Jesweez
3hr ago
Old men yelling at clouds again. You just happened to watch a reggaeton show for the first time probably. The US has rap music which features girls shaking their asses, that just how it is. Puerto Rico, part of the US, happens to have the world’s biggest reggaeton star, which is a musical style where people grind on each other.
Latin America has some classy as hell music and dance. Actually a lot more so than the US does. I’ve never been in the US and seen an old couple dancing salsa outside of a cafe. We could never, lol. There’s a level of classiness in that culture we’d have a really hard time replicating here, just like we’d struggle to do so you put us up against Italy or something.
But the youth tend to listen to songs about sex. Or violence. They’re just crazy fools who like to dance with their underdeveloped PFCs to stuff that shocks stuffy older people from whatever culture. You’ve got no room to talk, being from a culture that has a moral panic every decade or so about what the kids are listening to. Most of what we consider classic Americana music was considered devil worshipper music by the conservatives of that time, and people freaking out that the Super Bowl show was too sexual has been happening for decades now. Come on, you grew up here, you knew that.
In the end, the difference is that conservatives just don’t like Spanish and get frustrated by it. Their blood pressure tends to rise if they hear Spanish on the street, pobrecitos.
Jesweez
2d ago
Case in point of the below discussion of algorithmically delivered biases, my recollection of 2020 was a constant stream of videos of 50 year conservative women acting crazy, which is the origin of the word Karen ime. It’s interesting if you at the same time were seeing a bunch of videos of 50 year old progressive women behaving badly. Maybe the conclusion is not that the conservatives or the liberals are ‘weaponizing’ 50 year old women but rather “the algorithms are driving everybody insane”.
Jesweez
2d ago
I thought the context was pretty clearly about Trump always joking about ending presidential term limits and staying in power
In fairness I did at the beginning mix two concepts, one of which is the peaceful transfer of power (more of a J6 thing), and the other being presidential term limits.
Jesweez
3d ago
I guess messing with the peaceful transition of power was more something from last time than this time.
I mean, imagine there’s a guy with the power to repossess your house and kick you out. And for years, he keeps telling you that he’s going to do it, and then being like ‘nah man, it’s a joke, relax!’. You even saw him at the court doing paperwork related to your house once a few years ago. He oddly keeps talking about doing it. And he even printed out a shirt that shows your house with an evicted sign on it and sells it to people.
Is the ‘joke’ funny to you, or is your response more something like, “hey, fuck you”?
Jesweez
3d ago
I got mixed up because undoing the peaceful transfer of power was more of what happened last time
So he’s just eroding the one norm that keeps the whole project of peaceful transition of power together through the way he talks as president but only for fun and for meme value, not doing it seriously.
Thats not really better.
Jesweez
3d ago
A country that tolerates their leader joking about doing away with the peaceful transfer of power pretty much deserves to have it taken away.
Jesweez
3d ago
If we were a serious country the legacy would have been the same as what happened to Bolsonaro, who also tried the same trick.
Of course, we haven’t been through what Latin Americans have so we’re far too soft about punishing people who try to steal power or who exhibit blatant corruption.
Jesweez
3d ago
Imagine that the government wanted to make everyone get their bodyfat percentage calculated. ?
I’m for this one
We need to leverage more government power against the fats.
Jesweez
4d ago
Is authoritarianism just whenever the executive isn't constrained from doing things?
I mean, yes? That’s a pretty decent definition.
All I know is I live in a country where the leader tried to undo the last election that he lost in and at any given time you can check in and see a steady drumbeat of him and his followers arguing that we should either cancel or undermine the next one. There’s another one of those in the news right now. There always is. Sometimes it’s a ‘joke’, sometimes it’s a pitch, but it’s a decently constant backdrop to life with this administration.
At the same time, all of my international friends are quite concerned about just being randomly targeted by masked federal agents. The admin uses these agents like a way to punish his enemies, sending them en masse to cities as a spectacle and political stunt. The leader of these agents was recorded upon arriving saying stuff like “This is OUR city now”. If you look a certain way these agents will demand to see your papers. And for my international friends, I’m reminded, this isn’t a normal state of affairs for a typical country. You don’t go to Spain to study your PhD and have masked federal agents engaging in showy clashes with whole cities where you risk being nabbed off the street if your Spanish accent is off, for example.
And at the same time, the leader of my country is constantly engaging in these bizarre fantasies to conduct territorial expansion by force. He was elected for nothing of the sort but now has an entire list of territories that he constantly talks about annexing. Because he’s obviously a man who just always exaggerates and aggrandizes himself, we took it as bluster and as some strange verbal tic. But then he just out and randomly conducted a decapitation strike on a country in order, as he reiterated thoroughly was the casus belli, “to take their oil”.
Yes, him backing down recently on two separate things was a major relief, and some of the alarms that have been blaring may be able able to be turned off for the time being. But he’s clearly got authoritarian, vindictive, and grandiose instincts and it’s only a matter of what will he choose to exercise them on next.
As a possible fascist, our major saving grace is that he does seem to lack a true fascists will to power. He could have gathered up more absolute power on this timeframe. Members of his camp were actually openly mourning that he didn’t do so. He’s not a Hitler or a Mussolini. But he does clearly admire authoritarianism (a whole trove of his quotes over the years supports this), and had he been a younger man this next set of elections may be in much more danger. I would not be surprised at all if his movement produces a genuine American fascist who does take the steps that he didn’t. He’s eroded the norms of political life so thoroughly that it would no longer be a shock to the populace at all.
Rather than a committed fascist, he’s more like a Latin American strongman who just lazily sort of does what he wants while enriching himself and bucks the remnants of the former system that try to stop him. But his movement, aside from the cult of personality and yes men, is indeed made of many committed and severe ideologues, which is the major difference.
How does the null hypothesis have a place here and why do you get to decide what it is? We aren’t approving drugs here, we’re just trying to weigh two theories, it’s completely unfair to arbitrarily privilege the one you like more.
That’s kind of like asking how does algebra have a place here, we’re just trying to solve for a variable in this equation.
A hypothesis test is a method to provide evidence for or against two competing theories using data and the way that they’re commonly constructed is to assume a null hypothesis as being the one where the data are not from significantly different distributions.
A standard hypothesis test is not the only method and its use in science is sometimes over stated but it’s by far the most common approach to address such questions, and that’s just how it’s structured.
It’s kind of Occam in the end. It’s simpler to assume that there’s no difference between how fast this group of monkeys climb trees vs that one. If I wanted to posit that the second group climbs faster, I can collect data and argue that it backs up my assumption, but the null case is null because it makes less assumptions.
Jesweez
6d ago
The null hypothesis is indeed one of a set of competing hypotheses, but it’s typically the one that assumes no difference between populations.
If I want to show that two distributions are statistically different then I start with the assumption that they are not and then set out to disprove that.
Similarly, if I believe the populations are not actually significantly different, I believe it’d still be common to set up a null hypothesis that they are not different and then either confirm or reject the alternative hypothesis.
Jesweez
6d ago
H0 (null): no difference between populations
H1 (alternative): radiation resistance of the new population > radiation resistance of the reference bird population
This is the typical formulation. Null typically assumes no effect or no difference between the populations being considered.
Jesweez
9d ago
If you seriously think people in your day to day want you dead I think this is more indicative of a medical issue than a political philosophy debate.
This is the most extreme kind of political thinking that I’ve seen
You should not treat your political opponents as a homogenous group made of their most distasteful members
This (quite common) cognitive mistake becomes particularly egregious when the conclusion is: they all want to kill me
Jesweez
11d ago
Do not insult the flag of Cusco
Jesweez
11d ago
I think the problem tends to arise when people use these symbols and then also want to deport undesired races from their homeland.
Excellent post! I’m taking notes. If I’m ever in need, nothing will distract the fash better than a discussion of what fit the boys on the street should be wearing.
Jesweez
13d ago
I meant that it was unbecoming for someone on the right to ask me become preoccupied with online micro aggressions as if those were representative of my day to day reality.
Jesweez
13d ago
I’m not sure about your response, for a much more extreme example everything I’ve read about how people behave in wartime always surprises me about how people go on about their normal lives even while bombs fall around them. I remember reading some stories during the Syrian civil war which were like, yeah, we had to avoid those blocks because the rebels have control and the government forces are also over here, but we could take X street though and so after school we went to the theater. Or I also remember following the account of a pair of teenagers in Gaza who would make videos where they make talk about memes and jokes and then say by the way guys we arrived safe at the refugee camp and today we’re trying to find a little extra bread for our mother.
This obviously isn’t wartime in the US, just a clash that feels rather authoritarian to many. I’d give the guy his pass to talk about the museums and think the feds are getting a bit authoritarian at the same time, though.
Jesweez
14d ago
Their friends likely are. I know my immigrant friends are freaked the hell out with the news and would be afraid to leave the house if there was a surge of these masked federal agents grabbing people off the street here in our town. Maybe if you’re an obvious white citizen, like the two who got shot were, you do your friends a favor and make noise when those guys pull up.
Jesweez
15d ago
This is true.
It creates lots of conflict when the sides are polarized and each perceives different threats, but I guess it does cause us to avoid certain civilizational failure modes.
It’s either this or be like the Chinese and just preserve social harmony above all else. In the end a trade off. Hope you are enjoying the show!
You just saw a show where an American citizen sang about stuff like getting drunk with his cousin for the Fourth of July, and pointed at the camera and told people stuff like you can achieve anything you dream of, believe in yourself and keep working for it. He even celebrated the family unit and marriage, having a couple get married during his show! You just didn’t realize that’s what was going on.
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