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magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
1hr ago
@Belisarius @jeroboam @Jiro @crushedoranges @FiveHourMarathon
I think the steelman of this argument (though a lot of steel's involved) looks something like this: select a Republican candidate who's not Donald Trump, because the backlash will be weaker and that has two major effects:
- you might actually get more done to roll back SJ because they're not sabotaging you quite as relentlessly (also because someone younger might be more switched-on)
- raising the CW's temperature is bad for America, because it raises the spectre of a fifth column if there's war.
This is an argument I actually accept and have made here before. It still has some decision-theory issues, and it's Machiavellian, but this is a place where I'd be willing to compromise on that.
Now, of course, this has long since been water under the bridge. Neither Trump nor Harris was a good candidate for CW-temperature purposes, and certainly Harris would not have served conservatives' cultural purposes. I still vaguely preferred her due to Trump's advanced age, but then again I don't have to live in the 'States. But I just felt I should point out that there was at one point a version of this argument that didn't totally suck.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Detroit and Baltimore are typical examples. Both have areas where blue-affiliated people were moving (though to enclaves), though I don't know if they still do.
Rosencrantz2
1hr ago
A conspiracy theory typically involves some shadowy group doing something in a centrally planned way. Your bullet points are all just badly worded versions of perfectly reasonable observations about uncoordinated human behaviour.
A conspiracy theory such as flat earth or Qanon are in a completely different category.
Throwaway05
1hr ago
Here's a citation re: open residency spots
https://www.nrmp.org/match-data/2024/06/results-and-data-2024-main-residency-match/
Table 1A - pretty normal for about 5-10% of offered spots to be unfilled.
sun_the_second
1hr ago
This argument suffers from linking a thread about Aloy having a bodily feature that women are known to have, rather than any examples of her looking mannish or behaving in a masculine manner.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
Maybe I get this impression just because I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters.
Since the left holds the high ground of academia, their grifters are defined as higher-quality. Ta-Nehisi Coates comes to mind. Nikole Hannah-Jones (1619 Project) also.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
The academy is the "high ground" in the sense that a defeated tribe can hide out in the mountains and wage guerilla war until a suitable opportunity arises (like Hilary wanting a way to attack Bernie from the left) - not in the sense that it is the key strategic terrain being fought over.
No, it's the latter also. As @magic9mushroom points out, it can effectively gatekeep a large number of professions, and it can provide anointed Truth.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
I think the real lesson from 2012 is that pundits are wont to proclaim realignments, because they desperately want to live in interesting and historic times.
We've just seen, for only the second time, the re-election of an American President who lost an interim election. We're still seeing the echos of the fall of the Soviet Union (e.g. the Ukraine War). We recently got over a global pandemic causing worldwide oppression. We ARE living in interesting times.
We're going to have a divide, but subgroups have switched from one side to the other before (e.g. blacks in the 1960s) and they will again.
some
2hr ago
That choice dismisses the idea that femininity can be dangerous to one's enemies or efficacious for achieving one's goals. It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
From my understanding, currently feminist deny there is anything female-coded women are better at. Not that femininity can be used for good or bad, rather they demand be erased. I think this is why cultural products from the more feminists countries, such as the US, feature mannish-looking women, acting in a masculine manner.
If they were to admit that women posses certain strengths which men lack, it would naturally to the question of existence of male strengths which women lack.
RenOS
the mountain passed, the sea in front
2hr ago
AFAIK median ages always include children. So any place that families go to will be much younger than a place with mostly singles, even if the singles themselves are younger.
ControlsFreak
2hr ago
From first principles, active bodily processes to either heat or cool one's flesh likely consume calories. Temperature gradients need to be maintained. In fact, I've seen work posing the question of the effect of indoor environment control on caloric expenditure (if you have electricity doing the work of regulating your environment, you likely have to expend less). Given that most people maintain a body temperature above that of ambient, it is theoretically plausible (even likely) that increased body temperature would increase caloric expenditure.
Of course, the rub usually comes in terms of magnitudes. How big is the effect? A casual scan of the literature doesn't turn up anything all that great. So, I would maintain my personal belief that there is likely a positive effect, but extremely low confidence in any sense of an estimate for magnitude.
Concerning equations, the question always is what it is that you're trying to do. For very small groups, you can go through a very intensive process of measuring all sorts of body characteristics, down to the size of individual organs, and use some pretty detailed estimates to try to get really close. Most people don't do anything like that; it's just too much effort. Instead, people often want to collapse larger-group data into a handful of variables for ease of estimation, knowing that any such effort will inherently have variability and error bars. The equation that you get, and how much variability it has, depends on which type of population you're targeting and which variables you're trying to collapse it down to. Obviously, targeting larger/smaller population types tends to increase/decrease variability; similarly, increasing/decreasing the number of variables (under mild assumptions of them being correlated at all to the dependent variable and not entirely codependent) tends to decrease/increase variability. If you're considering fit and athletically-active populations, a lot of folks recommend the Cunningham equation. It also does not include typical body temperature. I'm not sure what the codependence will look like, what the rough magnitude of the effect will be, and how much additional variability you could cut out by including typical body temperature, just because I'm not aware of anyone who has taken the time and money to specifically explore it.
Tophattingson
2hr ago
The White Genocide conspiracy theory can also be steelmanned as people using an overly-expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, akin to the one originally proposed by Lemkin:
Generally speaking, genocide does not necessarily mean the immediate destruction of a nation, except when accomplished by mass killings of all members of a nation. It is intended rather to signify a coordinated plan of different actions aiming at the destruction of essential foundations of the life of national groups, with the aim of annihilating the groups themselves. The objectives of such a plan would be the disintegration of the political and social institutions, of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of the personal security, liberty, health, dignity, and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.
And then the flaw of the steelman is that if we were to revert to Lemkin's original wording we'd have to reclassify a lot of stuff that isn't treated as genocide as such, and then would inevitably need a new word to replace genocide to describe the narrower meaning.
Southkraut
A tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing.
2hr ago
Shame about the character.
Have you seen the Three and Four Musketeers movies from the seventies? If so, how does this iteration compare? And if you can speak to it, then where does the 2011 version fit in?
daguerrean
2hr ago
Israel is committing genocide in Gaza
You cannot seriously say that this view is anything like QAnon or Pizzagate. As Ben Garrison was saying, “crank” doesn’t just mean someone that’s wrong.
Someone claiming Israel is committing genocide might be guilty of using an overly expansive definition of genocide for motivated reasons, but there’s nothing crazy about the claim, there’s nothing detached from reality.
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
2hr ago
It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Well, no, it's not ironic at all actually. The writers know exactly what they're doing, at least at a subconscious level. The idea that femininity could be manipulative and dangerous is a bad look for women, so obviously they would rather not depict such characters.
Feminism as a concrete social movement is about advancing the material and social interests of women (or at least, the interests of a certain subset of women). It's not about "giving people the freedom to explore their identities" or "recognizing the complexity of every human" or any claptrap like that.
hooser
2hr ago
Last year, a new film adaptation of The Three Musketeers came out. (French, Part 1, Part 2)
I watched Part 1 first; the fight scenes are amazing. The scene of the arranged duel between D'Artagnan and the three musketeers that turns into a brawl with the Cardinal's men is particularly fantastic. The style has a flavor of Cinéma vérité in that it's a continuous and somewhat shaky take from a point of view of an unseen witness who keeps turning to catch the action while ducking away from danger, but it deviates from Cinéma vérité in that everyone fighting is super-competent. In this seemingly-continuous shot, one catches glimpse of feats of martial arts moves, all geared towards dispatching the enemy, none are for show. It's very cool and impressive, and worth watching for that scene alone.
Every film adaptation makes decisions about how much of the original material to use, and how closely to stick to the plot. When it does, that's a deliberate choice on the part of those who made the film. Sometimes it's a little change: Porthos is bi; Constance is not married and yet runs a hostel while working in the queen's chambers. It's annoying to have such present-day sensibilities undermine the portrayal of a society very different from mine, but I figured that at least these changes didn't utterly contradict an essential part of the story.
And then I watched Part 2.
Milady from the book is one of my favorite villains. She is smart, adaptable, ruthless, resourceful, flawed, vicious, and above all feminine. She wields femininity as a weapon far more effective then mere swords and muskets. Why dirty your hands, when you can manipulate men to do it for you?
In this adaptation, Milady is a sword-wielding girl-boss.
When an otherwise-good adaptation takes an awesome feminine villain and replaces her with someone who might as well be a man, that's a deliberate choice. That choice dismisses the idea that femininity can be dangerous to one's enemies or efficacious for achieving one's goals. It's therefore ironic that the people who made this choice consider it a feminist move.
Fiction is not associative: strong (female character) != (strong female) character.
self_made_human
Kai su, teknon?
3hr ago
-Ron Brown the Secretary of Commerce who was killed in a plane crash in Croatia. The medical examiner found a execution-style bullet hole in his head that was explained away as a flying rivet.
"Why would you shoot a man before throwing him out of an airplane?".
It makes no sense.
Tophattingson
3hr ago
I think what broke a lot of people (myself included) was the disastrous and anti-scientific response to Covid, which every step of the way was blessed by the so-called experts.
To add to this, if "conspiracy theory" was used in a neutral way instead of only being used against right-wing beliefs, then supporters of the mainstream response to COVID are conspiracy theorists. After all, they believe, without evidence, that masks stop covid, in the same way that a tinfoil hat might block mind control. They believe, without evidence, that imprisoning the entire population in their own homes, for just two weeks, with a "real" lockdown, will make covid go away. And they believe that governments that don't do this, such as Florida under DeSantis, are conspiring to commit mass murder while covering up the true number of deaths. Similarly, they treat all opposition to policies they support as motivated by criminal conspiracy (by some combination of Trumpists, Russians, the religious, or far-right) rather than by differing opinions or priorities.
Pretty much every crank view on the right has an equivalent on the left, just couched in academic language and with institutional support. There's plenty on the left that believe in a "Trans Genocide" or that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza, to state the obvious equivalents to white genocide conspiracy theories. And as for broader conspiratorial worldviews like QAnon, critical theory is just that: a conspiracy theory. Just one that's popular enough in academia that it dodges the definition.
Throwaway05
3hr ago
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?
I've never met a foreign trained doctor who came to the U.S. with Medical School and Residency training in Western Europe. We might actually have reciprocity agreements for those countries, I don't know, I've never encountered one. Scott did his Medical School in Ireland IIRC, which is note quite the same. The vast majority of foreign doctors I've met are from Asia (mostly India) and do absolutely need retraining and will generally admit as such, however frustrating it is.
Every time this comes up I have to drag out a few facts.
-There is actually a surplus of residency spots. Yes you heard me.
-We do have something of a shortage of some specialties, but this can't adequately be solved by increasing spots without decreasing training quality.
-Nobody wants to go into primary care because it pays significantly less, is one of the harder jobs, and has been made less attractive by regulatory burden and other factors.
-Most jobs are in primary care anyway, aka most doctors work in primary care.
-Even within primary care we have more of an allocation problem than a shortage. Doctors train very hard and start their adult life late. They want to be in desirable locations so Iowa has a shortage but NYC does not.
-NPs and PAs were meant to fix this but make it worse - they still want to go into specialties (and can since they have no specialty training, they can just do what they want) and they still hang around the same urban areas.
-You could hypothetically fix this by importing a ton of foreign doctors but you'd have to enslave them and force them to work in the undesirable locations long term or they would just leave immediately when given the option.
-You can fix this using the resources we have by raising salaries to what incentivizes the behavior you want. Nobody wants to do this, they just want to continue giving doctors the pay cuts they've been getting for the last 20-30 years, even though doctors are not a high percentage of healthcare costs.
zeke5123a
4hr ago
I think the left adopts this view because their self image is that of being the experts (by which they mean credentialed). The replication crisis strikes at the heart of this view. So they pretend it (and all of the other mistakes by the experts) don’t exist.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
4hr ago
I'll offer that record as an example: very few right wingers happy to rail against TikTok at the time of the original comment are still upset over it, and even fewer will acknowledge out loud why they're no longer upset about it, and I doubt even a few will acknowledge the Gell-Mann amnesia implications of their favorite "heterodox" writers forgetting about TikTok once they paid off Trump.
I'll admit to being somewhat peeved about people here going "well, this particular accusation against TikTok is dubious, so banning the site is bad". But rightists aren't quite as monolithic as you think; there is a monolith behind Trump, certainly, but there are a bunch of others in the tent.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '21
4hr ago
If conservatives have been ‘pearl clutching’ about sexual morality for this long maybe it’s not performative
Because the majority of pearl clutchers get divorces, use contraception, get abortions, let their sons and daughters fornicate in high school and college, consume internet porn, watch gratuitously violent and sexual movies/tv series, etc etc.
I don't doubt that principled conservative exist when it comes to sexual mores -- I think I (and you?) would probably count, but we're now a very small minority. My conservative religious family members are all okay with gays now, 20 years ago they absolutely were not.
So my point (perhaps poorly expressed) was that the media is engaging in a sort of cargo-cult appeal to Christian morality ("Can you BELIEVE he cheated on his wife/had sex with a student/posted raunchy comments on a forum/etc.??") to the ever-dwindling number of people who can muster anything more than lukewarm outrage to that stuff. There's a "smoke and mirrors" effect of the same type as a woke Twitter outrage mob. Some outlets repeat the story, Twitter addicts tweet incessantly and spam memes and shit up the victim's Twitter threads, and risk averse corporate/political consultants label the victim "high risk" and endorsements get withdrawn. The Kamala campaign astroturfed the heck out of the internet for weeks, we just saw a very pure example of this phenomenon.
More to the original point, they tried the same stuff with Trump. He's a philanderer, he has sex with expensive prostitutes, grab em by the pussy, pee tapes, etc. I'm pretty sure that (most) conservatives in the 90s would have been genuinely affronted by Trump's behavior, but (most) conservatives in the 2010s, while unhappy with his antics, apparently didn't find them disqualifying.
You don't train for routine issues, you train to know when an issue isn't a routine issue (and for how to deal with it).
If a patient comes in with abdominal pain, some times they need to fart and sometimes that person is going to die if they don't get transferred to a hospital immediately. You do the training so you don't get this decision making wrong, because society has decided it is unacceptable for us to get this wrong (which...fair).
Complicating this is the way that our regulatory and billing burden constantly pushes back against correct clinical practice, the science and practice are being always updated, and patients are grossly unreliable/muddy the waters.
Do keep in mind that a huge portion of clinical practice is not outpatient practice. What happens in a hospital is wildly different.
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