non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I've been more convinced by Richard Hanania.
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/israel-must-crush-palestinian-hopes
https://www.richardhanania.com/p/why-palestine-cant-deliver-peace
The tl;dr of those two pieces is that first, Palestinians really, really hate Israelis, even more than Nazis hated Jews, and the conflict will not be able to be diplomatically resolved. And second, even if through a mass PR campaign and enormous concessions Israel managed to get 99.9% Palestinians to accept true peace in the form of either a one or two state solution, just .1% of Palestinians sticking with Hamas and Islamic Jihad would be thousands of active terrorists, which is unacceptable to Israel.
non_radical_centrist
7mo ago
Give an inch, they take a mile. If you just let China take Taiwan with no fight because the war would be so costly, why would China stop there? Would you let them conquer every island in the Pacific until they have everything except Hawaii too?
non_radical_centrist
7mo ago
He didn't, and I don't know much about Ireland, but my casual awareness is that they have extremely low corporate tax and have become an international tax haven. So I guess Milei wants to make Argentina a tax haven too.
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
Exactly. I could not ask an Ukrainian to die fighting for NATO. But if they wanted to do so anyway, I'm more than happy to provide them the weapons to do so.
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
The language of a single podcast of course isn't the sole hinge on which Putin's justifications turn. But it is a small piece. I think Putin's casus belli is made very slightly more valid if Zelensky speaks Russian. And very slightly less valid if he doesn't. Putin talked about the medieval history of Ukraine and Russia being one country to Tucker for so long because that type of thing does matter to Putin, and to many other Russians.
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
I think environmentalists want to help the environment, although aesthetics is definitely a major aspect, but they are dumb and don't understand what actually helps the environment. A lot of the people who vote for rent control don't want there to be an under supply of housing; they just don't get how economics work
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think wokism as culture and wokism as law and wokism as anything else are all a positive feedback loop. There isn't a single definitive cause that, if you cut that out, all wokism is gone forever. But the book convinced me pretty well that certain executive orders and judicial decisions and bureaucratic policies played a major role in expanding wokeness.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
It lines up with what I've read about the Israeli far right too. MAGA supporters aren't literally like, settling parts of black communities or Mexico to create their own little villages and occassionally killing black people or Mexicans in the process. That's what the Israeli settlement movement is. Ben Gvir, one of the actual most important politicians in Israel and not just a fringe lunatic, is a settler himself. He has faced criminal charges from Israel over hate speech. He was convicted of supporting Kach, which Israel itself classifies a terrorist group. It's not just Gvir, there are other far right politicians like Smotrich too.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Itamar_Ben-Gvir
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bezalel_Smotrich
Claiming that all Israelis support them, or that 50% of Israelis support them, would be wrong I think. Claiming 10% of Israelis support them, I think is accurate.
Maybe you think the Palestinians are all barbarous demons and that the Israeli far right is justified. But the descriptive parts of the NYT article would still be accurate about describing the far right's actions.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Biden can't pardon Trump for state crimes. He could pardon Trump for the federal crimes.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
I think there's a difference between an executive getting fired because of some tweet he made on his personal account that's pro-trans, and the executive getting fired for a business decision that actually alienated a core demographic. The former would be cancelling, the latter is how things should work.
If an executive of any given company with a large leftist demographic gave a promotional product to Donald Trump, I don't think people on the right would be too outraged about the executive being fired. They might thing think executive doesn't deserve to be fired because they personally like Donald Trump, but it wouldn't cause the same sort of outrage as the executive being fired because he tweeted out "Donald Trump is a swell guy".
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
People making closed-source software that requires connecting to their server (rather than yours or one you choose) hate you and hold you in contempt.
Tbf, a lot of apple users deserve to be held in contempt, technology wise. I think it's fine to have a phone that's designed around minimizing user-agency so they can't fuck themselves. All the smart people should just use a different phone.
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
People don't become psychotic out of nowhere.
Some people do just have schizophrenic breaks and become bad for society if not medicated out of nowhere.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I read the Origins of Woke by Richard Hanania a couple weeks ago. I was going to write a more in depth review covering more sections, but got bored after writing my thought process about how employers aren't allowed to use discriminatory tests and never got around to writing more, so I'll post what I did write.
Let’s all people have a factor that you can represent numerically how good they will be at a job. Let’s call it the m, for mystery, because exactly what will make someone good at a job- e.g knowledge, skill, conscientiousness, etc. can be very difficult to measure, and knowing how important proportionally each sub-factor is to the final m factor or even what every sub-factor maybe is also very difficult. But, we can still try to estimate someone’s m. If you have a job that largely involves lifting heavy boxes and moving them around, you can get a decent estimate by having a candidate try to lift a heavy box- if they fall, they almost certainly have low m for that job, and if they succeed with ease, they’ll likely have a high m for that job. If you have a CEO position for a large multinational corporation, you can like at a candidate’s previous job experience- if they’ve previously been in charge of a corporation that hit records profits during their tenure, they’ll likely have high m. If while previously in charge of a corporation, it went from high profits to bankruptcy, or they’ve only ever held a job as a janitor, you can guess that they’d have low m for the position.
We can say with confidence that on average, black people have lower m than white people for most jobs. Whether this is because of genetics, culture, discrimination, or something else isn’t relevant to this discussion, because this discussion isn’t about increasing their m, just about what are fair hiring practices. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act passed, both Congress and the general population of America overwhelmingly wanted two things: For black people to not be actively discriminated against, but also for people to be able to still select the best employees for a job, even if all the best employees were white. But what is “discrimination”? That’s a surprisingly hard question to answer.
Let’s say an employer has 1000 job candidates, and needs to select 100 to fill a newly created job. The employer wants to get the 100 employees with the highest m- he is unlikely to succeed perfectly, but he still wants to get as close as he can. If the employer asked all potential job candidates to fill out a brief questionnaire as the first stage of the application process, and one of the questions was “Are you black?”, and then the employer threw out every single application where someone answered “Yes”, the average m in the remaining pool would likely be higher, although he also would’ve likely tossed some candidates who did belong in the final pool. Whether it’s a good idea from the employer’s perspective may vary- maybe the employer really has no good ideas on how to figure out which candidates have higher m, and his next step will just be to randomly select 100 candidates from the remaining pool, in which case he’ll have done better in terms of average m score than if he didn’t purge black candidates.
But, I think almost everyone would agree that purging black applications like that is discrimination, in the letter of the ACR, in the spirit of what Congress intended it, and that the majority of Americans don’t want to see that sort of candidate selection happen, not from government employers and not from private employers either. The government would tell any employer that tried to do that something like, “Stop that, rework your hiring practices so that you’re actually more directly testing for m, and not just discriminating against blacks”.
So the employer goes back to the drawing board, and comes up with another test. He will take a pencil, and slide it into the hair of a candidate. After releasing, if the pencil falls out of the hair, the candidate proceeds to the next stage, if it stays in, the candidate is removed from selection. That’s the Apartheid South African Pencil test, and in practice that’d basically be the same as the previous test, although it’s hypothetically possible some black people would pass and some white people would fail. Or maybe the employer tries to be slightly less blatant, and instead does a swimming test(black have worse buoyancy than white people). Unless the job actually involves swimming in some way, I think most people would still agree that such a test is discriminatory, not actually measuring m in any way, at least not more than a generic fitness test does, and would only have predictive power in job performance because it’s managing to exclude blacks.
The employer now comes up with a fourth test. It will be a straightforward algebra exam, the sort you’d see in a 10th grade math course. If the job does not involve algebra in any way, like it’s a job moving boxes around, or maybe it’s a cashier job at a retailer, or even a more high class job like a lawyer that doesn’t really involve math, then this test will also disproportionately fail black candidates, who tend to be worse at algebra. But, is it actually discriminatory? Where the previous tests only would have any predictive power for job performance in so far as they measured whether or not someone’s black, and black people on average did worse at the job, the algebra test might have real predictive power, because it’s not just measuring algebra skill, it’s also measuring general intelligence, and general intelligence would be a major component of m for almost any job.
Whether the test is actually discriminatory now comes down to whether “general intelligence” is real, and also that if it is real, can it be measured by an algebra test? I don’t think that question, in the absence of formal studies, has an obvious answer. I think reasonable people could very easily come to believe that algebra skill is divorced from other intellectual tasks like public speaking, literacy, chess skill, etc. My understanding of the literature is that that is not true- that there is a general intelligence, and skill at all intellectual tasks are relatively closely correlated. And that that general intelligence is also closely correlated with job performance in pretty much every job. But, reasonable judges who aren’t good at parsing scientific studies themselves can be convinced that general intelligence does not work like that.
Richard Hanania, in The Origin’s of Woke, writes that judges and bureaucrats expanding the definition of discrimination to also include tests that really measure future job performance is one of the key origins of wokeness. I wouldn’t disagree. Where I do disagree with him is that I don’t think it’s easily possible to permit real skill tests but ban actually discriminatory test, because they can look very similar. Ultimately I don’t disagree with his conclusion that the laws should be altered to allow for discrimination though, because I think where in the 60’s the Civil Rights Act may have been needed to prevent employers doing discrimination along the lines of a Pencil Test for employees like how the American people wanted, today the vast majority of Americans are no longer anti-black racist, despite what many on the left think. I think you could remove a lot of anti-discrimination protections, and unlike in the 60’s, a combination of few people today being actually racist and non-governmental social pressure to keep the real racists in line will prevent the sort of racism Americans hate.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Part of what I think makes Palestine different is that they have hundreds of millions of other Arabs and other muslims supporting them. Once the Tamils were broken, they were broken- they had no path to recovery. But for Palestine, every single member of Hamas could suffer from heart attacks and die tomorrow, and all the weapons could be confiscated, but I don’t think the conflict would be permanently over. Because other groups who want to see Israel ended and Palestine established would work to recreate Hamas or a similar group, providing funding and weapons.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I have a somewhat alternate theory to the standard HBD concept, one that may not be original but I haven't seen before, although I haven't delved the HBD forums much.
The standard HBD argument is that different races have different IQs, and that is the primary factor leads to all sorts of different outcomes. Instead of IQ causing so many differences, which I think might be true but is a lesser factor, I think different races are domesticated to different degrees. I read the book The Goodness Paradox about a year ago, and it was about how while humans kill each other in vastly larger scales than any other animal, we're also much less likely to try to tear each other's faces off in the woods than any other animal. The author first divides violence into two categories: reactive and pre-mediated. Sometimes violence is pre-planned and calculated, like a sniper watching carefully for the moment to take the shot. Other violence is reactive, like someone punches you or even just insults your mother and you hit back before you even think. The author presents a simple answer: That there is a relatively straightforward evolutionary process through which animals are domesticated, and domestication leads to much lower rates of reactive violence. The mechanism is that the animal is essentially forever childlike mentally. But not just mentally, also physically; that's why dogs look like wolf cubs, and domesticated foxes have converged on similar traits like floppy ears.
I think black people are similar, in that they are a more "adult" human. They tend to be physically bigger and stronger. I often see black women called masculine, and that is the explanation for why they're less attractive and do worse on dating apps- but I think it makes more sense to call them more adult(whatever the opposite of neotony is). Black women are well known for large secondary sexual characterics like big ass and breasts, that's hardly masculine. And east Asian women by contrast, a race widely considered more on the high end of genetics by HBDers, tend to be more neotonous, with smaller secondary characteristics and young looking faces. And their men tend to be smaller and less physically strong. So I think it's quite plausible that that domestication mechanism, while probably not the sole factor, is a sizeable one in making black people have such higher rates of crime and east asians such lower rates of crime.
non_radical_centrist
9mo ago
It's voluntary, but when it comes to the Delta Gamma of this email (assuming that the email is real),
The fact that that's newsworthy at all, and is from ten years ago, suggests to me that that sort of extreme pressure is an exception not the rule
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I have a formative childhood memory of exactly that sort of thing happening. I was roughhousing with a friend of mine, in the type of way that it was very unlikely either of us would get seriously hurt, but was still very much against the school rules. I remember then a parent volunteer caught us in a way that she didn't didn't directly witness it but it was very obvious to everyone what happened- I don't remember exactly how, but it was probably something like hearing a yelp and then turning the corner to see my friend with a bruise. When she interrogated us, I stayed quiet and my friend insisted he just walked into a pole- despite no poles being nearby. We both got off scott free.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
Why should an opoid addicted piece of white trash who was born to two parents who were white trash deserve American citizenship more than a Venezualen who fled socialism and crossed the Darien Gap just to participate in the greatest nation on Earth? That's purposefully inflammatory I know, but I do strongly believe that immigrants to America will rarely make natives lives worse, and often will in fact improve their lives through providing stuff like cheap farm labour. That's not an universal law, I look at Europe and see how terrible they are at integrating immigrants and wouldn't propose they open their borders because I don't think they could handle it. But immigrants are an amazing source of strength for America, one that should be harnessed.
non_radical_centrist
2yr ago
My model of Trump is that he's really just a narcissist who refuses to accept that those documents are not his to keep anymore. I don't think he's a 60 IQ mouth breather, I think he's legitimately pretty smart most of the time(albeit dumber than most presidents imo), but he also is not neurotypical.
Like this is the sort of behaviour you'd see on https://old.reddit.com/r/raisedbynarcissists/, someone's parent is keeping their child's possessions after the child moved out and estranged themselves, then insisted on keeping those possessions even after the child gives the parent numerous warnings and advance notice they'll call the police if they have to.
I'm not 100% certain of this of course, I'm not a psychiatrist who can diagnose someone, but it's my best guess
non_radical_centrist
7mo ago
not withdrawing from Afghanistan
He did begin the process, it just only finished under the Biden administration. I agree with everything else.
non_radical_centrist
1yr ago
I think "the media very rarely lies" just straight up doesn't apply to headlines. In the actual bodies of the article, the description is pretty balanced, albeit biased towards Democrats by citing experts who say it's a bad idea but not citing any experts who say "obviously you shouldn't be allowed to wear a mask while committing a crime".
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
I looked at this list of records for the Badwater Ultramarathon. The women are fairly competitive with the men. That would never happen in something like powerlifting, or intellectual sports like chess or esports, or sprinting.
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
how do you suppose Republican voters would react come 2028?
They primarily blame Democrats for blocking progress. I'm still a big believer in median voter theorem, probably whichever candidate can succesfully market themselves as more moderate wins 2028.
non_radical_centrist
9mo ago
Many types of mental retardation also come with physical defects that make the person ugly. When that's not true, I don't think it's an instinctive "ick" so much as their condition makes them not very good conversationalists. So you talk to them for fifteen minutes and decide you don't really want to talk to them any longer.
There's a great deal of productive work people can do with very little abstract thinking skill. I went through basic training recently. I was probably the smartest, or at least close to it, at stuff like algebra and writing essays and reading comprehension. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of people there would have trouble with those sorts of problems and would need to go through a couple hours of lessons to consistently get those problems correct, and even then would probably forget those lessons after a few months.
But that didn't matter at all. In boot camp, the things that mattered were how well you polished boots, folded clothes, made it to the place you were supposed to be on time, could do the multi-step safety check on your rifle, could put together a lean-to to sleep under, and all the fitness stuff. Almost all those people with lower IQs could blow me out of the water at those tasks(although there were a couple people that I expect would be especially bad at math and were even worse than me at basic skills). For regular life skills, stuff that wasn't abstract, they could do great- they weren't some barely conscious apes that barely managed not to kill themselves, like I feel like we'd both expect after hearing they couldn't answer 100-17 with mental math.
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