NewCharlesInCharge
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User ID: 89
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
It's not the individual story, it's the statistical mismatch between stories generally and reality.
If there was a murder mystery series and it turned out the murderer was a Jew 75% of the time, and it wasn't set in Israel, it wouldn't be wrong to infer that the writers must have something against Jews.
NewCharlesInCharge
8d ago
I’ve always been taught that anti-Catholic sentiment in America went hand-in-hand with nativism. The Catholics were from strange lands with strange customs like Ireland, Italy, and Poland. It wasn’t Catholicism per se that drove anti Catholic feelings in the country, but it was a common thread among the foreigners arriving from countries that weren’t well represented at the founding.
I guess the Pope coming out against Freemasonry didn’t help relations between American elites and Catholicism, either.
NewCharlesInCharge
8d ago
There was a large wing of the abolitionist movement that aimed to repatriate freed slaves to Africa. It’s how we got Liberia in the 1820s.
They organized themselves as the American Colonization Society.
NewCharlesInCharge
8d ago
That fails to recognize the distinction between prohibition and punishment.
Suppose we prohibit sneezing in public and make the punishment that nearby police must immediately say to you “gezundheit!”
The punishment is unusual but not cruel, and the prohibition still not itself a punishment.
NewCharlesInCharge
16d ago
If you’re consuming articles and not shows it might be hard to see the difference. Their articles tend to differ little from what you’d see coming from one of the wire services.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Autism is another example, women with autism/aspergers didn't match the DSM criteria which were designed around mostly male subjects, and took a while to be recognized and receive treatment at the same rates.
Tangential, but I find this strange. It's a condition that we don't know the cause of, nor is there anything like a lab test or imaging to confirm it. It's all based on observed behavior.
For males there's one set of behaviors that are used to confirm diagnosis, and for females another.
How can you make the determination that this is actually the same condition?
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
A Catholic news site I followed kind of posted about the same topic today. Nothign to do with Catholicism, the author is just an Anglophile:
https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/a-perfect-week-ironic-invites-and
There’s scandal in the air in London.
The country’s chief spy, the head of MI6, has found himself front page news, along with the head of the British civil service, who has been hauled before a parliamentary committee to answer questions, under pain of perjury.
The scandal reaches further still into the upper echelons of the establishment, implicating members of the cabinet. Even the King has been named.
Pressure is mounting on those tainted, and the tone in the media is approaching full-blown McCarthyite paranoia.
From the outside looking in, you might well assume a dangerous threat to national security has been unearthed — a spy ring worthy of a le Carré novel, or conspiracy of McCarrick-level proportions. But, at least in the eyes of some, it’s actually worse than that.
All these men, and they are all men, stand accused of belonging to the Garrick, a somewhat famous, and famously men-only, private London club, after the membership rolls were obtained and published by the Guardian newspaper.
The Garrick, founded in 1831, is what in London is commonly called a “gentlemen’s club,” a term which I gather means something rather different and less genteel over here in America.
It’s one of a handful of such places that have survived into the third millennium, long past their heyday of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
They once flourished as places for men (yes, men) of different sections of society to meet, eat, drink, and sleep it all off in town. Each club has (had) its own core constituency, be it the military, the literary set, politics, and so on.
The Garrick has long had social cachet beyond its links to the world of theater and the arts, making it something of a target for fashionable criticism, though it’s not the first such club to come under fierce public scrutiny.
White’s, the club for properly posh chaps, had its turn a few years ago, with then-Prime Minister David Cameron having to resign his long-time membership in shame after being shocked, shocked, to discover they didn’t let ladies in.
After leaving office, “Call Me Dave” — as we used to refer to him in my time at Tory HQ — joined Pratt’s, an even posher club, where all the staff are referred to as “George” by custom. As it happened, Pratt’s let women in a few years after Dave joined, though I assume the members address all the new ladies as “Nanny.”
London men’s clubs are an object of occasional fascination and fury in the U.K.
People, and it should be acknowledged it’s usually a certain kind of lady, get very steamed up about them whenever they remember they still exist.
According to the popular imagination, clubs are dens of quiet power-broking and deal-making, shadowy old-boy networks, wood-paneled venues where favors are exchanged and patronage is doled out.
They are malum in se for their sexist admissions policies, of course, but made even worse because they are locking out ladies from the true corridors of power, where the real decisions are made.
But the sexism charge is silly, really.
That men (and women) behave differently in mixed company, and sometimes like a time and place to socialize among themselves, shouldn’t be controversial. Ladies’ nights out are a social staple for about half the people I know, and if you need convincing that dudes (or chaps) liking to hang out isn’t sinister, I doubt I’m the one to convince you.
More to the point, proper clubs for women exist, too, some of them, like the University Women’s Club, are very nice and just as old as the men’s, and they come under no political scrutiny or media ire.
The real suspicion, and the real anger against the men’s versions, is about power and influence. But that’s nonsense, too.
The reality is that clubs intended to facilitate “networking” and mutual advancement do exist, but they tend to be set up by and for women, as a reactionary move against what they imagine goes on at places like the Garrick. And thus they tend to fail — at least in London.
One such enterprise, Chief, opened a swanky London outpost last year, promising a women-only space for the senior ranks of the sisterhood to meet and mingle with like-minded “executives.” But it had to shut down last month for lack of interest, despite offering the chance to split spritzers with the likes of Amal Clooney and Gloria Estefan — or maybe because of that.
I’m not surprised places like Chief tank, since they are exactly what many people wrongly imagine London men’s clubs to be all about, and they sound awful. Real clubs continue to exist not because the members can use them to “network,” but because they’re some of the last places in Western urban life where “networking” is forbidden.
In fact, all the London men’s clubs I know have actual rules banning business talk. Full disclosure: I am a member of one such club, and used to be a member of another — neither as chic as the Garrick or as well-bred as White’s, though I’ve been a lunch guest at both.
What I love about my club is that, as I’m a socially awkward person by nature, it's a place where I am, as a matter of policy, welcome at any table and in any conversation, and always considered a friend.
While critics like to imagine hushed conversations to stitch up promotions and curry influence, I’ve instantly forgotten what anyone does for a living, if ever they told me. The banter is usually obscure, rather than topical. The finer points of trivia on my true passions, cricket and watches, are common subjects.
You’d struggle to call the atmosphere “conspiratorial,” or even especially dignified.
On one occasion, albeit several years ago, another member challenged me over lunch to recite Edward Lear’s poem “The Owl and the Pussycat” from memory and I had to be gently but insistently reminded by the maître d' not to stand on the dining room furniture, after I got too into my declamation and mounted my chair halfway through the second stanza.
The truth is, the kind of people who like to “network,” rather than socialize, make for terrible company — they instrumentalize human interaction, rather than enjoy it. It makes them insufferable, even to each other.
Those people are why places like Chief fail, and it’s why places like the Garrick and the University Women’s Club won’t let them in. They are, ironically, the very people you join a club to get away from.
And their demands to be let in are probably the single greatest impediment to single-sex clubs changing their rules. It’s not that clubs like mine can’t conceive of female members fitting in around the place — or can’t think of women who’d make good company — but they suspect those aren’t the kind of women who would be applying.
The same sort of people who are offended by the idea of all-male clubs tend to be even more offended by the idea of a club that just doesn’t want them, personally, and the tendency of clubs (like the Garrick) to attract lawsuits if they just think out loud about changing their rules is quite real. Being a single-sex space provides a modicum of legal protection in this regard.
I know some women I’d happily propose for membership, and their capacity for both claret and lyrical verse exceeds my own. But in truth, they’d probably never think of applying.
Groucho Marx famously said he didn’t want to belong to any club that would accept him as a member. The best sort of people usually feel that way, male or female. The trouble is that the reverse also tends to be true.
Clubs, really, are for the rest of us — the ones who just want a place that feels like home, safely away from, you know, other people.
Is that so wrong?
NewCharlesInCharge
25d ago
In one instance everything about you is designed for production of exclusively small or exclusively large gametes except for one bit, and we’re aligning it with the others.
In the other case everything is designed for producing one kind of gametes and we’re bending everything the opposite direction. We are rejecting the design.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
This makes me wonder if there are any projects that succeeded in letting contributors just choose not to work with certain other contributors. Big companies make this work just fine, sometimes there are personality conflicts and we resolve them by moving people around to work on other parts of the same product.
I knew one high level IC who got along with his manager so terribly that he ended up reporting to an entirely different manager than everyone else on his team.
Not everyone needs to be a reviewer for every pull request, or to participate in every group chat.
NewCharlesInCharge
18d ago
If North Korea was cozying up to an alliance created for the sole purpose of keeping China in check then China just might feel the need to not let a border state join that alliance, costly as that may be.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
I think you may be typical-minding. Countless people on Maury have denied fathering a child for absurd reasons like “we only had sex one time.”
There’s plenty of people sleepwalking through life seemingly without ever making an informed decision. “I didn’t know I couldn’t orgasm after removing my penis” sounds absurd but I would be more surprised if it didn’t happen.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
4: They made SpaceX catch a seal, strap it to a board, put headphones on it, and force it to listen to simulated rocket noises to see how distressed it would be.
NewCharlesInCharge
3mo ago
Not only that, Biden has derided them over manufactured outrage. There was a still shot of a mounted CBP agent in the river with people crossing the border, with the agent spinning his reins to control his horse. The media promulgated this as "border patrol agent whips migrants." Biden personally said that the agents involved "will pay" for their actions: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/24/us/politics/biden-border-patrol-haitian-migrants.html
So they're really not enthused about not doing the job they signed up for, to help a President that wants them to pay for things they never did.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
I think I might get labeled “Putin defender” but I would disagree with the label.
I don’t think the Ukraine invasion is a morally good war, especially from the perspective of Catholic Just War doctrine, but I also don’t think it’s all that unusual given the history of how great powers pursue their interests.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
Ban women from high stress professions. (Women in STEM is grossly dysgenic due to low birth rates. Instead, reserve the least stressful STEM-adjacent positions for the highest IQ women. This is highly eugenic.) Reserve society’s least stressed jobs for women.
I don't have numbers, but my anecdotal observations are that this is culturally dependent. The Chinese and Indian women I work with take full advantage of the generous FAANG benefits to help produce and take care of children. Some white American women do, but not nearly as much. Family events put on by the company are full of mostly south and east Asian children. There are probably as many mixed white and east Asian kids as there are white kids.
A great deal of this is driven by family pressure to have kids. Maybe that's where policy would be most effective. Make white parents nag their children to have kids so that they can get access to some government benefit. Maybe offer full social security retirement benefits at an earlier age, or boost the benefit for each grandchild produced.
NewCharlesInCharge
28d ago
From a game theoretic perspective China has no incentive to pick a fight over Taiwan. The rates of change in technological and military power favor China. If they want a military victory, then the longer they wait the better their chances.
The US has the opposite incentives. The longer they wait, the worse. But they can’t be seen as too obviously instigating a war, so they make moves to keep the temperature high in hopes that eventually someone takes the bait and provides a causus belli. Think of the P3 that got clipped by an overzealous Chinese fighter pilot in the early aughts. Even then it was tense moment, and the US didn’t consider China a real adversary at that time. If something like that happened again a player could maneuver into a war.
A successful CHIPS act move actually increases the chances of war. If China senses that they’re no longer closing the gap then it becomes “now or never” for them. And they have far less need to manufacture a legitimate causus belli.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
In practice no one would perceive the disappearance of the black professional class. You'd just have more of them graduating from lower ranked schools, perhaps even with better graduation rates as ability and challenge get better aligned. Doctors and lawyers from lesser schools still get to call themselves doctors and lawyers.
Very few people will get enough contact with employers that feed from Ivies to ever notice. My employer leans fairly heavily towards prestigious schools and even I don't have enough anecdotal contact with the top law firms, finance industry, consulting, etc. to form an impression of the racial demographics of such places.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
Among rationalists I think the simulation hypothesis is given greater probability of being true than transubstantiation being true.
Yet in a simulation it would be trivial for all objects to have a property that represents whether it is or is not the literal body of Christ.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
About a quarter of the world practices a religion where for one month a year adherents don’t eat from dawn to dusk.
One way of promoting agency is giving examples of other people that have done the thing that someone has convinced themselves is nearly or truly impossible for them.
NewCharlesInCharge
28d ago
part of why Chinese manufacturing is so competitive is that their workers are so cheap.
Factories, even small ones, are pretty quickly adopting robotics and other forms of automation. I visited a factory that manufactured dental crowns and had about forty employees. CNC robots manufactured the teeth from blocks of ceramic and artists manually finished the coloring on the teeth to match the client's existing teeth.
There was a team of 3D modelers that fed models to the CNC, but the owner was looking to use AI to reduce or eliminate the amount of work needed in that area.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
This same industry will hire sensitivity readers to ensure that they're not making the slightest offense to the most terminally online members of favored groups.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
My state already has such a monument: https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/satsop-nuclear-power-plant
Cooling towers visible from I-5 from a half-finished nuclear power plant.
NewCharlesInCharge
1mo ago
During my recent two months in China I infrequently watched the news and remember seeing about three reports of uncovered spies working in the government. At the time my sentiment was “that seems like too many spies, probably this is political maneuvering.”
In light of this post, maybe not. Or maybe a bit of both.
Also curious that uncovered spies make the nightly news in China, but not here in America.
NewCharlesInCharge
2mo ago
From the outside I get the feeling that writers are being taught some kind of paint-by-numbers system, the construct a basic plot, and then dress it up to match the setting.
An example from the show: Chief of Police Danvers, portrayed by Jodie Foster, takes orders from some guy from Anchorage, and has to quote regulations to get him to defer to her. If you know anything about how police are structure in America, this makes no sense. Within municipalities the chief is the highest police officer. They do answer to others within the municipality, like mayors or police commissioners, but they're not part of some state-wide system.
My guess is that the paint-by-numbers called for the female chief to have a male chauvinist superior. The writers don't bother to make that align with any bit of reality except that it's "in Alaska."
Lewis in heaven, looking down at mukbang, disappointed that his imagination was so limited.
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