Bingbong
15d ago
Yeah for every Big Short that works out there'll be a plethora of attempts that end up getting absolutely wrecked (even if they're directional correct) by funding costs and market realities.
Bingbong
17d ago
Nor did the judge, given that Digwa is going to an ordinary prison and not a secure mental hospital.
Plenty of serial killers go to ordinary prison despite having traits that the vast majority of people would label as indicative of being mentally unwell.
Bingbong
18d ago
The main difference with Belfast is that they've got a lot of the structures for and exposure to sectarian violence in recent living memory, meaning that if a catalyst arises they're a lot more able to spring into action compared to the vast majority of places in the developed West.
Bingbong
18d ago
The amount of times people use historical anecdotes along the lines of 'A person of moderate Arabic complexion rocked up in court one day, the entire country came to look upon this oddity as they had never ever seen the like of it in many many years and it was the talk of the town for the next 20 years' as proof of dark people being in Northern Europe is kinda hilarious.
My dad is about the color of Tom Jones (and of Isles ancestry for atleast the last 2-300 years) and growing up in Northern England in the 1950s he used to routinely be called the N-Word and referred to as if he were the darkest person in the world. And this was a major port town after the empire had already happened.
Bingbong
18d ago
I have negative faith in the ability of social studies to deliver anything that isn't what they've already decided amongst themselves is the appropriate conclusion. Evopsych a tad different since it's a harder science and even then there's a lot of 'our data might say X pretty clearly and we'll publish it but we'll try and say we concluded Y instead'
Bingbong
18d ago
The average 70 year old these days is more fit to work at the typical job of 2026 than the average 65 year old was at the typical job in the early 1900s when public pensions were brought in and 65 was set as the interval for their payment. You are frankly insane if you think that, as a somewhat-young person, that the retirement age will be where it currently is when you're old enough to get there barring some huge luxury AI communism innovation in the meantime. The system is already buckling before the majority of boomers are even retired, medicine will likely continue to improve and unless there is an immediate reversal in the birthrate issue there won't be a large enough pyramid beneath you.
Bingbong
19d ago
Yeah but look at how awful the quality of work in social studies (especially anything sex-related) is.
Aella having an audience of people who are autistic enough to answer broadly-truthfully and being autistic enough to just present the info she gets instead of trying to massage it into a structure that suits whatever the agreed-upon orthodoxy of academic circles is is a level of truthiness I don't believe the current state of academic inquiry on this subject actually matches.
Bingbong
19d ago
I feel like the incentives of sexwork towards not getting pregnant/obviously fucked up with bad STDs (Yes, there is a bottom tier where people are less discerning) makes it less of an issue than the good people of Grindr who are going absolutely uncompensated and engaging in wild frivolous acts with randoms.
Bingbong
19d ago
You want to visit an escort service? Fine. You want to cheat on your spouse and potentially ruin your family? Fuck you.
I mean to a certain degree the fencing-off of these activities to pay-for-play gives incentives for everybody involved to keep it as transactional as possible and stop it snowballing into family-ruining consequences. I'm not particularly interested in using such services (though more since I just don't find paying for sex sexy than out of any particular moral condemnation) but I'm in a culture where it's a pretty open secret that a lot of middle-aged men have girlfriends or take boys trips a ton, and it kinda keeps things ticking over? It'd probably be better if they guys kept things in their pants (though then you've got to argue what obligations the wives have with regards to sexual availability) and Lou Pai stripper impregnations do happen but a certain level of circumspect whoring just seems to be pretty Lindy throughout human history. A lot of cultures don't really consider it 'cheating' in the same way that they'd handle somebody having an affair with a co-worker or neighbor.
Bingbong
21d ago
AFAIK Down Syndrome pregnancies have higher risks of complications that can impact the mother than typical pregnancies so it's not like it's purely a matter of 'assuming the infant is instantaneously adopted then it has no welfare impacts on the birthing mother'. There's still substantive risks and costs.
Bingbong
21d ago
The minority who sees abortion as murder would disagree, I think, as they are also very anti-MAID as a general rule.
I feel like this is all a sliding scale, though. Downs is the perfect point for debate since it's common enough, visible enough and you can easily say that people with it are capable of living happy lives (albeit at massive cost to the state and those around them). If it's some severe abnormality where the organs are on the outside of the body and the chances of making it 24 hours outside of the window is 0% and the risks of the mother carrying the baby to term are immense that's a completely different conversation. I've got 2 kids and I'd abort a potential future severely disabled fetus despite generally being pro-life (or seeing it as a very weighty decision that shouldn't be made frivolously)
Bingbong
21d ago
Yeah there were a bunch of people on twitter pushing the 'Abortion for any reason is fine, unless it's disability at which point you are committing a hecking eugenics' which creates this funny moral situation where you can supposedly abort out of mere potential inconvenience but also the like maximally inconvenient child cannot be aborted.
Bingbong
21d ago
People also underplaying just how expensive this is for the state since a lot of the costs are covered by subsidies. From what I can see out of pocket for a Down Syndrome child's care is generally 100k+ a year and that's tip of a far larger iceberg of tax money being deleted.
Bingbong
21d ago
Also a funny take on Twitter when some people came out as pro-choice except for in this case since 'this is eugenics'. The position that a person should be entitled to abort their children for any reason unless the child is maximally inconvenient for them is pretty amusing.
Bingbong
21d ago
Yeah. Miscarriages happen and there's a layer of social propriety around this matter where people aren't going to pry.
Bingbong
21d ago
Down Syndrome's kind of a funny spot in terms of aborting disability since they generally land in a spot of sufficient mental and physical development to be 'happy', though I feel like people are also not comprehending how much public investment goes into keeping a down syndrome person alive. IIRC they generally need several open-heart natal surgeries plus lifetime care.
Bingbong
24d ago
A bit different when there's a noted disparity of age.
If this had hypothetically been a 75 year old Digwa and a 20 year old Nowak I feel like the optics would be slightly better
Bingbong
24d ago
I believe the actual murder weapon had already been taken away by his mother, though I'd imagine he'd probably still have had his other smaller legal knife on him as a Sikh.
Bingbong
24d ago
Yeah it does sound like Digwa/his family were outlier-level belligerent and weapon-hoarding amongst the Sikh community. Afaik the brother had also had some legal troubles due to being armed?
Bingbong
1mo ago
Death of the monoculture and an increased fracturing in media consumption might mean the dynamic works a bit differently, but I also broadly agree.
Bingbong
1mo ago
Yeah. You can argue that there's some religious element but the entire idea of the Sikhs being able to carry knives is essentially a pro wrestling kayfabe where they're able to fulfil their religious requirement of 'self defense' but should also immediately get nuked with the full force of the law if they actually ever unsheathe one.
Bingbong
1mo ago
Open relationships are kind of an inverse bell curve thing for men, IMO.
If you're bottom percentile you'll go for them out of desperation. If you're top percentile and can trivially attract casual sex from other women, then it has an appeal again even if not everybody will go for it. If you're anywhere in the middle of sexual attractiveness it's inherently skewed where the woman in the relationship will have about 10000x the ease of attracting casual sex partners and it's thus skewed.
Though on the other hand you could just make the argument that somebody on the far right side of the curve is also incentivized to just pick a girl who's monogamous and tolerates his philandering.
Bingbong
1mo ago
UK media seems to be diverging pretty hard. The Henry Nowak story being huge on the Right and getting buried on the left, for instance.
Honestly the Dagestan combat sports thing is more to do with it being like the only region in the world where grappling gets the A-tier athletes immediately as their primary sport than to do with them being some incredibly insane unique genetic outliers of ability. The best athletes in their population go into combat sports since everything else is pretty marginal there, then get to train with other great athletes (which helps to refine technique and stop bad habits forming) in a geographic concentration.
Everywhere else Wrestling is only getting those who couldn't make it in ball sports and a lot of people will never even actually try the sport at all.
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