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MotteInTheEye
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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
7hr 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.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
7hr ago
You're incorrect about the modding. SS gets modded frequently for breaking rules (numerous) and he's still actually given more slack than some people harping on one-note issues in an inflammatory way and constantly making generalizations about the people they hate are given.
As for Chattah, I will simply reiterate that the thread began with an assumption that the District AG for Nevada personally intervened to give special considerations to an Israeli charged with a crime, and that she did this because she is a Zionist. So far, no one has offered any evidence for either claim. Instead, you are simply making arguments that she's a Zionist. Being a Zionist, or Jewish, or Israeli-born (it's other people who slide between these characteristics depending on what is convenient for their argument at the time, not me) does not prove any of the following: (1) That she intervened at all. (2) That she intervened out of loyalties to Isreel. (3) That Alexandrich's treatment is unusual.
This is basic reasoning and shouldn't be as difficult to grasp as it seems to be, but a lot of people really get wrapped around the axle when it comes to Jews.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
7hr ago
You can probably endlessly subject all of this to Freudian psychoanalysis, but I don't care for it.
Funny enough, dream analysis has always been the least interesting aspect of psychoanalysis to me. Probably because I rarely have them, and when I do, their "meaning" is always quite manifest and apparent -- there's a clear causal relationship between what I'm dreaming about and something I was thinking about recently, or something I experienced at some point.
Although, I am curious on a meta-level if this says anything about me...
HereAndGone
7hr ago
Enlighten my ignorance. I'm going by headlines I see online, so is it that the court decided the damages awarded against Trump were too high so they were struck down, but the charges can stand?
And what does this mean for the NY AG Letitia James? Is she okay on the grounds that the charges were legit to bring against him, or is this going to damage her?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
Ruminate? Hmmm, from time to time. Though as far as yesterday goes, not at all.
I mean, this is a sad story. You didn't want to marry her for reasons, this guy doesn't want to marry her for reasons. (I do think there's an element of pride there about not wanting to be perceived as the male version of a gold-digger, but whatever).
She's not sleeping around because she's riding the cock carousel, as the crude phrase has it. According to you, she only had a handful of boyfriends and slept with them in the context of 'this is a serious long-term relationship'.
She wants to get married, but can't. This is not the temptress of redpill lore, she has all the perceived advantages in the dating marketplace but can't find a guy who wants to marry her, and it's not because she's looking for unattainable perfection.
An arranged marriage would be the best chance for her: her parents find a decent guy who will be happy enough with a ditzy (but loyal) wife who looks good, has enough knowledge of wealthy social circles to fill the role of running the household and hosting and supporting his career, and he is capable enough to take over the family business and not run it into the ground.
I hope she finds someone soon, this is wasting her life and chances for what sounds like a nice (if dumb) girl. Remind me to say a prayer for her, the traditional one I know is "St Anne, St Anne, find me a man" but looking it up online the other matchmaker saints (for women) are St. Andrew, St. Anthony of Padua, and the Archangel Raphael. I guess St. Nicolas of Myra fits there too with the dowries he arranged.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
8hr ago
Ah, I was asking more about the symbolic meaning of the narrative -- the coming technological dystopia, the alienation from our humanity, a sense of impending irrevocable loss, etc. How often do you consciously ruminate on those sorts of things?
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
8hr ago
It definitely had aesthetic aspects of Black Mirror episodes, especially Fifteen Million Merits. But the central conceit of people allowing AI to use part or all of their brains as cloud compute I don't think I was ever exposed to, or consciously thought of until the dream.
Templexious
8hr ago
I read the other comments so I'm responding to the whole chain rather than just this one comment.
You have a really twitchy mod finger for SS, and anyone talking about the actions of the state of Israel and its proponents.
The wiki article notes this, on her article:
Reporting on the controversy noted Chattah's history of negative remarks regarding Palestinians, including calling them "animals", calling for "wiping Gaza off the map", and calling 2 million Gazans, "even the children", "terrorists"; she deleted her personal X account shortly thereafter.[22]
Including a couple of other notes of her calling people she is against out of pocket, denigrating, terms. I'd daresay there is enough information on her loyalties from those proclamations. It's fair to call anyone who is Israeli born, who wants to kill gazan children, Zionist.
I'm confused why you choose to go after him so frequently.
Doubletree3
8hr ago
I can buy the argument that the specific shape of a district matters less over time as people re-assort themselves. The corollary to this is that what does matter is the cycle-to-cycle changes in the districts. But on this basis, Texas' current actions are more likely to be a unilateral defection versus a tit-for-tat against previous democratic actions.
Also, if the district maps can be drawn at the whims of the legislature then the incumbent party can in general continuously redraw the map to maintain their advantage. This hurts your argument that everything will equalize eventually. The only way to prevent that is a norm that says "redistricting with the purposes of consolidating partisan advantage is bad". But your argument is the opposite of this.
That if you're reasoning in a hostile epistemic environment, you have to make leaps of logic without evidence because evidence will be denied to you.
If, hypothetically speaking, a murder was carried out in a heavily Italian-American town and the burly, besuited man caught with the gun in his hand disappeared from police custody and reappeared in Sicily with a new house and a nice car, you might suspect Mafia involvement. You won't have evidence for that suspicion, because those involved in the case aren't total idiots, but you might suspect it anyway. And your friend might say, quite reasonably, "Look, some of the police are Italian-American, yes, but not every Italian-American is in the Mafia. Do you have any actual hard evidence to back up your story except a DVD of the Godfather?" And you might reasonably say back, "Look, these people are not idiots who drop their receipts and a fax of their telecoms all over the place."
In short, because competent operators don't leave evidence on the ground, your opinion on 'Was this Zionist Jew removed from custody through the nefarious actions of other Zionists/Jews' is going to basically be a referendum on:
- How much influence do you think that Zionists/Jews have in supposedly impartial structures?
- How likely do you think they are to leverage that influence for dodgy in-group-assisting purposes?
And depending on the conclusion you reach, will probably shift your priors/needle on those questions a small but appreciable amount.
Nice. Been a long time since I've had a dream that I remember, nowadays I'm too tired to have any of those. And maybe that's for the better, since most of the dreams I do remember end up being hopelessly surreal or fucking terrifying.
One of my most realistic dreams to date involved a scenario where I had died as a kid and my family had made an android copy to replace me due to their failure to cope with the grief. Here I was the copy, filled with memories I knew could not possibly be real, and acutely aware of the fact that I had been modelled off a person whose internal perception of the world may actually have been nothing like mine. Out of obligation I just went about my days like nothing had happened, like everything was normal, and my family in turn treated me as if I was actually the child they had lost. It wasn't a nightmare in the traditional sense - there were no sudden bouts of panic - rather, throughout the dream the existential horror of the whole charade just sat passively in the background, and it actually stayed with me for a while after I woke up.
In yet another dream I got rather badly jumpscared. I was at some event or something, or party, and at one point I turned around and the entire dream went black and white, almost like early photographic film. There was a person standing right behind me, looking straight at me with this intensely malicious stare, and their face just kind of... popped forward, in a really fucking creepy way that I can barely describe. All I can say is that to date, there is not a piece of horror media that has viscerally freaked me out that badly.
I also tend to get recurrent dreams which are endless loops of waking up, realising I'm actually still asleep, then waking up again in the dream. These can go on for a while - I think at one point I "woke up" six times before finally successfully forcing myself awake.
Pretty much all of the dreams I remember are fucky in some way or other. You can probably endlessly subject all of this to Freudian psychoanalysis, but I don't care for it.
Primaprimaprima
I am trying so hard not to say the MBTI type of everyone I reply to
8hr ago
Everything I feel towards my wife feels somehow muted, or turned down.
We can certainly say that this is one of the general effects of AI integration, yes.
How well does this dream correspond to conscious, waking thoughts that you've experienced previously? Is the narrative of this dream a familiar line of thought to you, or did you experience it as something new?
NunoSempere
8hr ago
The FRC considers the analysis team’s current classification (IPC Phase 5 Famine with reasonable evidence) to be plausible
While it is possible that based on the data available as of 15 August, the food entering in August may meet the estimated 62,000 MT threshold of needs, this remains unclear. Even so, this would still not be sufficient to reverse the catastrophic levels of hunger and suffering, given the many months that this threshold was not met prior.
Wheat flour has seen major price fluctuations—up to USD 30 in June and coming back down to around USD 15 in July.
Food utilization in terms of preparation remains extremely hampered by the complete lack of fuel and cooking gas to prepare food, forcing households to increasingly rely on burning rubbish across all governorates, particularly in Gaza Governorate (73%).37 No cooking gas has entered the Strip since February 2025.38 Staple foods, such as lentils and wheat flour, if poorly cooked are not well digested by the body, reducing the body’s ability to fully absorb and use the nutrients
My best guess:
- Technical threshold of IPC level 5 (2 deaths in 10K people) probably not met
- Effects of declaration of the technical threshold met unclear. If the UN was widely respected and trusted, it could have been a Schelling point. Israel disputes it.
North Korea has a secret base near China with missiles that could reach the U.S., a new report from CSIS says
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A Russian military drone crashed in Eastern Poland during the night, causing an explosion that residents reported but resulted in no injuries. Radar systems did not detect the drone
Russian military drone crashes and explodes in eastern Poland, defence minister says
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Italian police arrest Ukrainian man over Nord Stream pipeline attacks
Doubletree3
8hr ago
Characterizing Texas' current actions as "a patsy finally noticing and fighting back" is a-historical nonsense im afraid. Republicans have had their share of innovation in the gerrymandering space. See operation REDMAP.
Doubletree3
9hr ago
We don't have to go back far in time to find a situation where NJ was roughly 50-50 in party congressional seats (2014 and 2016). The big swing towards Democrats happened in 2018, but new maps were not drawn until 2021, so partisan gerrymandering could not have played a role there.
the previous district map was drawn in 2011 by a bi partisan committee, in which a Republican cast the tie-breaking vote.
Looking at the two maps, one is not clearly more gerrymandered than the other.
So my conclusion is that regardless of how squiggly lines on the map are, Republicans have historically been proportionally competitive in nj-- so the squigglyness tells us little.
Of course cherry picking squiggly districts is orthogonal to the question of whether Republicans in this specific case are smashing the 'defect' button and trying to pick up extra house seats 'for free' . (They definitely are.)
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
9hr ago
I resisted anything suggested by my parents. It had to be organic, something I arrived at on my own. Perhaps a bit of mentalizing him without being direct. And it wasn't just because of parental pushing, or that it was organized. (In fact I liked organization.) It was a paralyzing fear of being around a bunch of people I didn't know. Again, who knows if that's key. But there are again ways of easing him into social interaction.
kky
9hr ago
Listen, man, Donald Trump the New York Democrat managed to convert the Republican Party (organization of “pretend to care about Christianity so we can deliver tax cuts for the rich”) into a bunch of bootlickers and imitators that are seriously if sometimes ineffectually trying to deliver the platform they were elected on. It’s patently possible to take advantage of deliberate sandbaggers and repurpose their organization to your own ends.
Not saying it’s easy, duh. But if it matters to you…
I don't know that you can separate them.
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