SerialStateLineXer
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User ID: 1345
Wasn't it only a few months ago we were told this was an insane conspiracy theory and only a few weirdos would ever try to abolish "mother"?
To be clear, nobody actually wants to abolish the words "mother" or "woman." They want to use them in what they assert is "correct" manner, i.e. to refer to parents or people who personally identify as women, irrespective of sex. Conversely, terms like "birthing parent" and "people with uteruses" are used specifically because they include trans men, and are intended to be used only in contexts in which those characteristics are relevant.
For example, "Birthing Parent's Day" is mostly a GC meme. Trans activists are, to the best of my knowledge, not particularly interested in renaming Mother's and Father's day, because they still see "Mother" and "Father" as totally valid terms as long as they're used in a manner consistent with self-ID and not with biological sex. Trans men who have given birth would, for the most part, rather be honored on Father's Day than on a renamed Mother's Day, and vice-versa for trans women.
If you ignore the ideological aspect and the silliness of the phrasing, there's a certain set-theoretic elegance to it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
In some ways what we have now is the worst of both worlds. We have open borders for criminals and for low-skilled workers who are willing to work for low wages off the books, but we have tightly restricted immigration for highly skilled workers.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
I don't really know who it benefits to keep creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society and then, when they fail to live in modern society, say "Yeah, they deserve to be tortured for that".
Is he saying we should practice eugenics?
Not that I'm opposed, but...he knows about heredity and the poor track record of educational interventions above and beyond what we're already doing, so what else could he mean by "creating people without the skills necessary to live in modern society?"
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
I met a girl at a party. She laughed at my stupid jokes and said I looked like an actor, and she didn't even qualify "actor" with "character."
So obviously she's ignoring the message I sent her. Why are women like this?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
Harvard's law school made more of an effort to appear to comply as well, although they still seem to be discriminating.
To that end it is no surprise he dislikes the HBD creed, given it is inherently divisive to the multiracial America.
I would argue that HBD, properly understood, is the least divisive explanation for racial achievement gaps. There are a few competing mainstream explanations:
- Racism, either systemic or individual. It's all white people's fault.
- Cultural deficiencies. Low-achieving minority groups have no one to blame but themselves.
- Socioeconomic privilege and lack thereof is the main determinant of individual achievement. It's all rich people's fault (or, per the "Dream Hoarders" narrative, the upper middle class is in on it, too).
HBD allows for the possibility that it's nobody's fault. White people aren't keeping black people down. Rich people aren't keeping poor people down (and neither are Jews). And black people don't just need to try harder (obviously this would help any individual on the margin, but it's not the main reason for group disparities).
Some of the more insightful leftists actually understand this, and hate HBD precisely because it offers an alternative to their libelous villain-and-victim narratives. Over the past week or so, I've seen several people "accuse" HBD advocates of being defenders of the "status quo," as if rejecting the idea that society is a conspiracy by whites/rich people/Jews to screw over everyone else were indisputable evidence of bad faith.
HBD also gives us a clear path to a biological fix to a problem that has stubbornly resisted all sociological approaches to remediation. We need to invest much more into understanding the genetics of human intelligence and developing technology for polygenic gene therapy. HBD is a red pill, not a black pill, and it offers a way forward out of this madness.
Edit: Wacky but also kind of serious idea to tide us over until STEMlords save the day: Offer low-SES women free access to semen from high-IQ men, explaining to them that this will give their children a much better chance at succeeding in life and greatly reduce the odds that they'll end up in prison.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
To be young and smart and white and male
"Smart" is doing all the heavy lifting there. Holding intelligence constant, white and male is probably the second worst demographic combination you can roll, after Asian and male, but the differences aren't that big, and being smart and born in a rich country is playing life on easy mode for any race/sex combination.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
"Gulf of America" is kind of silly, though. The US borders many bodies of water. The Gulf of Mexico is the one that has Mexico on the other side.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
There's also the odd Hispanic Asian, due to Asians immigrating to Latin America and their descendants to the United States. I don't know of any famous examples off the top of my head, though.
I think there are also some Hispanic Native Americans, which genetically is most of them, but the Census specifically defines Native Americans as indigenous people of the Americas who maintain tribal affiliation, which narrows it down quite a bit.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The talking point about the lack of an enforcement mechanism is silly. The enforcement mechanism is the same as the one keeping regular men out of women's bathrooms: Mostly voluntary, but the women can call security if there's a problem. If you pass well enough that nobody notices or cares, you get away with it.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Huh?
Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing, or stereotypical allegations about Jews as such or the power of Jews as collective — such as, especially but not exclusively, the myth about a world Jewish conspiracy or of Jews controlling the media, economy, government or other societal institutions.
Obligatory reminder that one of the first actions Biden took upon taking office was rescinding Trump's executive order banning executive-branch training that makes these sorts of claims about white people.
Edit: It wasn't limited to white people, but it was widely understood that nobody with any real power in the executive branch wanted to run trainings that made similar claims about people of any other race.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Selective immigration, probably. We're not getting random Jamaicans.
The level of partisanship required to vote for Fetterman at this point simply boggles the mind.
In general Congressional elections, most people don't vote for candidates. They vote to give their party control of the House or Senate. Showing up and voting the party line is 95% of the job. Fetterman demonstrated that he can do that; anything more is gravy.
Same deal with Oz. He's a garbage candidate, but a vote for him is a vote to block a Democratic trifecta, and that's literally all I care about in this election. If I lived in Pennsylvania, I'd vote for him.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
This is pretty bleak: Adjusted for inflation, South Africa's GDP per capita is up less than 7% since 1974.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
The original Zelda doesn't really hold up, IMO. There's way too much reliance on brute-force trial-and-error, made even more annoying by the one use per screen limitation of the blue candle and the fact that bombs are consumable.
On the other hand, Zelda II is underrated.
Someone who spends their money by buying stuff gets hit by sales taxes, while someone who "spends" their money to make more money gets hit with capgains taxes.
And then gets hits by sales taxes anyway when he spends his money in the future.
Taxes on investment income distort the trade-off between present and future consumption in a way that neither taxes on consumption nor taxes on wage income do.
There's a superficial appearance of symmetry here, where it seems like taxes on investment income discourage investment and taxes on consumption discourage consumption, but the illusion goes away if you work through the math. The tax system really is set up in a way that penalizes saving and investing.
SerialStateLineXer
1mo ago
You can clearly see that "business today" is AI generated fake USA today, "economic times" is fake The Economist / Financial Times, etc...
The Economic Times is a real Indian newspaper, isn't it?
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
I've been taking the stairs up to the 17th floor, and it's so much harder than I expected. I thought I'd be able to run up, like I normally do with stairs, but after 3-4 floors I just can't, and after 10 I can barely walk up. My heart rate gets up to like 170 and just stays there until I get to the top.
17/17, would power through it again.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
The fact that breasts lose elasticity with age is proof that there is no God.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
The reason to use free weights rather than machines is that you activate all kinds of smaller stabilizing muscles that aren't hit when using a machine because the machine guides the path of the weight for you.
Why do so few people take this to its logical conclusion and use dumbbells instead of barbells for presses? Dumbbells require more stabilization than a barbell does. At some point you get too strong for the heaviest dumbbells at your gym, but most people never get there.
SerialStateLineXer
1yr ago
Most people here will be familiar with the "This never happens...actually it's a good thing!" sequence. Is there a name for this? I feel like I've heard a name for it before, but I can't remember where (probably here) or what it was.
Also, does anyone know where this was first described?
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
The thing is, it's not just left: It's oblivious left. They demonstrate absolutely no awareness of then existence of obvious counterarguments to the ridiculous things they say. After the split, /r/SlateStarCodex didn't just move left. It got dumber. The /r/ : SSC ratio increased.
SerialStateLineXer
2yr ago
I was going to post my analysis, but this guy already did a much more in-depth analysis than I have the patience for:
https://cremieux.substack.com/p/black-economic-progress-after-slavery
TL;DR: As noted in the abstract of the paper itself, the gap appears to be driven almost entirely by state of residence, with southern but not northern blacks having been exposed to Jim Crow (the main analysis is in 1940, and the extended analysis only goes through 2000). There's also likely some selection bias, with more productive slaves being more likely to be freed.
In short, this provides basically zero evidence for the effects of truly exogenous poverty persisting for more than a generation or two once the impoverishing forces are removed.
Some guy in China killed 35 people by driving a car around a running track.
Not that I'm complaining, but why doesn't this happen more often?
Much is made of the fact that US has more guns and many more mass shooting incidents than other wealthy nations, and this is commonly attributed to the fact that guns make it easy to kill a lot of people. But so do cars, and those are widely available in most wealthy nations.
So why is it that the US has a lot of mass shootings (yes, I know that they're a tiny percentage of total homicides), but running cars into crowds is fairly rare in countries that don't have such easy access to guns? Are Americans just especially prone to running amok? Are mass shootings a meme? Is killing a lot of people with a gun just that much more satisfying than running them over with a car?
I don't have any good theories; I'm just noticing my confusion.
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