domain:npr.org?page=1?page=2
MiddleAgedMan
Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way.
6m ago
People pay an order of magnitude less attention to you than you think. Live your life and don't worry about what other people think.
anti_dan
9m ago
Are you talking about quantity or reach? Because the lowest quality grifter with the most reach in America is Ibrahim X. Kendi. Next you have the 1619 project, all BLM related orgs, etc. RW orgs with that much reach are people like Daily Wire and Vivek. You might not like their positions on everything, but those aren't grifters. One is a legitimate media business that has really innovated in the space, and the other is a serious politician and thinker, although odd.
jeroboam
12m ago
There seem to be trade offs involved.
There is a "woo" explanation that goes something like this:
In all plants and animals, there is a thrive/survive dynamic. During times of plenty, the plant will blossom, the animal will expend energy and look to breed. During times of starvation, the plant will go dormant, the animal will hibernate.
But the candle that burns brighter (high metabolism) is extinguished sooner. High metabolism may lead to better health, more energy, and visible abs, but it will also age one more quickly.
This is a universal principle of all life forms.
It's maybe directionally accurate. It's certainly not very well-studied. Maybe I'm just hoping there's an upside to my vampire like pulse rate and body temperature.
Felagund
14m ago
If you want an easy explanation of why they should be told, I know pro-trans activism likes to talk about elevated rates of suicide among people with gender dysphoria/trans people (even though suicide is a social contagion, and we elsewhere try to avoid doing that, but whatever). Do you not think that parents should know that their child is in a group with a vastly higher suicide rate?
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
16m ago
When we look at historical records, we often see even relatively sedentary men ate 3000, 5000, or even more kCals per day.
Huh? Where are the historic sedentary men eating over 5000 calories on a daily basis?
Lewis2
19m ago
The weird creepy ads about “people can look up your voting record and won’t date you if you don’t” also don’t help with this, especially when several of these ads didn’t clarify that while whether you voted is public, who you voted for is not. The social stigma of voting Trump is still high, as people get uninvited from Thanksgiving with their own families for leaning conservative.
The Republicans were unfortunately no better on this front, though their social pressure went straight to registered Republican voters and so was less visible than the Democrats’ efforts. Here’s one of several texts I received in the days leading up to the election (emojis and text formatting are original):
🗳️Voting records are public—your friends, neighbors, and family will know if you stood with Trump when it mattered most. 🇺🇸🔥
Hi Lewis, this is [X] with the [state] GOP. Tomorrow is Election Day—your 𝐥𝐚𝐬𝐭 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞 to make a difference. Whether or not you vote is public, and your community will see if you stood with Trump or stayed home. Don’t let your country down when our 𝐟𝐮𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐥𝐢𝐧𝐞.
I received a few more that included variants on the same veiled threat. I wasn’t and still am not very happy with that approach, but I imagine it probably is effective, given that both sides were trying it.
Templexious
20m ago
It's a recent move, and the Left's grift is still there, however, they've started to tone things down in the advent of the ascending accelerationists. Granted, sites like Salon and NewRepublic seem to exist to prove the strawmen visions of the Democrats correct to a degree that feels deranged, even if one were to find the American Russophiles and Sinophiles unpalatable.
Fruck
Lacks all conviction
22m ago
Yeah that will definitely have a selection effect, not just because you aren't seeing as many leftists, but also because people of all political persuasions generally hide their craziest beliefs unless they know they are in good company. So you hang out with rightists and they get comfortable with you and tell you their metaphors that they secretly believe, but are so rarely in a space that is comfortable for leftists that you don't hear their metaphors that they secretly believe.
anti_dan
29m ago
I think the "peak woke" line is cope on the center left and right for different reasons. The center-left keep writing these articles as a smokescreen to let their radicals reload, and the people on the right are just deluding themselves that the extremists will give up and/or that the center-left will ever side with them.
Gaashk
29m ago
Interesting.
My husband tended to be 99 F when he was younger, and also attracted way more static electricity than I do. He eats things like an entire pound of bacon, then just paces a lot, or walks around barefoot in the snow or something. My daughter seems to have inherited his metabolism, and actually was sent home from pre-K a couple of times for "low grade fever," but then she got home and didn't have a fever.
My body temperature is a bit below average (I don't check it very often, because I almost never run a fever), and I'm lower energy, but also have fewer random health problems -- things like almost never getting headaches or nausea, even when we eat something a bit off, getting over colds and flus faster, stuff like that. This has been good for pregnancy, which went smoothly all three times.
There seem to be trade offs involved.
hydroacetylene
47m ago
Because it means, almost definitionally, that he was using her for sex with full knowledge that that is what he is doing, and that she more than likely expected more out of it.
If he’d dated and married her it would certainly be odd, or if they’d dated seriously and it not worked out. But I don’t think it’s inherently skeevy unless he was a teacher at her school or something. The ‘using a teenager for sex’ thing is what’s wrong.
TequilaMockingbird
48m ago
Maybe things are different in the UK but my experience, the preoccupation with "dignity" and titles over things like training, compensation, hours, etc... is generally a mark of lower intelligence.
The iq 130 nurse practioner who realised who figured they could get 90% of the power, prestige and pay for 30% of the effort, vs the iq 105 doctor who's motivation to finish med-school was in part to shut up thier parents, teachers, classmates, et al.
Amadan
I will be here longer than you
49m ago
Yes, I have, and I've read a lot about the history of the region due to the prominence of the issue. As for accurately summarizing both positions... the Palestinian side would be easy but as for the Israeli side I honestly don't think so - there are real divisions in Israeli society on these topics, and coming up with an answer that could satisfy all of them is hard
I'm not asking you to summarize what all Israelis think. That would obviously be ridiculous. I'm asking you to summarize what the hard-liners who believe in a Jewish ethnostate believe, in terms they would agree with.
Even if your argument holds, the idea that they're disproportionately murdering women and children to amuse themselves says worse things about the IDF than any of the claims I've made so far.
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.
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.
I have never in my life heard a football chant that was as offensive and cruel as the ones from Maccabi Tel Aviv.
I have definitely heard racist and bloodthirsy shit from Russians about Ukrainians, from Arabs about Jews, from Americans about Iraqis, and that's just in recent memory - surely we don't need to take a trip down memory lane to Viet Nam or Korea or WWII. I am not defending what the Maccabi fans said, it's obviously vile, but I am disputing your argument that this shows some uniquely evil and genodical spirit among Israelis. Drunken footballers have always done awful and offensive things, and drunken footballers from a country currently at war? I think the press coverage has been wildly uncritical (presenting it as an "attempted pogrom of Jews of Amsterdam"), but I think you are just using it as another story about how evil Israelis are.
I believe they're ethnonationalists who want to reclaim the territory that their god supposedly promised them in their religious scriptures. That's the explanation! It sounds unflattering to modern, non-Bronze age ears, but that's because the actions the Israelis have actually undertaken are unflattering. You don't get to run an apartheid state and then complain that people are saying you run an apartheid state because you'd call it something else that's not as bad for your reputation.
Using the "Aparthead state" rhetoric kind of gives the game away, but as far as the first statement, yes, Zionists believe they are entitled to Israel because it is their ancestral homeland. And you know what? I agree that that's bullshit. You don't have a natural rightful claim to land that your ancestors happened to live on 2000 years ago, or the entire world would be subject to pretty dramatic redrawing of borders. At the same time, it's a lot more complicated than your simple anti-Zionist narrative of "Jews showed up to commit genocide because God told them to take back their land." 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.
Me! I can blame them! Not once have I ever in my life said that I would like another ethnicity to just 'go away' because I don't like the political consequences of their continued existence. If you want to defend that impulse, go ahead - but you're forever giving up the ability to criticize antisemites, racists and white nationalists. After all, they would just like the jews to go away - who can blame them, after all this time?
I mean, no, I don't really blame Palestinian youths for hating Israelis. I'm sure I would too if I grew up as they did. That does not make their position objectively right. 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 don't blame people constantly subjected to violence for hating the people responsible and wishing they'd just go away (and this goes for both sides). We can hope some leaders will rise above this, but we can also recognize that the motives are very understandable.
But at the same time, I'm willing to bet if you assembled all the white nationalists here on the motte and asked them if they were willing to go to the lengths Israel has gone to in order to rid their country of jews and non-whites, many of them would actually say that they would prefer less overtly violent and bloodthirsty methods.
Some of them might say that, and I might even believe a couple of them. On the other hand, we're back to how you characterize "the lengths Israel has gone to." You evidently believe the genocidal apartheid state version where Israelis (a critical mass of them, anyway) are just that evil and hate Palestinians and have not exterminated them only because it would be bad PR. The Israeli version would be quite different from that, and a lot closer to what the white nationalists would call reasonable measures to separate and suppress a violent population that is making war on them. (No, I would not agree with that characterization, any more than I agree with the more ungenerous Israeli characterizations of the Palestinians, but it's at least more coherent than "They're just evil genocidal religious fanatics.")
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
59m ago
That's a complicated question, and I don't think I can actually provide an answer for Americans because I am not one. I can tell you what those policies would look like for the country where I live (Australia), and those policies would probably look something like this.
- Cost of living adjustments - dramatic reductions in property values, dramatic reduction in immigration intake, increases in the amount of money provided to jobseekers/welfare recipients, muscular antitrust enforcement against major supermarkets engaging in price-fixing and collusion, nationalisation of toll roads run by overseas firms. I'd have to do some research and planning, but ideally I'd like to burst the real estate bubble while confining as much of the pain to the obscenely wealthy rather than the battlers who managed to get onto the property ladder despite the shithouse conditions.
- Actual taxation of the wealthy - creation of a petroleum resources rent tax, removal of all fossil fuel subsidies from major corporations, crackdown on tax avoidance by multinational firms and a full audit of everything PWC has ever done with public money. The entire fossil fuel sector in Australia contributes substantially less to national finances than payroll taxes on nurses and I think this is morally wrong (and not just inefficient). I'd also implement a progressive taxation system on income generated by real estate, with every property after the first getting taxed at increasingly ruinous levels.
- Muscular and substantial anti-corruption proceedings. Empower an actual body to go after incidents of government corruption and malfeasance, without being connected to the existing major parties and deeply compromised like the current NACC. There are a lot of scandals and naked corruption in Australian government and there's not going to be any trust in the government until that gets dealt with, and a lack of trust in government means there are a lot of good policies you just can't implement or pursue because the people don't trust government to do them fairly.
SlowBoy
1hr ago
Read Ymeskhout's if you haven't
He's my friend, I have a cameo in the article. His belief is that Republicans are going crazy, he respects my intelligence but thinks I have a reality distortion field that makes me irrational about Trump. Sure, he can think that -- and I think he's wrong! The theory is that we're wrong about everything, we're conspiracy theorists, we're cranks, we're crazy, we believe things without evidence, etc. etc. etc. Most of these guys don't actually know anything about the evidence: I sincerely doubt Hanania could give a steelman of RFK's position about vaccines, or Corona, or a steelman about anything, frankly. Yassine, at least, has been very patient in having these kinds of conversations, but I don't think he would really accept any of these arguments as legitimate: he isn't convinced, and he's not convinced anyone else should be convinced. So they're not just wrong arguments, they're crank arguments, conspiracy arguments, etc.
the fact that Republicans really have become the party of choice for conspiracy theorists that have very little grounding in reality
Democrats are the party of people who act as if there isn't a Replication Crisis. I see the worst nonsense taken credulously just because it was in a study somewhere. Corona came from wet markets? Puberty blockers are reversible? I can go on bluesky right now and find people arguing that Kamala won the election and has all the evidence and will coup Trump any day now. Please, please, I cannot stand to hear more about how I need to carefully consider the people who call me crazy because they didn't carefully consider me. The right does not have a monopoly on nonsense and that is so apparent that it's embarrassing to be told otherwise.
I avoid leftist spaces like the plague, but it really does seem like the right is more inundated with obvious, low-quality grifters.
Probably true if we confine our examination to X.
But, literally, there are tens of thousands, probably hundreds of thousands, of people who are employed in DEI. They are being paid billions of dollars each year to grift in an official capacity. I think we should probably tackle the taxpayer-funded grifters before worrying about random Twitter bros.
I do agree that it's a great time to be a right-wing grifter, but only because it's a growth industry. The number of people making money off left-wing grifts still exceeeds the inverse by a factor of at least 10.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
1hr ago
This is just an appeal to authority. If there are particularly compelling arguments, you can reproduce them directly here.
I viewed the entire document she put together as compelling - I can repost the entire thing here if you want, but why? If I just copy and paste the arguments I like piecemeal, there's way too much room for forgotten citations or other misunderstandings. There's an immense number of citations and I don't really see what would be gained by reposting the whole thing here with worse formatting.
So there's no point gathering evidence to support your claim? That's a bold position to take.
You missed the other half of that point. You can't use casualty numbers to determine whether or not a genocide is taking place, because by the time you can accurately identify a genocide via casualty numbers those people are already dead and there's nothing you can do. That's why people rely on other signs that a genocide is taking place or is otherwise imminent, because if your goal is to prevent genocides from taking place you have to be able to show that one is in progress or about to start, rather than just showing up after the victims are all dead, saying "Well, now that we have the numbers I guess this was actually a genocide." and shrugging your shoulders.
That's not really an argument. I could just as easily say the answer is so clearly and blatantly no.
Yes, it isn't an argument - it is just restating my position because the actual argument was already linked in pdf form above.
I think your mask might be slipping here. But I'm not surprised you like these conversations more when your opponent just admits you're right and they're wrong. You do have to do the work of convincing them first, though.
Mask? Assuming that you're accusing me of being an antisemite who is disguising my hatred for jews as a more generic opposition to crimes against humanity and genocide, I have to disagree. I'm a (very unconventional) leftist and I think that what Israel is doing is morally and ethically wrong, and this is a direct consequence of left wing political values. I've broken bread with jews and gotten along with them just fine at the protest marches against the genocide, so at the very least I can say that my own personal experience is not that of an anti-semite. If you think that all criticism of Israel is anti-semitic, then I fall into that category (and I'm in good company to boot).
Incidentally I'm curious as to where you get the idea that Israel is intent on ethnic purity. You do know that 20% of the population is Arab, right?
The Basic Law: Israel as the Nation-State of the Jewish People. I have been repeatedly told by Israelis that a single state solution is unviable because it would loses its Jewish character, and that seems to be backed up by the laws passed and enforced by Israel. If it isn't intent on ethnic purity, there should be no barrier to a single state solution with full-franchise for everyone, including non-jewish Palestinians.
daguerrean
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. I attribute this to the fact that Republicans have become more heavily dependent on the less educated, but also because a lack of established media orgs leads to grifters fulfilling the demand from an underserved market.
Templexious
1hr ago
How many headlines showed up, pointing to random studies, calling right wingers dumb or conspiracy-prone?
How many left figures show up now and imply that the left rejects grifters and grift in a way that the right does not? Perhaps this point is worth its own high-level post.
JulianRota
1hr ago
Maybe! I've lived in or visited several big cities, and never seen or heard of things like that though. It seems more plausible to me that things might be more like what Maiq described in what I guess you could call "dead cities" - the medium-small cities that used to be thriving, but all of the industries that were there left for various reasons. Most of the decent people with good life potential also left due to the lack of good jobs long before things got bad. The resulting downward spiral leads to a pretty bad place.
But then, those places are not exactly havens of progressivism, and I don't think any blue-affiliated people are going to decide to move there, which was the point of this whole thread.
roche
1hr ago
I definitely get you overall. Though IMO, there's a danger of getting lost out in the weeds making neat discoveries, while you cease to make true, profound progress. What we've covered so far is documented more or less by the ancient sages and practiced in their faiths, but if that alone were enough, we would surely have a better world than we do now. Even if some unbelievable truths were unearthed and documented in antiquity which had the power to perfect our lives if only we knew of them, the error still lies in a failure to communicate those truths to us, and we'd have to restate them in such a way they wouldn't be lost again. But that's assuming some incredible thing has been discovered, which I'm fairly pessimistic/skeptical of. All the things we've covered are neat, but they fall within the bounds of conventional religion/wisdom, so nothing mind-blowing -- like pieces to some grander puzzle we have no reckoning of. Take Nietzsche's "new psychology" for example which tears down the old antitheses of good and evil or pleasure and pain. This new psychology does not exist, because every man with the sagacity to notice that possibility does not pursue it, because there is a more comfortable road of easy discoveries and insights open to him. But that road's been walked for millennia; they unearth the same truths, and get the same results. For example...
in order to believe in the power of their subconsciousness, people need to believe that a diety is present (The oracle). People can barely meet a wise character in a dream without thinking that some external being helped them. It seems like we need to believe in something higher than ourselves, or even in something higher within ourselves (being made in the image of god, the transcendental function, being connected to a higher power, etc).
This is true, but why? There's clearly some rules in effect here -- like, just as Aristotle's says: "When humans think, there's a small set of axioms we assume like the principle of non-contradiction that are necessary for thought to occur". In the same way, there's a determined logic to the human mind and perspective, a set of rules to perception and feeling that we currently don't know. Why is it psychedelic/meditative experiences require a guru? Why is the parent/child relation so incredibly effective in religion? Is it because we have this deeply ingrained relation from childhood? Or (more likely) is it a natural part of the human mind? Which constructs of the human mind are innate, and which are constructed? Could we create a methodology to produce the perfect LSD trip? Could we eliminate the dark night of the soul from The Path? Could we create some environmental trigger that produces good dreams in us every night? These questions and more lie open, and they depend on strict and consistent rules that have yet to be found.
It's going to be hard for me to dig that up. It was on X and was based on records of courtiers in some European country.
Not the same, but here's the best I could do with 3 minutes of Perplexity: Trench soldiers eating 4600 kCals per day during WWI. Obviously, they were very active, but also must have weighed an average of like 140 pounds.
https://medicalmuseum.health.mil/micrograph/index.cfm/posts/2023/beef_bread_and_coffee_food_innovations_during_world_war_I
Even assuming extreme activity, this should only burn less than 3200 kCals per day: https://tdeecalculator.net/result.php?s=imperial&g=male&age=19&lbs=140&in=69&act=1.9&f=1
I've seen many other records of historical people eating large amounts of calories. Maybe they're dubious, I'm not sure.
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