aaa
7mo ago
I did look into some of those:
Stock market hits record high Bitcoin hits record high EU will buy U.S. gas not Russian gas Zelenskyy phones Trump & Elon
These are true.
Hamas calls for end to war
This is true but highly misleading, they want Israel to surrender, basically.
Qatar kicks out Hamas leaders
This is unclear, Israel says they did, Qatar says they didn't.
China wants to work peacefully with us
This is true but they say it after every election.
aaa
8mo ago
as far as I can tell based on my ideological prejudices (yeah), the children most likely to want to transition are the children, especially male children, of left-leaning single mothers
Your ideological prejudices are wrong, the increase in trans youth has been concentrated mostly in females:
Adolescents assigned female at birth initiate transgender care 2.5 to 7.1 times more frequently than those assigned male at birth
(...)
In October, researchers at Vanderbilt University School of Medicine published a paper showing a 389% increase in gender-affirming chest surgeries performed nationally from 2016 to 2019 on patients under age 18. The total of 1,130 procedures during the period, nearly all of them for chest masculinization, represents a weighted estimate based on records from more than 2,000 U.S. medical facilities.
(...)
The predominance of patients assigned female at birth is a reversal from the past. For years, when very few minors sought gender care, those assigned male at birth accounted for the majority. But about 15 years ago, that began to change as care became more accessible and the overall number of patients started climbing, according to studies and interviews with gender-care specialists.
For example, at Amsterdam University Medical Center’s gender clinic, a pioneer in adolescent gender care, the proportions flipped. From 1989 to 2005, 59% of its adolescent patients were assigned male at birth, the Dutch clinic reported in a 2015 study published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine. Since 2016, about 75% of the clinic’s patients have been youths who were assigned female at birth.
aaa
7mo ago
Another interesting example of high birth rates in non-African countries are central Asian countries like Mongolia and Kazakhstan. These countries seem to have been able to reverse, and not just slow down birth rate decline
Kazakhstan fertility rate is declining. You are thinking of Mongolia and Georgia. I already talked about them two months ago they are very unusual countries and the reversal in TFR is probably just a fluke.
The reason for the fertility rate decline is simple: the cost of children greatly outpaced growth in wealth for various reason deeply rooted in how modern western societies are organized. It can't be fixed without some deep changes nobody is willing or capable of making. Telling people something is high status doesn't work, you actually have to make them perceive the high status and in a capitalist society high status roughly correlates with more disposable income, therefore you either have to abandon capitalism or shower parents with so much money that having a child is a cash positive decision at any level of income.
aaa
2mo ago
No. The conclave system is designed to insure political continuity: cardinals can be made and undone by the pope at will and Bergoglio took full advantage of this, of the 135 cardinal electors that will participate to the next conclave only 17 were not invested by Bergoglio.
The reason for the crackdown on the latin mass is that a lot of congregation that practice it are borderline scismatic, see also thinking that Vatican II is in any way in question.
aaa
3mo ago
I think it bears asking the question how exactly average Blue Tribe normies believe Trump’s political ascendancy could have been averted, assuming it wasn’t some inevitable turn of events
I don't know about the blue tribe normie but if we're doing alt history I vote for not doing the mail-in strat in 2020. Without it Trump would have eeked out a meager victory in 2020: Trump 1 was lame and an immediately consecutive second term, with Pence VP and no Musk would have been much of the same if not even worse.
The post-covid immigration surge would have been smaller because of Trump and the post-covid inflation would also have been smaller because the war in Ukraine would have probably ended through diplomatic means 2 months in. Nevertheless with no immigration platform and a bad economy whoever would have run as a republican candidate in 2024 (Pence? De Santis?) would have lost badly, possibly historically so. And the dem republican would have not been Biden, possibly more radical and capable of running whatever agenda they had for 8 years (or more!) uninterrupted.
Second best would be picking a different date as the presidential debate in 2024. Had Biden not been sunsetting that one fateful day his poll numbers wouldn't have crashed, there wouldn't have been an assassination attempt on Trump and he could have won with a small margin. Then in 2028 Trump would probably have been too old to run again. It really was just a little bit of bad luck.
aaa
9mo ago
Why do people put any stock in happiness statistics? To me it looks like what it would be if we measured national temperature by feeling before the invention of the thermometer. Is Il Cairo very cold, cold, hot or very hot? In fact, it's even worse, because you have at least the possibility of moving somewhere else and experiencing another climate while you don't have the option of moving into somebody's else's head.
aaa
9mo ago
PS. I strongly suspect that the reason the diary wasn't released until today was to protect Paige from undue attention, given how prominently she is featured in the diary. There was no conspiracy.
aaa
5d ago
Are you suggesting that this proves souls exist and they are also subject to evolutionary processes?
aaa
8mo ago
At least part of this is that American ballots are fiendishly complicated
The complexity of the ballot is yet another weakness of the US electoral system. Having so many questions on a single ballot means that an attacker can deanonymize it and use this information to commit fraud. Complex ballots like that should be split into separate ballots, both because it makes counting faster and because it makes certain kinds of fraud impossible.
aaa
6mo ago
Ironically, these are the same people who tend to be fans of SI (popularly "the metric system").
I think opinions on DST vary a lot among fans of SI given that includes almost everyone on earth except citizens of the united states, the united kingdom and aviators.
Oh, so now you want to preserve a human-centric unit (like every system of measurement did before SI, metric or not) now that it affects you
There's nothing less human-centric about the SI the meter is just a standardization of the toise (also known as fathom, klafter and many other names), a measurement approximating the distance covered by a human's outstretched arms. If you wanted a unit of measure that wasn't human based you would invent something like the nautical mile, not the meter.
The other argument people make along these lines is about units of temperature but firstly nobody actually uses the Kelvin outside of scientific papers and is brine really a more human substance than distilled water?
Besides length and temperature nobody ever talks about anything else. Nobody ever argues that the pound is more human because the roman libra just exists in nature but the french bushel, precursor of the liter is an inhuman monstrosity. Or that the inch of mecruy just gives them a better intuitive understanding of pressure than the hectopascal.
aaa
5d ago
I see that you've been answering like this, but to me this means absolutely nothing. How is moving beyond a "mechanicistic paradigm" going to help us? What are you suggesting in concrete terms?
aaa
23d ago
If you take a look at a graph you can see that things really started getting “Super Fucking Lame” right about 2007
That's not what I see. I see it starting in 1997 and peaking around 2012.
aaa
2mo ago
It was already slop. I still can't understand to this day how they managed to spend this much money on what was essentially a less interesting Bioshock at every level. Especially after they managed to make 2 so good.
It was endlessly rewritten during production, with ideas being constantly implemented only to be scrapped because Ken Levine kept changing his mind. I'm pretty sure it's been talked about extensively, but I don't remember where.
You can even tell from the finished product, how the story doesn't make much sense in many points and how even the powers of Elizabeth are inconsistent (the first time you meet her she's opening a portal to another town but later she's only able to open portals to alternate dimensions of the place she's in).
Pretty common failure mode.
aaa
2mo ago
Roe v. Wade was a decision of the supreme court, not a law. They decided that it was not appropriate for them to make such a decision, therefore returning the issue to individual states.
aaa
8mo ago
satanic religions of old
There is no old satanic religion. Satanism was invented in the 60s by a topless bar manager.
aaa
10mo ago
I'm still convinced that the fertility problem is 100% economic in nature, it's just underestimated how serious it is. "But countries with lower GDP per capita have more children" you say. You are only measuring one variable, you forgot to consider the cost of children which in the west has skyrocketed.
For example, just in the past 50 years the cost of clothing a child has grown by a factor of 20.
Then factor in that the fertility window has become smaller, because everyone goes to college, that the period that children are dependent economically on their parents has grown, because child labor was made illegal and then everyone decided to go to college, that free childcare dried up, because women entered the workforce and people move away from their little village to seek jobs in the big city. Etcaetera, etcaetera. Childrearing is an externality, in an efficiently run country there's better ways to use anyones time than raising children.
None of this applies to Georgia in the mid-2000s of course and economic interventions don't work because they are not enough by orders of magnitude. It's too expensive, to the point that it's probably unfixable and everyone is coping about it. The left copes by thinking they can import slave labor from the third world and it will be just as good thanks to our magic soil. The right copes that if we push hard on religion we can scam everyone on making really bad economic moves.
aaa
15d ago
The only religion that I am aware of that has a thriving secularized branch is judaism. I think it works for judaism for two reasons: 1) it was always more rule-following focused than other religions, 2) they have the (very recent) memory of the holocaust to help them form a sense of community.
Belief in christianity is very important, how are you going to reconcile all the passages that say something along the lines of "salvation only happens through faith" with "actually it's all a bunch of baloney"? More broadly you will encounter two problems.
The first one is theological. You have started cutting things off the bible and off tradition, where do you stop? Christianity had an answer to this: you stop when the church tells you to stop, only they have the power, through apostolical tradition, to know what to cut.
The other problem is more practical, how do you get people interested in this? This thing has already been invented, it's called the Church of Humanity, it was invented in 1859. Nobody cares. People like to think of the societal benefits of religion but to be adopted and spread, just like genes, it needs to be useful to the individual here and now. The "magical" aspects of religion give real, immediate returns on investment in psychological terms. Saying "trans women are women" gives real, immediate monetary returns in the right career. What's your cultural christianity going to provide? What's your church going to do for me tomorrow?
aaa
5mo ago
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality
I wonder if someone's going to dig up that one issue of the sandman with the transexual to cancel him. I haven't read it in 15 years but if I recall correctly it had something along the lines of "moon magic won't work for you, YWNBAW".
aaa
4mo ago
did the transgender opera in Columbia like, actually happen?
It did, it was "As One" it was performed three times in Bogotá on march 16th, april 22nd and april 28th of 2022, in three different theaters. It was even announced on X (then twitter): https://x.com/OLA_opera/status/1501640790988275721
aaa
6mo ago
And yet, 3 teaspoons in a tablespoon, 6 picas into an inch, 12 inches into a foot, 3 feet into a yard, 1760 yards into a mile and 3 miles into a league. But you will be pleased to know that you can, in fact, ask for half of a liter or a quarter of a liter if you like fractions (and many fraction lovers do just that).
aaa
7mo ago
It's because conservatives live in rural areas, close to their extended families from which they receive millions of dollars in free child care.
aaa
10mo ago
It seems to me that hollywood is currently ongoing somewhat of a hangover moment: a lot of people there got really high on ideology in 2019-2021 and now that the high has subsided they're scrambling to fix the mess. Hence the acolyte getting canceled, borderlands and the marvels getting dumped without advertising, snow white, blade and captain america getting long delays and reworks, etc...
But it doesn't mean they won't get high again in the future. In fact I would say that for movies at least, it is guaranteed: they codified their DEI in the academy awards rules. What are they going to do? Make movies that can't get an oscar? I don't think so. I wouldn't be surprised if the movie-making side of hollywood is just going to slowly die and become more and more woke in the process.
Picard season 1 was so terrible I refused to watching anything after that, and it made me completely hate the franchise as a whole. I know that "some people say" that it got better, or that some other new Star Trek shows are good, or whatever
Season 2 is actually way worse. I was actually of the opinion that season 1, for all its faults, showed promise. Season 2 is terrible. It gets better with season 3, actually, season 3 is even good if you don't think too hard about some things. If you ever reconsider, skip season 2.
aaa
15d ago
I think my favourite anecdote of the liberal Christian "explain it away" is the "Jesus was ice skating not walking on the water",
In all of the years I've spent following the mythicist discourse I have never encountered this explanation. Usually what is offered as an explanation is that it was a magic trick: walking on a submerged plank of wood (maybe a deck or something). The criticism on Peter falling is not really biting, since a single gospel has it and you wouldn't expect a detail such as that to be omitted or forgotten, if it had happened. A much better one is that they are clearly supposed to be too far from the coast for it to be a trick of that sort.
Explaining away the virgin birth is fun, too.
I've never heard this one either. To be onest they both sound like strawmen to me. Usually the explanation for the virgin birth is that it wasn't even there in Mark, the explanation for the "specialness" of Jesus was initially his Davidian genealogy and the virgin birth was developed later, when the story moved into the hellenistic world, where people didn't care about David and stories of vigin births abunded.
aaa
22d ago
The first step towards walking in h spiritual path is reducing stimulus substantially. Luke Smith release a good video on this perspective yesterday.
Tangent, but if I ever wanted to make a meme about "religion bad' I would pick Luke Smith, he's gone orthodox and has aged 15 years in the space of 2. It's the kind of rapid aging that I've only ever seen in vegans before. That copypasta about falling for every meme needs to be updated.
There was some talk previously, here, about the "manifesto" of Audrey E. Hale, the 2023 Nashville Elementary School Shooter. The shooting happened in 2023-03-27 and the FBI hid the "manifesto" for well over a year, with only a few select pages leaking here and there.
Because the shooter was trans (female to male specifically) people speculated that the "manifesto" contained all kinds of nefarious ideological reasons.
Well, it's all out now. You can get it from The Tennessee Star or, if you don't want to give them your email, from the Kiwifarms.
Basically, there's nothing interesting to it. Alas, the mystery box strikes again: fantasy was better than reality.
A few observations in no particular order:
The backstory is that she was in love with two (black) girls, Sydney Sims who died in a car crash in august of 2022, and Paige Averianna Patton, who is a local radio personality (as Averianna The Personality). Syd never reciprocated, Paige only briefly in high school. On the 27th of february Paige had her first live show (I'm not sure what kind of live show that would be), which coincidentally was also her birthday, so that's probably why the shooting happened on 3/27. This is what Audrey writes about said live show:
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