SerialStateLineXer
No bio...
User ID: 1345
SerialStateLineXer
7mo ago
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.
SerialStateLineXer
4mo ago
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:
- 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.
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.
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
6mo ago
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.
SerialStateLineXer
7mo 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.
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
8d ago
People often talk about the degree barrier
Fun, counterintuitive fact: Degree requirements actually favor black applicants, because in the US, black people are educational overachievers.
That is, for any given test score level, black Americans have, on average, higher educational attainment than non-Hispanic white Americans. If you look here, in 2021, 26% of black and 45% of NHW Americans age 25-29 had at least a bachelor's degree.
If we look here, we see that the 74th percentile for black SAT takers is between 1000 and 1100, let's say 1050. This is an upper bound for the average SAT score of black four-year graduates; it's likely a bit lower due to the imperfect correlation between test scores and educational attainment. The 55th percentile for whites is around 1150, half a standard deviation higher. If we do a similar exercise for masters or higher, again we find roughly a half-sigma difference.
I don't think this is primarily attributable to affirmative action, since most four-year universities do not have competitive admissions. Probably the fact that black students tend to have wealthier and more educated parents than white students with the same test scores plays a role. Athletics may be a factor as well.
Anyway, since black people tend to be more credentialed than white people (and Hispanics) with the same cognitive and academic skills, degree requirements actually give them an edge. I expect that the DEI industry will quickly lose interest in skills-first hiring when they realize that the main beneficiaries are white and Hispanic men.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
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.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
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.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
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.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
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.
SerialStateLineXer
10mo 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
1mo ago
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: :-(
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
3mo ago
There are a couple of issues here.
First, seventy years is more than enough time for conditional convergence to work its magic. We saw this with the Asian Tigers. The reason that most European countries have not yet converged with the US is not that they need more time, but rather that they're not meeting the conditions required for convergence. In fact, in recent decades the US has actually been pulling away from Europe.
Second, saying that the US also has a welfare state is like saying that Europe also has fat people. Government spending is a smaller share of GDP in the US than it is in most Western European countries, by 10-20 percentage points. The main exception is Switzerland, which totally coincidentally is one of the wealthiest countries in Europe, surpassed only by a handful of microstates and one quasi-petrostate (Norway).
SerialStateLineXer
15d ago
I'm not here to stan for Big Wind, but there is a lack of quantitative reasoning ability when it comes to the public discussion of environmental issues.
There's a lack of quantitative reasoning in general. People just throw out qualitative claims and assume that the quantitative stuff works out to whatever is most convenient for their argument.
I wonder if there's a connection between this and schoolchildren's notorious aversion to word problems.
SerialStateLineXer
5mo ago
People who really care about anti-semitism are 1) Jews 2) wokes and 3) boomercons.
And with #2, it turned out to be negotiable.
SerialStateLineXer
6mo ago
What's the problem? You made a lot of economic contributions while taking back little in return for a long time, and now you have a surplus accumulated. By deferring your consumption, you allow the diversion of resources towards investment, which improves productivity and makes workers better off. The wealth you enjoy now is the fruit of your past labors. This is everything working exactly as it should.
A small minority of people get to skip the first part, because their parents deferred consumption to the next generation. It's not fair, but it's not really a problem. They're not hurting anyone, and their accumulated capital benefits workers, again through higher productivity. Seize the accumulated capital and give it to the masses to spend on present consumption, and that will divert resources away from investment, slowing economic growth.
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.
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
3mo ago
There's still a debate on which plant it was but I'm not surprised the Romans used it to extinction if it was real.
It's kind of surprising. Generally plants that are useful to humans flourish due to intentional cultivation. It's not like wheat went extinct. Though the Wikipedia article does mention some speculation that it may not have been amenable to cultivation for some reason.
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.
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