domain:alexberenson.substack.com
Yeah, but gay rights activists are angry that MSM can’t donate blood, because they feel it stigmatizes being gay.
But I agree with you, people valuing defeating stigma more than protecting people from serious diseases is a really bad thing. I think the gay community has long been in denial about how seriously HIV/AIDS created rather than reflected stigma against gay men, and my understanding is it became something of a rite of passage back in the day — “I’m pozzed, so I no longer need to worry about it.”
BahRamYou
24m ago
I just watched "Wheel of Time" and it's so, so bad in that regard.
Like, it's a major part of the worldbuilding that the world is fragmented. Every country has its own description and way of speaking. You can easily tell where someone is from. The main character, especially, grew up in a super isolated small town, and everyone looks at him weird because he has red hair. It's very obvious that his mother was an "outlander" as they call it. Big plot hook mystery what happened there.
Meanwhile that same town has two black women and... no one bats an eye? No one asks questions? Huh, OK. And of course they just happen to be the two women with the most power in the town. In fact, their role has been cranked up even larger than it was in the source material, stealing a lot of important scenes away from the main character.
The same pattern seems to repeat endlessly, with every single person of authority made to be a black woman, amping up their power and authority, and no one seems to question how this came to be. It's somehow both a post-racial utopia where noone mentions race, but also one with extremely clear racial boundaries.
It actually makes things pretty confusing. To be fair, it's a long book series with way too many characters, so I can appreciate how they have to cut a lot to make it work for television. But they put so much emphasis on the black characters that the white characters are left kind of pointless, with nothing to do. They just take up space on screen and make it harder to remember everyone's names.
ABigGuy4U
31m ago
I’m not saying there shouldn’t be any roles for Extraterrestrial-American actresses. I’m just saying these roles should be where historically and dramatically appropriate. Playing a genetically engineered creature in Morgan? Yes that’s a perfectly reasonable role for an ayy. Queen’s Gambit? It’s a bit of a reach, there were no ayylmao chess grandmasters back then. But given how much covert extraterrestrial involvement there was in the Cold War it doesn’t seem too ridiculous. But we don’t need to go cramming an ayy into a movie set in Scandinavia in the 11th century. It’s intentional human-erasure. And they clearly take special glee in casting her in romantic relationships with Earthmen. It’s about as subtle as a pornography video from PROBED .com.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
39m ago
pied piper of Hamelin
To be honest, I don't recall the details of the actual tale. I was just using the phrase in its usual metaphorical sense - I just double checked Wikipedia, about this, and it suggested that "The phrase "pied piper" has become a metaphor for a person who attracts a following through charisma or false promises.".
Skimming the Wikipedia page for this makes the tale, and its history, sound pretty interesting in its own right, but I don't have much to add to that.
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
45m ago
I'm talking exclusively about peak capabilities with intense training. If you're a couch potato till 25 and only later start exercising seriously, you can certainly do much better. Conversely, if you're already physically maxing yourself out, then you won't be able to get any better, and will likely notice decline. Someone claimed this can be further broken down into strength and endurance, which I'll have to check out later.
anti_dan
48m ago
No, it’s not. It’s not the reason we bailed on Reddit, either.
HOLD ON NOW! Anti-white racism was certainly a large contributing factor why reddit was no longer a hospitable place.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
53m ago
Side note:
Mike Tyson is the greatest SPORTS champion who ever lived ... probably. But we will never know for sure.
After Cus D'Amato died and the Don King organization brain fucked a literal homeless kid from New York, it derailed Tyson's career with no possibility for a comeback in boxing (although his podcast / movie / pot farm career seems to have been, and remained, quite lucrative).
He was a physical freak who also had an insane natural, prodigal understanding of boxing itself. If you watch the 80s videos when he's still pretty much a teenager, his movement is not only fast but anticipatory in ways that usually only come with experience. He sets up sequences before launching them - which is made all the more unstoppable by the fact that his punching power is generally beyond measure.
I've been contemplating the idea of writing a long effortpost on "Did Money Actually Ruin Sports?" and Tyson and boxing would be at the center of it rather than the usual suspects of the Big Four (Football, Basketball, Baseball, Hockey). The primary reason for that is that, with a longer lived Cus D'Amato and the blocking out of Don King et al., I think Tyson would be the absolute consensus pick for "Greatest American Athlete" of all time.
Yes, the guy who founded the Nazi planet in that episode explicitly believed that Nazi Germany was an extremely well-organised society. He says that it was the "most efficient state Earth ever knew". He thought that he could save this society by giving it a social model that had all the benefits of Nazi organisation and cohension while stripping out the evil goals.
This is not, I believe, a historiography that any competent modern historian would agree with. The Third Reich was quite inefficient in many ways, and frequently made poor decisions. Where the message of 'Patterns of Force' is something like "you can't separate the good from the bad, and the advantages of Nazism cannot outweigh its disadvantages", I think the message you'd get from a modern historian would be that Nazism is just bad overall.
I would normally say that it's possible John Gill is just meant to be wrong, IC, and his belief about the efficiencies of Nazism are wrong, but the episode does seem to take his side. The problem with Ekos is not that Nazism is ineffective; it's that Nazism is evil. Gill's failure was thinking he could remove the evil, not in thinking that Nazism is effective. Spock himself agrees with Gill's first judgement:
KIRK: Gill. Gill, why did you abandon your mission? Why did you interfere with this culture?
GILL: Planet fragmented. Divided. Took lesson from Earth history.
KIRK: But why Nazi Germany? You studied history. You knew what the Nazis were.
GILL: Most efficient state Earth ever knew.
SPOCK: Quite true, Captain. That tiny country, beaten, bankrupt, defeated, rose in a few years to stand only one step away from global domination.
KIRK: But it was brutal, perverted, had to be destroyed at a terrible cost. Why that example?
SPOCK: Perhaps Gill felt that such a state, run benignly, could accomplish its efficiency without sadism.
And it delivers the moral pretty blatantly at the end:
SPOCK: Captain, I never will understand humans. How could a man as brilliant, a mind as logical as John Gill's, have made such a fatal error?
KIRK: He drew the wrong conclusion from history. The problem with the Nazis wasn't simply that their leaders were evil, psychotic men. They were, but the main problem, I think, was the leader principle.
MCCOY: What he's saying, Spock, is that a man who holds that much power, even with the best intentions, just can't resist the urge to play God.
SPOCK: Thank you, Doctor. I was able to gather the meaning.
MCCOY: It also proves another Earth saying. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Darn clever, these Earthmen, wouldn't you say?
SPOCK: Yes. Earthmen like Ramses, Alexander, Caesar, Napoleon, Hitler, Lee Kuan. Your whole Earth history is made up of men seeking absolute power.
MCCOY: Spock, you obviously don't understand.
SPOCK: Obviously, Doctor, you fail to accept.
KIRK: Gentlemen. Gentlemen, we've just been through one civil war. Let's not start another.
jake
1hr ago
The others are right, chess at its highest level doesn't feed into anything but itself. If your daughter had that rare acumen and you wanted to support her and she made WGM, chess would be her work and her life. I think you might wonder if this would be so bad. WFM Anna Cramling is the daughter of WGM Pia Cramling and GM Juan Manuel Bellón López. There's this video of her watching as her mother plays an amateur at a chess bar in Paris, and it's idyllic. Titled chess players also generally come from moneyed families; there are worse people to fall into crowd with.
But there are examples of highly successful non-career chess players who were good at it, namely Stanley Kubrick and Peter Thiel. I'm not attributing, obviously it's that the traits that made Kubrick a superb filmmaker as an adult, saw him interested and successful in chess as an adolescent, same with Thiel. Maybe chess is the nascent flame of something much brighter in her future, why not encourage it?
If you want to brush up yourself, IM Jeremy Silman wrote the best general book: How to Reassess Your Chess
pigeonburger
1hr ago
Honestly, Japan, India and Australia are pretty much the only ones whose answer matters, having a navy in the general area.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1hr ago
Spectating, voyeurism is bad, robs you of life, time.
anti_dan
1hr ago
They dont need to be all powerful, they were in power. While in power they used every bullet they could, and even fabricated evidence to use against Trump and invented novel legal theories to try and nail him. All that tilting at windmills could have been avoided if they had a video of him having sex with a 15 year old prostitute.
phailyoor
1hr ago
Yet you still won't provide a link to the tweet or even make the slightest attempt to justify your interpretation.
A_Wee_Hearts_Toll
1hr ago
pied piper of Hamelin
What's the moral of the tale, to you? (This is a 20 year mystery for me.)
Blueberry
1hr ago
they couldn't be sure if the blood donated from gay people at the time could have infected people with HIV so he ordered the blood thrown out
Wait, what? This is insane revisionism, the bloody scandal was in the other direction!
https://www.dw.com/en/infected-blood-scandal-a-horrifying-global-disaster/a-70093762
Hundreds of thousands of people got HIV and/or hepatitis via infected blood transfusions over the past decades, and people are still dying.
"Any country that bought contaminated blood from the US in the 1980s was affected," said Wherry.
In Canada, 2,000 people contracted HIV and 60,000 people developed hepatitis C. … in France, more than 4,000 people contracted HIV.
In Germany, a scandal erupted in 1993 after government officials tried to cover up reports of HIV/AIDS in people given infected blood. Over 400 people died, and a third of the country's hemophiliacs (2,000 people at the time) were infected with HIV.
China also saw HIV infections from contaminated blood bought and sold internally. An estimated 300,000 people were infected with HIV through blood selling-schemes in the 1990s.
People are still being infected with diseases by contaminated blood products. In 2016, more than 2,000 people in India contracted HIV from contaminated blood transfusions
Yes you can screen blood, but this was only developed in the mid 80s and had high failure rate, for example it detected antigens which are made by the body after months of infection, so a freshly infected could still contaminate the blood supply.
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
1hr ago
Is Donald Trump an inner city kid who got into trouble, the way you're blaming society for his crimes?
Seriously, bro, what are you doing here? You could have just ignored this thread if it didn't interest you, if you think the whole Epstein obsession is tinfoil-hat stuff. Instead you've jumped in to say "It doesn't matter that Donald Trump is lying about a bunch of stuff because, you know, there was this one thing that happened in a different country on the other side of the ocean, and as a result you're not allowed to care about anything else until I say you can" followed up with "actually Donald Trump didn't do anything wrong because it was society that was set up the wrong way or all this never would have happened."
WandererintheWilderness
2hr ago
Oh, there's potential, but it's not going to scratch that whodunnit itch. It's something else.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
2hr ago
Most of the homicides are boring and obvious but some of them are really funny because of how dumb the criminals are. 'The gun just happened to go off'. They did their drug deal under CCTV. Or the dumb, crass nicknames they have on 'encrypted' messaging for drug importation. Or how they brag about killing this guy in their chat group. Or how they realize only when prompted by a judge that while they're trying to cheat on tax they're only making it worse for themselves, so they completely reverse their story.
Dumb people lying badly is funny and makes the audience feel superior. I'm not a good storyteller and don't remember too much of what I've heard but there's great potential.
AvocadoPanic
2hr ago
That wasn't a great area when I was young. The Florin mall was always a bit iffy. That Costco is 2.6 miles from where this happened in 1991 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Sacramento_hostage_crisis
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
2hr ago
So obviously (well you didn't link the tweet because of course not) the author of the tweet meant that, not meant any actual agreement with the libs. I can't see any other way to interpret this statement at all.
Your interpretation is not correct.
flitter
3hr ago
Similarly I suspect it's good for a kid to have something that they are better than adults at, for giving a sense of "being adult like".
They can play in competition at an adult level without being condescended in skill. And in theory learn how to gracefully win as well.
TitaniumButterfly
3hr ago
Yes! But I wanted to double-check for you and it was this one. 7981 E Stockton Blvd, Sacramento, CA 95823
Or it could be both? It could be that the media, journalists and a large swath of the rest of society torched the integrity and trust in reliable institutions and now in their absence cranks have taken over.
Those two kind of are complementary theories.
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