Crowstep
2yr ago
Does anyone know if Memphis PD still uses affirmative action in their hiring? Google suggests that it was ruled unconstitutional in 1999, but I wonder if it continued in some obscured form.
It stands to reason that a PD that tips the scales in favour of black applicants would have more police brutality than a meritocratic hiring process which can weed out the more reckless hires.
Crowstep
15d ago
we don't have a counterfactual Earth to compare against
No, but we have a counterfactual population to compare against, the population who chose not to get vaccinated. The comparison is gigantic and unambiguous, vaccines saved lives. And that's with the unvaccinated population benefitting from the partial herd immunity provided by the vaccinated population.
the distinct impression I got from the public medical establishment during the pandemic is that if it were happening they would not have been honest about it because of how they took a mortage on their reputations to push the vaccines
If they weren't being honest about side effects, why did you quote an article about them describing side effects and how common they are as a reason for not getting the vaccine? How does that not count as honesty?
There was no scientific curiosity
If that were true, they would have just released the vaccines instead of spending months and months doing exhaustive trials to see whether and to what extent the vaccines reduced infection, and what side effects there were. If scientific curiosity means anything, it means testing your hypotheses with studies. What exactly did you expect them to do beyond that?
but I have no data either way that I would personally trust about this
You have a massive population of vaccinated people, living among a massive population of unvaccinated people. The unvaccinated population had death rates from COVID that an order of magnitude higher than the vaccinated population. What more evidence could you ask for?
Crowstep
3mo ago
Well no, you're well aware that they benefit from race discrimination in their favour.
You're also well aware that Jews are classified along with all other European ethnic groups as white. All that's happening is that the places being allocated to white students are being allocated to the most intelligent ones. This doesn't bother most people because most people don't hate Jews.
Crowstep
1yr ago
What's bizarre is the Western world asking Ukrainian men to bear nearly the entire brunt of this conflict as if their lives have no value.
The 'Western world' isn't asking anything of them. The Ukrainian people and government want to fight, and want the west to support them. If the Ukrainian government wanted to surrender, they could do so tomorrow without asking for anyone's permission.
Other countries have agency too.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I think part of rationality is assessing the reliability of your sources. If you don't have expert knowledge, then you need to defer to other people, and I don't blame do_something for being mistrustful of believing someone who spends most of his time on this site denying the most well documented mass killing in history.
Crowstep
2mo ago
You misunderstand me. I'm arguing that successfully following CICO as diet advice is counter-productive. The Biggest Loser study showed that contestants who purposely decreased their CI (through having their food intake managed by the producers of the show) and massively increased their CO through exercise permanently reduced their metabolic rates, even after they regained the weight after the show was over. These people, who absolutely did follow CICO as advice ended up making things worse for themselves.
A person can choose to eat less. But eating less increases hunger (duh) and reduces metabolic rate. Homeostasis trumps willpower.
But obesity isn't caused by a lack of willpower (the whole world didn't get lazy in the 1970s for no reason). It's caused by a broken lipostat. This is the consensus among obesity researchers and it lines up with what we actually see. What caused the broken lipostat is still up for debate, I think it's vegetable oil but it could be something else.
Crowstep
1mo ago
5 as a body count is definitely an ‘arbitrary’ number, but again, you get much above that and it implies more bad decision-making.
Very arbitrary. A 26-year-old woman who became sexually active at 16 and slept with one guy every two years would exceed it.
It's much more likely to reflect the reality of serial monogamy than bad decision making.
Not ‘obese.’
Not unreasonable to include, but remember that obesity is an equal opportunities offender. Most non-overweight men aren't going to want a fat wife, but then most men are fat too.
This is also true, to a lesser extent, with mental illness. Women have more mental illness than men (or at least they say they do) but the numbers for men aren't zero.
In fact, we can really apply this filter to most things you've listed. Men have high levels of obesity, student loan debt, mental illness, existing paternity and STIs. We can't apply it to everything of course. Men want a woman below 30 for obvious biological reasons that don't apply exactly to women, but broadly the way you've framed the question implies an average eligible man and an average ineligible woman. Whereas in reality, most of these things affect the numerator as well as the denominator. Loads of women are fat, but so are an equal number of men, which reduces the competion for the slim women.
Crowstep
3mo ago
If you have evidence that universities are unfairly prioritising Jews, then present it. Insinuation isn't enough.
Meanwhile, we have actual concrete evidence and explicit admission by universities that they were favouring Africans and Latinos while penalising Asians (Euros are a wash, from what I recall). Asians were appearing less than their GPAs would suggest they should, while blacks and hispanics were appearing more than their GPAs suggested they should. Jews being particularly prevelant at some universities isn't shocking, because they are literally the most intelligent ethnic group on the planet.
A black Muslim pimp
He's paler than the average Italian. If you're gonna bring up his ethnicity, at least call him Afro-European or mulatto or something. The man's about as black as Father Ted. And Europeans don't use the one-drop rule. If someone passes as European (like Andrew Tate or Meghan Markle) the fact that they may have mixed ancestry is just an interesting factoid for most people.
Although him converting to Islam so he can get religious cover for his promiscuity and saying mean things about women is pretty funny.
Crowstep
9mo ago
It may well be embraced by fat acceptance activists, but it is also embraced by most of the field of nutrition science.
CICO, meanwhile, is only popular with laymen (who very often pair it with moral condemnation of fat people).
I don't think it's possible to look at a chart like this and conclude that what's really going on is a linear increase in laziness starting in the mid-C20th for no reason. Pick any profession full of intelligent, hardworking people (medicine, law, programming, high-level business) and you'll see similar proportions of fat people to the general population. While there are entire premodern cultures where nobody is fat at all.
CICO feels better than set-point theory in the same way that complaining about greedy landlords feels better than campaigning for YIMBY zoning reform. Most people will choose righteous outrage over real explanations if given the choice.
Crowstep
1yr ago
It works for a tiny minority of people. For almost everyone else, long term fat loss through diet is impossible.
Which really shouldn't surprise us. The global obesity epidemic didn't start due to a global reduction in shame or increase in laziness. It affected every country and population on the planet that started consuming the modern industrialised country diet. There is clearly something in this diet (or some other environmental stressor) that is causing obesity. Personally, I think it's the vegetable oils, but whatever is causing it, approaching the subject moralistically is a pointless distraction.
Crowstep
14d ago
Who are 'the pro-vaccine people', every government and health authority in the developed world? The supermajority of people on the planet who willingly got a vaccine? Humanity is not in a manichean struggle between pro- and anti-vax. Vaccines are just a (very) useful medical technology that unfortunately got tied up with the toxic partisanship and negative polarisation of American politics.
In the less angry parts of the world, we just got our jabs and got on with life once the virus went away because of them.
Crowstep
9mo ago
I would say that cultural marxists are those who are biased in favor of progressive favored groups, of intersectional alliance, such as blacks, Jews, women, LGBT, and more, are identitarians in favor of such groups, on the basis of deeming them oppressed.
Based on the last year's events, I can think we can comfortably say that Jews don't fall into that list. In fact, I'm pretty sure Jews haven't been on there since what, the 60s?
Among those who play the oppression olympics game, Jews are super-whites.
Crowstep
1yr ago
while promoting multiculturalism everywhere else
Do you have any evidence of this? Ideally from countries that aren't America.
Crowstep
1yr ago
'Selling her body' is a terribly misleading metaphor. Chattel slavery involves the selling of bodies, prostitution is more like selling labour for a fixed period. Of course, people use the 'selling her body' metaphor on purpose to frame the practice in a maximally negative way.
If our hypothetical 14 year old girl was selling her body, surely that would mean that Epstein owns her body after the transaction? If he doesn't, then he hasn't 'bought' anything.
Crowstep
1yr ago
Oh don't worry, I'm not posturing against the resident Holocaust denier for my own sake. I just think he degrades the quality of the conversation here by bringing every other conversation back to his own pet pseudohistoric topic.
I realise that a place like this is vulnerable to witches and is to some extent a necessary compromise we have to make, but damn is it annoying.
If getting people to stop overeating is impossible, and the only way to lose weight is to stop overeating, then yes, losing weight is impossible. I don't see why making that distinction helps apart from allowing us to cast moral aspersions on fat people.
Like sure, it's technically possible to lock someone in a cage and feed them the exact number of calories they need to lose weight. But then their bodies will fight back by reducing their metabolism, increasing their food cravings and generally making them miserable. Not only that, their reduced metabolisms won't even recover after the (inevitably) regain the weight back.
So I stand by my original point, weight loss through diet is impossible. Once weight is gained, it's essentially permanent. A more interesting question is why obesity came out of nowhere in the mid-20th century and exploded from the 1970s onwards. There's really only one likely culprit in my mind.
Crowstep
1yr ago
It's a shame you can't read the article, because yes, the accuser handed over her file from the rape crisis centre to the Times.
All the factual claims in the article (except the he said she said stuff obviously) has been verified by the journalists as far as I can tell.
Crowstep
10mo ago
When a political party replaces one candidate with another candidate (who is in fact the deputy of the current candidate) that can hardly be called a coup. Coups involve replacing the government, Kamala's government position (VP) hasn't changed, she's just now the person standing to be the next president instead of Biden.
Candidate choice is an internal party matter for the Democrats (as it is for any political party). There is nothing even remotely coup-like about this.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I wouldn't put too much stake on 'the realities of CICO'. No matter how much the public hears 'calories in, calories out' the obesity epidemic continues unabated. If it was as simple as choosing to eat less, we'd see far fewer fat people than we do. Nobody wants to be fat.
Maybe your wife will be able to reverse her expanding waistline, but if she does, it might be because she's started taking ozempic rather than through sheer force of will. Hoping that the latter will work has a good chance of disappointing both of you.
Crowstep
1yr ago
I wonder if part of the strategy is just making (remaining) Gaza even more densely populated. We know urban living reduces birth rates. A more densely populated strip should spend up the birth rate decline.
Crowstep
1yr ago
'Eat more and move less' doesn't actually work. We have almost a century of evidence showing that this advice does not work. If it did, people would successfully be able to lose weight long term. Just Google 'long term weight loss study' and you'll find pages and pages of evidence showing that even among the small number of people who successfully lose weight, almost all of them gain it back. Dieting and/or exercising for weight loss does not work. Cruelty is pretending that fat people lack the moral fiber necessary to lose weight when actually, nobody can do it (barring a tiny number of outliers).
We do not control our appetites, we do not control our metabolisms, we do not control how our body partitions nutrients. We can temporarily override our appetite and consciously try to burn more calories through exercise, but ultimately the body's lipostat wins. Fat people have disregulated metabolisms, not a lack of self control. If self-control were really the issue, then we would have to come to the baffling conclusion that the entire industrialised world started to decline in self-control in the 1970s.
Or, it could be because we introduced massive amounts of an agricultural waste product into our diet in the mid-20th century that doesn't have the same nutrient profile as anything humans have eaten in our evolutionary history.
Crowstep
2yr ago
If you're looking for right-wing examples, replace 'Nazi' with 'socialist' or 'communist'.
I wondered how long it would take for this to be about Jews. You never fail to disappoint.
As far as I can tell, you are upset that Rationalists regard high-IQ Jews as superior to Kurt, despite his noble physiognomy and the fact that they are 'short, weak, ugly nerds'. Am I getting that right?
I would worry about this being an uncharitable take, except for the fact that you cannot stop posting about how Jews are bad.
Have I misinterpreted the post? Could you summarise your thesis in a sentence?
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