domain:natesilver.net
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
The Ivy League will never run out of applicants.
They do, of course, need a good mix of genuine merit admits/connections admits/diversity admits. That might be slightly harder to manage, but plausibly deniable different rules for different people ain’t that hard to manage.
Ben___Garrison
Voltaire's Viceroy
1hr ago
That sort of thing (tough publicly, cordial privately) happened back in the Reagan years between the two parties, but mostly died after Clinton to my knowledge. It might have happened to intra-party disputes between different factions afterwards, but it's definitely not the modal outcome when dealing with Trump. He's very concerned with personal honor and his obsession with "loyalty" is thinly coded for "does what I want". If any R goes against Trump, he'll privately construe them (in his head, and to his aides) that they're disloyal traitors. Trump has been more obsessed with heresy-purging than actually winning against the Ds. All of this is a recipe for genuine dislike between the actors.
hydroacetylene
1hr ago
Trump’s state department made a push for decriminalizing homosexuality in other countries, for one example.
Trump is less pro-gay than democrats, and he’s not pro-trans. This does not make him anti-gay.
DTulpa
1hr ago
He's a Republican, he has troll energy, and he has Matt Gaetz's face.
That last one is a little jokey, but I do think that's what tilts it into a furor relative to any average Republican the left hates. He has a supremely punchable face that screams "douchebag", even to me. And I think he even knows it.
mrvanillasky
1hr ago
Indians in the UK vote more conservative than those in the US lol thanks to Pakistanis living next to them.
faceh
1hr ago
But there's a certain kind of boasting/hypernationalism that you can see sometimes online, a certain level of entitlement to other people's money.
I have to be circumspect, but in the course of practicing law, I've run across these types of clients who have a tendency to haggle about prices and rates from the start. And then once you've agreed on prices they will later on try to get discounts or write-offs, oftentimes by pointing out perceived flaws in the work or failures on the customer service side. And on some occasions just try to screw you over directly.
And when you notice that despite these people belonging to a group that is <10% of your clientele, they are like 80% of this specific type of problem client you encounter, it becomes bad enough that you kind of brace for it when you notice certain names associated with a certain ethnicity pop up.
Now, I have had entirely pleasant interactions and dealings with some of them, but adverse interactions are common enough that I can instantly recall the bad ones, and that can definitely feed into a bias.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1hr ago
Why on Earth would you expect an arbitrary student council to forecast support for Gaza? This is like interviewing homeless men until you find one with no shirt. Is “support” for shirts dying?
For what it’s worth, the articles of impeachment can be found here. They look fine to me. Campaign promises don’t and shouldn’t supersede actual rules.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
1hr ago
I constantly see claims that modern elections are 99% about turnout, not convincing swing voters, since politics is too polarized for there to be a significant number of swing voters. Maybe those takes are completely wrong, but it's certainly the received wisdom in any at all mainstream election analysis. Not sure that targeting redditors in particular is useful way to get out the vote of Democratic partisans, but the Democrats definitely believe that winning elections is about getting their own partisans to actually vote and discouraging Republican partisans from voting (e.g., by spreading negative news about Republican candidates). I say Democrats simply because that's the media bubble I'm in; I have no reason to believe the Republicans don't believe the same with the parties flipped.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
1hr ago
No, there's a LOT of Trump suppression too. I live in a suburb in Essex County, NJ, the bluest county in NJ. Yet over 25% of the vote for President went for Trump. A full quarter! Going by yard signs and other publicity, Trump support was more like 1 in 100.
AmericanSaxeCoburgGothic
Happy to be here! Goal is to post the most exclamation points.
1hr ago
I had a professor (native Russian teaching Political Science at a US university) who said that Jefferey Sachs deserved to be crucified in Russia for what he did with advising shock therapy. He also said the Russian leadership shared some blame for believing his policies.
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
Yes they do, all women I met including mixed black ones preferred white guys.
A common theme of ornograhy style acts women indulge in is called raceplay which is non white women wanting racist white guys to act like racist white guys, so /r/raceplay and /r/fuckingfascists
roystgnr
2hr ago
expecting them to never figure it out no matter how many times you lie to them
What's really weird is the ones who have that expectation, not just in a positive sense, but in a normative sense. At least on eX-twitter it seems like there's a significant number of people who believe that, when a candidate has taken a position previously and has since repudiated it weakly or hasn't even repudiated it at all, it's somehow ethically unacceptable for a voter to hold that position against the candidate unless the candidate is currently running on that position. @MaiqTheTrue is correct that it's "Machiavellian" to believe that you should manipulate voters who have the memories of goldfish, but is there a word for the belief that voters are thus morally required to have the memories of goldfish? Maybe this is just a bit of random chaff from the "wishful thinking"/"ought-is" fallacy, where if "X would have made it more likely for my team to win" then that's supposed to be evidence that X is true, at least in a weird sense of "true" that doesn't mean you can use it to infer any other propositions.
"white men in the like 25-45 range" does seem to be the least bad male demographic to be in.
In terms of dating and mating success I bet this is true. But I think the sharp understated problem is that the more success they achieve, the greater their overall risk becomes, too!
That is, white men will likely have more to lose/further to fall from getting me-tooed, divorced, or arrested.
To put it bluntly, losing a few billion dollars in a divorce is a patently absurd, and extremely harsh outcome, and even if we admit that it doesn't render the guy destitute.
And that's what white males, (almost every male, really) is sensitive to. Their success built over years or decades being threatened by picking the wrong woman or running afoul of the wrong social group. Because those are the conditions everyone currently operates under.
And no this isn't a "won't somebody PLEASE think of the Wealthy WASP guys?" post. Its a "if it can happen to them, it can happen to ANYBODY post.
So yes, I'd grant white guys are going to have it better ("less worse"), but they're not escaping the conditions that are plaguing everyone.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2hr ago
For what it's worth, I was raised by Republican parents who listened to Conservative Talk Radio and watched Fox News. Growing up I listened to Michael Medved, Glen Beck, Dr. Laura Schlessinger, Rush Limbaugh, and Micheal Savage in the car. I still follow some of these personalities on X. I feel like I am tuned into normie conservative sentiment. And the Normie Conservative Sentiment is that America is a values-based society. Immigration is great if someone is willing to work hard, not take handouts, assimilate, and parent their kids to do the same.
I only see the "Blood and Soil" types in fringe online groups. The vast majority of American conservatives are not like that, and if you think that the "Values-Based" Americanism is losing I don't know what to say. I don't even know where the fight is taking place - YouTube comment sections?
I say this as someone who thinks it will be very sad if France is not majority French people, Italy not majority Italians, etc. In my heart I almost see Europe as a museum and I will be sad to see that go away. But America is multi-racial and I see that as a good thing.
That being said, seeing America as a Values-Based Society requires limited immigration. To explain, let's say that we brought in 300 million immigrants next year from all over the globe. 50% of Americans would be immigrants, 50% would be born in the USA. Let's ignore the economic pressure that would create, housing and job crises, and just focus on culture. If the population of foreign-born Americans was 50%, would we be able to pass along American values and culture?
I asked my siblings this question once and they said, "Of course, why not?" I think they were pretty stupid for thinking so. If American norms and values were so easily acquired and distributed throughout the globe, why would people need to move to America? They could just turn their existing countries into America themselves.
Instead, we find in immigration-heavy states like California that new structures that resemble the bribery, nepotism, and corruption of immigrant's home countries.
Obviously 50% of foreign-born people residing in the United States would be too big a shift for us to properly integrate them into our culture. But what is the correct percentage? Immigrants today account for 14.3% of the U.S. population. I think this is an under-count, because they list only 11 million "unauthorized" immigrants, when other independent studies have found closer to 20 million..
Is 14.3% of foriegn-born people the sweet spot? I don't think so. At times of greatest stability in America, that number was between 5-10%.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
2hr ago
After the election, the president of the Student Advisory Committee of Harvard’s Institute of Politics insinuated that the IOP’s longstanding commitment to non-partisan civic engagement would be put aside to stand against the “threat” of Trump.
The Director of the IOP quickly rebuked the student, as did alumni. The original op-ed was modified to clarify that this was a student proposal, and not an official act of the IOP that could potentially endanger its tax status as a nonprofit in association with the school.
I was more shocked by the quick response than by the student’s comments; it’s taken for granted that the academy is the stronghold of Democrats.
The key here is "after the election". The Director now realizes that the power of the state might actually be wielded against him and his organization, so he's quickly moving to protect it.
It’s not a stretch to thing secular colleges could have students sign statements about their culture war/social beliefs in order to attend. Will the privileges of Ivy League degrees be gatekept for the “woke?”
They are to a large degree already, of course. But as long as they're dependent on the government (for student loans and research grants and likely other things), and there's a government that's both hostile to that sort of thing and willing to act on it -- which Trump certainly appears to be -- there's limits. We will not see new loyalty pledges like those diversity statements for faculty at the University of California system, and we will likely see some rolled back. The schools see which way the wind is blowing, and while they are unlikely to bend with it, they will hunker down and try to just withstand it.
Can schools (even elite schools) afford to have an ideological purity test for entry?
Sure; the Ivy League is TINY. Even if you add on the so-called West Coast Ivies and Public Ivies, there will be plenty of students for the top schools. Demographics will definitely hurt the down-level schools, but it's not dire enough to hurt the top. But they probably can't do it with the active hostility of a Trump administration, and they certainly couldn't do it if someone as competent as Chris Rufo got involved.
roystgnr
2hr ago
Abraham Linchpin
I can't tell whether this is a silly autocorrect fail or an incredibly clever pun+metaphor.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
2hr ago
Bad month for Mottizen grandmothers I guess.
If it's any consolation, I spent the night of her death sitting by my grandmother's bed watching football and reading the Phaedo. I didn't feel that much better about the whole thing than you seem to. The funeral process largely felt like masking my autism about the whole thing. I'm happy that my grandmother moved on before much more was taken from her.
Muninn
2hr ago
American Hinduism is closer to ACX-Rationalism than the sort of conservative thought that is ascribed to India's rural Hindi heartland.
LOL, data set of one and all, but this individual cornfed, white bread, SSC/ACX lurking American Hindu agrees with you!
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
No, incel forums clearly stated that white dudes had it the easiest with Indians or Asians at the bottom and blacks doing poorly too. They had this word JBW which meant just be white, as even the worst incel could find a wife in SEA.
It was hilarious since the media portrayal is the opposite. I saw it play out irl.
All dudes are a colossal disadvantage tbh, unless you're brad pitt or the leader of a state.
Here
2hr ago
After the election, the president of the Student Advisory Committee of Harvard’s Institute of Politics insinuated that the IOP’s longstanding commitment to non-partisan civic engagement would be put aside to stand against the “threat” of Trump.
The Director of the IOP quickly rebuked the student, as did alumni. The original op-ed was modified to clarify that this was a student proposal, and not an official act of the IOP that could potentially endanger its tax status as a nonprofit in association with the school.
I was more shocked by the quick response than by the student’s comments; it’s taken for granted that the academy is the stronghold of Democrats. As friends and I contemplate government service, we’ve talked often about what doors we’d be closing off entirely by entering the administration now, and how that would impact our trajectory. Mentors have suggested waiting until certain milestones to provide easier routes back into the private sector, but we all agree that academia is DOA outside of like Hillsdale.
Part of these discussions included off-handed references to China’s “loyalty pledges” for students attending plum universities or receiving scholarships to study abroad. Given the academy’s existence as another wing of the Democratic Party, is there a possibility of colleges or universities ensuring students meet certain political beliefs in order to attend their institution? Would it impact their tax status to do so, and if yes, is that the only thing stopping them?
Private non-profit Christian institutions make their students sign statements of faith in order to attend. BYU is an example, although their agreement is slightly more complicated than faith, per se (as TracingWoodgrains has spoken about before). Patrick Henry College includes a bit about the number of books in the Bible to keep out Catholics. It’s not a stretch to thing secular colleges could have students sign statements about their culture war/social beliefs in order to attend. Will the privileges of Ivy League degrees be gatekept for the “woke?”
Is that, in a way, what diversity statements have been doing for years? Maybe diversity statements weren’t about meeting racial categories, but instead to ensure a certain level of “buy-in” to DEI ideology. As an aside, in the post-SFFA world, the number of students interested in the Federalist Society doubled at my law school. It could just be an “election year” thing (the last data point we are able to access easily is 2020, which doesn’t count due to the remote education) or it could be a “freeing” of conservatives entering the upper echelons of professional education. More data is needed here to support this anecdata.
Purity testing at schools is, of course, nothing new. For instance, we had a professor banned from teaching first-year mandatory courses because he donated to the Republican party in 2012, a thing that still doesn’t sit quite right to me. Why are people looking through their professor’s donation records? As people uninvite family members to Thanksgiving due to who they voted for, can universities deny students on the same grounds? Would some universities feel inclined to?
I’m not entirely sure. The demographic cliff means that universities have to start making themselves more enticing somehow. Degrees are too expensive for their value, nowadays, and many are choosing to forego higher education in favor of the trades or other endeavors. Schools like America University saw their acceptance rate almost double and yet still didn’t hit their enrollment targets. Can schools (even elite schools) afford to have an ideological purity test for entry?
WhiningCoil
2hr ago
Elaborate on this, you think they dont get english or the language you work in,
I have no clue. Conversationally I never had any clue they had trouble with English. It was flawless. But it's like they suffered from some sort of specific language processing disorder where they simply could not synthesize new knowledge from spoken or written word. I have no idea how they learned anything in the first place, because nothing I ever said or wrote to them sunk in.
I think the best example I have is we had this one H1B on the QA team on a project I was on. Management was doing a demo, and wanted everybody off the servers so that the demo went off without a hitch. H1B decides that's the perfect time to do a full automated unit test against the demo servers. Project Manager runs into the back room mid demo yelling "WHO'S ON THE SERVERS!" H1B raises his hand and explains that he's running all the unit test. PM nearly cusses him out screaming at him to not run any more unit test, to which H1B agrees, and leaves satisfied that the message was got across. 15 minutes later PM runs back again wondering who the fuck didn't understand the simple directive stay off the server and H1B raises his hand again, because he was running the same damned unit test he was just running again. PM just stood their dumbfounded anyone could be that fucking stupid. Shit like that was a daily occurrence.
There was another Indian woman who was a project manager and my main point of contact for a contract. She was also the requirements expert for the project. There were 3 requirements that had this interaction where only 2 out of 3 of them could ever be completely obeyed in a fairly common edge case. No matter which two you picked, the 3rd was impossible. I spend roughly two days attempting to explain this problem to her, and consistently failed. It just kept going round and round, where I would explain that if I followed A & B, I couldn't follow C. She'd tell me to just do C anyways. I'd explain if I did C no matter what, I couldn't do A, so I'd be left with B & C. She'd insist I do A anyways. I'd explain if I did A & C I couldn't do B. And round and round and round like that until she tapped another project manager who immediately grokked the problem and changed the requirements. And that's more or less how every interaction with her went, which was frustrating because she was my primary technical point of contact. Every problem I had was 48-72 hours of beating my head against a brick wall until she handed me off to a non-Indian colleague who resolved the problem in 5 minutes.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
2hr ago
White men probably do objectively best as a race, but there's this constant undercurrent of sexual jealousy towards especially black men. It's a pretty constant genre of pornography, and a common cultural watchword. This despite all the objective success!
roystgnr
2hr ago
There's at least people getting the "less bad" end of it compared to each other, even if true "better" might be far in the past or future, and "white men in the like 25-45 range" does seem to be the least bad male demographic to be in. I long ago noticed in OKCupid blog data that men do have better odds as they get older, and looking now at the "Reply Rate by Race - Male Sender" graphic from the old OKCupid blog, it does look like white men had it less bad than other men - with nearly 30% of women they messaged willing to acknowledge they exist!
Disclaimer: all data above is at least 15 years old, OKCupid was since bought out for being too functional a competitor to commercial dating apps, and there is no reason to believe the descent away from "better" has abated. Even limiting our complains to the situation of men seems myopic; women hardly seem much happier with modern dating, with very different but similarly serious complaints.
NunoSempere
2hr ago
Elon Musk shared a perspective from Jeffrey Sachs, outlined in more detail here or here, about how Russia was provoked by NATO expansion into invading Ukraine, in the same way that the US was provoked by Soviet cooperation with Cuba. This matters because Musk has become an important Trump advisor.
African countries face cybersecurity vulnerabilities due to foreign control over critical technological infrastructure, with notable cases of Chinese cyber espionage in African Union headquarters and Kenyan government ministries. Chinese and U.S. companies dominate the application and operating system layers.
Theravada Budhist rebel militias control most of a state (province) in Myanmar. Seems like it could tickle some people here.
Otherwise, I'm thinking about how states just seem like a bad abstraction. Alliance blocks, ideologies, religions, dynasties seem like somewhat better building blocks. In particular, states seem like an easy abstraction, but recently they have mislead me when... a) thinking about the Iran/Hamas/Hezbollah/Houthis: it seems much easier to think about them in terms of religion than in terms of their geographic boundaries; b) there are a few governments that are pretty weak, and they are so just because the west recognizes and supports them. Yemen, the former government of Afghanistan come to mind, c) borders are important, but not that important. There is free travel between Paraguay/Argentina/Brazil, between the European Union, between the US and Canada, between Russia and Belarus, etc., d) at the lower level, a few governments are just a few families in a trench coat (Saudi Arabia, El Salvador, etc.).
Longer list of items below. Some may be wrong.
Protest in Hyderabad against Punjab's construction of more canals on the Indus river.
Canada forces are training for deployment in Latvia—an a potential
Potential prophylactic against Ricin, in case somebody is wanting to recreate a Pricess Bride scene irl.
A paper in nature warns about the danger of a repeat of the 1815 Mount Tambora eruption
Iranian foreign minister Abbas Araghchi warned of the potential spillover effects of the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, where Iran-backed groups are battling Israel. Araghchi stated that if the conflict expands, it could result in insecurity and instability spreading to other regions beyond the Middle East. I'm particularly worried about that scenario.
Biden administration "under pressure" to respond to Iran's plot to kill Trump, reports Fox News.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has called for imposing a weapons embargo on Israel and severing trade relations with the country
Far-right Israeli minister calls for annexation of West Bank
IDF says it destroyed most of Hezbollah's manufacturing, storage sites
Iran is building 'defensive tunnels' in Tehran metro network to save people from Israeli air strikes
Iran might have developed chemical weapons. These would have been tactical, rather than wide-area.. British tabloid claims that Liz Truss thought that there was a 50% that Putin would use a nuclear weapon in Ukraine in the eve of her administration
The Famine Early Warning System warns that if food supplies remain blocked, then Famine (IPC Phase 5) will most likely occur in North Gaza
An Iranian MP says Iran should move forward with a nuclear test
China is building nuclear reactor to power new aircraft carrier
France sent a nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to Japan
North Korea ratifies mutual defence treaty with Russia. The treaty commits both countries to providing immediate military assistance to each other using “all means” necessary if either faces “aggression”.
NATO military chief says troops would be on ground if not for Russian nukes
US flights to Haiti banned after 3 airplanes shot. government information campaign in Norway is urging citizens to prepare for emergencies, with a checklist of supplies including water, food, candles, iodine, a radio, and cash.
Doctors Without Borders ambulance in Haiti ambushed, patients executed by police officers and vigilantes.
Colombia has declared a state of disaster following days of torrential flooding impacting tens of thousands of families.
European Forum for Disaster Risk Reduction
Canada records its first human bird flu case
Global talks to reach an agreement on better fighting pandemics will continue into next year
The largest-yet multilingual open pretraining dataset was released.
China arms itself for potential trade war with Donald Trump. "You think you’ve priced-in geopolitical risk and US-China trade warfare, but you haven’t, because China hasn’t seriously retaliated yet"
Ukraine could build a crude nuclear bomb within months, similar to the Fat Man bomb dropped in Nagasaki, from spent plutonium
An elephant seal colony lost 95%+ of its pups because of H5N1
An Australian site makes the point that misinformation laws prevent converging to the truth when the official version is wrong, as it was in the early days of covid when the mechanism for transmission was thought to be droplets, rather than the virus being more generally airborne.
ChinaTalk reports on the state of model testing in China
It kinda sound like they got elected on a platform of violating the actual red letter rules and the adults in the room noticed it and are having them impeached?
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