domain:youtube.com
FtttG
39m ago
WandererintheWilderness
40m ago
Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?
The defining characteristics of lynchings is that they had social approval. Where there were lynchings, there was, by definition, a critical mass of the local white population who was at best unwilling to interfere with racist murders. Therefore, the existence of lynchings raises the likelihood for any one white local being racist and potentially murderous much more than the existence of lone racist killers does. How relevant the bigoted opinions of people three or four generations back still are today is a different question, but I maintain that "lynching" is a meaningful category with salient characteristics that set it apart from other racially-motivated hate crimes.
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
I mean, my assumption is that race matters a lot less than people say it does, and I'd like to go back to a more race-blind form of public discourse. This is, I fee it is worth pointing out, pretty far the mainstream press's position. It is worth distinguishing again between what I think, and what I think of what Blue journalists think. My position is that if you're going to try to pattern-match racial dynamics onto individual murders it's not prima facie absurd or disingenuous to assume white-on-black attacks are more likely the product of racism; but also I think you mostly shouldn't try to look at random killings as having anything to do with racism unless the facts of the case specifically support it.
Magusoflight
40m ago
it's basically a wash between black women and white men.
I wouldn’t call it a “wash” exactly.
FarmReadyElephants
46m ago
It's not mere contempt though. It's specifically using trans norms as camouflage for bad actors that I'm concerned about. Women are considered less dangerous and awarded more sympathy than men. Trans identified men who are bad actors specifically take advantage of that.
When I heard "Ziz" referred to as "she", I specifically was not on alert for a psychotic man to be active in my social circles and I underweighted the danger from Ziz as my priors were set to "female" and not "male". If I knew there was a murderous psychopath named Jack LaSota going around, that primes my behavior differently.
Trans language pollutes the information commons, to the benefit of evildoers
Quantumfreakonomics
50m ago
If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.
To be fair, this is also a negative outcome.
Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice.
I’m assuming this is a joke?!?!? I like not being stabbed.
VoxelVexillologist
Multidimensional Radical Centrist
51m ago
the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good
Nullius in verba the motto of the Royal Society. Of course these days, even they would tell you to "Trust The Science."
ThomasdelVasto
Κύριε, ποίησόν με ὄργανον τῆς ἀγάπης σου
52m ago
The sad conclusion of all this seems to be: the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good. If a conflict between their scientific principles, and their political principles arises, scientists seem to reliably choose politics.
The central myth and in my view issue of modern discourse is this idea that science, more specifically empiricism, has metaphysical and moral value, and can be used to make claims in such fields. It absolutely can't. Empiricism cannot make value judgements and be used as a cudgel to force metaphysical arguments about what a man or woman is. The second you begin to cross that line, your vaunted neutral, empirical viewpoint falls apart.
Unfortunately if we truly accepted this as a society, we would basically have to rewrite our institutions from the ground up anyway, a truly harrowing task. We'll see if empiricism is defeated anytime soon.
Magusoflight
56m ago
I've only been stabbed twice
Only twice? Noob
07mk
59m ago
My argument is a Bayesian one. What I said is: there is plenty of long-standing precedent for American whites killing American blacks for specifically racist reasons, but not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same; therefore, when dealing with any individual murder, it is prima facie more likely to be racism-based if it's white-on-black than if it's black-on-white.
To the extent that this Bayesian argument makes sense, it is pretty much useless for any analysis of this incident or incidents similar to this one, because in no actual incident we're talking about, are we dealing with a prima facie situation where literally the only thing we know about the murder is the races involved. Notably, the races involved, by themselves, provide so little information about any given incident in comparison to readily available information about the incident just from observing it that to call it rational to consider this specific almost-as-crude-as-possible Bayesian analysis to be meaningful would be rather absurd.
As such, your judgment below is suspect:
I would rather the press not ascribe racial motives to anybody without ironclad evidence, but it doesn't seem odd or irrational to me that white-on-black killings should be more readily assumed to be racist.
It is irrational to rely on such a crude method of Bayesian analysis to land at a conclusion when there are many far more precise, far more specific pieces of information that offer far more information on motive than looking only at the races. Now, it's possible that there's a silent "prima facie" in that sentence, which is perfectly cromulent and makes it more defensible. However, if such a hidden term were in there, it would also render it entirely irrelevant to the topic at hand, as the discussion is about a situation (and generally, multiple situations) where prima facie doesn't apply due to just mountains of information surrounding the incident and the individuals involved.
People aren't talking about what the Platonic form of a journalist would do in a spherical vacuum, they're talking about how real-world journalists are really behaving when given lots of information that has irreversibly destroyed their ability to be in a prima facie state and, as such, using extremely crude Bayesian reasoning of this sort is irrational.
However, it's not odd, given what we know about the biases and behaviors of most mainstream journalists in most mainstream outlets. I suppose that's one form of Bayesian thinking that's justified in this case.
Magusoflight
1hr ago
Yes that’s the exact topic I was looking for. Thanks
Magusoflight
1hr ago
I’m a mobile user and effort posting is really hard. If the mods were more relaxed about making simpler posts then I would be more willing.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1hr ago
The tyrant’s dream is to stop things from changing, since for him any change can only be for the worse—in the same way that, for a man atop a pyramid, moving in any direction means going downward.
This is just narrative. What things? Changing how?
It is worth noting that during Xi's reign China has changed a lot. Not in all ways for the better, but that's covered enough. They've become a high-trust society, in many respects higher-trust than the modern West. (So now we have pathetic protestations of things like safety in the streets or general politeness not counting, because it's compelled or whatever). They've doubled energy production per capita (the US has fallen a bit, while say the non-dictatorial UK has fallen off a cliff by 30% and is now far below China). They've transitioned from makers of slippers and "plastic crap" with a pathetically corrupt and infiltrated military and government to a technological superpower half a step behind the US and spooking the US into an increasingly undignified retreat from the Eastern Hemisphere. The list can go endlessly, it's arguably the most staggering timeline of national ascendance since the Industrial Revolution (if mostly by virtue of absolute scale), and of course it can be said that none of that is Xi's achievement, but he sure was well equipped to arrest those and other changes. He, however ineptly, struggled to accelerate them. Wouldn't it be easier to rule over impoverished peasants? Well, probably not. Chinese peasants sometimes used to decide they've had enough, successfully kill their emperors and usurp their thrones. "Lost the Mandate" and all that. Stupid slavish bugmen.
Taking it charitably, we know Xi was interested in Eastern mysticism and would likely love to be an Immortal Emperor. He also would opt to keep stagnant things he genuinely believes are good enough already: the "Democratic Centralism" and other buzzwords for the mechanics of the One-Party State he is lording over. That would necessitate stagnation and repression in significant aspects of culture and society, which we observe. But I'm not convinced a single immortal guy would achieve that better than an ever-regenerating hydra of government and quasi-government actors. Is there some cabal of ancient vampires maintaining American Civil Rights regime? No, they seem to keep recruiting. The Party, as O'Brien taught us, can be immortal even if the individual cell is frail. I think that's the core tragedy of our species – we have functional immortality for crude structures of power, often obfuscated in discourse by handwaving about "memes", but not for humans who, if they don't grow senile, can actually learn and acquire wisdom. Yeah, I think that even immortal dictators can be better than dictatorless dystopias, and it's too easy to build those.
Moreover, Xi said "in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old". It sounds like he describes the opinion of scientists about the probable outlook for life extension technology, not some secret project he could realistically monopolize. Technology of this nature is, in general, hard to monopolize, and its very realization depends on scale.
I don't think we will see an immortal Ubermensch King in the East. Or at least, there will be a sizable class of lower-tier Immortals cultivating towards ascension – like in those Xianxia novels young Chinese read so much.
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
Skibboleth
It's never 4D Chess
1hr ago
You cannot expose yourself by putting earbuds in and spacing-out on public transportation directly in front of a disheveled black man wearing a hoodie
I would submit to you that this is not some universally known people of social lore that every native-born American knows. Living in DC I've done this on hundreds of occasions and I've only been stabbed twice. If I see a disheveled black man on the Metro, I am vastly more worried he's about to regale me with an obviously made up sob story and ask for money.
TIRM
1hr ago
Even under segregation black people rode the bus. A black schizophrenic standing up and knifing a white woman in front of him would be equally viable under racial segregation. I don't accept the general premise and particularly don't accept it for this example.
Evidence Based Medicine, Science Based Medicine... I just want Based Medicine
In 2021 the Society for Evidence-Based Gender Medicine (SEGM) contracted McMaster University to do a series of systematic reviews of gender medicine, and what better place than McMaster, home to Dr. Gordon Guyatt, the father of Evidence Based Medicine himself? For quite a while the working relationship seems to have indeed been working, perhaps not completely without a hitch as Dr. Guyatt will later tell us, but 3 systematic reviews, assessing the evidence for puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and bilateral mastectomies, have been published earlier this year. Their results are consistent with all other systematic reviews published to date: the evidence for various forms of gender affirming care is of low to very low quality.
In February 2025 The BMJ published an article titled Medical journal editors must resist CDC order and anti-gender ideology. This was a response to the much-criticized Trump CTRL+F grant cuts, dataset changes, and orders for CDC scientists to remove themselves from studies that so much as mention "gender" or any other 2SLGBTQIA+ related terminology. The BMJ swears up and down that such terms are "medically relevant" and therefore "evidence based", and so the Trump administration has no place in dictating how science is conducted.
One of the responses to the article praises the BMJ for it's "anti-gender ideology" stance, but declares that this is just an empty gesture, as the journal has published the studies sponsored by SEGM, which has been designated as an "anti-LGBT hate group" by the SPLC. On top of that, Dr. Guyatt and his staff faced direct activist pressure of various sorts.
In August, McMaster University published a stetement about their systematic reviews, expressing concern that their studies are being misused to pass policy which takes away autonomy from the patient, something that goes against the principles of Evidence Based Medicine, as they understand it. They announced that they will not be working with SEGM anymore, and that they will be donating Egale Canada to help fund their efforts to prevent gender affirming care bans.
Following the publishing of the statement, there is now an open letter demanding an apology, and a retraction of the SEGM-funded studies.
...A renowned institution, a respected leader, some activist pressure, and a repudiation of their previous work: a story that we're quite familiar with by now... or is it?
Earlier this week Dr. Guyatt was interviewed on the Beyond Gender podcast about his work with SEGM and his statement about the systematic reviews. Throughout the conversation it becomes clear that there is no evidence-based argument against SEGM and their work, rather it's a disagreement of values. As already noted in the his statement, Dr. Guyatt holds patient autonomy in extremely high regard, and his main issue is with his work being used to justify blanket bans. This mirrors the shift in the discourse that I talked about before. Not being able to argue that The Science Is Settled, activists have to retreat to a more defensible position and settled on autonomy with a sprinkling of Trust The Experts, although they're kind of trying to have it both ways...
During the interview Dr. Guyatt is asked how he would define "medical necessity", at first he's confused, and then rejects the very concept outright, which is interesting in the light of the following exchange taking place at the end of the episode:
Mia Hughes: Someone very recently said that the very fact that you have signed this statement that says (...) "this is medically necessary"...
Gordon Guyatt: WHAT?! How ridiculous! We never said anything... I told you that I would never use the term "medically necessary", I would never use it. The fact that you said I used it is completely wrong.
MH: Well then, I will fact-check myself...
(...)
GG: Yeah, see if you can find "medically necessary" in my statement. I would have to jump off a bridge if I said that.
(Co-host asks another question to prevent dead-air)
MH: I did fact-check myself this is your statement:
We will no longer accept funding from SEGM. As recommended by community advocates, we have also personally made a donation to Egale Canada’s legal and justice work, noting their litigation efforts aimed at preventing the denial of medically necessary care for gender-diverse youth.
GG: Okay... that was not my paragraph, and I didn't read carefully...
Narrator: To date, Dr. Guyatt has not yet jumped off a bridge. He noticed no irony in the contrast between his complaint about his studies, that to date he still stands behind, being used to justify policy he disagrees with, and his downplaying of how his signature, on a statement he vehemently disagrees with, could be used.
Credit to Mia Hughes, not just for the interview, but for already collecting most of the links.
Ok, some extra thoughts.
This isn't the first time we got a politically charged statement from a suppesedly neutral political institution. Off the top of my head there was the AMA declaring gun violence to be a public health crisis, or similar statements from the American College of Physicians, complete with a trendy hashtag, and of course, who can forget "Racism is an ongoing public health crisis"? This is, however, the first time someone from any of these institutions was publically cross-examined, and the results were devastating. Do the other statements have better backing? I personally doubt it, we can always quibble about it and construct elaborate "steelmen", but it doesn't matter. My opinion is that all these statements should be rejected by default, and and treated as political, and not based on science or their understanding of the public good, at least until similar cross-examinations take place.
This also touches on Trump's dreaded funding cuts. We've had a number of people here complaining about them, claiming that Trump should have used a more precise approach. It can't be done. Any presumption-of-innocence approach would yield no significant outcome, as institutions could hire activists faster than you could get them fired. If you want people to stop cheering as he torches your institutions, do something to save them yourself. Show people that they're self-correcting and can be trusted by the public, and if they aren't then make them become self-correcting.
Finally, on a different topic, it's interesting to compare Guyatt's autonomy-valuing approach to the results of other people's non-autonomy-respecting approaches. Though I'm Rat-adjacent, I've never been a proper Rat. Rather, I hail from the "Skeptic" community - Sagan, James Randi, those sorts of people. Randi himself, and many of his followers, spent a lot of their time debunking evidence-free treatments, often calling for their banning and/or strict regulation. One of them, Dr Steven Novella, even formulated a broader criticism of the entire Evidence Based Medicine framework, and founded his own blog Science Based Medicine blog in response. The issue he and his collegues identified, is that EBM can be hacked as it focuses too much on clinical trials, rather than the entirety of evidence, and prior plausibility. For the curious here's his introduction post explaining their approach, and here's a post series about some spat about cancer treatments which provides a more specific example (and extra links outlining the differences between the approaches).
Given the direct contrast to EBM, and the opposition to patient autonomy when the treatment is not grounded in sound science, what do you think would be their response to the transgender care phenomenon? Oh, that's right, a complete caving to the trans activists in violation of all their principles. Credit where credit is due, I suppose, AJ Eckart, the pro-trans author they hired after dropping Harriet Hall, has been awfully quiet ever since the Cass Review dropped, so someone must have decided they backed the wrong horse.
The sad conclusion of all this seems to be: the romantic notion that Science™ can be trusted as a process seems to completely wrong. Science is only as a good as the people doing, and the people doing it at the moment don't seem much good. If a conflict between their scientific principles, and their political principles arises, scientists seem to reliably choose politics.
Pongalh
1hr ago
I suspect this one will not catch on: https://x.com/DainFitzgerald/status/1965107130668908660
FCfromSSC
Nuclear levels of sour
1hr ago
You appear to be making an argument that demands for citation are being used as, as another commenter put it, a filibuster against evidence other commenters don't want to look at. This may be so, and this is in fact the behavior your pasta is meant to highlight, but it seems to me that these are in fact inflammatory claims, that the citations should in fact be provided, and that while some here might be trying to filibuster in this manner, the user you are responding to is not, and it has drawn a number of reports.
We have a rule about proactively providing evidence for inflammatory claims. We also have a rule against low-effort engagement, which copypasta certainly is, and in fact your last warning was for copypasta. Your warning/AAQC ratio is about 3:1, not horrifying, but not great either. I am giving you a one-day ban; please read the rules posted at the top of the page and in the sidebar, and make an effort to understand and follow them. If you disagree with what you see here, just say so. You're allowed to do that. You are not allowed to do this.
Do we have any coffee experts here? :)
What equipment do you recommend for home brewing? I don't mind waiting 5-10 minutes for the cup to become ready. Lots of pleasant aroma filling my home would be a bonus.
What are good reasons for taking coffee seriously?
How much subjectively experienced variety is there in terms of bean types?
professorgerm
You shall love your crooked neighbor, with your crooked heart
1hr ago
That lynchings weren't a thing?
My claim is that this is "mostly peaceful protests" all over again and you're special-pleading that for ideological reasons, a subset of murders that are Officially Expert-Guaranteed Biased are substantially and meaningfully worse than murders that are probably but not officially biased.
Were the Zebra Murders lynchings, or not? If not, what exactly is that word doing in your complaint except to gerrymander and blinker the meaningfulness of certain murders above others?
I disagree, in the same way I am generally disinterested in the debate around fascism versus authoritarianism. Murder is murder. Mass murder is mass murder. Authoritarianism is authoritarianism. Gerrymandering the border to forgive one's own totalitarian or otherwise bigoted impulse while attacking another is not useful.
long-standing precedent for American whites
Not since the 1930s. First few years of the graph are also interesting.
I don't particularly feel like digging up the graphs for black-on-white murders, but your perception is downstream of this invention of a special category of murder, just like the power+prejudice definition of racism was created so that racism couldn't be committed against certain people.
not much for American blacks killing American whites for the same
You have zero proof for this.
the whiteness of some percentage of victims being incidental
Again, a bold strategy filled with assumptions. If Bayesianism brought you to this, of what use was the rule?
charlesf
1hr ago
Not a rebel song, but Parting Glass by Luke Kelly. Luke Kelly is going to show up a lot on lists on best versions of trad/rebel songs, as likely will Ronnie Drew.
dr_analog
top 1% of underdog fetishists
1hr ago
I actually haven't. I don't know if the Trump birthday letter to Epstein is real or not, for example. My hunch is that it is, but I'm not sure.
It seems real but not like a smoking gun or anything. Trump admitting to being a perv just like Epstein and also winking that Epstein likes girls under 18 is not a great quality but on its own I don't think it means Trump knew Epstein was a massive underage girl sex predator and that he also participated in it.
I think lots of people look the other way on underage dating if it seems like the people involved are mature or aren't being harmed. I had a high school music major friend that was 16 who was dating like a mid-30s something pianist guy. Seemed outrageous at first but she was mature enough and we didn't think too much of it.
I don't think there's much real danger of a dictator using technology to rule for hundreds or more years. At least, not with plausible near-term technology.
Unless the life-extension technology also gives the dictator some kind of high neuro-plasticity and/or elevated intelligence, at some point the old dictator will be outcompeted by more flexible and/or smarter rivals.
And if the dictator does use technology that elevates his mental flexibility and intelligence, it is difficult to imagine that this technology would be inaccessible to other elites around him for any long period of time.
And if all else fails, the dictator would still be as vulnerable to bullets and poison as he was before the life extension treatments.
In any case, the dictator would still be subject to the normal phenomena of politics.
In general, dictators do not rule because they are transcendently intelligent (they do tend to be extremely intelligent, but not outrageously beyond the normal human standards), and they certainly do not rule because their bodies are invulnerable to bullets and poison. They rule because they maneuver themselves into local political maxima, situations in which the political system as a whole finds it easier to continue with the dictator's rule than to maneuver away from it. I think that even Stalin would have been swiftly killed if the other Soviet elites, as a group, found it more convenient to get rid of him than to put up with him. A dictator who has made many people among the elite wish to get rid of him can only hope to survive for a few hours if powerful insiders around him start to believe that if one of them kills the dictator, they will not be killed by the dictator's loyalists and by other elites as a result.
Maybe someone should post the charlie kirk assassination. Sounds like a culture war.
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