Tophattingson
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User ID: 1078
Tophattingson
19d ago
Even though corruption will always exist to some degree, it's much better to live in a society where it's at least not blatant and generally seen as a bad thing that should be dealt with, as opposed to a country like Russia where it broadly runs rampant.
It depends. In the UK, I would vastly prefer the blatant corruption of money under the table to get construction contracts done over the stealth corruption of planning permission restrictions in favour of incumbent property-owning rentseekers.
I see, per capita deaths.
If considering how a country might react to being attacked, scaling up the attack to match the scale of the country is useful for understanding effects. In New York after 9/11, it was often understood that everyone knew someone who knew someone who at least worked in the towers, if not was killed. In Israel, that instead applies to the entire country, something that might be the case in the US if an attack lead to the deaths of ~40,000 people.
You don’t see anything wrong with Israel killing, at minimum, 36,400,000 “Chinese civilians” worth of Gazans?
The government of Gaza already maximally wants to kill Israelis. We don't need to debate the hypothetical of how their opinions might change if they took casualties equivalent to 36,400,000 Chinese civilians. Their answer to whether they want to wage unrestricted warfare against Israel on October 6 2023 is "yes" and their answer to that question on 24 May 2025 remains "yes".
In WW2, the US was quite happy to kill 2-3 million Japanese in retaliation for Japan killing 2,400 at Pearl Harbour. Japan could have suffered a lot less casualties by choosing to surrender on December 8, but decided instead to fight a war and lose.
They are willing to surrender, but Israel refused to accept conditions.
An unconditional surrender is always an option.
Tophattingson
21d ago
Why do you think ChatGPT would be able to accurately calculate that value?
Tophattingson
21d ago
The arrangement of politics in Australia is different and so support of political violence usually takes the form of supporting political violence by the state against dissidents. Why would the Australian blue tribe want to take matters into their own hands when the police will do it for them?
Tophattingson
21d ago
In an alternative universe where Al Qaeda was the government of Iraq, and Iraq carried out an attack on the US that killed ~40,000 people (same proportion of population) then yes, the US would be quite willing to flatten Iraq. And if, in this alternative timeline, Iraq chose not to surrender even after an overwhelming military defeat, the US would continue the flattening until the surrendering improves.
Tophattingson
21d ago
The threshold of herd immunity and endemicity is the same. R=1.
Tophattingson
21d ago
Sweden's population is almost 90% urban. It is just not the case that most Swedes live in rural areas.
Tophattingson
23d ago
Sweden's population density is comparable to the UK's population density if you treat the British Antarctic Territory as actually belonging to the UK. In an alternative timeline where the UK annexed the British Antarctic Territory in 2019, do you think this will have reduced the transition rate of COVID?
Sweden, Finland and Norway owning a bunch of tundra does not affect the population density that the average person experiences. That tundra cannot perform spooky action at a distance and affect what happens in Stockholm.
Tophattingson
23d ago
We do not (except perhaps to specific extinct strains, which is mostly practically irrelevant). Herd immunity is a state in which spread has stopped because there are enough immune individuals that an infection chain cannot be sustained within the herd.
By this definition herd immunity is any time covid infections are declining, which means it cannot be sustained. In practice, like flu and other coronaviruses, covid will likely alternate between herd immunity and very slightly below the threshold for herd immunity in perpetuity.
Tophattingson
23d ago
It's possible that many places achieved a transient herd immunity among the smaller pool of people who were susceptible to covid . Only about half of immune naive people seem to be vulnerable at any given time. which makes the herd immunity threshold low enough that it's plausible countries in Western Europe and the US hit it during the spring 2020 wave. Note, hit it regardless of whether they locked down or not. It's in my opinion the best explanation for why countries with severe lockdowns and countries without, such as UK and Sweden, achieved essentially identical outcomes. Lockdowns did nothing, they both hit herd immunity thresholds regardless, and the timing of lockdowns coinciding with that in the UK was only Regression fallacy.
Then there's Peru, which had so many deaths in 2020, despite extreme restrictions, that it implies >100% of the population should have had covid.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
I am far too used to people using the parachute idea as justification to not do RCTs in places where an RCT would clearly be best practice. Most recently, involving COVID restrictions, which are assumed to work because "physics" or whatever but never get tested. We don't apply such flimsy reasoning elsewhere. Designer drugs have to go through trials despite being physics telling you they should work because they interact with the target molecule in models. If you can do an RCT, and choose not to, you better have a good reason to do so, and parachutes isn't a good enough reason.
Early parachute designs were actually tested. Nobody took the claims of their inventors at face value, they wanted evidence that they work, so their inventors tested them either personally or with objects/animals. That's why we don't need additional RCTs for the concept of parachutes, even though you could do one using animals. If they were invented for the first time tomorrow, you'd probably want to do something like an RCT:
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Take 20 crash test dummies.
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Randomly assign 10 to use the parachute, and 10 to not.
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Simulate identical falls for all 20.
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Hand the dummies to a blinded team of engineers who assess damage
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Compare the results statistically to see if the safety intervention reduced injuries
Tophattingson
2mo ago
There are definitely high-profile Americans who are both Democrats and frequently regarded as racist. Mostly involving antisemitism. To name one example, Hasan Piker.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
if you think that a travel ban for some small number of people for a year and a half will have had more of a chilling effect than all of the news hysteria about the recent ICE detainments then you aren't living in reality.
Not living in reality? Okay. How much are you willing to bet that you are living in reality, and I am not? Let's set the terms to whether 2025 will have less visitors to the US than an average of 2021-2023. If you disagree with those terms for not decoupling a chilling effect from broader trends, then explain how you intend to decouple both effects to measure them otherwise and, if I think the method is viable, we can bet on those instead.
Sure. Still leaves me more likely to visit the US under a Trump administration than Biden, since the latter still came with extended periods of time where it's illegal for me to visit when I might want to. A lot of people, including me, want to visit a country at a specific date, for a specific thing, not just plan to do so at any time including years later. If I want to visit in 2022 but can't, the most likely outcome isn't that I'll delay it until June 2023, it's that this visit will just never happen.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
No, you misunderstand. It's already been adjusted because the raw figures of how many people they surveyed aren't included.
The survey asked X black people, of which 0.41X said they viewed him favourably.
The survey asked Y white people, of which 0.15Y said they viewed him favourably.
When you adjust for population, by dividing by X and Y respectively, you get 41% and 15%, so minority youths are more pro-Andrew Tate.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Yeah, if I had a time machine I could use to send past me information about when Biden is going to randomly shut the borders to me, I could go in September 2021. But I don't have one.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
Black and Asian people will be overrepresented regardless of the population distribution, because of those surveyed, a greater percent viewed him positively. As for whether there's still a white majority or plurality among those who view him positively, that's what I mean by I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell.
is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?
Both.
Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification.
Mindgeek (i.e pornhub) doesn't oppose age verification for pornography. They just oppose that they've not been given a lucrative monopoly on age verification via a law perfectly designed to match the system they've already made for it. It happens to be strategically useful to blame this on Rethuglicans to rile up Democrats in opposition, but there's no political commitment here.
A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.
The problem is, the cultural divide isn't genuinely over pornography. It's over censorship of the internet in general, because, rightly or wrongly, the current and prior British government, and their client media, view free expression online as a major threat to their continued rule. They are obsessed with introducing laws to ban it, and will reach for any tool available as a justification to do so. Porn is on the weapon rack, so it gets used. It would be trivial enough for governments to introduce legislation specifically banning porn. In practice, it only tangentially hits porn as part of laws that fire broadsides at online dissidents, who are the true target. Anti-porn activists get rolled out in situations where, before, they'd have been shut out as too religious and too conservative, because they are temporarily useful.
It would be illegal to operate this website in the UK post the Online Safety Act, for example, because it doesn't meet Ofcom's takedown requirements for content our government doesn't like.
Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?
The UK public simultaneously doesn't specifically oppose porn, but loves randomly banning everything. A significant percentage of people will support permanent bans on all kinds of activities for no discernible reason.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".
The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).
Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American)
Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.
Tophattingson
2mo ago
To add my anecdote to this, I am vastly more likely to come to the states under the Trump administration. This is because the Biden administration made it illegal for me to visit as a non-citizen non-immigrant from October 2021 to May 2023 via Presidential Proclamation 10294.
The reason this didn't negatively affect US international relations should be pretty obvious. Our home countries also wanted to discriminate against us, so why would they get upset at the US joining in on the hate?
Musk got on the political left's shitlist during COVID. I believe he was irrecoverably poisoned on the left when he expressed interest in hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment and complained about labor restrictions in California right as he saved Tesla from bankruptcy.
I believe it was specifically the factory closures that did it, because Musk would have seen it as a potential death sentence for his businesses if it carried on. Before this, blue tribe tended to act in ways that were either neutral or positive for his business. That suddenly flipped to extremely negative.
But this is always going to be the elephant in the room for any Trump/Musk is doing a wrecking ball argument. Progressives just drove a wrecking ball that was at least an order of magnitude worse through society, which can justify a pretty big wrecking ball in response if that prevents it from happening again. Or halts it, even. The US avoided some of the worst of it but parts of Europe were still doing severe restrictions in late 2021, after the vaccine rollout, and thus long past any logical stopping point. Worst case scenario for the minimally Trumpy world that Hanania wants is that we're still doing them in 2025.
And to reiterate the below comment, the result is that I’m also okay with pretty much anything if it means driving out whatever political faction we should call this thing.
The mirror image of this article, alleging insane beliefs by key liberal figure, could easily be written by a social conservative. I am not one, but it's quite easy for me to imagine a version of this which swaps out Zelensky's approval rating for e.g. beliefs on trans people, which many social conservatives would regard as "incapable of separating truth [that men are men and women are women] from fiction". I don't, so I will let someone else write the actual mirror image article if they want to. Regardless, at a minimum I think most would agree that regardless of right or wrong, beliefs about trans people are more politically profound and important than incorrectly claiming low approval ratings for a specific figure. This is the entire problem with Hanania's current routine. From the perspective of conservatism, there's plenty of low human capital liberalism, they just have the added benefit of sometimes getting to smuggle it through academia.
Tophattingson
3mo ago
theoretically nation-agnostic
I vaguely recall an ISDS case I can't put a name to where Canada banned some chemical ostensibly on environmental or health grounds, but in practice because this chemical was produced by and imported from the US, and the government wanted to favour domestic manufacturers who produced something similar but not identical which was not covered by the ban.
This obviously raises the question of why US tech companies don't just ISDS everything. And I suspect the answer is that since American-style free speech is a threat to the ruling parties of many countries, rather than just the bottom line of a few specific corrupt figures, that Canada would not permit itself to lose an ISDS case against e.g. facebook.
On the other hand there are other parts of the gaming industry where the big breakthrough came from taking something relatively niche and low-budget and dumping huge amounts of money into it. To name two examples, Monster Hunter was fairly sizable as a franchise but was ticking over on PS2-era budgets by developing primarily for handhelds, then decided to go AAA for World and massively succeeded. Genshin Impact arrived in what was previously a low-budget Gacha gaming landscape and singlehandedly reshaped it, with a pricetag of $100m upfront and estimated $200m more a year since.
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