HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
No bio...
User ID: 179
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
If I may make a suggestion: It's very frustrating and confusing to read "SD" and not know whether it refers to Sweden Democrats or Social Democrats, both of which are discussed throughout your post.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The "Nuance Party" is written as "Partiet Nyans" in Swedish.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
What are your picks for words/idioms that ought to be retired this year?
"Gaslighting". It has proper application sometimes, but it's increasingly little more than a synonym for "disagreeing".
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Am I misunderstanding you, or are you saying Rings of Power is somehow related to Bezos' dating life? Can you fill this in for someone out of the loop?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I'm surprised no one has mentioned what I see as the biggest problem with this. Do we really want presidents to effectively unilaterally nullify laws the president thinks are wrong? How would those in the blue tribe react if a President Trump pardoned Jan 6th offenders? How would those in the red tribe react if a President Kamala Harris pardoned BLM rioters (supposing some future 2020-summer-of-unrest-like scenario where offenders were charged federally, for the sake of keeping this comparison apt)?
Yes, presidents have the power to pardon, but I don't think we should let that slide into something that looks quite like undermining the separation of powers. This is just the latest in a long-running series of examples (student loan forgiveness, eviction moratoriums, vaccine mandates via OSHA, Trump's border wall funding via "emergency" powers, DACA under Obama) where the executive is trying to usurp power that belongs to the legislature.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Agree and disagree. There is one big difference on these pardons. They have high mostly bipartisan support. Not sure on GOP numbers but I would guess it’s close to 50% or higher.
The student loan forgiveness was a bigger deal for executive action because it was not highly popular.
If it's so popular, have Congress pass legislation decriminalizing marijuana. If Congress can't/won't, then why should it be okay for a president to unilaterally decide something similar?
The whole notion of political capital and being punished in the next election for doing unpopular things is the checks and balances for this move.
This isn't a parliamentary system. We don't do that here. Separation of powers exists whether we like it or not, and in my opinion it exists for a good reason.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
From the bottom up it was a game that required team coordination to such a degree that solo queue players felt they couldn't impact the end result of the match very much. Five 2k rated players on comms would beat the 3k rated player with 4 average pubs every time.
Why didn't Blizzard simply ensure solo queuers are only matched up with solo queuers, and team queuers are only matched up with other team queuers?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
When society gives itself the out of, "They can always just kill themselves," there is less incentive for it to try to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems.
Doesn't that require assuming that society doesn't prefer trying to improve the lives of people with fixable, temporary problems? I doubt anyone who favors euthanasia in these circumstances is any less eager to find nonlethal solutions than people who oppose euthanasia.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Well, one major reason is that obesity is almost entirely a phenomenon of the last 50 years or so. People in past generations maintained a healthy weight regardless of nature. That doesn't entirely rule out the role of nature - perhaps something in the environment has changed in the last 50 years that people with certain genetic predispositions are especially susceptible to. But my impression is that all that's changed is food is so much more delicious and ubiquitous. And in that case, it really does just start to look like a failure of will (except for people who are fat, know they're fat, and accept the health and aesthetic tradeoffs because they just love food so much. All the power to 'em!).
Now, you could be reductive and claim that this failure of will is largely nature too. People's ability to abstain from overeating is surely partly nature like everything else about our behavior is. And as someone who doesn't even believe in free will, I'm certainly on board with that at a certain extremely abstract level of analysis. But outside of philosophical musing, I assess someone who can't resist overeating the same way I assess someone who can't resist reckless driving, drug use, risky casual sex, and lashing out in anger: I hold them responsible, regardless of the contribution of their genes to their behavior.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
You're right! I suppose I meant to write "were able to avoid obesity". And I'm thinking less pre-modern times and more 50-100 years ago.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Does anyone have a good sense of how African Americans living in smaller towns compare culturally to those in large cities, or how they compare to their non-black neighbors in town? I'm thinking more along the lines of places that are 5-20k population and aren't super close to a metro area such that the metro's culture seeps into the town by osmosis. I also have in mind places that aren't the deep South, so, where the black population in the town may only be 5-10%.
By culture, I mean the sort of behavior that, in my opinion, drives segregation in cities and makes predominantly black neighborhoods less desirable places to live. I'll give a few examples that I hope outlines roughly what I'm talking about. For instance, a general sense that they don't need to follow the tacit expectations of society in regards to dress, politeness, language, obeying what seem like trivial rules, and dozens of little things like that; the glorification of criminality; a disinterest in the traditional family unit (e.g., no real sense that they're "expected" to settle down with a wife and kids; having children and more or less abandoning them and not seeing that as particularly shameful); an intense culture of honor, where slights by strangers must be met with a verbal or physical altercation.
Now, even though this is The Motte and I shouldn't have to, I'll go ahead and state the obvious: those things apply to a lot of white people, and they apply not the slightest bit to a lot of black people, even in the cities. Still, I hope it's not controversial that there are average cultural differences between the races in the US, even if just as the result of a cascade of historical misfortunes that are in some sense no fault of their own.
I feel like I have a good sense of what small town white people are like, but I feel like small town black people in the non-South is a complete blind spot for me, culturally. Like, I almost can't picture it.
Has anyone lived in small towns outside the south like this? How did the culture of whites and blacks in town differ, if at all?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
For what it's worth, I (the OP) am Canadian as well and live within an hour of Hamilton (not the Greater Toronto Area, though). And also for what it's worth, I definitely do notice in my home city a racial difference in the sort of behavior I mentioned. It's probably not as stark as might be observed in the US, but it's certainly obvious to me.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Confidence - 100% - I don’t get these things wrong
Do you know that saying something like that makes me lose confidence in you? No one should be 100% confident about vague future things, and not realizing that is a pretty big strike against you.
It reminds me of a story Russ Roberts at EconTalk tells about about the Stanford professor Ron Howard. Ron used to require students to assign a confidence to each of their answers on an exam. He would adjust the points they got based on their certainty - the higher the probability the student assigned to his or her answer, the more points they got if it was right. And he implored students to never ever assign 100% probability to an answer, because if you assign 100% probability to an answer and it's wrong, you get negative infinity points and you fail the exam. Alas, some students still put 100% probability.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
The guy who currently does this at my company basically searches the tags of an article "inflation, money", and then gets a list of images that match those tags. He quickly visually scans a gallery of images, and then picks out the one he wants. While looking at the images he might spot one that has a building in it that looks like the federal reserve, and he thinks 'oh even better match' and he picks that one.
The images aren't supposed to be special. They exist mostly just to break up what would otherwise be an ugly wall of text. We might all be fine reading sites like reddit, but apparently a bunch of people like more variety in their visual space.
Ugh, I hate when websites do that. I don't need a picture of a person smiling while looking at their laptop when I'm reading an article about filing taxes. What is it even doing there? I can't believe there are literally people paid money to find these pointless images.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I don't understand why votes are shown after 24 hours. If votes should be hidden, they should be hidden forever. If the idea is that people will refrain from commenting because they don't want to be downvoted to oblivion, this change doesn't solve that. People will still see how downvoted they are the next day.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Men and women don't differ that much in their views on abortion. Some stats from Pew:
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Even gender split on the question of whether life begins at conception and a fetus is a person with rights [1]
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60/51 female/male split on the question of whether women should have more say on abortion policies than men [1]
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76/68 female/male split on the question of whether the decision to have an abortion should be solely up to the woman [1]
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21/17 female/male split on the question of whether abortion should be legal in all circumstances, and 9/8 female/male on whether it should be illegal in all cases [2]
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Almost identical gender split on the separate questions of whether abortion should be legal at 6 weeks, 14 weeks, and 24 weeks [2]
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
Replace “gambled” with “traded with”, and its now basically the same as what any major modern bank does, I think. (Outside of the idiotic TOS, which I agree they effed up on, since the problematic phrase wasn’t even in there until May)
Except real banks are heavily regulated (the ratios they can lend out, what they're allowed to invest in, what they have to disclose, etc.), they can borrow money from the Fed, they're required to have keep a certain amount of cash in reserve, and they have customers' money insured by the federal government (and customers know this, which psychologically guards against the bank runs that cause this sort of catastrophe).
I swear, this crypto shit is just a speed-run of the last 200 years of issues in banking and relearning all the same lessons over again.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
While I think this seems like an overreaction, I strongly disagree that using "males" and "females" instead of "men" and "women" is "fine."
It might not be worth starting fights over, but it's a weird drift happening for no good reason
"Male" and "female" are often preferable when you don't want to imply that you are excluding certain ages, as man/woman/boy/girl does.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I just don't understand how it still works despite what I assume is a substantial number of people who are sick of it. I have for years absolutely refused to ever click on any video with one of those fucking thumbnails. Same with clickbait titles. I will not do it. I can't be the only one.
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I didn't edit it. If I did, you could see "Edited ago".
The "Edited ... ago" indication only shows if you edit a comment after few minutes have passed. If you edit within the first few minutes, nothing shows.
I'm not party to your conversation or anything, but I thought it'd be worth clarifying this for you and @sliders1234
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I don't think it should be any surprise that the vast majority of Holocaust deniers are people who have disreputable beliefs about Jews. Given how it's considered rank antisemitism and just about the worst thing one can be caught believing, wouldn't we expect that the vast majority of people who have gone that rabbit hole (much less admit to it) are antisemites?
I just don't see how that has any bearing on the truth value of the claim.
It's always going to be the case that the most taboo ideas in a society are only ever seriously contemplated by people who have some strong ideological or moral conviction related to those taboo ideas. I wouldn't be surprised if the vast majority of people espousing atheism in Europe hundreds of years ago were rapacious sinners, edgelords, and reprobates of various other sorts. So what?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I just don't understand why they don't come out with a parallel line of cheapo cars with limited computer bullshit like we had 20 years ago. There are a lot of people that don't like the computerization of modern cars. Why isn't the market stepping in to serve them and take their money?
HelmedHorror
Still sane, exile?
1yr ago
I do think we should examine it impartially, but have a strong prior that their claims are highly likely to false on account of their near-universal antisemitic motivations. I think the reason it's different from creationism is that it's at least conceivable that the mainstream opinion on the Holocaust is what it is only because of institutional and social pressures against dissenters, much like I believe it is in the case of Covid policy, medical interventions for trans-identifying youth, racial differences in intelligence (observed - not even HBD), innate gender differences, etc.
With creationism, by contrast, I don't think anyone who believes in evolution is particularly ideologically and morally committed to evolution being true. It's just sort of like gravity and heliocentrism - it's just what we happen find reality to be, so we go with it. Now, I actually do understand why creationists suspect that scientists are ideologically biased and cunning purgers of threatening dissenters. They believe that secularists want a godless world to freely sin in, and that promoting evolution is one piece of a grander scheme to try and write God out of society. I just think that's 100% mistaken, so I don't doubt the mainstream view of evolution.
If institutions can purge dissent and manufacture orthodoxy and the appearance of unanimity and certainty with regard to all the hot CW topics this forum is very familiar with, why couldn't they do so with the Holocaust? I honestly don't know, but without extremely persuasive evidence I'm going to default to the mainstream opinion. Given how virtually the only people on the dissenting side are antisemites and I lack the expertise to evaluate their claims, I'm doubtful I'll ever be convinced. But why is it seemingly so inconceivable to you?
I'm not sure I understand why top-level comments have a hidden vertical bar under them, as opposed to the visible bar of child comments. Consider this screenshot. I suspect if you show that screenshot to anyone familiar with reddit-style comments and ask whether pro_sprond and Quantumfreakonomics were making top-level comments, they'd say yes.
Am I missing something?
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