non_radical_centrist
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User ID: 1327
non_radical_centrist
10mo 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
6mo 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
5d ago
I don't have anything to say directly on the content, but writers like Zizek who seem to try to make their writing as difficult to parse as possible in order to show off their vocabulary have always annoyed me. There are times when a big, unusual word captures something that a shorter word doesn't, or is more convenient than using a string of shorter common words to represent the same concept. But when you're having to take a second to understand a phrase, time after time, it's irritating.
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
I don’t think there’s any plausible scenario the leads to Palestine being free from river to sea. They’re an US ally, so presumably even if they did start getting pushed back immensely the US would intervene to stabilize the IDF.
Maybe if Israel commits such atrocities in Gaza that the US feels the need to completely distance themselves from Israel, it compels all the arab neighbours to intervene against Israel, and Israel is unable to fight them off on its own like it has multiple times in the past. But that’s a lot of ifs.
non_radical_centrist
1mo 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
10mo ago
It’s probably fair to say they’re being cheeky but they really do want to indoctrinate you kids into trans ideology.
They do want to turn kids into atheist leftists. I don't think any of them would really deny that. That's what the chant means. The chant does not mean "We want to rape your kids".
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
I don’t know why gun rights advocates don’t just admit that yes, if all guns were confiscated and a very strict licensing regime was put in place gun homicides would likely drop substantially
What's the point in admitting "hypothetically, if every legal and illegal gun was confiscated, gun crime would drop". As far as I know most gun rights people don't have an objection to the government confiscating illegal guns used by gangs.
non_radical_centrist
22d ago
It's annoying how expensive substacks are. I wish there are some sort of bulk deal where I could buy all the ones I'm interested in at a significant discount, because as much as I love the writing of the writers I follow, I can't drop a hundred bucks a year on each of them.
non_radical_centrist
3d 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
5mo ago
Touch grass. I think a fair amount of gender ideology is concerning, but the main risks are a) biological males in women's spaces like prisons and sports leading to danger for biological women, and b) children getting permanent medical decisions made that they will regret.
For you personally, there really aren't any downsides to working with trans people. Sometimes you have coworkers who are lazy or who are assholes, and those are both much worse than a coworker who's trans
non_radical_centrist
6mo ago
Do they really need that dumb level faked audio to convince people they’re innocent if they’re really innocent? I would think it’d just hurt their credibility
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
The problem is quite frankly there is no perfect formula for asking out a girl. Every girl is different after all. What would flatter one girl would get another to want to call the cops. I can share my experience and what's worked with me though.
First, you should identify what you want and what you're willing to do. Think about whether you want a hook up or whether it'd leave you disgusted with yourself. Whether you're willing to be 50 and single or if you'd happily marry a sub-optimal partner as long as they shared your most important values. You might be wrong about guessing what you really want until you try, but it's better than going in totally blind. In my opinion it's a good thing to go on dates even with women you're not super attracted to, because the cost of one evening and paying for dinner is small compared the experience gained at socializing and the potential opportunity to unexpectedly connect.
The next step is to get on the big dating apps. Tinder, Bumble, and Hinge, and maybe a more niche one like Christian Mingle if you fit the demographic. Make a profile with nice pictures and a bio. I've read the advice "Be unique! Stand out with something silly!" but in my own personal experience making my profile as inoffensive but flattering as possible works best. Like every profile, in my experience it does not actually lower your elo, and takes much less time and energy than trying to determine whether you're attracted to someone who 99% will not match you anyway. When messaging first, comment on something in their profile or pictures. Expect to carry the conversation for the first bit. Ask for their social media at the first good opportunity, or as a casual hail mary if the convo is dying. Ask them to meet up for a movie or dinner or whatever you like to do at the next good opportunity. Don't bother playing games/hard to get. Don't necessarily respond the second they do if they're spacing out their messages, being that available can make people go "oh I kinda want to keep talking to him but I don't want a whole conversation right now, so I best not message because he's going to respond immediately". Waiting 15 minutes to 1 hour is fine. If they ghost you or are really dragging out their messages(24 hours+ between messages) they are not interested and you can stop wasting time on them. Even if they say they're interested, they are not actually.
That approach has gotten me a few dates and less wasted energy, ultimately no one I really liked, but still a big step up from where I was before learning all that.
If you're willing to work out at the gym and get sexy, that's an even bigger advantage, but personally I've always found that difficult.
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
Seems like a hook up app that's aiming at the demographic of non-MLM queers, bdsm types, and threesomes. I'm sure they view themselves as emotionally mature and "better" at sexual encounters, but don't most demographics? Ultimately that app just looks like FetLife for the modern age
non_radical_centrist
14d 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
4mo ago
I think it was just a joke about calling Cornell Engineering students so dumb that they're a vulnerable group. Obviously a joke because they're of course still quite smart, just not as smart as other top programs like MIT engineering.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
I think you underestimate the amount of support Hamas has among the regular Gazans. And the groups that are more popular than Hamas are usually other Islamic terrorist groups. And underestimate how much those regular Gazans hate Israel and would be uncooperative in the concentration camps, they wouldn't just be passively grateful for food and shelter, they'd be getting into fights. And those fights would be terrible PR- "Israeli soldiers beat civilian in concentration camp!", regardless about any context of if the guy needed to be beat down.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
Do you have any personal opinions about whether whether this was a fair ruling, Ashlael? I have little knowledge about law and can't even begin to determine how fair this case was for myself. The sources I would normally use to determine an opinion, like a synthesis of Wikipedia, liberal subreddits, conservative subreddits, and themotte comments, are all varying so much from each other and not really directly addressing each other's points that I can't come to a conclusion. But I do generally greatly respect your analysis as insightful and not particularly biased.
non_radical_centrist
4mo ago
I think the issue with that is often luxury products are actually marginally better than the defaults, and I don't think the state could consistently make actually good products. It's one thing to pay $10k for a watch that's 1% better than a $500 watch, it's another to pay $10k for a watch that's 1% worse
non_radical_centrist
5mo ago
There is some minor diversity like some of the senior officers and ladies maids improbably being black, but I didn’t think it was really a ‘woke’ picture.
I don't think that was particularly unlikely at all, France had a number of black mixed race people in it, including in the upper class. For example the famous author Alexandre Dumas' father was mixed race and a French general.
Personally I didn't like the movie, it really did feel like it made a buffoon out of Napoleon, who got cuckolded and is very insecure about his success. I would've preferred that it either double down on being a period piece romcom, or to have been properly about Napoleon's battles and conquests, instead of being a weird romance interspersed with battle scenes.
non_radical_centrist
11mo ago
They want both traditional social cohesiveness but also cowboy individualism.
As long as everyone in the society is the exact same, everyone is free to individually do the exact same stuff
non_radical_centrist
20d ago
Neoliberals were strip mining the economy and the labor market
Neoliberals embraced deregulation and austerity because Keynesian economics and large amounts of the economy being state owned or heavily regulated lead to the stagflation of the 70s.
non_radical_centrist
1mo ago
People have been protesting Israel and calling them genocidal basically every year since 1947, with only small breaks during the periods of hours to days when the Arabs start a military offense and briefly look like they have the upper hand before getting their asses handed to them.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
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Self-immolation draws attention. It's like tossing soup on a painting that's protected by glass. It doesn't do anything by itself, but it draws attention to the issue. It may also inspire comrades to action that does actually have impacts, like voting.
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We have soldiers who'd do that because the military is a very large place with lots of people. It's against the rules for soldiers to make political statements, especially ones that dramatic in uniform, but when you're the single largest employer in the USA, some of your employees will be mentally ill and break the rules.
non_radical_centrist
2mo ago
At the end of the day though, that's how New York chose to write its law and it's being implemented as intended. It was entirely in Trump's power to avoid this outcome by simply not lying. So as far as I'm concerned, he fucked around and found out. Tough bikkies.
The other concern I've seen and that I share is that it's just him being prosecuted for this. That this sort of fraud is very common and normally isn't enforced. It'd be like if they also prosecuted him for adultery, which is Class B misdemeanor in New York.
I'm not that sympathetic to him, I agree with your sentiment that he fucked around and found out, but I am pretty concerned about this setting a bad precedent of trumping up charges against political opponents.
Also, do you have a substack or twitter or anything with more writing I could follow?
Some pretty impressive news: YouTuber and author John Green, known for his channel vlogbrothers and for being one of the founders of the educational channel Crash Course, as well his his books such as the Fault in Our Stars, recently made a video advocating that pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson shouldn't extend their patent on the drug bedaquiline that's used to treat tuberculosis. It's used to treat millions, and saves the lives of many. But it is fairly expensive. And his video and call for his fanbase to bombard Johnson & Johnson to stop worked! They did still extend the patent, but they've allowed for the sale of generics in low and middle income countries that would otherwise struggle to afford it. This is quite possibly the single most influential campaign from an internet influencer ever in terms of lives saved.
The original video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=tMhgw5SW0h4
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