domain:ashallowalcove.substack.com
4bpp
Now I am become a Helpful, Honest and Harmless Assistant, the destroyer of jobs
2d ago
· Edited 2d ago
I am actually not particularly interested in collecting trite propaganda, but I'm confident I could find a lot of material denigrating white men in like 30 minutes of looking. However, this is not rDrama, and so posting those would not be any better than what the parent poster did.
murder data
I did a few quick back-of-the-envelope calculations with some 2019 data I found, and given that the male:female murder rate seems to be about 10:1 in the US, the absolute number of black and white murderers is about the same and the percentage of people logged as black is somewhere over 10%, it's basically a wash between black women and white men. Either way, we're talking about tail events; even for black men, the same calculation said that fewer than 0.5% ever murdered even under generous assumptions (and most of those are probably locked up or socially segregated in a way that makes this hardly relevant for day-to-day choice of neighbours and interaction partners).
Be careful of proving too much: very similar figures tend to turn up as lower bounds of how much more likely men are to be rapists (based on sex offender registrations, inference from victim counts, etc.). If you think that a 0.5% percentage of murderers in one visible demographic is grounds to agitate for its complete removal from public life in a country - on a rationalist-adjacent forum, rather than the screeching pit of public politics, no less! - then you will have a hard time rejecting the bulk of hardcore feminist stances on principle, which generally does not seem to be an outcome right-wingers like. If the monkey's paw offers that you get to treat blacks as murderers but have to accept that men will be treated as rapists, do you take the deal? On that matter, it's probably not that hard to find some other correlate of being murderous in America that's at least as good as "is black". If such a correlate is found, do you support the removal from society of everyone who meets it?
Jiro
2d ago
Demanding sources for something that you don't doubt the truth of is a filibuster, not an honest criticism.
WhiningCoil
Ghost of Quokka's Future
2d ago
How this murder occurred on a bus full of black people and not one single person who saw it happen helped her. Although in the grand scheme of things it took about 90 seconds for a black man to run back and attempt to apply pressure to the wounds about as well as you could hope an amateur would. So at least someone tried to do something.
Yes, I observed as much and was conciliatory in that regard. There was no saving this woman, and realistically shaving 30 or even 60 seconds off the response time that it took a good Samaritan to make an attempt to save her wouldn't have mattered. 90 seconds to someone who actually possesses a soul to rush to the scene might be the best you could expect in this day and age. Maybe even more than. My condemnation is of the 4 or more people who watched the attack, watched the woman collapse and bleed out, and just minded their own business, got up and walked away, whipped out their cellphone to upload to World Star Hiphop or whatever that shit gets uploaded to these days.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
2d ago
In Japan, the food that many people eat every day is shit. It's very high in low quality carbs, grease, and salt. Most of the vegetables are fried, pickled, or otherwise covered in oil or salt. It really is as OP says, it's stuck in nutritional trends from decades ago, probably because the average age is quite high.
I'm not attacking Japanese food. It's delicious. And there are healthy meals like kaiseki, kaisendon, sushi, etc. but those are not things Japanese people eat regularly. The regular diet here is not great.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
90 seconds is probably about as fast as you could expect someone to react, though? Nobody expected stabbing out of nowhere.
Totalitarianit
2d ago
What about the surface connection? Can you see surface connection?
Rosencrantz2
2d ago
That's your prerogative but to me your argument is identical to someone saying, 'I use regular pronouns as honorifics. 'He' is no longer worthy to be called a man, so I use the term 'it'. It should be hanged'. You can do that if you want, yes, but you assume too much if you think others must be using the terms the way you do.
ToaKraka
Dislikes you
2d ago
It's a lot of work to go find good links to prove each and every small claim, especially since this has been well-trod elsewhere, so please do more than say citation needed and walking off like you've improved the conversation.
Is there any reason you think any of this is untrue, or did it trigger a fnord?
I don't have any reason to doubt this user, but this forum's rules should not be blatantly ignored. Don't blame the messenger.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
But ‘has black people’ is, in charlotte, not narrowing it down, and this woman was used to public transportation anyways.
hydroacetylene
2d ago
Immortality is the usual obsession of Chinese emperors; I suggest Xi drink mercury.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2d ago
I fail to see the deep connection between darts and sacrifice, or the reason for why bashing out a few Mortal Kombat matches with the boys can't be considered mingling the way pool is.
"Video games are for children -> but what about them gaining popularity with adults -> then the adults are childish" is circular. I suggest you find something other than surface aesthetics to classify entertainment as childish vs. mature.
"misgendering" is a propaganda term.
Personally I do use trans pronouns as an honorific for well-socialized trans people who are well-integrated into the social fabric. And I do remove them if a person acts in antisocial manner. Otherwise, the pronouns serve to cloak the identity of the person (usually as an antisocial man, who is actively hacking people's threat assessment with female identification), which is exactly the harmful case that TERFs are worried about
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
You are making the pronouns an issue. Would it be any less ideological if the NYT abandoned their style guide, just this once?
chooky
2d ago
It seems like it would be more that sample size starts to get small at crazy high earners and that response rate is probably pretty low for extremely highly paid people. I'm also not sure what privacy issue there is when the max granularity is top 10% of households - this is roughly 30 million people or whatever.
We can also look at the CPS and start to get a lot closer to the question of "What is the normal income for working people in the US?", as there is a specific category of 18+, full-time. Average total money income was $96k in 2024, which seems pretty reasonable to me as an estimate. This sounds to me like it would also include that investment income you are looking for, though I don't think I agree that this should be included for the purpose of this exercise since the idea seems like it is to ensure that a prospective immigrant worker truly is valuable to a company and not easily replaced by a domestic worker with up to double the average earning power... is your idea on including all income to capture things like stock options as compensation or something? Even a 100% average threshold if using $96k would go a long way to fixing the problem of H1Bs frequently going to mediocre-tier workers. https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/cps-pinc/pinc-02.html
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
avocados
TIL
ZanarkandAbesFan
2d ago
It's still imperfect, because the hazard of drugs isn't just that they can kill you, but that they can ruin your life and the lives of people around you long before you die.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
No, my comment wasn't really directed towards you but towards the woman, who of course wouldn't read it. You are correct that it's weird for the woman to think she's traditionalist. I'm pointing out that she jumped to a conclusion very quickly, and it's probably the wrong conclusion. A bit of a Freudian slip.
OracleOutlook
Fiat justitia ruat caelum
2d ago
I'm not very sympathetic to what some consider contradictions between Galatians and Acts 9. It only seems to be a contradiction if you think each is supposed to include, step by step, everything Paul did right after his experience. But in the same source, Acts, you have two descriptions of the events internally, Acts 9 and Acts 22. It's clear that each depiction does not contain an exhaustive list of what Paul did immediately after his conversion. Instead, in Acts 9 we find phrasing like, "after days," and "after many days" leaving lots of room for Paul to make a trip.
Meanwhile, Acts has very detailed descriptions of Paul's travels and how long it took to get between each places, information that would be very hard to get without the author traveling from place to place themselves.
If we assume an early date than Acts is attempting to chronicle "the story of Christianity up until now" and I just don't think it does that.
It's more like, gLuke is what Luke could gather about Jesus from those he talked to and Acts is the history of the people Luke spent time with - Peter, Priscilla and Aquila, and Paul.
Original gMark ended mid-sentence, which seems to me to indicate it was not finished because the author or scribe was interrupted. Acts has an ending, just one that places it before Paul's death. "And no one tried to stop him." That's just a lie if it is written after AD 70, and an obvious one. It definitely was written to a Roman (or Gentile more broadly) audience and the selection of what stories to include reflects that, but that does not mean it was faked.
Primaprimaprima
Aliquid stat pro aliquo
2d ago
@Magusoflight you said that the main thread right now is "wildly boring"; please let me know where this post ranks on the boring/exciting spectrum, and if it's not up to snuff, I'll try to incorporate your feedback into future posts.
The Tyranny of Transhumanism (paywall'd, but it's short, and I'll quote the relevant bits):
When Vladimir Putin joined Xi Jinping last week for a massive military parade in Beijing, the geopolitical message wasn’t exactly subtle. Ostensibly, the parade was a commemoration of the 80th anniversary of the Allied victory in World War II. But Xi’s decision to invite the leaders of Russia, North Korea, and Iran, while snubbing the United States, Britain, and France, made clear that he is thinking more about future alliances than historic ones.
As is often the case with carefully stage-managed propaganda events, the most revealing moment happened by accident. Chinese TV cameras picked up a conversation between Xi and Putin as they walked to the reviewing stand, in which they talked about the prospect of technology making human beings immortal. “There’ll be constant transplants of human organs, and maybe even people will grow younger as they age—even achieving immortality,” said Putin, 72, through a translator. “It could be that in this century humans might be able to live to 150 years old,” replied Xi, also 72.
Coming from Silicon Valley billionaires, such an exchange would be unremarkable. The idea that technology will soon be able to abolish death has been mainstream in technofuturist circles for decades. Still, there is something clarifying about hearing aging tyrants talk about the allure of immortality.
From the tech world’s perspective, the abolition of death looks like the apotheosis of progress: After conquering so many forms of suffering, science and technology will now do away with mortality itself. But if Xi and Putin were able to achieve immortality—or even just live until 150—no one could call it progress. On the contrary, it would mean historical arrest. 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. When a country settles into this kind of malign stasis—as in today’s Russia and China, where it is quite inconceivable that the ruler will ever leave office voluntarily—the only consolation is the knowledge that even the tyrant is less powerful than death.
It should be clarified that, as a matter of empirical fact, there is no such thing as true "immortality" or "stasis". Entropy comes for us all in the end, and the expansion of the sun in approximately eight billion years will, at minimum, force a change of environs for whomever remains on Earth at that time.
Nonetheless, in contradistinction to the majority of transhumanist aspirations which are of a fundamentally childish nature, there is in fact something to be said for the image thus outlined: the immortal Xi, who stands as the silent and watchful observer, a grim reminder of eternity. (I have specifically chosen Xi's name here as the metonymic signifier of dictatorial immortality rather than Putin's as a token of good faith, and to demonstrate that I'm concerned with structure here rather than content; I have publicly expressed my own harshly critical views of China in the past.)
Of course, in order for the narrative to work, in order to establish the appropriate mise en scène, it can only be Xi who is immortal, and not any of his subjects. He precedes you, and he will outlast you. You will not live to see your great-grandchildren grow to maturity; but Xi will. He measures the seasons of his life by the empires he has seen rise and fall; for you, the turning of the leaves and the thaw of Spring are all that is needed. He stands as the lone pillar that structures a great many ever-changing forces and events, an isolated outpost of stability, made all the more enigmatic by his remoteness from ordinary affairs such as "birth" and "death". You'll never get to find out how the story ends. But he will.
This would, at least, be the portent of a new drama; this would at least give the poets "something to sing about". If nothing else, it represents a vision, instead of the horror of and the recoil from vision. To have a vision is to make a choice, to accept the structural role of sacrifice, to say "yes, that is mine" but also "no, that is foreclosed"; it cannot be otherwise. I am not in any way opposed to the pursuit of immortality. But I am opposed to stasis, to the leveling of difference, and to the "end of history".
The formula of an authentic anti-egalitarian politics is: "if not me, then somebody". We might go one step further and say that, just as the communists have their "heroes of the revolution", so too the anti-egalitarian hero is the one who brings about the state of inequality. The Übermensch, far from being a victorious conqueror, may indeed be the man who, upon noticing that everyone has finally become equal, takes it upon himself to make the sacrifice, to abase himself, to accept a lower station, in order to restore the distinction of rank between man and man.
100ProofTollBooth
Dumber than a man, but faster than a dog.
2d ago
They got to a federal death penalty charge via transit terrorism, which seems like a bit of a stretch.
Definitely a stretch in the raw legal terms of it, but I like the idea.
Murder in the US is overwhelmingly the result of strained interactions between males 18 - 34. If a man gets murdered, they're very likely to have known their killer and to have had a recent dispute around drugs, money, respect / social esteem, or a woman via love triangle. For women who get killed, the stats are even crazier - something around a 90% chance their killer was a previous or current romantic partner.
Random acts of lethal violence like this one truly are rare and shocking. I like the idea that, for such cases, we ratchet the punishment up to eleven. This isn't to say that we should shrug at "normal" murders. "Murder stay murder," to quote the Wire. But I like throwing a terrorism or federal level hate crime charge in there. I know deterrence theory for criminal punishment is one of the wobbliest concepts out there in terms of efficacy, but if a random act of violence gets a no-buts-about-it life sentence with no parole, I have to imagine that would have an effect...For those in control of their faculties.
Which brings up the point about the culpability of schizophrenics, drug addicts etc. There's a lot of landmines here in terms of personal liberties and the slippery slope power of the State to lock people up for being cooky, but the alternative (and current) situation is that sane society carries around this socialized risk of literal death that is also quite obvious and easy to mitigate; DeCarlos Brown had a decade long rap sheet, which included prior armed robbery and assault. Jordan Neely (of the Daniel Penny incident), IIRC, had been arrested over 100 times in NYC. The stats are almost a pareto distribution; "top" 1% of criminals are responsible for 63% of convictions per NIH - it's darkly ironic that that's being published by the National Institute for Health. When these big red alarms keep going off, eventually it rises to the level of a literal public health issue to not intervene with these individuals.
KMC
2d ago
Do you have any competing memes? I'd like to see them.
A single incident in a country of hundreds of millions is not data nor does it form a basis for consistent policy
You wouldn't like the data, either. The data say that blacks are something like 50x more likely to kill whites than whites are to kill blacks. The data say that rich blacks are more murderous than poor whites, and that black women are more murderous than white men, despite the incredible share of all violence committed by men.
The data say the same thing as the anecdote, you just don't like what either one says.
sun_the_second
could survive a COD lobby and a gay furry discord server
2d ago
The government enjoys massive political will among all strata of society to prosecute CP with great prejudice, just a bit less than actual child molestation. I think expanding that to arbitrary definitions of coomery will be a bit harder than "no problem".
KMC
2d ago
It really is. There was a wave of black on white violence after the slaves were freed, and as a response to that, Jim Crow which was effective at its intended purpose of preventing these depradations. Jim Crow and segregation were weakened by integration and eventually repealed and replaced with the Civil Rights Act, and there was a corresponding wave of black on white violence which lasted until the tough on crime 80s. Those policies also worked, and some lingered into the 21st century when they were repealed by legislatures or subverted by activist DAs, and we're living through the third such black on white crime wave since the civil war. Hopefully we will have the correction sooner rather than later.
Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action. The cycles will continue until we both learn the lesson, and teach it to our children so they don't forget.
This is exactly what segregation was for, and it worked as intended.
Blacks sat in the back under threat of violence. I think people would be less outraged if a gang of whites had immediately jumped the Charlotte subway guy and killed him in retaliation.
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