youtube and Facebook and to some extent Instagram are weird that way. Moderation is obviously slightly woke but the commenter base is definitively anti-woke. Places like Reddit, 4chan, X have a more typical convergence of leadership and userbase.
VA had a hiring spree last year, in large part because of the expanding benefits from the PACT Act.
Your impression of a hiring freeze remains partly correct, because VA has budget shortfalls and plans to lay off staff:
I suspect that VA tends to paint a bleak picture to Congress as a standard operating procedure, in hopes of getting more funding. Though my nephew assures me from his VA experience that more funding would not go amiss.
So back to my off-the-cuff idea of importing doctors: my point is that any VA hospital that finds it challenging to attract a decent US doctor ought to be able to do what the private sector does. Right now, the VA follows AMA's standards, which require any non-US-trained doctor to do 3+ years of residency (plus other things) before they can practice medicine in US. Residency slots are, apparently, the bottleneck for US doctor supply in the first place.
My question is: just how crucial is it for someone already practicing as a doctor in a French or German hospital to do 3+ years of residency in US?
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