sliders1234
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User ID: 685
The Proud Boy sentences being quite severe is on my mind today. 22 years for Tarrio who was not there on Jan 6. He does have text saying it was them who did it. A few others got in the high teens sentences who were there.
I will admit I respect the Proud Boys and agree with a lot of their statements. I do believe the 2020 election was stolen. The lack of a secret ballot thru mass mail-in voting violates every principle of Democracy. Without violating the secret ballot Trump would have easily won in my opinion. The Proud Boys official position from memory was a desire for a new election following Democratic principles. Seems fair to me. So I feel they are directionally correct even if they took things too far.
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The right won’t get equal treatment in the court. It seems like the key courts are in cities that are going to have unsympathetic juries and judges. If you flip these courts to rural areas then my guess antifa types are getting 20 years and Proud Boys 2 years. In rural areas they would have judges very sympathetic that the election wasn’t proper and their anger was justified in the same way BLM protestors get courts sympathetic that America is a racists nation.
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I think the left is making a mistake with these massive sentences. If they gave them a couple years I would feel it was fair as they went too far. But now I want them pardoned. If Trump pardons them as he should then it’s a slap in the face of the court decision. Delegitimizes the court to have the court decide these are really bad people deserving long sentences for overturning Democracy but then have the next guy release them. It feels very third worldish to me. With other lawfare attempts it seems as though any future POTUS should do mass pardons. I’m not sure how balance of powers can survive this.
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The punishment for Proud Boys seems to have some connection to the debates and Biden declaring them “white supremacists” and Trump telling them to “stand by and stand down” (which felt coded). It made it important these guys got long sentences to confirm that they are the bad guys because then a court confirmed what they told you. Same thing with Floyd officers and long sentences which confirmed that they were bad murderous cops. A jury convicted therefore we know it’s true.
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It’s another example of punishment for exercising your right to a jury trial.
I agree with Garrett Jones books “10% Less Democracy” and America would be better with less activision and less voting. But America looks more and more like a third word spoils system. Win you get the spoils, lose you go to jail. Which makes elections far more important.
Links aren’t important just sometimes people asks for articles.
https://www.npr.org/2023/05/04/1172530436/proud-boys-jan-6-sedition-trial-verdict
https://www.amazon.com/10-Less-Democracy-Should-Elites/dp/1503603571
Edit: Focus on the punishments and any results from the severity. I used a certain frame to put it in their view. We don’t need to discuss election legitimacy again.
sliders1234
1yr ago
It seems like Trump is getting his twitter back. The weird thing is I think red tribe doesn’t want him to get twitter back. I don’t. Blue tribe will put up a big fight over it but actually be very happy if he got twitter back. Then they get his tweets to rally against. For now Musks says he’s thinking about it. From a free speech absolutist view he does have to approve it. But I still want him to say no.
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1593673844996288512?s=46&t=o4yJPOOQnQoAxYXvJuPdlQ
This will probably get some play and is a bit of a different topic. Former CEO of YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicicki son died of a drug freshman year of college at Cal.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/former-youtube-ceos-son-found-dead-uc-berkeley-rcna139355
The obvious implications is he took something laced with fentanyl. Culture war wise concerns about fentanyl are red coded though issues with fentanyl seem apparent in both red and blue states and people.
Overall I feel like this issue has lost its place in the news cycle. A quick google overdose deaths topped 112k in 2023 an all-time record. I am seeing a current U.S. population of 334 million. So to put this in perspective 112k multiplied by an average lifespan of 80 years is like 9 million deaths. Or close to 3% of US population at current rates will die by a drug overdose. I think I can fairly say it’s a huge issue even if you disagree with how I’m calculating the average persons risks of OD at around 3% in their lifetime.
Quick analysis of the kid he looks in shape for a 19 year old and was majoring in math so he’s the dream of any parent. Odd thing is he was found unresponsive at 4:23 pm on a Tuesday. That is going to be weird and details will come out as that time frame is more of an addict death. Versus I expected a weekend OD and he did some fentanyl laced coke/Molly during the weekend.
From people I’ve talked to opioids are amazing. I do not know if I’ve ever done them. They have to be if people do them. I’ve done molly/coke/mushrooms in the past. The big thing to me is I’m paranoid I’m doing something laced now and have largely cut out doing anything now.
The midtwit take is that dealers either sell both and cross contaminate or lace other drugs to get people addicted. Personally opinion and perhaps a difference without a difference is it’s probably lacing just so people say it’s the good shit.
Sorry for their loss.
Culture war issues
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Plays into the immigration debate of not controlling the border
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Blue states seem to be adopting a let it happen and treat but it doesn’t seem to be working
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War on drug topics. I don’t think the old war on drugs ever dealt with the death rate we have now but war on drugs doesn’t seem stupid when it’s a 3% population level lifetime death rate which is far higher than COVID and killing people with high life expectancy
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Other policy considerations. Some would say things like legalize drugs to kill fentanyl and people get “safe” drugs. Some conservative arguments that something’s should just be illegal. Opioids probably are fantastic but the death rate for someone who tries opioids seems extremely high.
My numeracy tells me this is a big problem and I believe an order of magnitude bigger problem than COVID. I don’t think it’s quite as hard coded in culture wars.
Im a little drunk on thanksgiving. Can someone tell me the pope having lunch with transgenders is false.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1727444933207056730?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
This was low effort. I think a 7-day ban is too much. But this is still something where as a Catholic you would be like what I’m seeing has to be wrong. I will eat it. This isn’t an unworthy culture war post if it fact checks which from Hannania I assumed he did.
sliders1234
1yr ago
Are food allergies another aspect of the culture war? I was reading Reddit and a person was feeding 100 people and someone mentioned to make sure you have all the allergies/food restrictions covered. Being honest I’ve never met anyone with a food restriction I can think of except a lot of brown friends who won’t eat sausage but also have no problem with alcohol.
Ancient religions had a lot of restrictions, now Im borrowing this from elsewhere that the rise of food restrictions is just the same thing as ancients banning certain foods as holy acts. I’ve long argued that the culture wars are less of a culture war and more of a religious war and dietary restrictions are just a modern form of Jews and Muslims banning pork/shellfish etc and Catholics not eating meat on fridays. All religions seem to have focuses on eating and sexual rituals.
I know mental illness has far higher rates amongst lefties. My guess is dietary restrictions and food allergies are much higher in lefties and if your not in that religion it’s something you never think of.
The latest Trump legal woes comes once again from NY where a judge ordered his business dissolved for fraud. Nobody losts money and it came down to some misstatements. I haven’t read the full case, but the judge on a high profile part of the case is completely off. Not even ballpark off.
He valued Mar-a-Lago at 17-25 million. I texted a broker in the area and he told me 100 million for an ocean acre and 25 million for a non-ocean acres. Mar is between 17-20 acres depending where you look online. Palm Beach has gone up a lot since COVID so maybe divide those numbers by 2 since Trump made his filling. He listed the property at 450-650 million. Without doing a full underwriting (maybe zoning issues where it couldn’t be worth the raw land price) it still appears Mar is worth a lot of money.
If you are going to do lawfare shouldn’t you avoid obvious mistakes? It’s easy to see a headline and write this whole case off as political. It weakens public perception of all other cases if you make mistakes that are this stupid.
If I am remembering this case correctly he did likely violate the law and include some statement that were obviously false but in a category that no one besides Donald Trump gets prosecuted for. So the case of Mar-a-Lago violates a principle of maintaining plausible deniability.
Edit: @AshLael looked up the prosecutors brief and it appears they did not use the tax assessment for valuation purposes. Which would negate my main point. The judge has a history of making stuff up against real estate developers and being later reversed. It’s quite possible this judge hates developers and just does stupid things.
https://twitter.com/goodguyguaranty/status/1707232241925910944?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://nypost.com/2023/09/27/mar-a-lago-judges-developer-hating-past-is-a-big-win-for-donald-trump/
Which would change the ruling and it’s citations to much more of all developer are bastards story (which is culture war) than my why are you lawfaring stupidly story
Update. Perhaps I should just include it in the thread I created below but I feel like they go dead.
I complained at the Iowa State Fair that Vivek wasn’t taking the mask off. Here he is. Calling transitioning as a child barbaric. Perhaps this is a sign of really good public speaker that he can be aggressive in one venue and come off compassionate in a different venue.
https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1691880080866263319?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Musks also retweeted this speech and I’ll include his summary so you don’t have to click thru.
https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1692267994490060817?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
TRUTH.
- God is real.
- There are two genders.
- Human flourishing requires fossil fuels.
- Reverse racism is racism.
- An open border is no border.
- Parents determine the education of their children.
- The nuclear family is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.
- Capitalism lifts people up from poverty.
- There are three branches of the U.S. government, not four.
- The U.S. Constitution is the strongest guarantor of freedoms in history.
Strategy interests me. The billionaires who were backing Desantis seem to be looking at Vivek now. They like myself don’t like Trumps persona. I now think Vivek is probably the best salesman for the GOP. Especially if they want to make arguments the PMC will listen to. Desantis I believe is the best get shit done member of the GOP. If you get where I’m going Vivek will make a lot of sense as the frontman President with Desantis as VP. Trump is the best at throwing a raving party and he’s really good at taking punches from the left and keeps moving forward. Which has bought him a lot of trust in the gop.
Strategically the GOP best move is to keep Trump as the poll lead until like March/April. Let them develop their lawfare election strategy. Then slide the nomination to probably Vivek maybe Desantis. The issue with this and one of my biggest problems with Trump is he doesn’t care as much about advancing an agenda as he cares about Trump winning. But for winning an agenda my thoughts today is this would be a very good strategy for winning.
Next thought. Vivek said “God is Real”. I assumed he was Hindu so was trying to figure out what he meant. So I had to go look at his Wikipedia and find out what that meant. He’s a monotheistic Hindu. I don’t know if that’s a true belief or something adopted to be more palatable to the right. Could be something explored in the election that he at some point will likely need to explain.
The other thing I thought of when he said God is Real is Marginal Revolution ran an article on St Thomas preaching the gospel in India. So I thought with him saying God is Real it might mean he was a member of that community. I didn’t even know about old Christian communities in India until yesterday. So perhaps there is a connection between St. Thomas and Monotheistic Hinduism. I do recommend reading the marginal posts as initially they thought St. Thomas wasn’t real but then some archaeologist found some stuff that confirmed a lot of the story.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/no-doubt-saint-thomas-reached-india.html
This is a suicide posts about an entrepreneur who failed and is going thru certain twitter communities.
https://twitter.com/smb_attorney/status/1720486539325587858?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720231141826015303?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
https://twitter.com/moseskagan/status/1720232058109469137?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A few thoughts.
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Yes business owners do kill themselves when their business fails. Capitalism does have brutal aspects.
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I laugh when the one guy posts go talk to a therapists here’s the suicide prevention helpline. When your business is failing your issues are not lefty mental health. Your dealing with a real issue of not being able to provide for your family and seeing all your dreams disappear. It’s one of the most emasculating things that can happen to someone especially someone who is use to being able to handle stuff
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He shouldn’t have killed himself. I’d assume he could have found some consulting or being an employee for a bit gig.
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Society has very little tolerance for failed men. After the fact everyone will say he showed some signs and should have helped out. When you are failing you have the stench of failure and people honestly try to run away from you.
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I know someone whose dad killed themselves so when there business failed. I always thought the lefts argument that rioting and looting isn’t damaging was false. Being able to provide for your family is life and it’s something men take very personality.
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Females somehow survive with nothing. Not sure how but realistically society is far kinder to widowed mothers.
Since it’s election denialism day. Let’s talk strategy on the Hunter laptop. I believe this is an accepted fact now: The FBI had possession of the laptop a year prior to the election and had verified it while being aware Guiliani and others had a copy. Hunter and Joe also knew he had a copy.
Guiliani’s behavior makes sense to me. You have a bombshell on the opposition so you release it last minute for maximum effect.
But what about the lefts/fbi play? The play they ended up choosing was do nothing until it’s released then claim it’s a Russian plant. Now the fbi ran with something going to happen from Russia that is misinformation to their media and social media partners. Those who did that I guess have plausible deniability they just meant a “general threat” and weren’t aware it was “Hunters verified laptop”. I have my doubts those people hadn’t been read in on the laptop.
My question is why wasn’t this leaked earlier? Prevent the October surprise by getting it out earlier? Ideally even perhaps the primaries so you just didn’t have to deal with Joe. All it would have taken is telling Warren or Sanders about it and then they go get a copy from Isaacs.
Instead the path chosen seems to have been let’s run a psy-op to protect Biden. It just seems like frequently when given choices people seem to be choosing let’s just lie to them.
I guess the conclusion I can come up with is the people with access to the laptop were not fans of a lot of the Democratic Party and weren’t fans of Trump.
I know the Sanders people have long thought the official DNC was against them. And I’m no Sanders fan. But the fact no one tipped them off to the laptop when it could have been used seems interesting. Along with what felt like a successful media-op which I guess was organized by the FBI.
Alternative strategy Guiliani actually have played it wrong and should have released it earlier to let it get digested instead of late to swing a few voters. And Isaac perhaps was more partisan since he didn’t get a copy to the left.
sliders1234
8mo ago
Hannania, Iowa State Fair, and Vivek. Vivek’s response to LGBTQ made the rounds on twitter mostly with positive support on how it can be handled.
https://twitter.com/richardhanania/status/1690890371398836224?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
Vivek says a lot of words but if I had to summarize it’s basically libertarianism for adults - you can do what you want - but no pride for kids and restrictions on female sports and bathroom usage.
I use to share these type of opinions and perhaps I still do. But I no longer find these as stable positions. It comes down to well why don’t you want pride in schools? It’s because I believe in social contagion (and the broad right) that pride is bad and I don’t want the next generation of children to be more gay and transexual. Basically I don’t want grooming for those lifestyles. I think the left knows this. And won’t settle for the right thinking pride is bad. And then it’s well your a homophobe/transphobe. Masks off yea I am. That is why I don’t want pride in school because I think it’s bad for people.
Of course I think the same problem exists with Hannania’s new position on race. Treat everyone the same. Be tough on crime. Do I think being colorblind will be accepted by the left when it ends up with whites always on top and blacks on the bottom with a lot of black men in prison? No.
I feel like we have discussed these issues a lot. Even a mod thru in a post on why can’t we just be colorblind (perhaps bad summary from memory). I think it’s interesting seeing the third leading GOP candidate making similar arguments. And in all honesty my guess is Vivek’s position is likely the preferred position of mosts on the Motte. None of the pride everywhere but adults can do as they please. The race issues I think perhaps we could get back to the old equilibrium of ignoring disparate outcomes and just treating blacks as if they are white. But I doubt it. The Pride issues I think are harder because not wanting children exposed more directly says we think it’s bad and don’t want our children taught this stuff. The positions I’m laying out are likely the preferred position of most of the GOP establishment. I think Desantis would even accept these positions if offered. I don’t expect the left to offer these compromises because they are true believers that disparate outcomes are proof of racism or because a lot of supporters find the moral superiority of getting to call red tribe “your a racists/transphobe” etc enjoyable so no reason to stop.
While I think these positions are unstable I’m not sure the right could move the country to the stable positions. Which would be widespread knowledge that a great deal of disparate outcome is from hbd and on pride matters getting the country to agree that lgbtq lifestyles are not desirable (which was the world pre-2008). As it is the current positions seem unstable to me and easily attacked by the left and to a great extent makes the right look like hypocrites afraid to say the quiet part out loud.
Also, might be a good place for anyone to posts anything they found interesting at the Iowa State Fair.
sliders1234
1yr ago
Personally I always thought Texas and other border states were just playing national politics with the border crisis. Creating a crisis as an issue to run for re-election on.
https://www.axios.com/2022/10/07/new-york-adams-emergency-migrant-buses
NYC has received 17k migrants since April. That seems tiny compared to what Texas has dealt with.
Adams said the city is receiving on average 5-6 buses a day. I will assume 40 people per bus or about 240 a day. That’s about 75k a year and he says it will cost the city a billion a year.
Now 75k a year of migrants is probably NYC fair share of migrants for how many are coming. NYC population around 9 million or 1/35 of the US.
He says it’s not an issue they asked for, but they did declare themselves a sanctuary city.
Maybe Adams is actually a Republican. Because his complaining is exactly what Republicans would want from busing them for political reasons. Conversely maybe Texas GOP complaining about migrants was not just politics but a real issue they were having trouble dealing with. I assumed it was politics.
I think this also shows some weaknesses with the blue city state capacity. The basic agreement before was we have some globally competitive people we can tax a lot to fund our local poor plus civil servants. Blue cities aren’t that good at building more housing and infrastructure anymore. It’s about $20k a year for them per migrant. Texas and the south can just give them a mortgage for $20k to buy a used a trailer and use their land which can house multiple people though jobs might be a problem theirs only so many meat processing plant and ranch hands you need.
Honestly NYC should just ship them to Chicago and write a $20k a head check. There’s plenty of abandoned property on the southside that needs people (though has violence issues but better than where they came from).
If Adams was going to be a good Democrat he should just pay the tab and tell Abbot he will take his proportional share.’
sliders1234
7mo ago
Inside Disney and internal corporate boardroom drama. Iger appointed Chapek as his successor but ended up decided coming back. It touches on the fight with Desantis, the prior generation deciding not to retire, internal power struggles, managing a business where no one has the skillset for all of the businesses (creative, running parks, international, finance, sports, launching a streaming business). About a 15-20 min. Iger seems more interested in the Desantis fight than Chapek who just wanted to play nice.
https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2023/09/06/disney-succession-mess-iger-chapek.html
This isn’t culture war for today. It was between roughly 1918-1930’s. It’s short and about why he quit drinking alcohol. In my opinion he hit all the key points on the subject, his logic is correct, and wrote it in a very concise way.
He does seem to miss drinking alcohol. I have to agree as a mild alcoholic he’s correct. I think he’s also correct that cannabis isn’t the great substitute society now claims it is. Shrooms I am far less sure on.
It’s not culture war today but I’ve grown a lot of respect for the prohibitionists as being basically correct. I also wanted to post this as I felt like it’s a good example of fantastic writing.
https://pmarca.substack.com/p/on-pausing-alcohol?r=h8x
Edit: should we either more explicitly allow less culture war subjects or have another thread. Sitting on an Afghanistan article I found that was good journalism but it’s not heavily culture war
This is good so I’m just going to post link to the Pelosi video. There’s no hard evidence he was a right wing intruder. I notice two things he had a drink in his hand and was partially undressed. Now if someone broke into my house late I’d probably be in my boxers. But I wouldn’t be wearing a button down shirt too; I’d be topless or in a t-shirt
I think the video will be interpreted both sides. It doesn’t prove he was paying a crazy gay prostitute to blow him but bodycam would lean in that direction instead of a red tribe terrorist.
https://www.zerohedge.com/markets/watch-paul-pelosi-hammer-attack-bodycam-video-released.
I guess bigger culture war issue is if he was just trying to get his dick sucked and the media said that was false and it was a right wing terrorist then basically confirms a lot of peoples view that they are lying to us. (Nothing wrong with trying to get your dick sucked).
Edit: there’s video of him breaking in which adds more to the intruder narrative I didn’t see previously still weird video of cops entering. Without breaking in video it looked more like a domestic.
There is something I really like in this Ygeslias article. Whatever is causing more partisan politics it’s not the economy. We’ve done well the past few years.
https://www.slowboring.com/p/how-obama-and-trump-and-biden-beat
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Macroeconomic management has been actually really good the last 15 years. Someone can argue we could have had a few million more people employed between 2010-1016, but that’s like 2% of gdp. Trump did close that gap and I’m not sure if he was brilliant or lucky but he yelled at the Fed for being too hawkish.
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I like how he led with the shale Revolution. I’ve been saying this for years. Tech gets all the fan fare but if Tech was the Jordan of the economy American energy independence over this time frame was the Scottie Pippen in creating wealth for America. I think part of the reason it doesn’t get the fanfare is because it doesn’t create 12 figure networth people. Its a constant costs business versus moat building business. Of course if the businesses are not as profitable then the surplus value went to consumers in the form of lower energy costs versus companies having high margins. Also likely led to America not needing to write giant checks to the Saudis which meant our trade deficit could fund other things and those depend more on price leading to the strong dollar. People working in constant-costs businesses (farming, manufacturing, energy) tend to vote red; people working in wide moat with ability to extract economic rents or winner take all markets tend to vote blue. Someday I should write a long article on this because I have not seen anyone write about it. But the split in voting patterns makes a lot of sense based on the economics of their business. It would even make sense to have different tax regimes for these businesses but would be impossibly hard to execute. As a driver of political views it seems as powerful as male-female splits which seems a lot more talked about.
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I think maga and the left like to cite American wealth not making it to the middle class etc. But honestly this much wealth creation can’t just be consumed by the 1% it pretty much has to flow to others. Perhaps, the middle class isn’t doing as well as we want them to be doing but the counter factual (Europe) would be poorer than what we got.
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The GDP numbers are more pronounced because we calculate things in currencies and the cited figures were when the dollar was weak. The gap has definitely shifted in favor of the US but I do think this overstates the change.
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The Tea Party seems underrated to me. They put a halt to more government spending. Less fiscal policy meant the fed could keep rates lower which basically crowded-in private investment in tech and shale and a host of things with cheap money. The current situation is the opposite of this where we increased federal spending from about 20.5% last decade to 24% now. And that’s caused a massive change in rates to get inflation close to target.
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Culture Wars seem to have little to do with economic mismanagement by either side. I think the right is correct that the fall of small towns is bad but I think that largely came from economic forces (like productivity) gains that couldn’t be prevented. And there small towns have also been hurt by the people (probably like myself) who would be logical local elites moving away.
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As much as national divorce or something always sound appealing it’s just going to make us all poorer. To break up economic integration would make our economy much more like Europe. We would run into something like Brussels that is ineffective at macro management and lose the economy of scale.
1460 SAT and rejected at Cornell has been trending on Twitter the last few days.
https://twitter.com/maiab/status/1736766407348814091?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
A lot of the takes were about him being rejected because he is white. The thing I find interesting is the condensing of the top 1-5% of scores into a smaller score range over time. My guess since the score differences look smaller it lets schools select more for other characteristics rather than pure mental horsepower. Getting a perfect score today or something that looks similar 1550 plus will not differentiate people as much.
Elon Musks apparently had a 1400 SAT. Bill Gates a 1590. Obviously they are both smart but I feel fairly confident Bill Gates is significantly higher pure IQ. With the way normal distributions operate I feel confident saying there is a big intelligence difference between the two but on the current system Musks would probably get 1580 and Gates 1600.
Digging thru SAT history there have been a few key years where the test had significant changes.
1993/1995 - some test changes but the big thing was a recentering to get scores back to about 1000 from 900. Before this update a median score at HYPS would have been 1370-1400 area. Bill Gates 1590 would have really stood out and guaranteed alone admittance to Harvard.
2005 - attempts to move the test closer to high school curriculum and eliminated analogies and quant comparisons. My guess is this made the test less of a pure intelligence test and closed gaps between highest performers and mid range.
2016 - more I guess dumbing down and trying to make the test more like what they did in high school. Multiple choice questions went from 5 options to 4 options and wrong answers no longer carried a penalty. This would make educated guessing far better.
Here is the current percentile for different scores.
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-percentiles-and-score-rankings
1500 is now solidly top 2%. 1450 is top 4%.
Here is the data from 2003
https://blog.prepscholar.com/sat-historical-percentiles-for-2005-2004-2003
1490-1600 was solidly differentiating between the top 1%.
I believe the new scoring significantly hurts the outliers at standing out from the test. And likely hurts the highest performing white, Asian, and Jewish males at getting into the most selective schools since the difference between a 1530 and 1600 SAT score just doesn’t seem that big statistically. It feels to me that studying for the new exam and learning test taking skills are more important today. Perhaps, you think this isn’t a big deal that the raw mental abilities of the top 1.2% and .3% of the population isn’t important and allowing schools to select more on other criteria is more important. My opinion for the very top programs finding the Bill Gates level intelligence matters. Men also have different intelligence bell curves (more people on the extremes) therefore on net I believe it hurts males.
I am also curious how someone who is really good at math could stand out in today’s environment. The SAT and a few good AP math scores wouldn’t seem to be enough. Do you need to have the opportunity to compete in high-end math tournaments?
Personally, the new testing I believe would have significantly effected my life. Coming from a lower class white family being able to crush the SAT gave me a way to stand out for a relatively cheap costs.
I am seeing a median SAT score of 1520 at Harvard and a median of 1440 at UMICH. My guess is back in the day that gap was much higher.
sliders1234
7mo ago
Not all humans have 135 IQ (supposedly the average here). The people joining the union just want good wages and benefits to have a family. They don’t think like us here who want routes to be rich.
(And I hate unions but I think this is a good understanding of what their people want)
Seems like it’s been a while since we had a COVID report. I am seeing reports of excess deaths continue in western countries especially mRNA vaxxed countries. Theoretically after a pandemic that targeted people with a high risks of death we should see a period of below trend deaths. Usually I use Berenson when something feels off on the vaccine; always thought he misrepresented data but I knew he would have the vaccine skepticism data and seemed to do Scott’s line of the official media (he was NYTimes) will always present you true data just misrepresent it.
So he’s showing 1 million excess deaths in the last 12 months in MRNA countries which is a lot
https://twitter.com/alexberenson/status/1622623915775336448?s=46&t=5lPC0Ua_zfSaFWePIhVHfg
And a few counties I believe parts of UK and Germany are at peak excess deaths.
Then you had the Hamlin incident which doesn’t look like the initial story sold to me.
A few rationalist made mea culpas lately for being too pro lockdown etc. I’m now questioning whether my pro-vaccine position was correct. Scott Adams gave a mea culpa he was wrong on vaccines.
https://youtube.com/embed/C41GCgyG4mI
Of course on death counts. Overdoses seem to be at a new base rate adding some excess deaths. Maybe explains 150k. Murders up too but that’s like 30k tops. And some more suicides. And COVID still exists. But we also thinned the herd of near death people which should pressure excess deaths down. Did everyone get fat sheltering in place and/or didn’t stimulate their immune system enough with all sorts of pathogens plus other health care (cancer etc) went undetected?
I think the long term mRNA vaccine bear case rests on it training your body wrong for long term immunity by flooding your system with just the spike protein. Plus the Pfizer project Veritas guy said they don’t have a good explanation for menstrual changes that shouldn’t be occuring but could indicate it’s doing something with hormones unexpected.
Now I was never pro-mandate. Got COVID before vaccination confirmed and without symptoms. Eventually got 1 jab of mRNA as a booster and it knocked me out for 36 hrs so I swore off taking more shots. But I still recommended it to older family members.
Which leads to the discussion - what is causing the excess deaths? Will the mRNA vaccines end up being viewed as a huge failure and Berenson moves from quack to Seer who saw everything everyone else was blind to. And Kyrie Irving moves from fool to semi-normal. Currently I am in the confused stage where the data seems to be not fitting with my prior beliefs and trying to figure out what is going on. Is there a more rational explanation for excess deaths than mRNA vaccines are bad.
sliders1234
7mo ago
End of day unions steal from other workers. They only have market power if there is a bottleneck. Longer term you can just hirer other people. But in a constant cost business they just drive up prices for everyone else.
Or since this is the auto industry and exposed to free trade they end up bankrupting their firm and everyone just buys a cheaper Japanese car.
sliders1234
1mo ago
Trump case out on him being an insurrectionists.
https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/23pdf/23-719_19m2.pdf
Compared to the Reddit debates and how the SC would prevent this as a non-lawyer I thought the opinion was fairly basic and simple. It seems to me that they just declared it a Feds power in Federal elections and the States don’t get a say. Personally, I did come to a belief that it was self-executing.
I think they avoided really touching on all the novel legal theories both ways going around on Reddit or twitter.
It came down to what I believe was one of my original views that letting States have any say in declaring someone an insurrectionists would be a complete clusterfuck and basically turn into state legislatures electing Presidents. Therefore they declared it a federal power.
I would call this pragmatic versus legally correct in my opinion. They avoided 100 page treatise on whether the President is an office holder.
I predicted something between 7-2 and 9-0. 9-0 seems better for the nation.
sliders1234
7mo ago
https://twitter.com/vivekgramaswamy/status/1696234841249857658?s=46&t=aQ6ajj220jubjU7-o3SuWQ
He’s now posting for physical fitness test for colleges in order to help black people get into college.
There probably is an edge for blacks at the extreme of the spectrum but I’m also a believer intelligence and athleticism aren’t anti-correlated. You would end up getting the superstar athletes who are 1100 SAT scores. But those guys don’t want to go to Harvard they rightfully view football as their payday and want to play in the SEC. The 1300 SAT score tennis player is likely already getting into Harvard.
Ramsy does have this popular mid-twit sounds good at first thought messenging.
I would be down with getting every kid to do a 6-ish minute mile. Upper class and wealthy people already are skinny. Obesity is one of those things I see in statistics but I know fairly close to zero people with the issue.
sliders1234
4mo ago
Nah man. Jews are Americans and semi-western. Geopolitical allies. As much as I hate Jews for being the leaders of anti-white bigotry at the end of the day I still have their back. The international arena does matter. An attack on their people is an attack on me. They are part of the civilized world and I will defend them from barbarism.
In an ideal world we would deport the food cart guy. He clearly doesn’t share our values.
My issue with Jews are basically mistake theory. My issue with Isis and Hamas and those organizations is conflict theory.
sliders1234
1yr ago
Think you are forgetting the amount of education of a high school grad even one going to an elite school.
Africans just haven’t figured into the big world events that high school kids don’t know. They’ve had zero influence on major ideologies, political systems, communism versus capitalism etc. The course is either going to be about soul food, Tulsa race riots, and rap music or be a crt/Marxist indoctrination.
The former I think high school kids need training in bigger things or the latter is just woke training.
Suella Bravermans Tory conference speech caught my attention as it seems to more bluntly come out anti-immigration and she specifically says don’t be afraid of being called racists. Here is the key quote with a lot of other red meat in the speech.
'The wind of change that carried my own parents across the globe in the 20th century was a mere gust compared to the hurricane that is coming.'
As far as I can tell Sunak did not slam immigration as much. He did have one-nanny state policy of banning cigarettes (which I sort of support) but was also very clear on gender ideology (a man is a man a women is a women parts). A politician would not have those two policies in America.
Back to Braverman there are a few things I find interesting. The specific phrase “hurricane” seems to have far more meaning to my long term views on Europe and immigration. Along with her using the term economic migrants. Africa’s population is the one place in the world with absolutely booming population. In the next 50 or so years the amount of people acting in their own best interest and economically migrating should absolutely boom. There will be a hurricane of migrants.
The issue for Europe and I do believe in HBD is the desire to economically migrate won’t disappear because the economic gaps between Europe and Africa won’t disappear. And while some of these people will end up being quite smart and successful there will be an addition of a large low hbd population.
The end result of this would be a South Africanization of Europe. If my view of this is correct and I do think demographics are destiny then I expect as time goes by and the negatives of mass immigration become more apparent that eventually Europe will fully adopt Bravermans views. The question is will they realize this before it’s too late. Europe already has their right wing political parties gaining support all thru Europe.
I do not see the same sort of risks for the US. South Americas population doesn’t have the same boom dynamics. And the US has shown an ability to partially integrate Hispanic communities into US society. The data I’ve seen in the past has the Hispanic community eventually reaching mean white criminality levels of the US but with far lower educational attainment. I believe we should reduce illegal immigration but I don’t see the same fears of immigration as I would have if I lived in Europe.
The other thing I find interesting is the rise of Indian voices in right wing voices. Sunak, Braverman, Ramaswamy. I have my theories on this - one is a fluke, two is a coincidence, 3 is a pattern.
Article includes video of the key quotes https://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/suella-braverman-andrew-boff-home-secretary-labour-tories-b1111176.html
Completely unrelated and not worth it’s own post this caught my eye today as I have no idea what it means. El Chapo’s son bans any fentanyl in northern Mexico https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/el-chapos-sons-allegedly-ban-fentanyl-production-northern-mexico
Could be nothing. Could indicate a CIA/Sinaloa deal.
Edit: wouldn’t be surprised if people find the fentanyl stuff more interesting. It seems this was the catalyst.
https://insightcrime.org/news/extradition-fentanyl-prohibition-mexico-tries-counterdrug-reset/
Dreher apparently wrote an article that too specifically quoted Orbans thoughts. Supposedly it’s a bigger deal in Hungary but I believe there’s a few money quotes to discuss.
On Ukraine:
“To be clear, Viktor Orban doesn’t want the West to be in a war with Russia. But he says that far too many Westerners are deluding themselves about what’s really happening—and what could happen. . . .
Orban said that the West needs to understand that Putin cannot afford to lose, and will not lose, because he’s up for re-election next year, and he cannot run as the president who lost a war. What’s more, he said, Russia cannot allow NATO to establish a presence in Ukraine. The time has long passed when Russia might have been able to conquer Ukraine, or install a friendly regime. Had Russia won a quick victory, that might have been possible, but it’s hopeless now. Therefore, said Orban, Russia’s goal is to make Ukraine an ungovernable wreck, so the West cannot claim it as a prize. At this, they have already succeeded.”
On Ukraine I 100% the west, specifically NATO and the US, is at war with Russia. I often see the criticism from critics of the war that we do not understand this point. We do. It’s just in the modern world country’s don’t officially declare war. Russia did not. Nato did not. Perhaps it gives you cover for peace or something to not say it directly, but for whatever reason war is not called war. I agree Putin probably can’t lose the war or he’s out of office and perhaps a sacrificial lamb for the next dude. Disagree Russia had any strategic fear of NATO. 100% agree a fear of EU in Russia was justified as the western cultural umbrella would spread easier which he didn’t mention but culture war I’ve always believed was far stronger than any military war. Think Putin could have won the war earlier with better planning by crushing the military in the east first. But they had bad intel. Now the west is invested so theirs no way for Putin to win so his only play I guess is to make Ukraine in the east depopulated. Perhaps that’s not losing at a high costs.
On EU:
“Someone asked the prime minister if he wanted Hungary to stay in the EU. “Definitely not!” he said, adding that Hungary has no choice, because 85 percent of its exports are within the EU.”
This is true everywhere. Our wealth is thru trade. The old meme - the right can just invent their own twitter, their own internet, their own payment system…….Everything is interconnected and dependent on others. Centralized services have better economies of scale. Hungary due to geography can only be wealthy by becoming interconnected in the EU. Some businesses more constant costs businesses do not have these factors - farming, light manufacturing, etc (mostly right dominated industries). The lefts conquered all the industries that scale or have strong network effects. And that’s where the culture war fight has come from of trying to not be dominated.
https://www.thebulwark.com/how-rod-dreher-caused-an-international-scandal-in-eastern-europe/
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