domain:jessesingal.substack.com
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
I'm reluctant to post this last part because I don't expect anyone to take this seriously.
Listen, I'm just a crazy spirit helping out my diety, so my opinion and $6 will get you a nice festive White Peppermint Mocha from Starbucks, but I take your experience as serious as a heart attack and completely believe that it happened to you exactly as you described it. In my own family my paternal grandmother was infamous for her presence in her home after she passed away until my grandfather joined her several years later. Both he and my uncle received occasional guidance from her and at least one direct message, usually when they were looking for something. Sounds woo woo and hokey, right? But how would you feel if you were wondering where that screw was that dropped out of your glasses and a thought came unbidden into your mind and said, "it's in the heel of your shoe!" It blew my grandfather's mind for sure. While I never had a personal experience involving her after her passing, it felt like she was hanging around the house to me, too. In fact, I'd say that her presence was palpable while he still lived. I've had many other personal experiences in my life as well, more than enough to satisfy my own questions about life, death, the afterlife, etc.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go torment some drunken writer/poet...
mrvanillasky
2hr ago
Those are his not mine lol. I have never been in a relationship, I simply wanted to know what you guys thought, universally panned 🤣
Here
3hr ago
The University of Michigan Central Student Government voted to impeach their president and vice president for (i) incitement to violence (an instagram post on the "SHUT IT DOWN" account encouraging students to pack a CSG budget meeting in early October); (ii) cybertheft of CSG property (changing the password on the student government instagram account and voicing support for the student protestors; and (iii) dereliction of duty (attempting to defund student orgs at Michigan and attempt to send the money to Gaza).
The student leaders had explicitly run on a "shut it down" ticket, receiving 47% of the vote back in March (granted, less than 20% of the student body voted). The leaders had pledged to "halt all CSG activity and associated funding until the University fully divests from companies profiting off Israel’s military campaign in Gaza," were voted in, and then proceeded to do... exactly what they had promised. But living up to their promises is, apparently, enough to impeach them for.
There were some challenges to their campaign, citing unfair election tactics, but they were ultimately sworn in to their posts back in April - and only now has impeachment been brought forth, eight months later.
Is this a window into a changing tide of how culture war issues are discussed on college campuses, or do students just get frustrated when they start feeling the actual impact of their actions (no funding for their organizations)? Is "support" for Gaza dying, and if yes, what is the new cause de jour that will rise to take its place?
mrvanillasky
3hr ago
"Do not redeem" makes me crack up everytime 🤣.
A whole bunch of registered rape cases here are where the girls withdraws consent later, I was told about this by a reactionary girl I was into a while back
Yeah, India can't build, the even if you had classified tech, stuff would barely get built due to the bureaucracy and infra issues alongside the shoe string budget which attracts very few able competent types.
roystgnr
3hr ago
These aren't the cases you really need euthanasia for, though. Morphine and all its more modern alternatives are some strong shit; we know how to handle physical pain right before the end. The metastasized tumors in my mother's lungs made her more and more tired for months, until she never woke up again, but with the pain counteracted there was no reason for her not to want to get as many awakenings as possible.
What we can't do anything about is mental suffering. My father's tumor went metastatic before treatment killed it, and its progeny recurred inside his skull, where the fight with them became an existential horror, crushing various chunks of his memories and personality one by one, leaving an increasingly confused and terrified remnant behind. I try to reassure myself that, a week or two before the end when his frequent screaming sessions changed from "Help! Help!" to "Hell! Hell!", it was surely only because he'd lost more fine motor control, not because he was making a deliberate evaluation of his situation.
I want legal euthanasia, with the explicit ability to create a medical directive that instructs and allows my family to be the ones to order euthanasia at some defined point after I'm too far gone to do so myself. There's a bit of a paradox in the fact that the only circumstances under which I'd want to kill myself are those where I would be non compos mentis and so both personally and legally unable to do it.
mrvanillasky
3hr ago
I can't unsee it now kek
mrvanillasky
3hr ago
They should be deported en masse asap, no two ways around it. This stuff makes the good kind look bad since.
BaronVSS
Sort by controversial
3hr ago
Kitboga has done immense damage to India's reputation
Thanks to him, I cannot think about the word "redeem" without automatically associating it with India.
I wonder if the yelling scammer guy is aware of his own popularity.
There's always someone complaining about dating. Both males and females. Of all races.
White men , unlike Indians and Asians, don't complain about racial barriers specifically. The other groups have all of the standard grievances plus the feeling that their race is disfavored by the majority.
So they're probably the winners, as a race.
FiveHourMarathon
Listen to Pierre
3hr ago
The male disaster action hero fantasy is characterized by the main character specifically having a chance to massively increase their relative social standing and personal control over their life.
The female equivalent is the increase of one's social status massively, by way of her sexual value being threatened/desired for control by multiple parties. If you're a pink collar woman in HR, you have maybe an inattentive leaf-eating boyfriend or husband who doesn't really get that worked up over you or value control over you. In Handmaid's Tale type fantasy/dystopia the entirety of society is built around controlling and possessing you and your sexuality.
DradisPing
3hr ago
I really liked the Jacques McKeown audiobooks (Will Save the Galaxy for Food, Will Destroy the Galaxy for Cash, Will Leave the Galaxy for Good). He reads them himself so you get his presentation skills.
I am particularly fond of spaceships, so it got points for that. It's a light and funny listen that's easy to follow. So it's great if you're doing chores or going for a walk where there may be some distractions.
I played it on a drive with my father and he asked me to turn it off because he liked it but it was too distracting. Usually he's fine with audiobooks on drives.
I had trouble getting into "Differently Morphous". I'm less familiar with some of the Lovecraftian & Harry Potterish material that the story involves. Plus there are POV jumps that make it harder to follow in while playing the background.
I'm planning to give it another try.
His books are not anything dense or deep, but I find them enjoyable.
Tanista
3hr ago
I'm biased against progressives on certain issues so I'm inclined to think that the reason the trans thing is such a red line is precisely because it's just not true and is the most obviously ridiculous stance Democrats take. So you have to suppress any hostile discussion of it or basically go with DARVO. If you can't discuss trans stuff besides "it isn't happening" or "you're the weird one for caring" then you need to be able to control the tempo of the discussion because that is just bullshitting. At this point I think progressive takes on crime have also worn out their welcome so it can happen on multiple issues.
Another answer that doesn't depend on people we disagree with being secretly doubtful of their most cherished beliefs is that Democrats thought they had cultural hegemony so they had less to gain from going on to other sites. Twitter is only a couple of years out from being a left-wing stronghold that was more dangerous than Reddit given how it allowed the cool kids to set up cancellations. Rogan was attacked precisely because he felt like an oasis - and he wasn't even right wing! They legit thought they could have closed off all meaningful alternatives. At least for people not hooked on Fox News.
In that sort of environment it may feel like the incumbent has more to lose from stretching themselves than they have to gain. Meanwhile Trumpists have to take any platform offered.
As for liberals putting up signs: you have seen it, everywhere. It's the rainbow flag.
I don't really see much of a meaningful distinction between "Covid was too infectious to be controlled" and "it is possible to control Covid, provided your country is a geographically isolated island nation without land borders and you keep your borders shut indefinitely". It's so telling that "zero Covid" types always fall back on the examples of Australia and New Zealand to demonstrate that of course lockdowns work at controlling Covid (and it's just a complete coincidence that both countries are geogprahically isolated island nations without land borders). Show me an example of a country which isn't a geographically isolated island nation with land borders which was able to control Covid with vaccines and NPIs. I'm going to assume we can't. Given that most countries are not geographically isolated island nations without land borders, it seems perfectly reasonable to argue that, for 90%+ of countries on earth, Covid is too infectious to be controlled.
And insofar as you're labelling the decision to reopen the Australian borders a "conservative" one, we both know full well that if Anthony Albanese (Labor party) had taken office a few months earlier, he would have made the same decision. In point of fact, Albanese did take office in May 2022, and did not immediately reverse the previous administration's decision to reopen the border. New Zealand reopened its borders a few months after Australia did, a decision made by a Labor prime minister (who was previously, consistently praised for her aggressive response to Covid and "girlboss" energy throughout the Anglosphere), and saw the same dramatic spike in Covid deaths. Are you just defining "conservative" policies as any policies which do not pursue the minimisation of Covid deaths as a terminal goal, at the expense of all other considerations? Or are you only interested in discussing the relative rates of Covid deaths when you can blame conservative decisions for them, and studiously ignoring progressive politicians who make almost identical decisions in almost identical circumstances?
If elderly lives are worth radically less, why does murdering someone in their 80s carry the same penalty?
I never said elderly lives are worth radically less. You claimed that Covid is more lethal than AIDS, but this is obviously untrue for the simple reason that it is much easier to kill a sick elderly person than a young healthy person.
it took a year just to work out that it was sexually transmitted, and you couldn't just post that information on a website because the internet didn't really exist
TIL the Internet was the first ever medium for disseminating medical information. In point of fact the CDC (among other bodies) ran massive nationwide campaigns throughout the 1980s intended to raise awareness of the disease and how to avoid catching it, as did various governmental bodies in the UK. There was a very brief window, only a few years, in which a person who'd contracted AIDS could legitimately plead ignorance and say they didn't now better.
With AIDS, avoiding it would have required not having any relationships for the next decade or two
Or, you know, wearing a condom.
With COVID, you were asked to wear a mask and avoid big parties for a few months.
Yes, we were asked to do that. But even getting massive buy-in from the public on both counts had virtually zero demonstrable impact on the rate of transmission of the virus. China was unable to control Covid even using vastly more punitive measures (like literally locking people inside their apartment buildings) than any Western government, even in 2022 after 90%+ of their adult population had been vaccinated. I mean, even in your preferred example of Australia, even while their borders were shut, people still died. Or are you claiming that Australia really could have gotten its Covid death rate down to zero if literally everyone had always worn a mask outside the home?
Failure to do so placed everyone around you at risk.
Well, no: it placed every old and immunocompromised person around you at risk. Most people are neither, and Covid poses little more threat to them than the flu.
DelendaEst
3hr ago
If you are in favor of ideals then Republican immigration policy sounds like it would be a better fit for you. In order for American Ideals to continue to be American Ideals we need to assimilate immigrants into them, and that means taking in a manageable flow, and preferably from all sorts of places. Too large a flow and the existing culture and ideals get diluted too quickly. Too much from a single source means they form enclaves which makes assimilation harder (I am especially thinking of the majority muslim areas of Michigan here). Republican policy preferences are the ones that will meet this goal the best.
stuckinbathroom
3hr ago
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
3hr ago
Nobody is saying it’s easy, but Trump leaning people do exactly that. Trump’s base has absolutely no problem going onto any platform available to them. They have no problem putting up signs — even in hostile places — or wearing Trump gear, or posting pro-Trump messages on social media. Trumpers are like CrossFit fans, you don’t have to ask, because they will absolutely tell you.
I think it’s a belief problem. Liberals don’t seem to actually believe in the message. They don’t advertise in hostile environments, they don’t put out signs or wear gear, they don’t talk about it with friends and family. They mostly flee.
SophisticatedHillbilly
3hr ago
Objectively, pretty much just white men in the like 25-45 range (definitely blurry at the edges there) who are some combination of wealthyish, charismatic, and healthy (or maybe just agentic? I’ve always felt that was a bigger factor.)
The thing is, you assume that 'ideals-based identity' and 'ancestral identity' are separate and orthogonal to one another. But even if we put aside tribal allegiance, it's pretty clear that emotional predispositions (openness, authoritarianism, neuroticism, etc.) are at least partially genetic. And this is going to correlate somewhat with race, because most places have had fairly stable demographics for hundreds or thousands of years.
The ideal of "free speech" is going to look very different in a country of high-openness, high-extroversion people vs high-neuroticism, low-openness. Likewise "self-governance". Moved from one country that considers itself meritocratic, self-governing and devoted to free speech to a very ethnically-different country with the same ideals really drove that home for me.
American notions of what their founding ideals mean has already shifted pretty clearly since the country was founded, and I doubt that's independent of the demographic changes that America has been through since the founding. Anyone who wants to preserve modern American values has to consider the demographics of the population upholding those values and passing them down to their children.
(Look at how much work it took for Roosevelt et al to get federal jobs allocated by exam scores not patronage. Both factions considered themselves thoroughly American, but one defined 'merit' as 'decades of loyal service' and the other as 'intelligence and diligence").
Tanista
4hr ago
It's weird because a lot of the manosphere is black. Especially in the post-Kevin Samuels era.
They have zero interest in HBD on race (though they are quite fine with male-female differences and questions that could be considered racist if asked of them like "name 10 female inventors").
In some cases these black redpillers have larger platforms than people like Fuentes they're platforming. Fresh and Fit was making a ludicrous amount of money bashing Miami women and lost it to platform antisemites whose beef with the Jews is that they let in black migrants as "biological weapons" as they put it.
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.
More options
Context Copy link