Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
No bio...
User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now.
To be pedantic, this doesn't tell you about your "bias", it tells you about your entirely reasonable priors that are presumably based on your familiarity with Islamists being the primary practitioners of political beheadings. If you know absolutely nothing else other than that someone was beheaded over a conflict on religious ideology, you should absolutely have your first case be that it was a Muslim. Even after this story, I am disinclined to make a major update to that prior, as there is no student with a sawed off head.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
There are very few paths more predictable than communists causing economic failure and deciding that the kulaks are to blame.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics
Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:
“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.
“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”
Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”
“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.
“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”
The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:
Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”
“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.
She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”
This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:
One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.
…
The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!
At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:
The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.
Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.
Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.
“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.
Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:
To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.
…
Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."
If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.
The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:
Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.
Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.
OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:
It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.
Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.
Oh dear.
Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I reject "getting someone drunk" as a framing that should apply to an adult. At a festival this summer, I wound up so inebriated that I had to go lie down in the shade and take a nap. Had I wanted to get up prior to sleeping it off a bit, I would have had a tough time doing so. Was I drugged? Did someone "get me drunk"? Was my wife, who was with me the entire time, responsible for my drunken state? I'm inclined to say that as an adult who has more than a passing familiarity with alcohol that I was solely responsible for my state of being.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
As someone who was on the other side of the argument back then, I've had some introspection about how much more consideration I should now give to the bible thumping bigots I used to dismiss, because they were right and I was wrong.
This is where I wound up as well. I was aggressively in favor of gay marriage, but I have to admit that I was plainly wrong about there not being any slippery slope. I genuinely thought that gay marriage represented the end point of winning equal rights for gay people, not just another battle on the way to whatever weirdness comes next. Such is the peril of youth, I suppose.
What's wild to me is how many of the activists that I thought I was on the same side as, but am now significantly to the right of, don't seem to have any personal memory of having held a position other than insisting that government funding of trans hormones for kids was morally obligatory and constitutionally required. The number that must have actually thought that a decade ago must have been vanishingly small (the term "gender-affirming" didn't even exist yet), but it is now the bog-standard Democrat position.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
California has a likely new Senator, and her background is a doozy if you're someone as cynical as I am about political figures. With Diane Feinstein having died, Gavin Newsome can now select anyone he'd like, and had promised that the position would be selected from a strict affirmative action pool of black women. He apparently failed to find anyone that actually lives in California that fits the bill, so he has instead selected Maryland resident Laphonza Butler for the position. What, you might ask, are her exquisite qualifications that would make her the top candidate for such an important position? Wiki's summary suffices:
Butler began her career as a union organizer for nurses in Baltimore and Milwaukee, janitors in Philadelphia, and hospital workers in New Haven, Connecticut. In 2009, she moved to California, organizing in-home caregivers and nurses, and served as president of SEIU United Long Term Care Workers, SEIU Local 2015.[4][5][6]
Butler was elected president of the California SEIU State Council in 2013. She undertook efforts to boost California's minimum wage and raise income taxes on the wealthiest Californians.[4] As president of SEIU Local 2015, Butler endorsed Hillary Clinton in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary.[7]
In 2018, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Butler to a 12-year term as a regent of the University of California.[6] She resigned from her role as regent in 2021.[8]
Butler joined SCRB Strategies as a partner in 2018. At SCRB, she played a central role in Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign. Butler also advised Uber in its dealings with organized labor while at SCRB.[9] She was known as a political ally of Harris since her first run for California Attorney General in 2010, when she helped Harris negotiate a shared SEIU endorsement in the race.[4][10]
Butler left SCRB in 2020 to join Airbnb as director of public policy and campaigns in North America.[11][5]
Butler was named the third president of EMILY's List in 2021. She was the first Black woman and mother to lead the organization.[12][4]
EMILY's List is an American political action committee (PAC) that aims to help elect Democratic female candidates in favor of abortion rights to office. It was founded by Ellen Malcolm in 1985.[4] The group's name is an acronym for "Early Money Is Like Yeast". Malcolm commented that "it makes the dough rise".[4] The saying refers to a convention of political fundraising: receiving many donations early in a race helps attract subsequent donors. EMILY's List bundles contributions to the campaigns of Democratic women in favor of abortion rights running in targeted races.[5][6]
From 1985 through 2008, EMILY's List raised $240 million for political candidates.[1] EMILY's List spent $27.4 million in 2010, $34 million in 2012, and $44.9 million in 2014.[3] The organization was on track to raise $60 million for the 2016 election cycle, much of it earmarked for Hillary Clinton, whose presidential bid EMILY's List had endorsed.[7]
Chalk up a win for patronage models of politics! This is someone whose entire career is built on raising money for politicians, culminating in heading a powerful PAC that is more explicitly built around money, money, money even in their very naming than any other PAC I've seen. Obviously, anyone paying attention knows that PACs are always about raising money and that's their express purpose, but I don't think I've seen one literally just make their name an acronym for the patronage enthusiasm. Big donors give money to politicians and get what they want and the organizer for acquiring that wealth is awarded with a seat in the Senate. In all, I see three things of note that are often the subtext of various choices and decisions, but I rarely see so blatantly:
-
The appointment will be explicitly about race and gender. If you're anything other than a Black Woman, you need not apply.
-
The Democrat party apparatus does not care in the slightest whether this person represents California, states are a stupid anachronism anyway.
-
The appointment will go to someone that has demonstrated loyalty and usefulness in assisting with the funneling of hundreds of millions of dollars to preferred sources.
On the one hand, it's all rather offensive, but on the other hand, I can think of no better Senator from California than a transient grifter that makes her living off of identity politics.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
She did not come off particularly sympathetically in the video.
It comes off quite a bit differently knowing that she's six months pregnant, just got off her 12-hour shift, and that the theft was on the part of the guy harassing her. What's she supposed to feel like? She would probably be better served by stating the claim plainly rather than becoming emotional, but if I had just worked a long shift, had some scumbag trying to steal a bike from me, and some other guy recording the incident for fun and profit, I might lose my capacity for calm indifference to the situation.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
2mo ago
Legalizing gay marriage was seen as a radical leftist movement, but the actual result was that all the gay people - and most importantly, gay artists and icons and culture warriors - stopped living as radical counter-culture outsiders challenging every pillar of the nuclear family, and switched to being respectability-politics-first normies living quiet lives in the suburbs with 2.5 adopted kids. Conservatives had to give up on oppressing gay people, but managed to bring them largely into the tent of traditional marriage and neoliberal economics and so forth.
Is this how you remember the sequencing? As someone that was vigorously in favor of legalizing gay marriage, I recall the path being inverted from this, where the respectability politics had already happened and the big selling point was that our gay and lesbian friends are not degenerate weirdos, they're totally normal and just want the same thing that straight couples have. This was a pretty good selling point! It convinced me handily, and I certainly see couples that live exactly like that now. The problem is that the aftermath of that win was not declaring victory and slapping a Mission Accomplished sticker on the Pride flag, it was moving onto trans politics, leading up to the modern day "trans kids", trans "women" in women's sports, and so on. At this point, I've basically been convinced that I was wrong, the slippery slope people were completely right, and that simply winning on the one cause and then moving on with normalcy was never an option.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
There’s a powerful strain of authoritarianism on the Right, manifesting in contexts ranging from January 6 to the laws in various red states that make it harder to vote.
This stuff is genuinely infuriating. Say what I will about the J6 rioters, they weren't driven by "authoritarianism", they literally just thought they won and were being cheated. Likewise, say whatever anyone else will about telling people to bring their ID when they go to the polls, it's not "authoritarian".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
Direct discussion of drugging was missing from the first trial — which ended in a mistrial when a jury deadlocked on all three counts — with Mueller instead having to imply it through the testimony of the women, who said they were woozy, disoriented and at times unconscious on the nights they described the actor raping them.
Wow, there's no way that wooziness, disorientation, and passing out could be explained by mere alcohol, these women must have been drugged!
Seriously, how the hell is anyone supposed to defend themselves from this other than simply replying, "uhhh, yeah, they might have been real drunk, we were indeed partying"? I keep looking at cases like this and trying to figure out how I could possibly exonerate myself if someone I hooked up with from a party 20 years ago claimed that I "drugged" her, and I've got absolutely nothing. In this case, one of them was evidently his girlfriend at the time; I really have no idea how I could defend myself if my wife decides a decade from now that having sex after we both got home bordering on a blackout drunk New Year's Eve was actually "rape".
Is there some steelman explanation I'm missing for how this could plausibly be a legitimate trial with legitimate evidence? It seems like it's literally some women that got drunk and had sex with Masterson that decided a decade later that they were actually drugged, without even the slightest bit of physical evidence for the claim. Never mind being sufficient for a reasonable doubt, I just flat out don't believe them at all.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
8mo ago
Röbynn Europe
Nominal determinism strikes again.
Almost all (if not all) of her ex-boyfriends have been white men. In a 2011 interview with Vice, the interviewer notes...
Never ask a white nationalist or a social justice warrior the race of their partner, as they say.
I really don't even know what to say on the cases themselves. They're so absurd, so comically ridiculous to me that it's hard to articulate much other than a point and sputter. Likewise for the $1.8 billion awarded to potential teachers in NY that were victimized by their inability to pass a test. When you reward black incompetence and grifting, you're going to get more black incompetence and grifting.
Genuinely, it is hard to come up with anything to say that isn't already immediately obvious to any casual observer. My main reaction is that after all the sturm und drung about our sacred democracy, the people that want this are doing everything in their power to destroy the remaining legitimacy of Our Democracy. Of course, this thinking is about on par with the elephant in StoneToss.
Second is that I can barely contain my contempt for the legal profession and all of its fake pseudo-philosophizing. Hundreds of pages. They wrote hundreds of pages on this. Does anyone believe that hundreds of pages were necessary to arrive at this conclusion? Whether you think January 6 was an "insurrection" that disqualifies Trump or not, it's pretty obvious that you view isn't going to be based on careful line-item reading of endless history and text. In writing so extensively on the topic, the justices clarify that they're just liars concocting elaborate explanations for doing what they want to do anyway.
Finally, I would predict increased potential for violence, and it sure does seem like the people in charge are pushing the envelope, but after 2020 and its fallout, it's hard to imagine the American right doing much other than the elephant from StoneToss routine.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
I had a conversation over the weekend with a friend that is now compelled to write "Türkiye" in all formal documentation and I must confess that I'm absolutely baffled by why anyone is agreeing to play along with the petty power games of renaming the country. Many, many countries have different local names than what they're referred to as internationally or in other languages, and pretty much no one cares about these distinctions as anything other than petty provincialism. I will be very surprised if the residents of Deutschland start taking offense to being called Germany, or if the English decide to call the pasta homeland Italia. I have no intention of demanding that Mexicans who say "Estados Unidos" knock it off and learn some goddamned English. Nippon doesn't usually go by Nippon internationally, and if it did, that would still just be a weird Anglicization of the actual Japanese.
I know I'm going to look like a total boomer, and a low-class one at that, but I will still be writing Turkey and India for the foreseeable future, along with ordering Chicken Key-Ehv rather than Chicken Keeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeev.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.
And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.
I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “fuck you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.
As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.
There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.
“Between a high, solid wall and an egg that breaks against it, I will always stand on the side of the egg. Yes, no matter how right the wall may be and how wrong the egg.”
When I read this, I think to myself, "yeah, this is why I hate Marxists". Openly admitting that it doesn't even matter who is right, they'll just always side with whoever they think is weaker is a recipe for the dissolution of civilization.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
But in that interpretation, isn't any legal prohibition of experimental or perceived-to-be-unethical medical interventions still similarly equivalent to "deciding someone needs to die"?
YesChad.jpg
Seriously, I'm perfectly willing to bite that bullet. Even in the case of treatments almost certainly being useless, denying people the option of trying to do something for themselves in the face of a terminal disease is telling them that they must learn to die on the state's terms.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
Put another one down for my claim that "most political violence is right-wing" is a lie generated by people that just elect to not classify violence as political when it's bad for that narrative.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
The health authorities that had insisted on everyone being locked down and not going outside to even mingle within parks also wrote a blank check to these protestors. They were no longer "super spreader" events, but some weird health carve out where protesting police violence somehow made you immune to spreading covid.
I want to emphasize the flip here once again, because I feel that many people either fail to remember how extreme it was or claim that it was exaggerated. In back-to-back blog posts, my county public health department went from this school-marm scolding:
What we do know is that there are asymptomatic carriers out there, and while we may feel perfectly healthy, and the person we want to get together with feels perfectly healthy, if one of us is an asymptomatic carrier, we have now spread the virus. One of us will take it home from hanging out at the park, the backyard get together, or the Frisbee game, and pass it on to someone in our household who may actually get sick with the virus. That household member may pass it on to others as they go about their essential errands before they know that they have it. And suddenly we are right back where we started.
We know that the weather is getting nicer, and backyard parties and picnics are calling. Memorial Day weekend is calling. Kids are tired of being inside and want to hang out at the park, or sit 6 feet apart and do sidewalk chalk. But now is the time for patience and perseverance, and keeping up that stamina so we can all cross the finish line together.
To this endorsement of mostly peaceful protests:
Fighting for racial justice is essential, even in a pandemic
Communities across the country--including our own--are reeling from the murder of George Floyd. The past several days have been devastating as we grieve for George and the long line of people of color who have been killed while in police custody. The anger and frustration isn’t new, nor is police violence against black people and other people of color. During this time, we remember the lives of so many who have senselessly lost their lives, including Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Freddie Gray, Philando Castille, Tony Robinson, and many others. Together we strive for a future in which black lives are valued and protected.
...
Racism is a public health crisis, and unjust policies and systems have created and perpetuated the inequities that persist everywhere in our country, including here in Dane County. Public Health Madison & Dane County has a commitment to being anti-racist, and we will continue to grow as we work with our community to build a more just Dane County.
There's some pro forma muttering about continuing to wear a mask, but it is just absolutely wild to imagine the shift from telling people that playing Frisbee is too dangerous to saying that the protests are "essential".
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
Nate Silver has been one of my favorite commentators for a long time, since well before he was primarily in the politics business due to his clear writing on baseball analytics. Every time he comes up in a controversy of some sort, I'm reminded of why I'm a fan - whether I agree with him or not, I think he really, truly does his best to get things right via careful, non-partisan analysis. Silver has been incredibly consistent on how to use pollsters predictively, part of which is including pollsters that have known house effects and simply correcting for that when incorporating them into the analysis.
As a result of his insistence on avoiding partisan hackery, Silver takes a ton of shit from people on Twitter and other elements of the commentariat that are just less competent at actually analyzing things than him. Amusingly, this used to come largely from the right-wing, who kept making fun of his model for giving Trump a roughly 30% chance to win the 2016 election, because apparently grasping that 2:1 underdogs win pretty often is basically impossible for some people. That Silver is now more controversial on the left than the right is another example of what I view as American progressives dissociating themselves from ground truth, with that phenomenon accelerating aggressively with Covid, Summer of Floyd, and gender ideology.
Well, yeah, obviously. I don't think I have a better example of the whole two movies thing that the way people see Clinton's emails. While there are admittedly some blank spots that I can't fill in with details, the outline of the story is so incredibly damning, so plainly the acts of someone engaging in corruption that I have a very difficult time understanding how anyone could believe otherwise. The act of setting up a private server rather than just using legitimate State Department resources should straightaway result in adverse inference regarding any follow-up action; perhaps not legally, but certainly from a political understanding of motives and behavior. Likewise for the deletion of approximately 32,000 emails that putatively were just personal emails. What, exactly, was she hiding? I don't know and that part barely even matters to my evaluation that her behavior was the behavior of someone that's trying to hide what she's doing.
That other people don't just disagree, but think the whole thing is so made-up that it should just be flippantly mocked is wild to me. Accusations of "whataboutism" aside, I just think it's plainly obvious that she acted like a guilty person trying to cover-up their actions. I can't even imagine someone behaving this way in my personal or professional life and being able to just say, "no, I checked them and they were just personal emails, we're all set". Everyone would assume the worst!
The legality probably hinges on technical details that I frankly don't care about very much. The obvious wrongdoing does not hinge on anything other than the weirdness of a government employee diverting their emails to a private server and deleting them when they're requested by the government.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Lots of people, (Midwestern Americans and Canadians, in particular) have a niceness reflex; when you, say, trip on someone else's foot, the kneejerk assumption is that you were being inattentive and just stepped on a person's toes; you say "sorry" and yield to them, it taking a moment or two to realize that you've been intentionally tripped. Other people do not have this reflex, either because of their cultural background or because they're dicks; either way, these people notice the niceness reflex of others and try to exploit it.
Of note - this is highly adaptable. When I lived in the DC, the mental strategy that I developed for exploitation of niceness or just general belligerence was advice that I'd picked up from (oddly) Adam Carolla - always have a "go fuck yourself" chambered. I employed this a decent number of times and I don't think it was ever at an inappropriate target, but being inclined to respond to someone with a well-earned, "go fuck yourself" was something I had to actively cultivate. Then I moved to the upper Midwest and discovered that this skill was no longer useful, I just didn't need it for anything, and the mental tension of being ready to tell people to fuck off was a poor tradeoff here.
Once again, I encourage decent people to abandon the hellholes on the coasts unless you're personally dedicated to the political project of trying to reform them. There's three thousand miles of country that doesn't require you to assume the worst of everyone you encounter.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
5mo ago
My prediction is that the most vocal coverage will be conservative Twitter/substack trying to make this about Democrat hypocrisy with regards to crime.
Yes, I agree with this prediction. The most common take will be something along the lines of, "see Democrats believe that shooting people that steal from people that matter is good, they just think you don't matter". For my part, I agree that shooting thieves is good, but I expect that most of the soft-on-crime left will maintain ideological consistency and say that it's bad that the Secret Service would shoot at someone that wasn't even a threat to anyone.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
To add even more spice, California just approved unemployment for striking workers. No matter how ridiculous I think we've gotten, there's always a new vanguard to subsidize people that refuse to work with funds from people that are working.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
In the same ninth district of Budapest where two years ago a BLM/LGBTQ kneeling statue of liberty was installed and destroyed soon after,
Amazing story. The American Empire's cultural reach is truly beyond anything I'm aware of existing in all of history. I can barely imagine having to explain to Grover Cleveland what the layered symbols here mean and what the hell they're doing in Budapest.
Unknown people repainted the bench back to the original brown with a sign saying "I just want to be a bench. Which is good for everyone. For you, for him/her. For us."
I like these guys, but I think Auron Macintyre is correct that the side that wants to win will always beat the side that just wants to be left alone.
The new House Speaker, Mike Johnson, is an Evangelical Christian that has positions and stances on homosexuality that I do not share (I confess, I remain a Millennial lib that has no problem with gay people doing gay things). Nonetheless, this CNN video where they discuss his positions on homosexuality and conversion therapy just seems so bizarre to me. In it, they refer to the idea of someone going from gay to straight as "debunked", quote Johnson saying, "there's freedom to change if you want to", and "homosexual behavior is something you do, not who you are".
Despite my own inclination to completely accept gay people qua gay people, I find nothing objectionable about Johnson's statements and see them as a much more accurate model of reality than what the CNN crew is expressing. I have zero doubt that sexual preferences and predilections can be substantially altered through a combination of conditioning, cognitive therapy, and repetition. I'm agnostic on whether this could allow someone who has a natural inclination towards homosexuality (or heterosexuality) to groom attraction for the sex that they didn't initially prefer, but it's not obvious to me, and I don't think there's good reason to say that it's deboonked as though this is just a common stylized fact. Likewise, even if it proves impossible to change one's underlying preference, it certainly remains true that one can elect to follow a different pattern of behavior than their natural tendency. I might have a natural tendency to hook up with a flirtatious woman at the bar while I'm on a work trip, but Mrs. O'Dim wouldn't appreciate this and I value her so much more than some stupid hookup. Were I a religious man, I might be inclined to view my religious obligations through the same sort of lens.
But really, the thing that keeps hitting me with dissonance isn't even the above points, which I can at least countenance reasonable counterarguments to, but the incongruity with the belief that gender itself is a mere social construct that is fully malleable to an individual's stated preference. A man attracted to other men cannot become a straight man, but he can become a straight woman. Do the people articulating this view not notice that this is at least a difficult pair of propositions to adhere to? Do they see no conflict? Do they understand the conflict, but believe that it's a question that's been solved by The Science, so better to just trust The Science and move on? Cynically, I think it's mostly that expressing the opposite view will get you bullied and fired.
More options
Context Copy link