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SerialStateLineXer


				

				

				
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joined 2022 September 25 09:14:45 UTC
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User ID: 1345

SerialStateLineXer


				
				
				

				
0 followers   follows 0 users   joined 2022 September 25 09:14:45 UTC

					

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User ID: 1345

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To whence

This is even worse than "from whence!"

Hence/thence/whence mean "from this/that/which place," so "from whence" is redundant, and "to whence" is nonsensical.

Hither/thither/whither/yonder indicate destination, so you might ask a passerby "Whence have you come, and whither are you going," though I suppose the contemporary verb conjugations might have been different.

So the question is whither to roll back the clock. Whence to roll back the clock? Hence, obviously.

Also, Im puzzled why people want more than the allotted 80 or so.

I'm puzzled that anyone is puzzled by this. Living is awesome, and 80 years isn't nearly enough, especially when the last 60 are spent in slow decay.

Is there something serious there for Biden to answer?

Biden refused to collect interest on student loans for nearly three years, and tried to outright cancel them before the Supreme Court told him to cut it out, and then he immediately got to work on trying to do it again.

In a sane world, the President unilaterally misappropriating hundreds of billions of dollars to pay off his base would be clear grounds for impeachment and prosecution, but we don't live in that world, so I guess they're going to try to tie him to his son's shenanigans.

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:

  1. Racism, either systemic or individual. It's all white people's fault.
  2. Cultural deficiencies. Low-achieving minority groups have no one to blame but themselves.
  3. 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.

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.

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.

I think you're overlooking a simpler explanation: You don't need recruiters if you're not hiring. As for HR, I'm not sure about this, but I suspect that they spend a wildly disproportionate share of their time dealing with onboarding new employees. So there's less need for that during a lull in hiring as well. Plus companies that laid off engineers have fewer existing employees to manage.

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.

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.

Yes, there are obvious problems with the profit-and-loss system: first, it counts preferences only to the extent that they are backed by dollars

This is a feature, not a bug. This is what money is for. Imagine that we have a semi-capitalist system, where you're paid based on the marginal product of your labor and investments, but everybody's preferences are weighted equally when it comes to production and distribution of goods and services. Under such a system, money would be worth about as much as Reddit karma, and there would be no reason to work.

The weighting of preferences according to how much money you have and are willing to spend is not a drawback of capitalism—it's the main reason capitalism works better than socialism.

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:

  1. While only the US and two other countries voted against it, (almost?) every advanced democracy abstained.
  2. The other two countries voting against? Ukraine and Palau.
  3. The country sponsoring the resolution every year? Russia.

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.

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.

There's also this Random Critical Analysis post.

Also important to note that the correlation between crime and poverty is confounded by personality and cognitive traits. People with low intelligence and poor impulse control tend to commit more crime and not be very employable. That doesn't prove that the poverty causes the crime. So much of what R*dditors "know" about sociology is either just made up, or at best based on low-quality research that fails to account for obvious confounders.

This comment awakened ancient memories within me, and I reflexively looked around for a link to a site selling counterfeit handbags or something.

But what got them into trouble was taking the wrong side on Zionism.

College students have been engaging in consequence-free (well, except for Rachel Corrie) protesting of Israel for decades.

The scaling also heavily favors low earners:

For an individual who first becomes eligible for old-age insurance benefits or disability insurance benefits in 2023, or who dies in 2023 before becoming eligible for benefits, his/her PIA will be the sum of: (a) 90 percent of the first $1,115 of his/her average indexed monthly earnings, plus (b) 32 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $1,115 and through $6,721, plus (c) 15 percent of his/her average indexed monthly earnings over $6,721.

Social Security has great returns if you earn minimum wage your whole life, and terrible returns if you consistently cap out every year.

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.

indeed asian crime rates are lower than other ethnicities countrywide

Yes, but Asians are also richer than other ethnicities nationwide. What's interesting about New York City is that for some reason they have the highest poverty rate, and still commit the least crime.

Why Asians have such high poverty rates in New York City is an interesting question. I virtually never see this discussed except as a throwaway line in articles promoting the "Model Minority Myth" myth. I suspect that it has something to do with NYC being a destination for Asian immigrants with limited English and technical skills, and possibly some confounding by age (which would be relevant to the crime issue as well), but I'm not sure.

Specifically, IQ is positively correlated with classical liberalism. As a classical liberal, this doesn't bother me much.

If I ask you what’s the result of 22+2, you are most likely going to answer 24, but if I ask you what’s 22:00+2:00, you are likely not going to answer 24:00 (which isn’t a thing)

It's quite common in Japan to see a bar or restaurant with posted hours of operation from 17:00 to 27:00 (i.e. from 5:00 PM to 3:00 AM). 27:00 is valid in the same sense that 27/24 or 400° is valid; we might call it an "improper time."

You also don't specify whether 22:00 is time of day or duration. If it's a duration, then 24:00 is clearly the correct answer.

On an intellectual level, most people on the left (in the broad sense) have bought into a harm-based model of morality. Since most people have very little need for intellectual consistency, what this means in practice is that they rationalize all of their moral intuitions by convincing themselves that the things they don't like are harmful. Hence "words are violence."

Bestiality grosses most people out. But in order to give themselves license to support banning it, they have to convince themselves that it's inherently harmful to animals. Non-vegetarians have to convince themselves that it's more harmful to animals than killing and eating them.

Keeping the peace is a fairly small part of most modern governments' budgets. Subsidizing private consumption of the lower and middle classes accounts for the lion's share.

If we were to say that Bill Gates' tax bill should be equal to a share of military and police expenditures proportional to his share of the nation's aggregate wealth, he'd get a tax cut. If we value a statistical life at a mere $1 million ($10 million is more typical), then the US has a total wealth of around $500 trillion. Gates has a net worth of about $100 billion, or 0.02%. Military plus police spending is around $1 trillion per year, so he'd have to pay around $200 million per year, which I believe is less than he's actually averaged over the past few decades; he claims to have paid over $10 billion in taxes. And that's with an extremely conservative valuation of a statistical life; a more reasonable valuation would put his annual tax bill well under $100 million.

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.

God: Hey, I need you to turn my son over to the Romans so that can crucify him.

Jews: :-/

God: Trust me, it'll be awesome! You're my chosen people! Would I lead you astray?

Jews: Well, there were those forty years in the...

God: Oh, for my sakes! Will you let that go already? I gave you manna, didn't I?

Jews: Okay, fine, you're the god.

Jesus: X-(

A thousand years later...

Jews: :-(