Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
No bio...
User ID: 265
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1mo ago
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
I've been chided by you yet wholeheartedly defend your regime as mod, FTR. Well done. Amadan too, begrudgingly. And more than I can name.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
I was hoping the American Grand Strategy in Ukraine was to bleed Russia dry, at the expense of Ukraine. I think it has basically worked, as beyond WMD, I think Russia has very little in their arsenal to threaten the West with. I am surprised, however, by the turn of events where Trump accuses Ukraine of having started the Russian invasion. My hope remains that Trump is playing 4D chess with Putin, softening him up for a triumphant blow, but my hope wavers. It seems clear that Ukraine would be a much more likely and loyal ally than Russia could ever be.
In my view, here are the American interests in the region:
- A greatly weakened Russia
- Ukrainian mineral rights
- Opposing invasions and annexations
- Additional and stronger allies and spheres of influence
American fears:
- WMD in the wrong hands (Russian collapse, or scared Putin)
- Emboldened Russia
- China / Taiwan
The Biden strategy seemed pretty reasonable if tepid in light of these points. I'm not sure what Trump would think of the above.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
don't think there is any reason to believe that being a "male feminist" says much at all about how likely any particular man is to be a sex pest.
Sure, but the vast, vast majority of muslims are not terrorists, yet most terrorists who fly airplanes into buildings are muslim. Most male feminists are not sex pests, but many sex pests turn out, ironically, to be male feminists. There may be some kind of cluster that is worth examining.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
3mo ago
My favorite type of American critic: the carpetbagger
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
Very interesting, but Russia seems much weaker now than in 2022. Heavily sanctioned, big stagflation, and fielding laughable armor deployments and infantry tactics. Quads, donkeys, motorcycles, and "camels". We've been assured that the 3 day Special Military Operation is still going according to plan. They've evacuated Syria, Wagner is a shadow of its former self, and are they still conscripting and fielding prisoners or is that well too running dry?
If Russia was going to roll into Poland, what do you think that force composition looks like?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
10mo ago
Whereupon I unsubscribe from Matt Stoller
I had long considered Stoller to have solid analysis and a respect for markets, even when I didn't agree with his political slant, editorial direction, or choice of topics. But he has lost me here, and probably forever, in his simpering defense of the Harris economic plan, which includes price controls on groceries and vague yet sinister crackdowns on so-called price gouging.
It’s all predictable, both the economist revolt, and reporters who interview economists as if they know anything. I suspect what’s going on is that economists, as moral reformers who ordain truth, believe price-setting is beyond the realm of elected leaders or normal people. Harris has interfered with that belief, leading to an angry reaction of religiously scorned zealots. Another possibility is that those who think the most about how to set prices are monopolists and economists. And like anyone who sees someone new coming into one’s realm of expertise, they are angry at Harris. Regardless, I can’t see much of a downside to being attacked by economists and experts, after all these are the elites who got us into this mess.
Someone hasn't read The Road To Serfdom. I'm actually kind of flabbergasted to see this, though I shouldn't be surprised.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
10mo ago
Is an artist allowed to paint a picture of Mickey Mouse murdering Hillary Clinton in negligee with the soles of her feet showing? Should the paint manufacturers limit the scope of output?
Also, a more neutral take: https://elizamondegreen.substack.com/p/about-that-twitter-shitstorm-affirmationnot
Brief recap:
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NYT shifts its coverage of medical concerns for trans issues from 100% supporting transition in all cases to a more questioning stance, particularly with minors
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An open letter is sent to NYT laying out "serious concerns with editorial bias" in response to this shift
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Jonathan Chait posts a critical response to the open letter at New York Magazine (no relation to NYT)
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Chait gets dragged on twitter for being anti-trans, with a highlighted passage
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Jesse Singal posts in support of Chait, showing the highlighted passage is directly in accordance with WPATH guidelines and explains what it means
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E. Kale Edmiston, a trans man, posts in response that he, Edmiston, wrote the WPATH guidelines posted by Singal, and that Singal is misinterpreting them
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Liberal media pundits and reporters pile on, when Singal defends the straightforward interpretation, demanding that Signal accept Edmiston's (frankly bizarre) interpretation of the quoted passage
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Singal has done his homework and contacts several other WPATH authors, who all confirm Singal's interpretation of the passage and reject Edmiston's
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Eventually this reaches Scott Leibowitz, overall head of the WPATH guidelines document, who says that Edmiston definitely did not write the highlighted passage, and later severely admonishes this lying and false attribution from within academia
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Singal performs several victory laps on Twitter, demanding from the media pundits and reporters the apologies and corrections they had demanded from him
Good guys: Jesse Singal, Jonathan Chait, Scott Leibowitz
Bad guys: E. Kale Edmiston, Madeline Leung Coleman (NYMag editor), Michael Hobbes, Jeet Heer, Marisa Kasabas (MSNBC Columnist), David Perry, Eric Vilas-Boas (Vulture staffer), Miles Klee, Siva Vaidhyanathan
The most interesting, dire, and relevant info is from Eliza Mondegreen, linked near the top. Apparently there is a wink/nod system with the WPATH Standards of Care document, where the words are written a certain way because they must be, but they are interpreted much differently.
She concludes:
Theory and practice—the Standards of Care and what actually happens in the exam room—have nothing to do with one another. Everything in the Standards of Care that sounds cautious and responsible comes with an understanding that’s supposed to go unspoken: We don’t really mean it. We just need to say this. If a patient shows up with serious comorbidities, of course we have to say that they must undergo a “comprehensive” “assessment” and that the clinician must remain open to the possibility that the patient might not really have gender dysphoria and maybe shouldn’t really transition. But you know how important the work we all do is.
In other words, the Standards of Care are a lie that everyone involved in gender medicine pretends to believe. When reporters like Singal and Chait try to hold gender clinicians to WPATH standards (something I think is worth doing, by the way!), savvy clinicians will respond: Yes, of course we “assess” patients very carefully, what do you think this is, the Wild West?
Among other, more obvious mistakes, Edmiston’s most grievous error was not pretending to believe the lie.
EDITS: Signal, Single, Liebowitz. added Cast of Characters, Eliza Mondegreen quote
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
Men do, women are, so men naturally assume that when you ask them this, you're asking them to apply the woman's label. Unless you're a man predisposed to Gayness (which forms part of the problem with Gays, from the average man's perspective), that is inaccurate, insulting, and outright dangerous.
I think there is something interesting here but I can't figure out any of this. Can you clarify?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
11mo ago
From the B&R subreddit, it appears the boxer is male intersex with internalized testes that produce typical male levels of testosterone. Similar to Caster Semenya and likewise raised as a girl.
Eli Lake at Bari Weiss' The Free Press
He lays out in simple, clear language how the FBI has held double and triple standards when it comes to investigating or protecting powerful political figures. I believe this piece is downstream of more original reporting from the likes of Taibbi, Shellenberger, etc, ultimately stemming from Elon Musk's release of The Twitter Files.
You’ll recall that those scoops weren’t as big a news story as was the fact that Facebook and Twitter banned users from sharing the story on the theory that it was the fruit of Kremlin fakery intended to sway the presidential election. It turns out that the FBI officials who warned social media companies that the laptop story might be part of a Russian scheme to mislead voters themselves knew that the laptop was real. And they knew so as early as December of 2019.
But instead of clarifying that the FBI had verified its contents, the bureau instead allowed a falsehood about its provenance to linger. Savor the irony. In an effort to counter Russian disinformation, the FBI actively allowed American disinformation to spread.
It’s also Russiagate—Trump’s alleged (and never proven) collusion with Russia—which was fueled by a Democrat-funded opposition research sheet known as the Steele Dossier. The FBI knew by early 2017 (at the latest) that the whole thing was junk. But like the Russian disinformation lie about the laptop, the bureau let the dossier falsehood linger while the Steele Dossier was hyped like Watergate by the legacy press and Democratic Party in 2017 and 2018.
Then there is the double standard the bureau applied to pursuing foreign influence investigations into Trump’s campaign and the campaign of Hillary Clinton. That was one of the primary conclusions of a report released in May from U.S. Special Counsel John Durham. For Trump, the FBI opened a full investigation on the thinnest of pretexts. For Clinton, the bureau delayed investigations into potential foreign influence and offered defensive briefings to her lawyers.
Here it is useful to examine the other major event of last week: the serious allegations raised by two career IRS investigators who led the team probing Hunter’s tax violations. On Wednesday the two agents, Gary Shapley and Joseph Ziegler, testified in open session before the House Oversight Committee.
Ziegler and Shapley painted a picture of a long-standing probe that began in 2018 into Hunter Biden’s income that was stymied and delayed at nearly every turn. The delays were significant—so significant that eventually the statute of limitations ran out. Ziegler said that the probe did not follow normal procedures. Prosecutors, he said, “slow-walked the investigation, and put in place unnecessary approvals and road blocks from effectively and efficiently addressing the case. A lot of times, we were not able to follow the facts.” Ziegler and Shapley also said there were times when prosecutors informed Hunter’s lawyers about investigative steps, such as a search warrant.
All of that would be bad enough. But the event that led Ziegler and Shapley to eventually blow the whistle was when, in October of last year, the U.S. attorney in charge of the case, David Weiss, privately told them that it was not his decision to charge Hunter in districts outside of Delaware. That directly contradicted the pledge that Attorney General Merrick Garland made to Congress that there would be no restrictions placed on Weiss in his investigation of Hunter.
These feel like bombshell revelations to me, but there is also a sickening feeling of two movies on one screen. This stuff is worthy of coverage in global mainstream media, right? Not just "bloggers on substack"?
I don't have a NYT or WaPo subscription. In the last five years, I have completely lost faith in mainstream media. Is this FBI stuff getting the coverage it deserves? Shouldn't something like this make a career for a scrappy Berenson type at the NYT? Are they salivating or putting their (and our) heads in the sand?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
This is not exactly the same as: I am clued in, turned on, and working hard. I imagine there was a week to respond "Yes", but it's different when asked for details on a short deadline. It sends a different signal.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
Oh shit, you're veqq from /r/CredibleDefense Doing the Lord's work over there. That Tooze article was interesting for good and bad reasons. I discounted most of what he had to say after the bizarre opening paragraph. The repeated, unsupported claims of "MAGA is bullshit" seemed literally sophomoric, along with the multiple retreats to "racism!".
His analysis of the scary dilemmas presented by Vance was insightful, but I think he was wrong to downplay the now-unavoidable concerns about immigration across all Western nations which have opened the floodgates.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
7mo ago
May Trump supporters and Trump voters and Trump himself never know peace.
Is this not a straightforward call for violence? I find this manner of speaking despicable in public, and I'd want an apology if I was her target.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
7mo ago
Taboo the word hate, sheesh. I'm with the Count, here. The word is inappropriate for the feelings being expressed; hyperbolic and histrionic, as expected from one side of the divide.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
11mo ago
Anyway, looking him up, I found a recent article he wrote entitled It All Comes Down to Race. I read it carefully, twice, and I'd like to engage this community because I don't know any other place where this can be critically discussed.
You aren't aware of anywhere else on the internet that allows criticism of white nationalism? Seems fishy...
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
2yr ago
The unequal treatment of demographic groups by ChatGPT/OpenAI content moderation system by David Rozado
I have recently tested the ability of OpenAI content moderation system to detect hateful comments about a variety of demographic groups. The findings of the experiments suggest that OpenAI automated content moderation system treats several demographic groups markedly unequally. That is, the system classifies a variety of negative comments about some demographic groups as not hateful while flagging the exact same comments about other demographic groups as being indeed hateful.
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The OpenAI content moderation system works by assigning to a text instance scores for each problematic category (hate, threatening, self-harm, etc). If a category score exceeds a certain threshold, the piece of text that elicited that classification is flagged as containing the problematic category. The sensitivity and specificity of the system (the trade-off between false positives and false negatives) can be adjusted by moving that threshold.
On gender:
The differential treatment of demographic groups based on gender by OpenAI Content Moderation system was one of the starkest results of the experiments. Negative comments about women are much more likely to be labeled as hateful than the same comments being made about men.
On politics:
Another of the strongest effects in the experiments had to do with ideological orientation and political affiliation. OpenAI content moderation system is more permissive of hateful comments being made about conservatives than the same comments being made about liberals.
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Finally, I plot all the demographic groups I tested into a single horizontal bar plot for ease of visualization. The groups about which OpenAI content moderation system is more likely to flag negative comments as hateful are: people with disability, same-sex sexual orientation, ethnic minorities, non-Christian religious orientation and women. The same comments are more likely to be allowed by OpenAI content moderation system when they refer to high, middle and low socio-economic status individuals, men, Christian religious orientation (including minority ones), Western nationals, people with low and high educational attainment as well as politically left and right leaning individuals (but particularly right-leaning).
The statistics appear to be rigorous. The author has a very long Conclusion section that is nuanced and worth reading in its entirety.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
10mo ago
I'm sure you've heard of "sideshows" or "slideshows" where groups of mostly Dodge Challengers and Chargers do donuts in the middle of an urban intersection or freeway or bridge, creating an informal yet spectacularly dangerous block party. Also the roving gangs of plateless dirt bikes and quads, presumably mostly stolen anyway. Oakland, Baltimore, Atlanta, etc
And the police are literally completely incapable of shutting these down. We've heard the official explanations about manpower and escalation, but I would love to know how those internal deliberations really go. You've gotta have some gung-ho sergeants putting together gameplans and orchestration, but the top brass shut it down? For woke / squishy / PR reasons? Anyone have real insight?
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
11mo ago
Joe: "Lord, why do you sound like Nancy Pelosi?"
Lord: "I move in mysterious ways. Now, we can do this the easy way or the hard way..."
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
4mo ago
I'm referring to Putin's statements after the disaster at Hostomel and the decimation of the armor columns rolling towards Kiev in the first few days of the war.
Here is a video analysis of the SMO in that regard:
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1yr ago
I think there is a fundamental misunderstanding of the motivation behind the paintballs. The local citizens are not trying to solve the problem of homelessness, locally or globally. They are acting in their self interest, attempting to preserve the good aspects of their city and prevent them from sliding down into vagrancy, filth, violence, and drugs. This is a broad, human, historical civilizational norm.
Austin, SF, and Seattle violate this norm. They attract vagrancy rather than repel it.
If you want to solve homelessness, start with one. Pick a project person, take them into your home, let their problems become your problems, and I believe you will understand the nature of the solution and be able to advocate for it more effectively.
Nwallins
Finally updated my bookmark
1yr ago
I've seen many claims of Hamas militants being drug- or meth-fueled, along with some healthy skepticism of such. Based on what, exactly?
Hamas terrorists who carried out a surprise attack on October 7 were found to be under the influence of Captagon, a synthetic amphetamine-type stimulant that has been clandestinely produced in southern Europe and trafficked through Turkey to the consumer markets on the Arabian Peninsula, as reported by Nir Dvori of Channel 12.
The pills were recovered from the pockets of many terrorists who lost their lives on Israeli soil.
Captagon belongs to the amphetamine family and was initially developed to address attention disorders, narcolepsy, and depression. Despite its highly addictive nature and potential for inducing psychotic reactions, it continues to enjoy popularity in the Middle East due to its affordability and ease of manufacturing. In poorer countries, the drug can be purchased for a dollar or two, while in wealthier nations, it may cost up to 20 dollars per pill.
Its primary effects include arousing feelings of euphoria, reducing the need for sleep, suppressing appetite, and providing sustained energy.
According to medical professionals in Lebanon and Syria, Captagon is not only prevalent among fighters but is also frequently used by desperate civilians residing in conflict zones.
Once a source of revenue for ISIS members through drug smuggling, Captagon has now become a major source of income for Syria and is actively supported by Hezbollah.
Around two years ago, an investigation conducted by The New York Times revealed that individuals associated with Syrian dictator Bashar Assad, including family members, had established a thriving industry for the production of Captagon.
As a somewhat reformed Angry Internet Atheist, this is certainly the most interesting and palatable form of Christianity I've encountered.
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