SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
Specifically, in the last couple of years, I've become a LOT more authoritarian on crime.
I don't think supporting a crackdown on crime is authoritarian. Rather, I see my libertarianism and support for incarcerating criminals as two sides of the same coin. I think government should be in the business of protecting people's right to life, liberty, and property. I oppose government trying to take these away, and I oppose criminals trying to take them away.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
It's not about what the revenues are used for. It's about internalizing the externalities. When you use roads, that imposes a certain cost on society, because it costs money to build and maintain the roads, and only so many people can use them at the same time. When you burn fuel, you impose a certain cost on society by contributing to global warming, and also emitting other pollutants.
US gas taxes might be high enough to cover one of these, but are probably not high enough to cover both of them. So maybe burning a gallon of gas has a total social cost (including the cost of extracting the gas, road upkeep, and pollution) of $3.50, but you only have to pay $2.75. Or whatever. This means that if you get $3 of value out of burning a gallon of gas, you'll do it, even though it does $3.50 worth of damage. That's a bad outcome. We want an incentive structure in which you only do $3.50 of damage if you get at least $3.50 in value from it.
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
11mo ago
It was this executive order, repealed on Biden's first day in office.
SerialStateLineXer
11mo ago
The EPA tried to moot the case by withdrawing their compliance order, but
Come on, man! I'm on the edge of my seat here!
It's interesting and a little encouraging that even the liberal members of the court (except Ginsburg) are not eager to give the executive infinite unappealable power.
I can't imagine that she's all that eager these days, either.
SerialStateLineXer
10mo ago
That's far smaller than the bill that the Apollo creator would be getting for my usage when I'm on mobile.
Reddit's been saying that under their current pricing model the average Apollo user would incur about $2.50/month in API charges, and that Apollo is a particularly inefficient user of the API, with other applications like RIF incurring about a dollar per month per user in API charges.
However, it's not really clear what an "average" user is. Maybe it's diluted by a bunch of users who only use it for a few minutes per day.
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
8mo ago
I'm not familiar with the historical Nordic/Alpine/Mediterranean/Adriatic classification system, but it corresponds pretty well to the clear pattern of differences between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan (and Slavic more generally) countries. The North Germanic and West Germanic distinction is a bit more subtle, but it's still there.
I don't have a strong opinion on how much of this is genetic and how much is cultural or otherwise path-dependent, but if you look at HDI rankings, there is almost a complete disjunction between Germanic, Romance, and Balkan countries.
That's the motte, but people pushing the systemic racism narrative routinely go out of their way to interpret it in ways that make modern white people the villains. The standard response to "I never owned slaves" is "But you benefit from the perpetuation of a system of racial privilege and oppression†." Maybe it's not technically your fault, but it's totally your fault. Also, modern white people are actively perpetuating systemic racism with microaggressions, cultural appropriation, voting to imprison criminals, not voting for reparations, reading to their kids, demanding that high schools teach calculus, etc.
There is some hypothetical systemic racism narrative that scrupulously avoids blaming modern white people just minding their own business, but it's not the one we get in the real world.
†Not actually true; white people would actually be better off if black people started performing at par. Less crime, less welfare dependency, no longer needing to pick up the slack on taxes, etc. We'd still have to deal with opioid addicts, but many of the US's problems would diminish greatly.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Sadly, the conclusion that 95% draw from historical eugenics movements is not that murder and forced sterilization are bad, but that any attempt to make future generations healthier is bad.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I've seen about a hundred people express concern over what other people would do if HBD became public knowledge, and about zero people express the idea that we should enshrine racial discrimination in law because of HBD. There's some selection bias here, of course—I don't really hang out in racist forums—but I do think that the idea of equality before the law is deeply enshrined in the modern American consciousness. Pushes for racial discrimination come almost exclusively from the environmentalist left. We do not, in general, endorse restrictions on the rights of people with low intelligence. There's a very strong knee-jerk reaction against the idea of, e.g., gating voting behind a test of civic literacy, or sterilizing institutionalized women with severe mental disabilities, who are at elevated risk of sexual abuse and clearly incapable of raising children.
Given that there's extremely strong resistance to any kind of limitations on the rights of individuals with even severe intellectual disabilities, the idea that the public would suddenly decide to restrict the rights of even highly intelligent individuals on the basis of membership in ethnic groups with low average intelligence strikes me as wildly implausible. Meanwhile, the insane overreaction to racial achievement gaps by heredity denialists is a very real problem that we're dealing with right now.
Could you give a couple of example? This reeks of "our enemies hate us because they know we're right", which is basically never correct.
Off the top of my head, I can give you one. The other two recent examples that come to mind would require self-doxxing. Here's Jamelle Bouie on Richard Hanania:
The question to ask here — the question that matters — is: Why does an otherwise obscure racist have the ear and support of some of the most powerful people in Silicon Valley? What purpose, to a billionaire venture capitalist, do Hanania’s ideas serve?
Look back to our history, and the answer is straightforward. Just as in the 1920s (and before), the idea of race hierarchy works to naturalize the broad spectrum of inequalities and capitalist inequality in particular.
If some groups are simply meant to be at the bottom, then there are no questions to ask about their deprivation, isolation and poverty. There are no questions to ask about the society which produces that deprivation, isolation and poverty. And there is nothing to be done, because nothing can be done: Those people are just the way they are.
If some groups — and really, if some individuals — are simply meant to be at the top, then there are no questions to ask about their wealth, status and power.
I'm not saying that Bouie has done a deep dive into the evidence, concluded that there is in fact a strong genetic basis for racial achievement gaps, and decided that he has to help cover it up. I'm not saying he hates us because he knows we're right. Frankly, I don't respect him enough to give him that much credit. What I'm saying is that I don't think he cares that much about the science, and that his true objection is that hereditarian explanations for achievement gaps undermine the idea that these gaps are the product of a deliberately rigged economy, and let those bastards off the hook. He's pretty explicit about this.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
It's "reproductive choice." Lefties talk a big game about reproductive choice, but they only want to allow women to choose whether to have children. I want to allow women to choose what kind of children to have. That's real reproductive choice.
This is actually the second excavation to turn up no actual corpses. I don't think there's any basis for doubt that a lot of children died at the residential schools, partly due to the fact that children dying was a common occurrence back then, and partly due to the fact that they were kept in crowded housing that promoted the spread of infectious disease. Poor nutrition and extra susceptibility to European diseases may or may not have been factors.
However, it's clear now that the false positive rate of these GPR investigations is very high (0 for 48, by my count), and representing these hits as the discovery of definite or probable corpses was grossly irresponsible.
I don't remember to what extent the media actively encouraged this misinterpretation, or at least failed to discourage it in their reporting, but a lot of people were under the impression that these GPR surveys provided proof of hundreds of deaths above and beyond those which had already been documented, and/or cover-ups of actual murders.
My name is a snarky reference to the bizarre fixation of the left on the imaginary crime of crossing state lines during coverage of the Rittenhouse case, and has nothing to do with Nazis.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Note that shitty parenting likely correlates with heritable psychopathic tendencies. It's like ACEs (adverse childhood experiences). There's a ton of research showing that ACEs are correlated with had life outcomes, with the researchers and media glibly asserting causality, but if you actually look at the canonical list of ACEs, it's markers of bad parenting like "abused by parents" and "parent went to prison," not random bad luck like "raped by a stranger on the way home from school" or "injured in a serious car accident."
So there's an obvious genetic explanation that's being almost totally ignored by the people who are supposed to be the experts.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
To elaborate on this, a town has to have an economic raison d'etre: Something they produce to export in order to get money to buy imports. A mining town might export minerals, a factory town might export manufactured goods, a farming town food, a tourist destination might "export" hotel and restaurant services. Everyone else earns money by by providing services to people who produce the exports, or by providing services to those people, and so forth. In principle you could have a small town supported by exporting things like software, but I don't know whether any such towns actually exist.
When a town no longer produces things to export, it no longer has a reason to exist. The sole service it provides to the outside world in exchange for money to buy imports with is qualifying for welfare.
People blame the government for not giving it a reason to exist, but if the government subsidizes unprofitable industries for the sake of propping up a town with no economic reason to exist, the residents are just LARPing at being productive. Maybe it's cheaper than just giving them straight-up welfare and getting nothing at all in exchange, but in the long run, this isn't good for anyone involved.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo 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
8mo ago
College loans guaranteed by the government, at least on paper, make up a value equivalent around 6% of GDP, which isn't quite the right comparison but it's as useful of one as I can provide.
That exaggerates their significance by at least an order of magnitude. Assuming that they're paid off on a ten-year schedule, student loan payments would be more like 0.6% of GDP, and well under 1% of aggregate personal income.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I seem to recall the name from maybe 5-10 years ago, with some annoyance, like maybe pushing ultrawoke Code of Conduct mandates on open source projects.
Are you thinking of Coraline Ada Ehmke?
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I couldn't find any reference to Cohn from more than a few years ago.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
That chart is not actually the median mortgage payment, but what a mortgage for the median home sale price at current mortgage rates would be, correct?
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
I think people need to stop assuming that conditions that are clearly due to extraordinary circumstances will continue indefinitely. We know why buying a house is difficult now. Mortgage rates are high because the Fed has raised rates to get inflation under control, and home prices are not adjusting downwards because people don't want to move and trade in their 3% mortgages for 7% mortgages.
Sooner or later, one of two things will happen:
- The Fed will start lowering rates.
- People will start selling houses again because they can't hold on forever.
Ideally we would also build a lot more homes, but that would require better voters, so don't hold your breath.
Also, the home ownership rate is currently 66%. The only time on record when it's been higher is 1997-2011, and even then it was only a little bit higher (the 2020 spike was just an artifact of pandemic-era polling practices). The percentage of people who don't own their own homes is about what it's always been.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
IMO these are very different. Sheeple passively accept the status quo, while NPCs actively recite a script, which may or may not be supportive of the status quo.
SerialStateLineXer
8mo ago
Good example of this: Every year for a decade or more, there has been a UN resolution condemning the glorification of Nazism. Back in 2017, an old friend of mine—a single, middle-aged Seattle woman with all the political attitudes that implies—shared a link to this article about the US, fuming about how "shameful" it was that the US stood nearly alone in voting against it. I pointed out that the Obama administration had voted against it as well, which took a bit of the wind out of her sails, but she was already committed, so she said that was shameful, too.
The rest of the story:
- While only the US and two other countries voted against it, (almost?) every advanced democracy abstained.
- The other two countries voting against? Ukraine and Palau.
- The country sponsoring the resolution every year? Russia.
Drug Dealer Adam is a utility monster, so it's okay.
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