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cjet79
3hr ago
Nobody I am aware of argues that 2A describes an inherent, inalienable and unconditional right.
I would say that the right to self defense is an inherent, inalienable, and unconditional right. And I'm definitely not alone in that belief.
The second amendment is just an offshoot of that right, as guns are one of the best tools for self defense.
Just like freedom of speech is mostly useless if the government says "you can say whatever you want, just not in a newspaper or online or anywhere we can see it".
EvanTh
3hr ago
What makes you think their voting requirements were closely associated with IQ?
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
my impression was that the large segments of the population who are wary of black people and the segments of non-black population who live in the US metro areas were two circles that do not overlap much.
Eh maybe. To start with, the black-hispanic... strong mutual dislike... dwarfs any other racial tensions in the US by the numbers, even if BLM shenanigans are more common in the media, and this is a mostly urban phenomenon. You're certainly correct that the blue tribe is less wary around black people but nice urban liberals are well aware that big crowds of blacks/majority black areas are not good news from a safety perspective. They won't say it out loud of course but they are aware of the general correlates of race and crime, even if they think 13/52 is exaggerated, blame racism rather than criminals, etc.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3hr ago
Except in this context Christianity directly opposes usury, the problematic and exploitative behavior in question. For some reason (I legitimately have no answer) most modern Christians have just completely ignored the teachings on usury and how bad it is. Even if you want the wretched to suffer, usury and issues like this cause problems that damage society as a whole - unless you have active sadism and want to make society and your own life worse to make the wretched suffer even more, preventing this kind of thing is to the advantage of the non-wretched as well.
I read this off a comment talking about the Sherlock TV show done by the BBC - stupid people think that smart people are wizards. They literally can't understand them, and when they try it's like a smeared caricature of a psychic precognitive superhuman. When Sherlock enters a room, he intuits the correct sequence of events from an incredibly spurious and thin bit of evidence. From the stupid viewpoint, smart people are magic guessing all the time.
It is not, in fact, magic, but rather a systemic way of thinking that is orderly and (ideally) well reasoned. But a stupid person might go 'what makes your magic guess better than mine, huh?'
If you can't understand people's reasons, you sure as hell can't understand their motivations. It's easier to believe that your enemies are malevolent cackling pedophiles than to understand them as agent-actors with self-interest and multiple motivations. And when a smarter person disagrees with you publicly for reasons you can't understand, you lash back in narcissist ego-defense. People don't like being made to feel stupid even if they are and will lash out in comically disproportionate ways.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3hr ago
I can only imagine how poorly it goes when somebody who's barely scraping by gets screwed over by these people.
Why imagine? This happens every single day all over the western world. There are entire industries devoted specifically to screwing over the poor and struggling, and there's so much profit in payday loans and other loan-sharking behavior that criminal gangs fought violent conflicts over them in the not-so-distant past. It has been known as an incredibly pernicious social evil since at least the time of the old testament (see the biblical prohibitions on usury), and any society that cares for its people maintains those prohibitions because fucking over the lower classes like this is bad for the rest of society too - unethical exploiters get financially rewarded, and the desperate problems caused by the underclasses being in terrible financial situations leads to increased crime and anti-social behavior.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
1911's have become a default sidearm among hog hunters for a reason.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
No.
The directional distribution of crime stats is widely known in America, but the specific stats are not- and most Americans do not feel threatened by high black crime, because 'not going into the hood'(the ghetto is not where most people want to hang out anyways) is a perfectly viable method of avoiding it. And political support for gun rights is mostly correlated with living outside of the inner city anyways. Distrust of the government is a real factor, but the driving factor for concealed carry is fear of mass shootings, or drug fueled 'random' crime. Not fear of gang related crime among the black population, which yes most Americans are aware is a problem but also is seen as something that is geographically limited to places you don't really want to be in anyways. The sentiment is more 'the police can't be everywhere at once' and less 'the police favor black gangbangers'- the latter sentiment would be seen as farcical among the vast majority of Americans, including the last pockets of red tribe racism.
FirmWeird
Randomly Generated Reddit Username
3hr ago
As one of the ostensible leftists on here this just makes sense. Left wing populism is personally advantageous for everyone who does not have so much wealth they never need to work again. Wealth inequality is so high it is damaging almost every aspect of western societies and the conflict between the upper classes is at the heart of a vast number of culture war issues. The usual consensus here on a lot of issues, like whether we should import an infinite amount of indians to drive programming/IT wages as close to zero as possible, is actually isomorphic to the left populist position (i.e. infinity indians is not a good idea).
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
3hr ago
There is also an earlier dip because we urbanised before the development of refrigeration, meaning that there were a lot of people with very limited access to fresh food. The other country of which this is true is Belgium, which is not coincidentally the other country whose cuisine is a joke and whose signature dish is cheap seafood and chips.
quiet_NaN
3hr ago
the illiberal left is trying to demonize Charlie Kirk because he was a Christian.
While I am sure that you will find some people for whom being Christian was enough to demonize him, I think the median lefty who demonized Kirk did not do so merely because he was Christian. Being Christian is not enough to become a target of the leftist cancel mob, thankfully.
A fighter on the SJ side of the CW who was also outed as being privately a Christian of some liberal church would likely not face much backslash if someone outed them.
Kirk was a fighter in the CW for the MAGA side. On virtually every CW hot topic, he vehemently argued for his side, using many of the techniques which make the CW so toxic. That was the reason why a large part of the left demonized him. Perhaps his religion was the cause of his political beliefs, or perhaps he was adopting religious as well as political beliefs for their CW expedience.
Imagine, if you will, a non-violent Muslim preacher waging the CW. Perhaps he is calling woman who do not cover their hair sinful, or calling for the legalization of polygamy, or preaching against the alcohol and pork industries, adopting Sharia law into the criminal code. He expresses the belief that America will one day be a Muslim nation, and bashes Christians and Westerners every chance that he gets. Probably MAGA would rather hate such a guy, if he was big enough to notice. Would it be fair to say that he is demonized by MAGA because he is Muslim?
urquan
Hold! What you are doing to us is wrong! Why do you do this thing?
3hr ago
Sure, but that seems terribly unlikely to me.
But really I don't think Trump thought this through, he wouldn't know Christianity (or the LDS flavor of it, for that matter) if a Bible smacked him in the head. This was pattern-matched without evidence to other recent attacks that could plausibly said to be related to anti-Christian animus and became the subject of an immediate Trump tweet. I thought it was frustrating when I initially heard it because it immediately politicized a brutal attack that seemed to have very murky and mostly clinically insane motivations. Both sides of our politics have a pretty bad time diagnosing the actual motivations behind mass violence, even if they're obvious.
The interesting, albeit strangely impassioned, arguments we've had recently about Christian creeds and the LDS faith has really just been a sidequest; not the sort of thing I'd bring up outside of the Autistically Debate Nuances of Ideas Free Speech Zone that is the Motte. People were lit on fire, I'm not sure it matters in the first 24 hours whether the guy who did it did it because he thought Mormons were Christians or Mormons were the anti-Christians, though that might eventually become important. Does the LDS church commemorate martyrs?
[Mercatus Center] economist Kevin Erdmann
Erdmann and Scott Sumner have successfully convinced me that their contrarian theory of the 2008 crisis [free 70-page report, Amazon book] is probably correct:
Quote from the linked report:
In the standard view of the housing and business cycle of the 2000s, there are at least eight interconnected assumptions:
(4) The boom was fed by deregulation of banking, pressure from government regulators, or both, which led banks to make too many mortgage loans.
We will show that these assumptions are unwarranted. Lending during the housing boom was mostly directed toward affluent households.
I prefer the theory advanced by American Enterprise Institute economist Peter Wallison (free 90-page report (p. 441), Amazon book).
Quote from the linked report:
Before the enactment of the GSE Act in 1992, and HUD’s adoption of a policy thereafter to reduce underwriting standards, the GSEs followed conservative underwriting practices. For example, in a random review by Fannie Mae of 25,804 loans from October 1988 to January 1992, over 78 percent had LTV ratios of 80 percent or less, while only 5.75 percent had LTV ratios of 91 to 95 percent. High-risk lending was confined primarily to FHA (which was controlled by HUD) and specialized subprime lenders who often sold the mortgages they originated to FHA. What caused these conservative standards to decline? The Commission majority, echoing Chairman Bernanke, seems to believe that the impetus was competition among the banks, irresponsibility among originators, and the desire for profit. The majority’s report offers no other explanation.
However, there is no difficulty finding the source of the reductions in mortgage underwriting standards for Fannie and Freddie, or for the originators for whom they were the buyers. HUD made clear in numerous statements that its policy—in order to make credit available to low-income borrowers—was specifically intended to reduce underwriting standards. The GSE Act enabled HUD to put Fannie and Freddie into competition with FHA, and vice versa, creating what became a contest to lower mortgage standards. As the Fannie Mae Foundation noted in a 2000 report: “FHA loans constituted the largest share of Countrywide’s [subprime lending] activity, until Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac began accepting loans with higher LTVs [loan-to-value ratios] and greater underwriting flexibilities.”
HUD’s policy was highly successful in achieving the goals it sought. In 1989, only one in 230 homebuyers bought a home with a downpayment of 3 percent or less, but by 2003 one in seven buyers was providing a downpayment at that level, and by 2007 the number was less than one in three. The gradual increase in LTVs and CLTVs (first and second loans combined to produce a lower downpayment) under HUD’s policies is shown in Figure 4. Note the date (1992) when HUD began to have some influence over the downpayments that the GSEs would accept.
hydroacetylene
3hr ago
Taking advantage of the gun show loophole requires considerable agency. You have to save up enough cash, find a show, find a way to travel there (presumably he is not driving a car?). Knowing how to ride a bus without conveying to the guy in the next seat that you are (1) mentally unsound and (2) on you way to buy a gun would be helpful as well.
In practice, there is not a generally available 'gun show loophole'. It's possible that you, enterprising prohibited person, will find a vendor not covered by background check requirements at a gun show, but it's not very likely.
BahRamYou
4hr ago
It's weird to me how the Mormons seem like the most boring, steadfast, buttoned-down, no-nonsense of all religious groups in the way they act. And yet their actual religious dogma seems like one of the craziest. Sure, just dial up their direct hotline to god whenever they need an update on current political issues, that makes sense...
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4hr ago
Which I found particularly hilarious because once you take the idea of a separate revelation of Jesus to North America seriously, the possibility of a separate revelation to Africa of the type that Elder Cunningham appears to deliver is entirely plausible at a theological level. "One with the people of Africa" indeed.
Mormons are to Christians as Christians are to Jews. They have what might be described as a Newer Testament, which they see as a subsequent revelation to the Christian one, which is, you guessed it, now also closed.
Actually, the Mormons make a big deal about having a living prophet, who can receive new revelation as needed. This has come in handy a couple of times when political considerations have forced the church to update its doctrine in a hurry, such as in 1890 when they stopped practicing polygamy in order for Utah to join the Union, or in 1978 when God changed his mind about black people.
hydroacetylene
4hr ago
He thinks he's purging the military of Mohammedans, possibly.
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
I'm pretty sure I grew out of, "Joke's on you, I was only pretending to be stupid!" when I was in primary school, yes.
But who knows, maybe there will be something surprising down the line. I suppose we will see.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4hr ago
Basic argument: Victorians had faster reaction times than moderns. Reaction time (which is known to be about 20% correlated with IQ at an individual level) may be a better measure of true population-level g if the Flynn effect (rising population-average IQ test scores over time) is driven by education and not g. If you convert the average Victorian reaction time into an IQ based on the modern reaction time-IQ curve, you get 108. And a 8 IQ-point drop in genetic g is consistent with what you would predict based on dysgenic fertility over the intervening 150 years.
Counterpoint - why do we think that "ability to function in modern society" is better measured by reaction time than performance on IQ tests? All the work which validates the IQ-functionality correlation uses test scores and not reaction time.
OliveTapenade
4hr ago
I think you're muddling two things here. With the good thief, the question you asked was, "is he a Christian?" With the 60 IQ believer, the question you ask is, "Is that belief system Christianity?" Those are different types of question, and their answers don't necessarily always correlate. In almost all real cases they will, but I can imagine scenarios where they do not.
(One example might be someone in a coma or someone who has suffered significant age-related cognitive decline and is no longer capable of understanding or of holding propositional belief. Can such a person be a Christian? I'm inclined to say yes. On the other end of things, we can imagine a person who believes that all of a particular mass of Christian doctrine is true, but who, notwithstanding, renounces any kind of loyalty or obedience towards God, and in fact hates God. Satan is presumably such a figure - aware of all the facts of Christian doctrine, but nonetheless not a Christian himself.)
I'll also note that even granting that this 60 IQ individual is both a Christian (he is, to the best of his ability, seeking to know, love, and follow Christ) and a Mormon (he is likewise attempting to conform to Mormon doctrine and practice as best he can), it does not therefore follow that Mormonism is a form of Christianity. "If someone can be both a practicing Christian and a practicing Mormon, then Mormonism is a form of Christianity" seems like a mistake. For a counterexample, as I understand it, Mormons are religiously required to be teetotallers. It is obviously possible to be both a practicing teetotaller and a practicing Mormon. Would you say that Mormonism is a form of teetotalling? Or we can go past that - Mormons are not required to be vegetarians, but it is certainly possible to be both a practicing vegetarian and a practicing Mormon. It is possible to be both a practicing socialist and a practicing Mormon. That it is possible to be something else alongside a Mormon does not show that Mormonism is a form of that something else.
In this particular case, the argument would be that the Mormon understandings of who Christ is and who God is are sufficiently different to the Christian understandings of the same that it is misleading to describe them as instances of the same belief. It is possible to combine the two - that is, to believe in Christ in the Christian sense, and to believe in Christ in the Mormon sense - only through conceptual confusion. Our poor 60 IQ believer might be, through no failure of his own, one such case.
MadMonzer
Epstein Files must have done something really awful for so many libs to want him released.
4hr ago
Definitely before 2020 for Apple.
DirtyWaterHotDog
4hr ago
Clean-shaven privates just look better
yea
Inflation is eating your lunch, you could at least have some of that in like Treasure notes so you're not losing money.
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