domain:forecasting.substack.com
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4m ago
I heard about this on the news, but the only angle I got was "we gotta stop this by taking away the guns". No mention that the shooter was trans, though that indeed appears to be true.
AnonymousActuary
7m ago
Some what shocked there has not been a top level post about the Annunciation School Shooting yet given the obvious culture war angles and parallels to the Covenant School shooting of a few years back (religious school, trans shooter - though FtM vs MtF).
https://www.cnn.com/us/live-news/annunciation-catholic-school-minneapolis-shooting-08-27-25
I had missed that the Covenant shooter was determined to have not acted out due to any real culture war stuff, but just due to your generic mass shooter mental illness + desire to be remembered cocktail.
I would guess that throwing in the Culture War angle makes it a lot more likely that the shooter's name and face get passed around, though in this case seems like he was just crazy more so than any particular niche of the political compass.
Presumably gun control will be in the news again a bit.
Rov_Scam
8m ago
The modern-day equivalent would probably be those guys who carry a Leatherman around in a belt clip. It's not the kind of thing that would draw much attention at all, and if it did even the most anti-gun person would probably assume that the guy was an outdoorsman or often made a bunch of minor repairs, not that he was open-carrying a weapon.
The difference between smh and the telegram chuds he scoffs at is that the misinformation printed on those telegram channels is written by someone who actually believes it....
Putting aside how significant that difference is, am I to grant more latitude to flat earther propaganda because they hold actual beliefs when journalists, you say, do not?
The information environment sucks. Traditional and nu-media professionals all contribute to the state of that, sure. I don't care for the meme right's slop factory products or The Guardian's. All I can do is complain about it, so I have and will continue to.
They will omit details, use careful wording ("no evidence to substantiate claims") and construct a story that serves their interests first and foremost.
I'm not comparing chuds to journalists or saying one is more honest or has better epistemics as a category. I don't particularly trust journalists as a general rule. Scott's assessment is correct, but of course he is seemingly too kind-- blind to the implications. Journalistic failures are not pertinent to how much I am inclined to tolerate wishful bullshit of others.
I'll even add that 'telegram chuds' isn't charitable. It's a lot of different flavors of online right wing culture that are chomping at the bit to slurp down the outrage.
My suggestion is to build a gallows. Whoever can be scapegoated as the highest government official who failed with knowledge of grooming gangs at the time has to go. Yes, retroactively. They probably can't resentence the perps, so they need to make a big show of another new convicted Asian guy. Sucks for him, but the people demand blood.
Also lol at the idea distrusting the authorities is the modern equivalent of a witch hunt. Was it Matthew Hopkins Witchfinder Footsoldier? Who ran the Spanish inquisition again?
Scrutinizing authority comes in a lot of flavors. Not all of them are good, pro-social, or justified.
But it would be nice if the people who brag about epistemic humility actually employed it.
I am not entrenched in some position. I thought I was pretty clearly arguing that we don't know shit, so you shouldn't have that opinion, because it is not founded. I gave my opinion on what it looks like to me with the limited information we have. I am more than happy to vacate my position of ignorance for a better informed one. I'm probably not going to get that information from the outrage factory.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
15m ago
It’s perfectly reasonable to film preteens in public if they’re acting like assholes, or if you get into a confrontation with them and they attempt to accuse you of trying to molest them.
RenOS
something is wrong
15m ago
Interesting. Probably it's my academic background, which is already very female-biased and pretty much requires one to be comfortable with travelling, including outright living in other countries. It seems I don't really register 64% women as an imbalance (even though it obviously logically is), since that's in line with my daily experiences (arguably, it's on the low end; When I started my degree, we were around 10 guys for 30 women, which after the first-year crash of nearly 50% reduced to around 4 guys for a little less than 20 women. Even now, I work almost exclusively in collaborations with women [which is intentional, since it opens up a lot of funding for me indirectly that I otherwise do not have access to]).
I guess it makes sense in that if I think back to my hometown, it wasn't very uncommon for older men to consider travelling a frivolous waste of money, while the older women seemed more accepting of the idea (though they still didn't travel without their husbands). Norms change, and the same kind of men still considers it a waste of money, but the women then just go travel anyway, I suppose?
It doesn't really fit with the school friends I kept in touch with, but those unsurprisingly were also pre-filtered for more open-minded personalities.
stuckinbathroom
19m ago
no more than Mexicans born in the US makes them Americans
Aye, that one’s a consequence of the Magic Document
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
22m ago
Drawing a sword is equivalent to brandishing, which AFAIK is illegal essentially everywhere unless you are in a situation where pulling the trigger would be permissible self-defence.
RobertLiguori
23m ago
Then I must invite you to explain what form of evidence might, in theory, sway you.
Hmm. Recorded footage from someone else, verified to not be selectively edited, showing initial misbehavior from Team Dual-Wield and no prior interest from Bulgarian Man would be strong support. If the based wing of the Internet is unable to dig up any history of deceptive or antisocial acts from Bulgarian, that would also be weaker evidence in favor.
Witches were real, at least in the sense that there were women in medieval Europe who believed that they possessed supernatural powers acquired by heretical means.
With respect, the fuck is this? People believing themselves to be Napoleon or Jesus or fucking married to Professor Snape on the astral plane do not mean that any of those things are real. The systematic, extended, and horrific abuse of young women and girls in Great Britain by aliens, which was explicitly and deliberately covered up and minimized by the government and media, was a real thing that happened to real people, in spite of people claiming it didn't happen. Conversely, no one in Europe had social or sexual relations with Lucifer the Archenemy, uses hexes to spoil crops or kill livestock, spied on their neighbors through the eyes of a familiar spirit, or flew through the air on a broomstick.
Describing something as a witch hunt is evoking a community turning on someone for committing crimes it is impossible for them to have committed, because magic (and evil magic in particular) is not real. The rape of young girls by foreigners is real, was ongoing for a very long time, and was covered up by people who used every rhetorical deceit in their power to obfuscate, deny, or simply attack people who spoke otherwise. It is, in short, a bad stylistic choice to move my priors in this case, especially when paired with an argument from numbers which seems to be contradicted by another grooming gang incident in the same city dug up by my sibling posters.
If you hear about a sexual assault case in Iceland, you probably shouldn't assume the perpetrator was brown. Why shouldn't I? I know that crimes are not equally distributed by race and sex; I know that in America, African-Americans and Hispanics commit violent crimes in excess of the White population per capita (https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-the-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-43), and that the numbers are so swayed that a strict majority of murders are committed by a 12% of browns; I know that murders tend to be investigated in more depth because there is almost always a body laying around, and I know that specifically in Great Britain it is the observed policy of police and government to minimze the crimes of brown perpetrators, especially against the vulnerable White underclass, and double-especially when it's sex crimes and young underclass girls.
Given all this, why should we assume that a random sexual assault case was done by some type of brown, barring specific information otherwise? If we heard that there was a sexual assault in a convent, whose population was 19 female nuns with no criminal record and one escaped sex criminal with a dozen convictions for sexual assault, what sex should we assume the perpetrator is? (And, to be clear, this example is stacking the probabilities in a way that is more exaggerated than racial differences in crime rates are, and that it is not the case that literally all crime is done by some-flavor-of-brown men and that there are plenty of criminal Whites who get up to similarly-heinous shit, but the point is that we are not starting from an equal playing field and that numbers and base rates matter.)
MadMonzer
Pedo! Pedo! Pedo! Out! Out! Out!
23m ago
This is another example of how the modern right has erased class from their view of history. It was not normal in almost any premodern society to allow just anyone to open carry weapons of any kind. The carrying of weapons was nearly always carefully prescribed according to class-status concerns, and the carrying of weapons served as a denotation of class. The peasantry and urban underclass were almost never allowed to openly carry weapons without punishment.
There was also a big difference between urban and rural areas. The extreme case was the Roman Republic, where all classes of citizen were allowed to open-carry outside the pomerium and only lictors attending a dictator were allowed to open-carry inside the pomerium. In medieval and early modern England the "freedom of the City" meant the right to carry weapons inside city walls, and even the nobility didn't have it by default unless a specific noble had been granted the freedom of a specific city (or more likely was an officer in a regiment which had been collectively granted the freedom). There is a curious welcoming ritual every time the Monarch visits the City of London (i.e. the historical square mile inside the old walls, which is also the modern financial district) which is intended to obfuscate the question of whether royal guards need the permission of the City authorities to carry weapons inside the City. Whereas all Protestant Englishmen enjoyed the right to keep and bear arms in the country from the 1689 Bill of Rights up to the introduction of modern gun control.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
25m ago
Poor guy was probably just walking in the park when the psychotic natives started brandishing weapons at him.
According to your own earlier story, the guy filming provoked the preteen into brandishing the weapons at him, This hardly seems like a reason for sympathy.
johnfabian
28m ago
"migrant" in the UK context almost exclusively refers to illegal immigrants, and often specifically the small boat kind
johnfabian
30m ago
You might have been thinking of Ukraine, whose GDP per capita is a third of Bulgaria's.
Quantumfreakonomics
31m ago
It seems pretty clear from the video that the girl was in fact threatening somebody. The only question is whether he deserved it or not.
FlailingAce
32m ago
Having finally watched the video, I am so confused at people's takes on this. The guy filming is clearly trying to do one thing - get a video of the preteen open carrying a knife and an axe. She's not 'intimidating him', she's cracking under the pressure and revealing her illegal behavior. And he's not a 'creep' (the most plausible reason people might think that is because he has a foreign accent and doesn't clearly articulate what he's about) but it's absolutely obvious from the video that his concern is documenting the armed children hanging out in the park.
I'm generally opposed to the excessive levels of immigration in western countries, but this video makes me more sympathetic to the immigrants. Poor guy was probably just walking in the park when the psychotic natives started brandishing weapons at him.
I guess I don't have much else substantive to add, except to note that the whole story seemed much more interesting to me until I finally got around to watching the video myself. I wonder how many culture warriors out there also haven't even bothered to watch the video, or already had their minds made up by 2nd and 3rd hand commentaries so that they couldn't take in the primary source objectively.
hydroacetylene
35m ago
Uh, if I saw a toddler with an axe I’d 100% take it away before they take their own foot off.
hydroacetylene
36m ago
Oh itd be controversial, but the cop who shot a girl(and I suspect her US equivalent is black) for waving an axe around after yelling at her to put it down would not serve time.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
38m ago
The fact that we're talking about it is proof that it's an effective way to raise your profile, no?
KingOfTheBailey
39m ago
Unfortunately the only things I can find arguing that story are still at the "screenshots of chats" level of evidence.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
40m ago
When demand exceeds supply, you gotta make do with what you have.
hydroacetylene
40m ago
No, it’s common in western history for the entire free population(granted, not 100% of the population) to have open carry privileges. After the abolition of slavery the law often restricted it to ‘respectable’ citizens, not nobles- that respectable citizens could obtain concealed carry licenses easily remained the law on the books until Austria-Hungary fell, at least.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
40m ago
Yeah they do. You think that dude who harassed Central Park Karen was forced to upload it? You think it got leaked?
hydroacetylene
43m ago
Ah yes, George Zimmerman and Derek chauvin, easily mistaken for middle school girls.
hydroacetylene
45m ago
They usually don’t publish their video all over the public internet though.
I am having trouble reconstructing this scenario mentally.
More options
Context Copy link