domain:x.com
birb_cromble
1hr ago
This reminds me of the mountain lion in the Eastern US.
The official stance from the federal and state wildlife agencies is that, excluding a small relict population in Florida, the mountain lion has been extirpated from the East Coast and has been for decades.
Despite this, local sightings persist and at least two have been struck by cars in the last twenty years. I have a relative who claims that one was hunting his sheep. He called the local game commission who told him that it didn't exist and that shooting it would be against the law. He claims to have taken a shot at it and winged it, and nothing has hunted his sheep since.
He's also an inveterate story-teller and drunk, so take that with a grain of salt.
range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
I remember stories about 30+ pound black feral housecats in the outback. Is this related?
Under US law, sentencing serves four specific purposes: deterrence, incapacitation, retribution (or just punishment), and rehabilitation.
In the context of the death penalty, the US Supreme Court has held that mentally disabled offenders are not smart enough to understand deterrence and are inherently less morally culpable as regards retribution. These rationales date back at least to English common law.
I can't comment on non-Anglo countries' sentencing systems.
Thoroughlygruntled
1hr ago
I think it's also worth pointing out that even FIRE and the other libertarian groups are essentially part of the Republican coalition. Both their personnel and their legal arguments draw almost entirely from the right side of the political spectrum. They have been totally and completely frozen out of left-wing institutions, most dems outside the abundance movement refuse to have anything to do with them, and even the abundance dems are embarassed and try to downplay the relationship as much as they can to their fellows.
With the exception of now-irrelevant dinosaurs like Ira Glasser, pre-2025 calls for free speech, tolerance, and academic freedom came exclusively from the right, and even now that Trump is in power the only people maling principled arguments in that direction are still disproportionately right-wing activists.
lollol
1hr ago
The other problem for democrats in an all out gerrymandering war is that they simply have fewer seats to eek out. The most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; red states going tit for tat isn't actually something they can escalate that much against
Is there a ranking of states and how gerrymandered they are somewhere that you would recommend? I briefly looked at https://gerrymander.princeton.edu/redistricting-report-card/ and wasn't able to find like a CSV or something.
ArjinFerman
Tinfoil Gigachad
1hr ago
It's one thing to make inferences. Some inferences are reasonable, in the absence of evidence. But "leaps of logic" land you into assumptions based on the presumption that your inferences are accurate.
I think your Mafia/Zionist comparison is rather specious,
That's fine, you're entitled to your opinion. Can you know stop falsely portraying the other side's argument?
Thoroughlygruntled
2hr ago
Having lived next door to both, I can assure you the random MAGA was a far better and more pleasant neighbor than the elite college professor. The MAGA person was fun, invited people to barbecues, always offered to help out, always had his kids running around playing outside. The professor hardly ever interacted with the community other than to harangue someone for some petty slight. Most college professors I've met have been either awkward and socially stunted or actively unpleasant to be around.
IQ is not the only measure of quality.
Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?
In and around the Blue Mountains in New South Wales there's the Lithgow panther, over 500 sightings of which have been reported in a 20-year period. Big cat sightings have been reported around the region for about a century, and there are a range of explanations for how one might have ended up in Australia, such as specimens from the exotic animal trade or travelling circuses getting loose within the country.
This is actually a more interesting story than most of the cryptids that often make their way into local folklore because there have actually been government enquiries into the subject - four in fact - a number of which actually state it was "more likely than not" that a big cat lived in the area based on scat and hair study. The most recent report, written in 2013 by an invasive species expert, concluded no evidence of a big cat in the Blue Mountains, but he later privately disclosed to the ABC that the existence of a small population was possible. Wiki article here.
Now this one isn't local to me, but there's also the obvious example of the thylacine, where the idea that it may still be extant in remote parts of Tasmania persists with many sightings of it to boot. There are even sightings reported on the mainland, in some cases. Some of the sightings in question are by zoologists and other experts, with the most famous being Hans Naarding's assertion in 1982 that he did see a thylacine and that it was unmistakeable. This analysis of sightings suggests it may have persisted until the 1980s and that there is still "a small chance of persistence in the remote south-western wilderness areas" of Tasmania.
Really I would say these examples of cryptids are actually... fairly plausible, as far as cryptids go. As for me? I'm still a firm skeptic, but of all the cryptids out there, these are the ones I'm most likely to believe in.
charlesf
2hr ago
There have been a few books that were especially well written that I read twice. The first time I'm too consumed with finding out what happens, plot progression, resolution of tensions etc. I overwhelmingly am interested in how the story ends, which distracts from some of the finer points of the writing, sub plots and characters that weren't critical to the main storyline etc. During a second read I already know how these things are going to resolve and can more enjoy the total quality of the writing. Most books aren't actually good enough to warrant this though. I can usually tell when I'm going to reread a series pretty soon after I start it too. Steven Erikson's books are a first example I can think of.
HighResolutionSleep
2hr ago
He sold?
Annouce ze rate couts.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
2hr ago
I’ll be honest with you that most normies just don’t really care about politics and thus don’t really care if their votes actually count. It’s not a question of getting people upset about losing their vote in whatever form it takes, people honestly don’t care about politics except as a means to amuse themselves on social media or feel important because they’re “informed.” Go to any school board or planning committee meeting — these are things that have a real and lasting impact on community life — and nobody shows up and you’d have a hard time to find anyone who knows one out of 5-6 members of that board. Politics for the rabble isn’t about making decisions and changing things, it’s about feeling powerful feeling like they’re the good ones for being informed, and yelling at opponents who are “obviously screwing everything up.” As long as those things remain intact and the country is more or less running smoothly, the normies will be too busy watching sports and yelling at people online to notice that the votes the cast don’t matter.
Throwaway05
2hr ago
Exactly! Is that enabling sclerotic politics? Is that perfect for enabling minority representation?
Shit I don't know but it is complicated and not a new political ethics problem caused by modern political division.
aldomilyar
2hr ago
Yeah my understanding is that even in a lot of gerrymandered situations the boots on the ground for the party that's losing out would frequently rather have one ultra-secure seat to enable a 30 year tenure in the House versus 2 55-45 seats in which they've got competition coming both internally and from the other side. Plus more vulnerable to random macro upheavals.
There's a reason a bunch of the longest house tenures are Southern Democrats who essentially sit in Rotten boroughs.
I don’t know about the chick described in the OP, but in my Lived Experience women are smarter than you (the general you) think. That is, women’s IQs are higher than what their personalities would suggest—as holding IQ constant, on average women are more basic and boring than men.
Men have the burden of performance. Hence women being less (intentionally) funny than men, and women consistently, substantially underperforming men in knowledgability tests, despite only a modest IQ gap if you’re Hanania-pilled. I doubt, in a hypothetical where their life is on the line, an above-Lizardman’s-Constant proportion of people would pick a randomly selected woman over a randomly selected man to win a trivia game to save their life.
The basicness is amplified for young attractive women, who are generally kind of “retarded” and clueless about the world, even if you know that their grades and test scores are/were high. Talking to a given hot chick outside of her preferred topics such as herself, TV/movies, make-up/fashion, celebrity gossip, or interpersonal drama runs the risk of her finding you WEIRD or—ironically enough, BORING—just as you might talk to a little girl about her favorite dolls, movies/TV shows, school friends to keep her engaged. I suppose there is no reason to be interesting or knowledgable when you’ve been coddled all your life, and people will pay attention to, help, and accomodate you no matter what.
So the IQ gap between oneself and retarded hot chick [X] might be surprisingly small. And thus marrying a retarded hot chick doesn’t necessarily mean dooming your kids to be mid IQ-wise, or possibly retarded themselves.
Your calculations using the input assumptions look correct, but I question the applicability of the inputs to most situations smart young men would find themselves in, given assortative mating and homophilic social sorting (“Different Worlds” and Young Earth Creationists come to mind). A 40-point IQ gap is pretty vast for just an acquaintanceship to be made and maintained, much less a potential relationship.
A typical 130-IQ young man likely doesn’t have that many <= 90-IQ people in his social circle. Even without social sorting/assortative mating, <=90 IQ people are only 25% of a population with a mean of 100 and an SD of 15. If one’s social circle has a still-pretty-modest average IQ of 115 and an SD of 15, this already drops to under 5%. He likely doesn’t have too many prospects from online dating, social media, or IRL cold approaches (each of which would still have some social sorting and assortative mating). Plus, in your hypothetical, the girl’s offspring IQ would likely regress to a higher mean than 100 given her parent and sibling IQs.
I'd pay a lot to have my kids come out with an additional 12 points. I would fistfight a dog smaller than a labrador for a mere five.
If that dog is a near-labrador-sized member of the Breed of Peace: after the nannying experience, you might not still be around to see a given kid come out.
Pasha
Defend Kebab
2hr ago
Where does this idea of lowering criminal sentences because the criminal is stupid or trashy originate from? Is this common across many countries? Just an Anglo thing? Recent? Old?
This woman had drawn the genetic short straw; the rest of her family consisted of high-achieving intellectuals.
Then any potential offspring would probably be fine, intellectually speaking at least.
Your kids aren’t a strict combination of you and your spouse - it’s your respective whole families being blended
I would be more worried if she was smart while her whole family were mouth breathers
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2hr ago
The trial judge convicted Trump of fraud, and on that basis imposed on Trump two separate punishments—disgorgement of several hundred megadollars, and disqualification from serving as an officer or director of any New York business for several years. Disgorgement is, not really punitive, but compensatory, meant to undo any damages that were done. The appeals panel ruled that the prosecutor failed to prove the quantity of damages caused by Trump's fraud, so the disgorgement had no basis. But the punitive disqualification still stands.
I have no opinion on what effect this will have on the prosecutor's reputation.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
2hr ago
I don't know that you can separate them.
MotteInTheEye
3hr ago
I don't think the "secret sauce" was ever that immigrants were universally viewed as just as good as anyone else. German immigrants, Irish and Italian immigrants, Chinese and Japanese immigrants, and now Mexican immigrants have always been viewed with suspicion and some resentment by large segments of the American society they were immigrating to. They came anyway because the opportunity afforded by the runaway growth of the American economy was irresistible to those with incredible grit or just those with no other options. And as a class they worked hard to seize that opportunity and to prove that they could belong just as much as native-born citizens, despite the suspicion they faced.
If something has changed in the modern era, I would argue that it stems from the welfare state. If you make it to America, you are effectively guaranteed some share in its riches whether you then work hard or not. This has the two-fold effect of removing the implicit filter on immigrant quality, and of creating larger proportions of the resulting immigrant population who bear out the nativists' suspicions. Also add to that the effect of explicit multiculturalism which weakened the incentives for immigrants to assimilate quickly.
It all adds up to a world where the nativists are increasingly justified in their complaints. If the dynamic driving modern immigration does not change, two out comes are possible. The nativists will eventually be strengthened to the point that they will kill the golden goose, using the power of the state to throw the baby out with the bathwater by cutting off opportunity for immigrants across the board. Or the center will not hold and American society will dissolve into disconnected groups of takers squabbling over their share of a rapidly shrinking pie.
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
3hr ago
What part of "the most gerrymandered states in the union are all blue; there is no more gerrymandering blue can do here" don't you understand?
The part where it's not true. TX in particular is not gerrymander as aggressively as it could be (though it is still gerrymandered). The same is not true of, e.g., WI, NC, or OH.
Conversely, NY, CA, WA, etc... could be significantly more gerrymandered. The biggest limitation here is not "room" for gerrymandering, but legal constraints for doing so.
birb_cromble
3hr ago
One of my favorite parts of living in the middle of nowhere is the prevalence of cryptids in the local folklore.
Obviously you have your rock star cryptids like the Mothman and the Hopkinsville goblins, but the more obscure ones are great too.
In Northern West Virginia and Southern PA, people have reported sightings of an enormous snapping turtle that ranges in size from "as big as a man" to "twenty feet long". Sometimes it has two heads to match its monstrous size.
Obviously, there isn't a turtle half the size of a city bus tooling around the Monongahela, but sometimes I wonder if an unusually large alligator snapping turtle wandered north of its usual range. I remember living in Tennessee and seeing a local farmer pull one out of his pond that was nearly as big as I was, and he told me that it wasn't the largest one he'd ever seen.
Farther south, there's the Grafton monster, which is described as a giant, bipedal creature with no head. The most likely explanation I've heard for it is that a local black bear got into somebody's whiskey still, which was then witnessed by the still's owner (who had also gotten into it).
Do you have any local cryptids that haven't worked their way up to the national stage? Do you think they have a plausible natural explanation?
Yes, that would be an example of the phenomenon that I am referring to. I am interested in the justification for this discrepancy in the mind of a progressive or even classical liberal. @ThisIsSin care to weigh in?
Texas being gerrymandered isn't exactly new. Trump et al. just want to make it more gerrymandered.
Prior to the mid 2000s there was gerrymandering in both Red and Blue states, but it was piecemeal and wasn't that impactful because it was largely aimed at protecting state-level incumbents (and, in the South, keeping the wrong people out of power), not generating national political advantage (also it was harder without computers). Still not great, but not a hugely pressing issue.
In the mid 2000s the GOP put together a national strategy for gerrymandering their way to success. They largely succeeded, which is also why they've repeatedly refused offers of mutual disarmament. (That and the tribal mindset of the many conservative struggles with the idea of independent redistricting - a process which isn't biased in their favor must necessarily be biased against them).
Two critical problems with gerrymandering reform: 1) virtually nobody prioritizes it highly enough to mobilize voters against it, and even if they did, gerrymandering makes it extraordinarily difficult for electoral reform to win 2) even when the electorate avails themselves of means to override state governments, it is not uncommon for the state government to simply ignore them.
Throwaway05
3hr ago
AuDHD
Made up shit likely because of poor understanding of the underlying substrate and map/territory issues.
Something like about 75% of patients with autism meet the criteria for at least one other mental illness and of the pot of mental illnesses something like about 75% meet the criteria for ADHD.
So it's not everyone but pretty close enough.
That said, I state "meet the criteria for" instead of "has the disease" which usually isn't very important but is instructive in this case since it is very possible that the underlying cause of the symptoms is not the "problem with the brain's hardware and software that causes the majority of ADHD symptoms in individuals with no other mental illness" and is instead a sequence of behavioral deficits better explained as caused by the same underlying issues as the autism which does a lot for explaining the prognosis* and high degree of comorbidity and at the same time just means that the person is going to get the same treatment as everyone else.
Psychiatric formulation is mostly a kludge used to jam something that resembles the medical model in place for purposes of billing and ease of communication.
Needless to say from my rant you aren't likely to catch much clinical conversation using AuDHD unless its more word bad less word good type situations.
However most of the wild type implementations of AuDHD are likely to pattern match to people identifying with their mental illness and trash tier social media engagement about health.
Sorry recently triggered by a soccer mom.
*I'd have to do a lit review to be sure but I'd hazard that spontaneous remission rates in pure ADHD patients are higher than in the ADHD with comorbid AUD population however this would be likely be hard to research.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
3hr ago
It's one thing to make inferences. Some inferences are reasonable, in the absence of evidence. But "leaps of logic" land you into assumptions based on the presumption that your inferences are accurate.
I think your Mafia/Zionist comparison is rather specious, but is the theory that a Zionist AG did a special favor for an Israeli plausible? I'll say I could be persuaded. But given that everyone making the "leap of logic" to assume it is true just happens to be someone who hates Jews, I find it reasonable to be skeptical and demand more evidence than someone's feelings about Jews.
A non-trivial number of these are effectively required to exist by the Civil Rights Act.
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