MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
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User ID: 896
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Liberals don’t care about most of that. They have zero interest in fixing local majority minority schools.
I think this is false. The amount of money shovelled, with the full support of liberal elites and the votes of liberal non-elites, into uplifting children from historically disadvantaged groups (very much including white oiks and chavs in the UK - I'm not sure if class counts in the US) through education and anciliary services is more than we have spent on almost any other social problem except for elder poverty (which we have managed to bankrupt the west over, but we did at least solve the problem).
It is true that this spending has been ineffective for "bad apples and bad bets" reasons, but that doesn't imply zero interest in fixing poor schools, just an inability to triage.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
The US security guarantee under NATO never extended to US support for punitive operations against countries which harboured terrorists. When Israel area-bombs civilian targets in southern Lebanon in order to root out Hezbollah, the US sends cash and ammo. If the UK had area-bombed civilian targets in County Monaghan and County Louth in order to root out the IRA, the US would have sent a Suez-style spanking.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Yahadut Hatorah is an explicitly non-Zionist coalition of Haredi and Hasidic political parties that consistently gets 6-7 MKs. Back in the 1990s their MKs would refuse to sing the national anthem at the start of Knesset sessions. The anger at a party which was widely perceived as anti-Israel joining the government in 1996 drove the foundation of Shinui as a secular, Zionist, right-liberal party in opposition to Likud - the first pledge in Shinui's manifesto was "we will never join a coalition that includes MKs who don't sing the national anthem". The Haredi parties have improved their behaviour since then in order to become an acceptable coalition party for Netanyahu after 2009, but they still represent the tendency within Haredi communities to treat the State of Israel as a food animal.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Politically correct taxonomy - it's not just for hominids.
(IIRC Jared Diamond wrote that if any other species did taxonomy, chimps and humans would be in the same genus).
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
Most taxonomists consider canis lupus lupus (Eurasian wolves), canis lupus dingo, canis lupus familiaris and the various subspecies of north American wolf to be the same species.
It isn't clear to me why canis latrans is a categorised as a different species given that fertile hybrids exist, although the wikipedia articles imply that c. latrans/c. lupus hybridisation is much less likely in the wild than hybridisation between c. lupus subspecies.
Combining the two topics, it appears that the debate about the origin of dingos has been stilted by concern about Aboriginal sensibilities - Occam's Razor points to the dingo being descended from feral domestic dogs brought over by the ancestors of the Aborigines, but lots of people want the story to be that dingos and humans came over separately and the Aborigines domesticated the dingo themselves in Australia.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
1d ago
McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee
Two different groups with different agendas. The HUAC was devoted to rooting out actual communists (most famously Alger Hiss), fellow-travellers (like Charlie Chaplin and Orson Welles), and people protecting them (like Arthur Miller). McCarthy was putting on a show for the benefit of the "water fluoridation is communism" crowd and pioneered the art of making bad-faith allegations of communist sympathies against political opponents.
Lumping them together discredited the work of the HUAC, it didn't rehabilitate McCarthy. After the Army-McCarthy hearings McCarthy's reputation is rightfully unsalvageable.
The post-1994 (in the US) or post-1997 (in the UK) policy of incentivising single mothers into low-paid work with their kid in subsidised daycare has succeeded. But a single parent in a low-paid job (or, for that matter, a second parent in a low-paid job) which barely covers the cost of childcare isn't directly improving their economic situation by working, only making themselves more deserving of subsidy.
To fix the incentives towards single parenthood, you need to increase the gap in standards of living between two-adult, two-income families and one-adult, one-income families. For the less-than-respectable working class, making single-parent families poorer in general means letting kids starve, but you could abolish the soft preferences for single mothers in the jackpottable parts of the welfare state (like social housing in the UK). And increasing the standard of living of low-paid couple-headed families at that level (where people are not rich enough to pay a lot of income tax) means giving them money, which gives conservatives the ick, unless it is BAH for dependas.
According to conservatives on radio it is Great Society welfare policies that destroyed black American marriage rates.
Also the Moynihan report, which was not by a conservative.
Old-school Welfare treated a family headed by a single mother as deserving poor (having been introduced at a time when most single mothers were widows, or divorced for sympathetic reasons), but a family headed by a man who couldn't hold down a steady full-time job as undeserving poor. The incentive to make yourself deserving poor is obvious.
It remains the case that a single mother is going to be subsidy-dependent (one person can't earn enough to support both her own family and the woman who is looking after the kids while she is working unless she is pulling in an upper-middle-class income) and these subsidies are means tested such that most of the income of a lower-middle-class man who joins her household is promptly going to be means-tested away (or, in reverse, that most of the income of a lower-middle-class partner she ejects will be replaced by means-tested benefits).
Post sexual revolution culture thinks that people should couple up for love and not money, meaning that not redistributing away the (very practical, with a computable cash value) benefits of couple formation is creating a "perverse" incentive. The red tribe agrees with the general principle, but think the required redistribution should be informal through churches (meaning the benefit can be restricted to women who comply with the red tribe's marry-early-marry-often version of modern sexual morality) rather than coercively through the state.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
nothing stopping you from job-hunting a bit again especially towards the end of the internship
And as an intern without an offer, you can openly jobhunt while employed, and even get help from with your jobhunt from your co-workers. You can't do that in a normal job.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Patel is so useless that he does more damage to the administration alive than dead? But if you thought that, you would probably think the same thing about Trump.
If Trump were to die of natural causes tomorrow my heart would want to rejoice, but my head knows that Vance is probably more dangerous.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Every midterm election has been bad for the President's party since 2006. (Both 1998 and 2002 saw the President's party gain seats, 1994 was the Gingrich wave election, and before that there were enough Dixiecrats that the system worked differently).
But there are bigger and smaller midterm defeats. The 2026 Senate map was supposed to be unwinnable for Democrats, and now it isn't.
Historically, the biggest midterm shellackings have happened when the incumbent Congressional leadership beclowns themselves, like the House Banking scandal (1994) or the numerous scandals of the Hastert-Delay paedoCongress (2006). This may be the first time a President destroys his Congressional colleagues without their help.
Nike is much better at marketing than Adidas, that's pretty much it. Also I think most people don't actually care about the nitpicky rules and so the barrier was already broken, does breaking it a second time "but actually" really say anything new?
Breaking it in an actual race gets you recognition from e.g. the Guiness Book of Records, which is what the man in the street takes as official. You can argue about how much the difference between an exhibition race run under competition rules (like the "race" Roger Bannister ran his four-minute mile in) and an event with a team of 41 pacers running in a formation designed to protect the record breaker from air resistance, but from the point of view of achieving the thing we set out to achieve when people started talking about the two-hour marathon, the point is that one counts and the other doesn't.
Also, the 2026 London Marathon was a real race with big money on the line. It wasn't the pacer in from of him that pulled Sawe over the line, it was the risk of being overtaken by Kejelcha that pushed him.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Barkley is deliberately non-commercial though. If there was money in ultra running, Gary Cantrell/Lazarus Lake wouldn't take it, and the infrastructure to get east Africans entered into his events would never come into being.
The (relatively small by first-world professional sports standards, but large by Sub-Saharan African middle-class income standards) money in marathon running is needed to maintain the infrastructure that finds fast runners in what is still darkest Africa. Part of how we got the 2-hour marathon is by sending a talent scout into the kind of remote village in the Kenyan highlands where nobody even dreams of being able to afford $500 trainers in order to find boys like Sabastian Sawe.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Are you saying that the people who stormed the Capitol were insane, given that they did interpret Trump's speech that way, or are you making the true but irrelevant point that one particular sentence of the speech, taken out of context, is a rejection of violence? I am not going to waste my time pulling out the other sentences from different parts of the speech which, taken out of context, are calls for violence.
FWIW, I think Trump intended a riotous mob to assemble outside the Capitol and threaten violence for the purpose of intimidating Mike Pence (and Congressional Republicans) into going along with the plan outlined in the Eastman memo. Given Trump's character and the ambiguous nature of the Ellipse speech when considered as a whole, it is more likely than not that he hadn't thought about whether he wanted the mob to enter the building if Pence ignored the threat.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
People in the distance running community are comparing it to the full-body swimsuits that eventually got banned.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
That appears to be Eliezer's view. He thinks it is morally justified to use effective violence to stop probably-unaligned AI development, and that in Western democracies firebombing data centres is ineffective violence and lobbying governments to pass laws is, as libertarians would agree, effective violence.
On the relative effectiveness of randos blowing shit up vs passing laws, which is an is question, not an ought one, he is obviously correct.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
Hell, Trump has even called for the death penalty against those Dem lawmakers like half a year ago which is one of the closest things you can get of support for violence while still not quite crossing the boundary.
I'd say a government official with the power to set in motion the process of executing somebody calling for them to be executed clearly does cross the boundary - it is, in non-clown cases, an order to start that process. When Trump does it he arguably isn't calling for violence because when Trump speaks in public it is presumed to be (especially by his supporters) a mindless bloviation intended to express emotions, not an attempt to communicate.
That sounds like more of an argument of practicality then.
The morality of violence depends on the practical consequences. In consequentialist moral frameworks (including Yud's) this is trivial. In most deontological moral frameworks violence is wrong unless certain conditions are satisfied, some of which relate to practical consequences - for example in Catholic just war theory a just war must be fought with a reasonable probability of success. And in virtue ethics engaging in violence without a plan to achieve anything by it is a vice.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
2d ago
The more important difference between J6 and the typical political assassination attempt is that Jan 6th was organised by the institutional GOP and various other organised right-wing groups*, whereas the shooters (of all political persuasions) have been lone wolves radicalised by internet memes.
The reason why Trump hasn't been prosecuting "them" for "their" repeated attempts to kill him is that there is no "them".
* Even if the organisers didn't intend for the mob to storm the Capitol, the people who did storm the Capitol did so based on their non-insane interpretation of Trump's speech, and in any case "they" were a group of people who were sufficiently affiliated with organised conservatism that they got the message to come to DC.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Today I had the opportunity to watch history being made
[I live near the start of the London Marathon, though the bit we actually went to watch was the mass start with the charity runners in fancy dress, not the elite start]
or
Competition between near-peers is the best thing to drive us to the highest levels of achievement
or perhaps just
Humanity, Fuck Yeah
First, as a piece of dull but boring throat-clearing, congratulations to Yomif Kejelcha of Ethiopia who finished today's London Marathon in what would, under normal circumstances, be a world record time of one hour and (drowned out by cheering). The actual official time was 1:59:41. But his achievement is going to be forgotten because the winner of today's London Marathon was Sabastian Sawe of Kenya with an officially-recognised world record time of 1:59:30.
The two hour marathon has been the biggest round-number goal in athletics since Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile. But the interesting thing is the rapid improvement it took to get there. My preferred way to think about it to look at Sawe's splits. He ran the first half of the marathon in 1:00:29, and the second half in 59:01. Looking at the half-marathon world record progression, in 1986 Sawe's performance would be two half-marathons, back-to-back, both in world record time. As late as 2005, Sawe's performance would be running a half-marathon at championship pace, and then running the second one in world record time.
What is going on? Well it starts with HBD - only east Africans can be elite long-distance runners, just as only west Africans (and their US/Caribbean descendants) can be elite sprinters. So the first part of what is going on is that east Africa, or at least the functional bits of it, has got rich enough that their best runners can be talent-scouted and fed into the international elite athletics machine. There is also the slow optimisation of training techniques, diet etc. over time that allows athletes to reach peak performance. And finally, there have been some spectacular recent improvements in running shoes. Modern elite marathon shoes use carbon fibre plates and advanced springy foam (originally developed for insulating airliners) to give a similar power boost to having actual springs in the shoe (something that has always been illegal in competition as mechanical assistance). World Athletics intervened in 2021 to set limits on the thickness of foam allowed and to ban shoes with multiple rigid plates. Shoemakers have, of course, aggressively optimised within the rules.
Conditions matter. London is a fast course, but until today it was not considered one of the world's fastest (that would be Berlin and Chicago). The weather was good for distance running. (Cool and dry with light winds). But ultimately, two elite athletes pushed each other to the limit, and although there only was and only ever could be one winner, they both turned in world-historical performances.
And something similar (but without the big round number) happened half an hour earlier in the woman's race. Ethiopia's Tigst Assefa won in a world record time of 2:15:41. (Note that this is the record for women-only races - women run faster in co-ed marathons with a world record of 2:09:56, although the world record holder was later busted for doping so the record is tainted). The second and third-place times were 2:15:53 and 2:15:55.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
What I was trying to say is that he is the sort of person who, if white, would have ended up at a university below his IQ, but didn't because of affirmative action.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Correct - but the "American Street" or at least the minority of it which cares about foreign affairs interpreted it as a threat. "It is a historical inevitability that your civilisation will collapse" is technically a prediction and not a threat, but in the mouth of someone with the technical ability to collapse your civilisation it is (and was intended to be) menacing.
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Interesting to compare him to the standard psycho political shooter profile of the last few years: smart, weird in an autistic-coded way (whether or not diagnosed), goes to a university of a tier well below his IQ level and doesn't do well there, fails to launch into a PMC career, no female girlfriend.
If he is mixed-race, he is politically Black and eligible for affirmative action on that basis, so the information to date is consistent with "this is a Thomas Crooks type smart autistic loser, except he was affirmative actioned into Caltech so he failed out of life later than Crooks did." His CV looks like a series of short stints at the kind of jobs that Caltech would love to affirmative action a black kid into, consistent with him failing out repeatedly and being given too many second chances.
Anyone want to make odds on him turning out to have a female girlfriend?
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarassed liberal elite
3d ago
Yeah - Trump is obviously the target. The interesting question is how crazy the killer is, and whether there is a plausible political motive (either left-wing or idiosyncratic) or whether it is pure whackjobbery like Hinckley or Crooks.
I think the athletes are doing most of the work - the guys running 2-hour marathons with supershoes were running sub-2:15 marathons without them.
Also these are $500 trainers - i.e. well within the budget of a middle-class American, an upper-middle-class Europoor, or a DIII college athletics programme - not $15 million F1 cars.
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