Corvos
23hr ago
I also learned recently that many Torii gates in Japan are sponsored by businesses and the Japanese characters written on their pillars are advertisements for those businesses
It does work out nicely for all involved. I think that's partly because it's more tasteful that usual advertising, though. Just the name of the sponsor carved in a neat serif font. It's more like having "R. D. Williams Esq." carved on the wall than "Coca Cola: this is my flavour".
No, obviously. [Sometimes relevant], depending on the availability of other context? Yes, obviously.
I answered the question above and you ignored it. No, it is stupid to care about whether someone's daddy was a gangbanger if they are currently pointing a gun at you. You no longer need to calculate their likely propensity for violence and aggression, because you are currently discovering it for yourself. Would have been pretty good for you if you'd had the wit to think about these things in advance but, hey, too late now. Empricism, baby.
If you have ground truth information, you don't need prediction. If you know somebody well, and you know he's a great guy, you have no reason for caring about his parentage. If you are, say, devising an immigration strategy, or whether to trust somebody you don't know well, or predicting the behaviour of a group of people, then you need lots of context and throwing some of the most predictive information it is possible to obtain on principle is stupid.
@JeSuisCharlie is right and you are a stupid peepee doodoo head
- Deutoronomy
Oh, well. That's me told, then, eh?
In the nicest possible way, you seem to be aggressively working to misunderstand the point.
Nor do I believe that you can extract more accurate answers to the latter queries from the color of one's skin
than I can from context clues
I am saying, and the point is very clear, that the colour of one's skin and other matters of parentage is a big context clue.
The only context clue worth paying attention to? No, obviously. More relevant at some times than others, depending on the availability of other context? Yes, obviously. But you seem to be so offended by the statement of an obvious fact that you reach immediately for attempted gotchas that don't make sense.
Corvos
1d ago
If you could do that, then you could just shut down China's import routes, which artillery wouldn't be particularly relevant in doing.
This seems overly optimistic about the power of sea- and air-based warfare. I'm far from the first person to note that America is fundamentally a sea power and struggles to prevent sanction-busting on land. China is a land power. I'm not saying that America couldn't make life very annoying with a sea-based blockade, but as a guy on the far left of those bell curve memes, it seems to me that war often doesn't end up going the way you think it's going to go, and confidently saying you aren't going to need something is rarely a wise move.
Same reason you warm up a lithograph to expected operating temperature before you use it. Operating conditions for sensitive equipment should be kept constant. Since the factory is built so badly they're going to get set on fire at some point, better to make sure they're on fire always and then you can compensate for it ;)
Corvos
2d ago
That question presupposes that a) those two things are orthogonal, and b) that you know the answers to the latter queries. If you don't, and if lineage correlates to interests and aggression, then who someone's father is can be eminently worth caring about.
Well, for example, going to war against Japan (an island!) involved heavy ground battle all through Burma.
Imagine, if you will, America objects to a Chinese blockade of Taiwan, or some other inciting incident. First, there is the problem of preventing the larger, closer power simply out producing you. Yes, you can bomb and so forth to some degree, but that requires resupply and avoiding AA defences and at some point I think it's likely that you're going to want to take and hold ground within China. If you can't, there is really only so much you can do. You don't necessarily get to say if you want to have a land war or not. Russia didn't want to need artillery in Ukraine.
Furthermore, not even credibly being able to do it then constrains all your options if you were ever to escalate, and both parties know it, so even capabilities that you never intend to deploy can be relevant.
Corvos
2d ago
Oh, sorry, I got confused about the timeline we were discussing. I think there's an okay chance they beat Biden, but I wouldn't bet money on it - Trump is very unpopular in many circles but also very popular in others who wouldn't have turned out for a regular Republican. I don't know how DeSantis stacks up. Mind you I'm not good at this: I'm on record as thinking that Kamala Harris would win the election.
Corvos
2d ago
Biden was incredibly unpopular because he belonged in a memory care facility.
I think you are over-indexing on your reddish environment and hindsight. I know lots of people who voted Biden amongst the Americans of my acquaintance: not one had doubts about his age or his mind, they just wanted to go back to talking about taxes and medicare instead of immigration and culture. ("Normal politics" in other words.)
Understood. For clarity, to me the statement
"whatever he died of, good riddance"
with response to a career criminal doesn't seem like celebration, just a statement of the obvious. If I found out that Jimmy Savile had died under suspicious circumstances, I wouldn't go around saying 'how wonderful! the child-rapist is down in hell where he belongs!' but an internal 'good riddance, the world is better without him' would seem completely appropriate.
To me, this response isn't appropriate to the death of a genuine innocent, no matter how much I dislike them. My reaction if Jeremy Corbyn or Diane Abbott (both left-wing politicians I dislike intensely) were to die would not be on the same level as my response to the death of a career criminal. I might find myself feeling some vindication or even pleasure, I'm only human, but I wouldn't say it out loud and I would feel bad about it.
I think there are huge swathes of the left that don't feel the same way. A hugely popular left-wing position - not saying it's yours - seems to broadly be that anyone actively working to advance right-wing positions is effectively on the same level as (or far below) something like George Floyd, and I reject that and find it abhorrent.
If Kirk had been struck by lightning, the left would have celebrated in much the same way. Would you then accuse "the left, broadly" of having electrocuted him? Are all right-wingers whose take on George Floyd was a sneering "whatever he died of, good riddance" to be blamed for his murder?
No. But this to me symbolises one of the reasons the Left and the Right seem to talk past each other. The idea that people can see any equivalence between Charlie Kirk the family man & debater, and George Floyd is obscene and incomprehensible to me. George Floyd, the home invader. George Floyd, the man who put a shotgun pistol to a pregnant woman's belly. George Floyd, the man who spent five years in jail for aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon, the man who died while being arrested for trying to pass off counterfeit currency, out of his skull on fentanyl.
I agree completely that people shouldn't die while being arrested / be murdered by the police, and that investigation and punishment of the police officer was appropriate. I agree that it's unseemly to celebrate people's death no matter who they were and what they'd done. But the fact remains that Charlie Kirk was an innocent man and George Floyd was scum. To me, the fact that the Left considers actively celebrating the death of a man for the crime of being right wing in public to be remotely comparable to not caring that a career criminal is dead demonstrates a vast and hideous chasm of moral divergence.
EDIT:
Claims that George Floyd pointed a gun at a pregnant woman during a 2007 robbery are false; court records show no evidence that the victim was pregnant (emphasis mine)
Oh goodie! Thank you, Politifact. I was worried there for a minute that something bad had happened, you know?
EDIT EDIT: what is known is that the six men with Floyd overpowered a single woman and beat her in the "head and side areas" to make her shut up so they could rob her in peace, Floyd's pistol to her abdomen apparently not having brought the message home: https://www.factcheck.org/2020/06/meme-spreads-wrong-photo-details-in-floyd-criminal-case/
Corvos
3d ago
Porn is bad for men's minds and leading them astray, but prudishness is the enemy of art, so only women receiving Arts Council funding should be able to depict nudity or explicit acts.
Corvos
4d ago
It means ethnically British. You know, the people who lived in Britain for a thousand years. Who are more like each other than they are like anything else. Those guys. Importantly, it does not mean the 6 million EU citizens who applied for citizenship post-Brexit and the breakup of free movement, who are already getting on to 10% on their own.
In any case, thanks for breaking down the numbers.
Corvos
4d ago
The genetic distance between Irish and Western English is minimal, and the distance between Irish and English as a whole is not much more (thrown off by more Viking and French ancestry in Eastern England). The Irish are more like the English than they are like any other European nation, and are considerably more like each other than, say, the Spanish and the Portuguese who aren't even on separate islands.
| Population | Ireland | England | France | Germany | Poland |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Ireland | — | 0.48 | 1.32 | 1.67 | 2.65 |
| England | 0.48 | — | 0.63 | 0.62 | 1.74 |
| France | 1.32 | 0.63 | — | 0.91 | 2.29 |
| Germany | 1.67 | 0.62 | 0.91 | — | 1.27 |
| Poland | 2.65 | 1.74 | 2.29 | 1.27 | — |
Table shows FST (genetic distance) x 1000.
I doubt this survey carefully filtered out those who are not ethnically British. So '5% of native British change their minds about Britishness, the 15% of society that is now immigrants say 'I iz BRITISH nigga, fuck yo racist ass, think you own this island'. Not exactly persuasive.
Corvos
4d ago
Come on, this is silly. There are two islands that make up ‘Great Britain’. Until very recently almost everyone on those islands were descended from the peoples of those islands, the newest of whom came here one thousand years ago. That is ‘British’.
These peoples are not French. They are not German (insert obligatory joke about the Royal Family, which proves people do notice them not being British even if it’s mostly pointed out in good fun). They are not Spanish. Nor Indian, African, or Asian. They are British.
Corvos
4d ago
It’s the toaster-fucker problem again. I think it’s well established that parents sometimes feel dark impulses towards their children: my friend had a child in the very conservative Japan and one of the pieces of official advice the prep classes emphasise most is, ‘no matter how annoying it is or how angry you get, DON’T SHAKE THE BABY’.
In common society this is considered unfortunate and shameful, to be explained quietly only to the relevant parties and not to be said in public. Most certainly not in front of your now-grown children!
But now the internet is making what was quietly and implicitly known into something explicit. Parents are going ‘wait, you wanted to literally kill your children too?’ and experiencing this as catharsis instead of mutual shame. America’s confessional culture and no-woman-is-ever-at-fault-unless-she’s-trad feminism is then turbo-boosting this phenomenon.
Corvos
5d ago
I never read ‘And Then There Were Nine’ but isn’t the killer a violent deluded maniac? Whereas the killer in the Orient Express is a symmetric
Corvos
5d ago
Said friend is 40 years too old for that reference. To him it just sounds like cool Victoriana, like calling a time travel device the Chronotron.
Corvos
5d ago
We love the vigilante as a romantic hero, but his story always ends in tragic sacrifice
I would say that's a very culturally contingent reading. How many Batman comics end up with Bruce Wayne asking to be arrested? What about the murderer in the Christie's Orient Express? At the end of the Count of Monte Christo
Corvos
5d ago
That's not what he said. His argument is that they were trying to indoctrinate people against white racism and the indoctrination escaped containment over the years and ended up becoming indoctrination against whiteness.
Corvos
5d ago
That's not xenophobia, it's cultural counter-signalling.
Essentially it's conveying contempt of and non-fraternity with the would-be cosmopolitans who announce 'it's pronounced Paree' as if they've discovered the true path to enlightenment and look at you like a clod-hopping peasant if you use the conventional name and pronounciation from your own language. The genuine cosmopolitans already know and actively counter-signal because they don't want to look like prats. The non-travellers don't care.
Then I apologise for the sarcasm. I admit I personally distrust such questions as a debate tool: in my opinion they only make sense from the questioner's viewpoint, so they end up coming across as 'have you stopped beating your wife, yes or no, don't evade the question' even when that is not intended.
What I suspect is actually happening is that people are factoring in reversion to the mean. If a girl's family are all obviously aggressive and mentally-ill, you should think very hard about having children with her even if you've known her long enough to know that she is genuinely darling because genetically the odds are good it won't turn out well.
The same to my mind applies to asylum seekers. Then you're dealing with complex group genetics but you still have to weigh the likelihood that a genuinely great guy might end up replicating the kinds of people and culture that they left to escape.
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