domain:abc.net.au
self_made_human
C'est la vie
20hr ago
This article in particular presents people who lost weight, noticed immediate massive benefits in their life they're desperate to keep, and yet still can't keep the weight from coming back. It is just the satiety setpoint being set so high it's torture for them to not eat to the point of overeating?
Yes.
The mechanism via which the body "hungers" is somewhat complex, but can be usefully simplified down to the action of ghrelin, a hormone produced in the stomach which makes you hungrier, and leptin, which does the opposite.
Surprisingly, obese people have more adipose tissue, which produces leptin. However, it ceases to have the usual satiety inducing effect, as the body becomes resistant to its action. The way this is perceived is the body interpreting the lack of signal for being full as a sign of starvation.
And starvation sucks. Other than disease, it's probably what's killed the most humans in all of history, and you can imagine that it's a very unpleasant state that the individual feels compelled to rectify. The easiest solution being to eat more, till the pain goes away.
They're also being struck with a double-whammy. In lean people, eating causes suppression of the levels of ghrelin, in obese people, it doesn't. So they feel less full, with the same amount of food, as compared to those at a healthy weight. Hence they feel compelled to not just eat, but eat excessive amounts for the sake of relief.
I can only reiterate that starving sucks, and the body will drive you crazy in order to avoid that feeling. It's too dumb to know or care that you are, objectively, perfectly well fed. Waterboarding feels just as bad as actual drowning despite the ~nil risk of death.
While doctors usually feel compelled to tell their patients to watch their weight and diet, this almost never actually works. I consider myself a pragmatic one, and advice that isn't actioned in practise is about as useless as advice that doesn't work at all. I was on the Ozempic hype-train well before it was cool.
My mother is very obese, and has been for over half her life now. She's diabetic, and has developed fatty liver with hepatic fibrosis. Her own commitments to working out and dieting never held. She's a doctor herself, so she knows, on an intellectual level, what the risks are. She's been driven to tears by the scolding she gets from my grandpa or my dad who genuinely care for her and want her to lose weight, and after gentle suggestions failed, were driven to tough love.
None of it worked. She loved to eat, and reducing her caloric intake was pure agony. For a long time, I was resigned to the seeming inevitability that she'd head into cirrhosis, and I'd have to steel myself up for a liver donation. It's a nasty, nasty surgery, nothing like giving away a kidney. It leaves a grossly disfiguring scar, leaving aside the significant risk of death during and after the procedure. I'd do it for my mom, because I do love her.
Eventually, when Ozempic, or oral formulations of semaglutide, became available in the Indian market, I badgered her into seeing her endocrinologist and getting it prescribed. Despite the initial nausea and diarrhea, she eventually adapted, and lost the lost weight she's ever managed, and kept it that way. Right now, my priority is hounding her into going to that gent again and getting that dose upped, it's well overdue.
Exhortations to exercise failed. Asking her to watch her portion size and not snack failed. Driving her to tears failed.
The pill didn't.
When people get on their high horse and claim that using drugs to solve your problems is a crutch, it takes everything I have to not tell them to go fuck themselves with a rusty pole. It saved my mom, fuck you. Nothing you have to offer, including your empty words, comes close.
To hell with willpower. A world where we can power through our problems with pills is a better one as far as I'm concerned.
I'm a doctor for many reasons, but ranking highly among them is that I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work. Telling people to use their will to get over depression or diabetes doesn't, and the same is true for obesity. Claiming the moral high ground and virtue signaling? Doesn't beat adding years of healthy lifespan.
10+ arrested after a rifle ambush of security at Prairieland Detention Center near Alvarado, TX on 4th july.
Shortly before 2300, some of the arrested fired fireworks at center to draw out a response, when it arrived at least two of them started shooting at the responding officers from a distance of 100-150m. Soon after, a driver (trans, seems the only one) with a van that had 2 ARs was stopped by a responding cop (map & times)
The shooters fired about 30 shots at responding cops, hitting one in the neck, suffered a jam, probably faced return fire and then started running. Shortly after cops arrested 9 of them in a field 300 m away, armed and in body armor in addition the driver in the van. At least one got away. $25k reward.
Total equipment recovered so far on the spot: 4 AR rifles, pistols, 12 sets of body armor and several helmets.
NYT article: https://archive.is/CBvms Unusually big ambush, usually it's just one guy.
Here's a twitter thread with more details. Can't vouch for the veracity of it. It seems logical - we've been hearing for years how antifa can organise and has people. These people look too clean though, antifa protesters usually look much scruffier.
This looks very.. amateurish. Sure there was a plan but it seems they underestimated the difficulty of hitting anything at night. Or just chickened out.
Same vibes as my series (is three a series?) of "unenviable lives" posts, which in turn was, I suppose, inspired by many Slate Star Codex posts about Scott's (aggregated for anonymity) patients. These are not people who write thoughtfully about their (actual) lives in extended blog posts; these are Henry David Thoreau's "mass of men," who "lead lives of quiet desperation." Only, you often wouldn't even know it, they do not seem to express any desperation. They're just living their wildly suboptimal lives, and the people observing this (in those cases where people observe it) can only wonder at the seemingly unnecessary tragedy of each successive move.
Aristotle famously (now, infamously) thought it quite obvious that some people are born "masters," and some born "slaves." Contemporary thinkers are of course quick to point out the problems with Aristotle's arguments (for example, he regarded Greeks as natural born masters, and everyone else as natural born slaves) but most carefully avoid noticing those circumstances in which Aristotle seems to have been obviously correct. To this day, children in Western nations are frequently treated in the Aristotelian way: as "slaves" in substantially ancient Greek fashion. The 1000 Word Philosophy link says:
The second premise, that there are human beings who lack the capacity to deliberate, might be true in some cases – perhaps those with severe brain damage or advanced dementia – but they are certainly not who Aristotle had in mind.
This is true just to this point: Aristotle would suggest that people who are temporarily or accidentally impaired are not slaves by nature. But he would I think readily agree that they are slaves, as he means it, insofar as they are impaired! And sure enough: in the United States, it is possible to become subject to the rule of another, in the form of conservatorships, guardianships, etc. I cheerfully grant that these have more safeguards and checks and hurdles than would have been encountered (or even conceived of) in ancient Greece! But in Aristotelian form we still substantially enslave people today. We justify it by insisting it is only and exclusively for their own good, of course, or perhaps for the safety of others (as in the case of enslaving much of our incarcerated population, per the Constitutional permit to do so). But focusing in on people who are wards of their family or the state as a result of impaired reasoning (i.e. due to IQ below 70): if an IQ of 69 can trigger a "guardianship," why not an IQ of 70? Or 71? And even above those thresholds, other impairments--youth, drug addiction, or mental illness, for example--also apply.
We draw lines in law because, it is often suggested, "we have to draw the line somewhere," and that is perhaps true as a practical matter. But reason and agency seem to be more of a spectrum, and a quick Google search suggests that more than a fifth of the population has an IQ falling between 70 and 90--the range from "borderline retarded" to "low average." These are people I suspect Aristotle would want to put in the "natural slave" bin (assuming, of course, they aren't Greek!). Why? Because it would be better for them, in so many ways, to have their lives managed by someone with greater executive functioning. This, even though they are certainly intelligent enough to survive on their own. In the modern world we outsource this--we increase the perception of independence through subsidies and welfare and wealth redistribution, but wards of the state are still wards, and the fact that they are not forced into hard labor as a result is predominantly a function of contemporary abundance. To whatever extent taxation is slavery (PDF), we often enslave the free in order to free the slave!
But the natural slave cannot ultimately be freed; they can only be managed well, or managed poorly. Left to their own devices, they will manage themselves poorly. Aggressively managed ("literally enslaved"), they will lash out against the strictures of the arrangement, often violently (the free citizens of slave societies live ever in fear of revolt). How much of the history of "government" is the history of developing increasingly sophisticated methods for obfuscating the nature and extent of the bondage imposed on the "mass of men," not only for their own ultimate benefit, but for the benefit of all? And--to what extent might we as a people be slowly forgetting that, as we seek to "liberate" those masses, by continuing to give them the resources of life, while withdrawing (or declining to enforce) any guidance?
If I were to try and make a fancy title for my opinion on the Texas anti-ICE attack, I'd call it 'How I Had To Figure My Way Out Of A False Flag Suspicion.'
I was hoping to do a writeup on this incident, since the Antifa attack has some ties to a post last month on how the Democratic civil war will give the Trump administration a lawful basis to go after parts of the background Democratic coalition. Antifa is a fringe part of that coalition, but still a part, and this certainly counts as a basis to go after a network. I was holding off because Ngo's article- while informative- had several 'weird flag' indicators that had me raising an eyebrow and waiting for information to dispel a possible false flag / misattribution.
One of the weird things was the mix of preparation and self-affiliation. Preparation is usually a sign of competence, but self-incrimination is usually incompetent, unless it's intended for a false-attribution, in which case incompetence can be explained by even greater competence.
On the preparation side, there was clear material preparation for first, second, and even third order consequences. From the Ngo article, the plan was to use fireworks and graffitti as a flashy / damaging, but low danger, way to bring out the ICE agents. Then the responders would be ambushed by the gunmen with, well, lethal guns, even as the team had personal radios for their own communication. At least a limited firefight was prepared for with body armor. An electromagnetic blocking device, i.e. a jammer, could then be used to frustrate the secondary response units, any ICE-Police coordinations, and otherwise help with the escape. The assailants appear to have fallen back and retreated through the immediately adjacent woods. They had a getaway car plan as well.
This is a multi-step plan that supports a level of sophistication and prior thought. This is competent, dangerous, and effective small-unit tactics that comes from training and deliberate preparation.
But then you have some of the incompetent aspects that suggest the planners were going for tacti-cool rather than tactical advantage. At least seven of the militants dressed in all black, as opposed to useful camouflage or even clothes to help blending in with normal people on the escape. Pure-black 'looks good,' but it's more a uniform for official police teams to distinguish or play to light contrasts in overt contexts- it makes as much sense in a guerilla force as thinking that historical ninjas actually dressed in all black, as opposed to the black uniform being the stage-show theater dress to make it obvious. They used AR-15s, which are not, despite years of anti-gun campaigning, particularly good rifles for waging war (or insurgency). They discarded their AR-15s, leaving evidence behind in literal walking distance of the target. Some of the discarded AR-15s were found jammed, suggesting poor weapon handling... or, reported later, weapon modification attempts to increase rate of fire. This theory of 'more bullets = better' is not actually better in general, since a good part of the value of a semi-automatic rifle for small teams is that the slower rate forces better shooting fundamentals for reliability per shot, rather than wasting ammo faster for less gain.
And then there's the backpack with antifa literature. Just... why?
This, more than anything, got my 'is this a trick?' allergy going, because this is the sort of thing someone could do to try an inflame political tensions for its own sake as a false-flag action.
Leave behind left-coded Antifa literature to feed the initial view of a blue tribe attack. The right-coded AR-15s as a symbol of red tribe means. The mix of high-competence (a group who knew what they were doing) and low-competence (a group who were making incredibly basic mistakes) that could in and of itself be used to dismiss / deflect initial attributions. 'Of course it's Antifa- the literature matches the motive matches the target in attacking ICE!' could be deflected with 'Of course it's not Antifa- Antifa would be more competent, it's obviously a fake by a red tribe domestic extremist. Right wing extremists are obviously military competent, and look- they used the scary AR-15!'
This is the sort of narrative motivation that could support a broader variety of 'true' actors. Anyone with a 'maximize for heat, not light' could want that sort of recrimination spiral. It could be right-wing accelerationists. It could be the Antifa actors seeking to maximize (in)famy while invoking a circle-the-wagons effect of their left-tribe brethren. It could even be foreign agitators. If you want to accelerate a conflict in another country, the ideal false flag is to do something that elements in the target country would plausible want to or even try to do. It's not like this would be the first Antifa attack on a ICE facility.
To be clear, a false flag is not the assessment I would make from the initial information. But it's not a scenario I would rule out either. One of the most effective ways to do a false flag attack is to do something that non-trivial parts of an existing political coalition's fringes wishes (someone else) would do. And with the recent Democratic politician accounts in the (increasingly visible) Axios "Democrats told to "get shot" for the anti-Trump resistance" article, there are certainly people who think fighting ICE and Trump is the good fight.
Which is why another of the really weird things about Ngo's initial big post was how it didn't support that this was an actual Antifa cell in the first place, particularly when the initial government accounts didn't make that claim.
Ngo didn't actually provide evidence that these people were Antifa in the original article. Ngo makes the claim, but his supporting evidence in his post is that there was Antifa literature in a backpack of one of the caught shooters- aka, the sort of very easy thing to do if one wanted to insinuate Antifa. Ngo also cites fundraising by Antifa-linked people in support of the shooters... but the political tribal sympathy nature of tribal fundraising is also well established, and doesn't rely on prior association. Ngo does not actually cite any Antifa organization / social media / group that claimed the shooters as their own, or cite any of the shooters self-identifying as Antifa.
One reason I'd been holding off posting on this was hoping that follow-on media reporting would clarify the affiliation. It largely did not. The Washington Examiner released an article repeating the claim, but they did not really justify it either. The WE article did include a reachout to the FBI, but didn't attribute any Antifa attribution to the FBI. Then again, the FBI is often mum with ongoing investigations. The New York Times article does not make the antifa attribution... but this could be explained on partisan grounds of omitting politically unfavorable context. (Another weird(?) thing of the NYT article- no comment section. Not all NYT online articles get to have comment sections, but enough do that sometimes it can be seen as a choice not to.)
So I was waiting for yesterday's Department of Justice charging statement. I would imagine that at least some in the Trump DOJ would like to emphasize an antifa connection if they could. But there is no mention of Antifa in the DOJ statement.
So, not Antifa?
Well, not quite. Not only has there not been the sort of firm denunciation/separation that would be expected if a group was not affiliated with the broader political spectrum (as with other politically-sympathetic but unaffiliated political violence attempts over the years), but there's also Benjamin Song.
If you don't recognize his name from the OP article, that's because he was not one of the ten identified in Ngo's initial article, or the NYT article of the incident, or in the initial DOJ statement of charges.
The Dallas Express has published a much more extensive look at a specific (but still at large) suspect, which gives more compelling evidence of a specific connection via one (still wanted) suspect: Benjamin Song.
The Dallas Express writer is not entirely neutral- the left-skeptical political bias of which was probably why they got the presumably FBI-supported information for the article- but it provides a bit more specific claims that are contestable by others. So far none seriously have been, but these are at least falsifiable. To quote-
Song was a member of the militant Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, and he had a history of left-wing radicalism.
This, at least, is falsifiable. And elaborated upon, with a history that suggests a clear pattern of 'helping others with violence.'
He was a member of the violent Antifa group Elm Fork John Brown Gun Club, known for intimidating people outside drag shows. Song faced a lawsuit for “battery, assault, stalking, and conspiracy” after a confrontation at a 2023 drag show, as The Dallas Express reported. During the event, Fort Worth Police busted violent members of Song’s group.
Song was also reportedly a member of the Socialist Rifle Association. A transgender suspect, accused of shooting and bombing a Tesla dealership, was part of the same organization.
He trained Antifa in firearms and combat in 2022, according to a video uncovered by journalist Andy Ngo.
The account that posted the video – “Anarcho-Airsoftist” – is an apparent Antifa training ground in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. Notably, according to his alleged LinkedIn account, Song was formerly a martial arts instructor. The account* showed participants learning to fight.
Before he trained Antifa militants, Song was arrested for “aggravated assault” at a riot in Austin during 2020, according to KVUE.
And, of course, where he got his skill set-
Song was a member of the Marine Corps reserves from 2011 to 2016, when he was dismissed on an “other than honorable discharge,” as The Dallas Express reported. According to LinkedIn, he “managed up to 60 Marines” and “managed, organized, and accounted for inventory worth over $1 million” during his time with the service. His profile stops after this.
For those unfamiliar, 'other than honorable discharge' is the 'you are being kicked out for causes that don't necessarily raise to the level of a felony' that typically accompanies the dishonorable discharge. 'Up to 60 marines' in turn scales to between a larger-than-normal platoon or a smaller-than-normal company. 'Managed' insinuates, but does not imply, a platoon leadership position- rather, when mixed with the inventory metric, suggests an administrative role. This does not imply he was not also tactically proficient, but would explain additional skill sets in organization.
And with this, some of the earlier discrepancy falls into place. We are not talking about a group of an average consistent quality that must be competent or incompetent. We can be looking at a cell with a more-competent organizer, a former Marine who taught tactical skills, and less-competent line members.
Which also helps explain another weird flag in the initial report, of how 10 suspects were arrested... but 12 sets of body armor were recovered.
And why Song is still at large.
From the Dallas Express-
[Song] allegedly bought four guns used in the ICE facility ambush on July 4, which wounded an Alvarado police officer, as The Dallas Express reported. He reportedly hid in the woods near the scene for a day after the shooting, then fled.
This, if true, could be a result of a particularly competent technique. Two, possibly. One way to hide something valuable is to hide it in relation to something extremely visible and attention-grabbing, so that to observer's attention is drawn away. Another is to use a sacrifice play, so that the person who searches finds a first, and expendable, asset, but doesn't know to keep looking for the more valuable, and better hidden, asset.
If immediate police response finds 10 suspects fleeing a scene... what are the odds there is another still hiding for the attention to drift further away, to depart under better conditions once the initial surge of attention starts drifting and looking further away?
Of course, there are limits to this level of competence- limits that are explainable by the limits of Song and of chance. If he was a small-unit-tactics focused Marine for only 6 years, that would suggest limited exposure to the sort of investigation/exploitation awareness that might have led him to plan better on the evidence disposal. He didn't know what he didn't know, and thus didn't prepare for them, which is how investigators could unravel things relatively quickly afterwards. He might have typically-minded his Antifa cell members and not overseen them.
And, of course, the rapid capture of specific members- especially the get-away driver- allowed a rapid exploitation of evidence / safe house / etc. while he was still in his hide-and-escape phase. This was not part of the plan, and was an issue of chance, probably. If that getaway driver hadn't been caught, then the members might not have been captured, the staging base might not have been identified, and so on until Song could get back, clear out, and cover his tracks before the police found it.
Or maybe those preparations wouldn't have been enough either. Point is- the police response that found the getaway driver, something that might have been pre-empted by the jammer or if the police car had taken a different route or any number of things, created a vulnerability in the getaway plan. That's not necessarily incompetence on his part.
Song specifically has since appeared in more reputable, mainstream, and Democratic-Party-respected media like ABC, Newsweek, and CBS. This is consistent with standard media industry practice to support government requests to publicize criminals to increase their profile and make it easier to solicit tips to lead to their capture.
None of the above media sources mention Song's antifa affiliation.
quiet_NaN
15hr ago
I do not think this should be a criminal matter. There is plenty of fucked-up shit which is enough to lose you custody of your kids without landing you in jail.
If the reporting is accurate, then I would expect family court to completely cut her from her kids. If that was not enough to act as an disincentive, sending her to prison would not have made a difference either.
From my reading of the text, the main problem was that she was doing this in secret. Once she was discovered, the repercussions (divorce, loss of custody) were likely swift to follow. I do not think that another society would have dealt much better with this. Even in Saudi Arabia, though there might be norms where a husband is checking his wive's phone, she might have another phone for sexting convicts.
As a wise mullah once said: "What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
This is bullshit. Especially as the beatings would likely be administered by the husband with no judicial oversight. I mean, sure, if the husband had beaten his wife for no reason on the general principle that she should live in terror of him, it would have been very likely that she would not have picked up her hobby of sexting convicts. But this is like suggesting that cobalt bombs are a good way to stop wildfires in California: while technically correct, the cure would be worse than the disease.
not sticking your dick in crazy.
If people only have sex with people proven sane beyond all reasonable doubt, humanity would die out in a few generations. From the reaction of the husband, it seems that he was surprised by her behavior. We do not have the context to say if he should have seen this coming, and what his other options for a spouse were when he decided to marry and have kids.
self_made_human
C'est la vie
15hr ago
While I agree with you, for the most part:
This is bullshit. Especially as the beatings would likely be administered by the husband with no judicial oversight. I mean, sure, if the husband had beaten his wife for no reason on the general principle that she should live in terror of him, it would have been very likely that she would not have picked up her hobby of sexting convicts. But this is like suggesting that cobalt bombs are a good way to stop wildfires in California: while technically correct, the cure would be worse than the disease.
Despite what Western media reporting might have you believe, the rate of petty crime in India is surprisingly low. People rarely get pick-pocketed or robbed. Do you know why?
Because if caught in the act, the perpetrator would be rather unceremoniously beaten to a pulp, both by whoever caught them, and any civic minded individuals present. You can get a nice crowd going, it's fun for the whole family.
This is of course, strictly speaking, illegal. Yet any police officer, if asked to intervene, would laugh, shake their head and say the criminal deserved it. If the crook had the temerity to file charges, he'd probably be taken out back and given a second helping to change his mind.
As far as I'm concerned, this is strictly superior to prevailing Western attitudes regarding property crimes or theft. A shopkeeper who discovers someone shoplifting has very little legal recourse, the police rarely do any more than file a report and then give up on pursuing the matter. Giving them the de-facto right to take matters into their own hand and recover their property? The shopkeeper wins. Polite society wins, the only loser is the thief, and in this case the process is quite literally the desired punishment.
Before you ask, the number of false positives is negligible. I've never heard of anyone being falsely accused in this manner (at least with accusations of theft), and I've never had to have that particular fear myself.
I am, in general, against husbands beating their wives. Yet, in this specific scenario, I could hardly fault the poor chap should he be forced to resort to such methods to protect his own family. At the very least, I'd vote to acquit. It's a bit moot, because with prevailing Western norms, he likely didn't even consider a haymaker as a solution to his problems. In general, that's a good thing.
ControlsFreak
16hr ago
I am very happy that these drugs helped your mother. I do not disparage anything about these drugs or anyone who chooses to take them.
...however.
I have an urge to find solutions to problems that actually work
You, like many others, go too far. Changing your lifestyle does actually work; it's just that many people don't do it. There are a bunch of reasons why they don't do it, and that's okay. They may be perfectly fine using a drug. Nothing wrong with that. But don't tell people that changing their lifestyle doesn't work, because it does.
Let's take something like, I don't know, becoming a doctor. I've heard that this process sucks. I've heard that plenty of folks burn out or fail at some point. I'm sure someone's mother somewhere failed in trying to become a doctor, regardless of how much her family tried to make her do it. Nevertheless, I think there are still fine reasons to say, "Here are the objective things you need to accomplish to become a doctor, and here are a variety of subjective tips to help you pattern your life in a way that is conducive to achieving that goal, if you so choose." Some people won't do it, and that's okay (in fact, the vast majority of people right now don't become doctors). We don't have a pill yet that magically gives people all the required knowledge of a doctor. But even if we did, it wouldn't be a reason to say that the other (true, good) information "doesn't work".
HereAndGone
3hr ago
Why am I (and others of an older generation) so horribly prejudiced against perfectly normal people covered head-to-toe in tattoos and piercings? Why do we cling to our outmoded beliefs that tattooing of that extent reveals low-life trashiness?
Well, cases like this, for one. Add in drugs (but of course drugs were involved) and it's a mess. Why, how can I look at the photos of this productive member of society and think to myself "that's a crazy dangerous person?"
Because he is a crazy dangerous person.
Also, while I'm at it, let me give out about the members of my own sex who hook up with crazy dangerous guys and still persuade themselves that this is the human equivalent of a velvet hippo cuddlebug pitbull who won't ever bite their own face off:
Jurors took just over four hours last month to unanimously convict Mr Scannell of the murder.
He struck Mr Baitson from behind the left knee with a sword at the Eurospar car park on Newtown Road in Cobh, Co Cork on the evening of March 15, 2024. Medical evidence revealed that such was the ferocity of the attack, the samurai sword cut through muscle, artery and bone and partially severed the leg.
... A letter from his partner, Alison Roche, was read to the court which said he was a devoted and loving father and partner.
She said her partner had battled alcohol and drug addiction issues but that everyone deserves a second chance at rehabilitation.
"Addiction is horrible," she wrote.
Mr Scannell has 11 previous convictions, one from July 2016 for assault causing harm in which he received a two year suspended sentence from Cork Circuit Criminal Court.
So let me get this straight: he's covered literally to his head in tattoos, he sells drugs, he's a drunk and a junkie, he's violent with the criminal conviction to back that up, and he just straight-up violently murdered a guy with a samurai sword over a disputed drug debt. But he's such a loving partner and father!
I honestly don't know why some women are so stupid. Yeah, loving and devoted up to the minute he swings at you with a sword, you silly girl.
Back to my main point: people covered in tattoos and/or piercings are the human equivalent of aposematism, change my mind.
This is horrible. Putting any child younger than 3 years into such a facility is equivalent to putting them part-time into orphanage. Infants and toddlers do not have emotional regulation to handle that and they need regular skin-to-skin contact with mothers and to lesser degree with fathers. Otherwise they can develop similar symptoms to those of institutionalized children with all the baggage - learned helplessness, closing into their internal world as they know outside help is not coming even after hours of crying etc.
Tree
17hr ago
Is there any solid evidence of this psychological damage? A lot of parents, starting from month 6, try to ignore their kids crying, so that they cry less and become less of a burden (they are far more coddled now than they used to be). And from adoption studies we know that parenting does not matter much.
AlexanderTurok
Alt-MSNBC
5hr ago
Recently @RandomRanger accused me of strawmanning the Right:
Turok was being banned for being overtly aggressive and obnoxiously creating imaginary narratives like "The "Woke Rightist" looks at his race, sees a mostly imaginary mass of helpless unemployed drug addicts and demands tariffs so that they can rise to the lofty heights of sewing bras, picking fruit, hauling equipment, and digging ditches in the rain."
That's not what the 'woke right' thinks and he surely knows it. He need only check the MAGA rhetoric from Trump about good factory jobs, or the rhetoric from the right about the need to mechanize dull fruitpicking jobs and raise productivity. Why, they say, should millions of people be brought into the country if AI is going to destroy everyone's jobs? Or the need to have American wealth kept in America rather than sent off in remittances. Or them hating H1Bs as cost-cutting that interferes with developing talent. Or them not seeing the country as purely an economic zone but having responsibility to native citizens. It's an insanely uncharitable and aggressive butchering of other people's ideology.
Did I strawman the Right? Let's ask Lori Chavez-DeRemer, the United States secretary of labor:
FOX: I think American citizens are willing to do the jobs that illegal immigrants are willing to do.
LORI CHAVEZ-DeREMER: Americans are willing to do the job. What we have to give them is the opportunity to have those jobs.
DeRemer refers to "Americans," the online racialist Right is talks about whites, but in both cases the vision is the same, uplifting the ingroup means getting them the opportunity to do the jobs currently done by the guy standing in the Home Depot parking lot. Is there any wonder high-income whites are moving away from the Republican Party? Working-class whites, too, don't want their sons working casual labor, which is why in the video DeRemer goes on to talk about how Americans will be given opportunity through being "skilled, upskilled, re-skilled" and how the Trump administration is increasing apprenticeships. Of course, few illegals do those high-skilled jobs, so upskilling Americans won't replace many illegals, but it's not like the Fox News host is going to point out the apparent contradiction.
Given that I've given an example from a cabinet-level Trump administration official, (not "nutpicked" from some rando on Twitter) I expect that @RandomRanger will withdraw his claim that I "obnoxiously created imaginary narratives" in the interests of truth and courtesy.
Chrisprattalpharaptr
Ave Imperaptor
9hr ago
This post is about Tariffs, again, lest I be accused of burying the lede. Just read the last two paragraphs if you don't enjoy window dressing.
China tightened regulations on real estate developers in 2020. Xi Jinping stated 'houses are for living, not speculation.' Ghost cities, huge numbers of Chinese citizens owning multiple houses as investment vehicles, I assume you're all familiar with the stories after five years of news stories and discussion. Economists and western commentators largely agreed that the policies were A Really Bad Idea due to the ensuing chaos and meltdown in property prices.
To which I have to say ...what? They said they wanted to reduce housing costs! What did you think that would look like? How else are you going to do it? And what do you think it would look like to 'make housing more affordable' in the USA? If the YIMBYs and neoliberals abundance socialists get their way, home prices are going to tank here too. This is a good thing! Maybe there's some Chestertonian benefit to the upwards spiral of housing costs, but this here's a fence I'm ready to take a torch to.
Anyways, to inch closer to the issue at hand - I have to confess that I had some tepid enthusiasm for Trump returning to office. Despite it all, I'm still an Elon stan and I thought some of the Dogemaxxers might have cogent arguments. I had some hope for racking up some China tariffs, eating bitterness for a few years and coming out the other end as a cohesive autarkical bloc of NATO + AUKUS + Japan + South Korea + anyone not named Putin or Jinping we can convince to join the squad. Setting aside my disappointments with Trump 2.0...
I'm utterly perplexed by the dialogue around tariffs? I can remember breathless fearmongering about shortages, empty shelves, inflation all spring. People on reddit posted invoices where what used to be a 10,000$ order from China was now over 50,000$. And yet...none of this chaos has come to pass? As far as I can tell, TACO is somewhat responsible, but also, average US tariff rates are just over 50% on Chinese goods?. Is it all TACO? If 50% tariffs have been painless, do you expect me to believe that 100% tariffs will truly be apocalyptic to the US economy? Do any of the firmly anti-tariff crowd have an explanation or prediction to make?
And on the other side, I fully expect victory laps and crowing about 4D chess from the 'Trump BTFOs retarded soyboy economics ExPeRtS crowd' again, but if the tariffs are painless and everyone is still buying cheap shit from China, aren't we losing??? Isn't the inflation, the spike in prices and the empty shelves the point of this whole exercise? Why are you promising people it will be painless, rather than YesChadding and telling them that the pain is the goal? You can have affordable housing when you're willing to accept that your own home will depreciate in value, and you can have low-skill manufacturing in your country when you're willing to accept higher prices for your goods. Eat bitterness with a smile on your face. Tell your daughter she only gets two dolls instead of 30 this Christmas because communism uncle Jerry with the high school degree needs a better job.
Andy Ngo has some good long form coverage of the suspects. Actually he's got a few good articles on his substack about this and other culture war adjacent incidents. Some of the shooters were trans which is an interesting datapoint.
I don't know what these clowns were thinking. How did they expect this to end? They're lucky the majority of them are still alive.
Are people really in such a mental state that they think an assault on trying to murder federal agents over deportations is an appropriate course of action?
FiveHourMarathon
Wawa Nationalist
12hr ago
When Aristotle talks about "natural slaves" he's not really talking about some American nightmare-vision of an antebellum plantation*. The ancient Greek system of slavery he was familiar with was closer to "employee who can't quit" than it was to "living under absolute constant terror." In some sense "slave" is a mistranslation, because the context is so different.
If you say "should it be legal to enslave people" everyone says no; but if you asked the same people "Should it be legal for certain people to be employed in jobs they can't quit" many would say yes.
There's no question that a great number of people need a structured job created for them, where they are directed. Traditionally, bosses took a large hand in the personal lives of their workers; today that is frowned upon.
*It should be noted that actual plantation life wasn't like that either. There were black slaves better off than some poor white people.
cjet79
13hr ago
Video game thread
I've been playing Captains of Industry, and Len's Island lately.
The first is a kind of mix between factorio, a city sim, and a terrain flattening sim. The latter part doesn't sound fun, but is weirdly the most satisfying aspect of the game. If you ever wanted to dig a giant pit and dump it all into the ocean, this is the game for you.
Len's Island was described as an isometric Valheim in a review and that has mostly been true. Generally an enjoyable game if you like the genre, but nothing too ground breaking or unique.
WhiningCoil
13hr ago
So I read Blindsight in about 4 days ish. That was a ride. Waaaaaay less comfortable of a first contact story that Mote in God's Eye, which was the last novel I talked about which brought recommendations of Blindsight. Here, and also a buddy of mine who just lent me his copy.
I liked it... but I didn't enjoy it. Like, it was rich in concepts and took the story in directions I never saw coming. But I felt like it spent more time trying to fuck with me thanks to the layers of unreliable narrators than it did advancing a story. And then of course it's just a total downer from a humanist perspective. I feel like Blindsight is a better recommendation to go along with something from HP Lovecraft than an almost Star Trekkish "Rah Rah Humanity!" first contact story like The Mote in God's Eye.
I guess if you love hearing about how much we suck and are doomed and the universe will trample us with it's indifference, Blindsight is pretty good. But something in me says Lovecraft did it better. Probably a matter of taste.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
9hr ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold? Is this true of people in guardianships? It seems strange to cite Aristotle's conception of slavery and then apply it to situations that seem to be missing the central feature of what it meant to be enslaved. From your link:
Further, as production and action are different in kind, and both require instruments, the instruments which they employ must likewise differ in kind. But life is action and not production, and therefore the slave is the minister of action. Again, a possession is spoken of as a part is spoken of; for the part is not only a part of something else, but wholly belongs to it; and this is also true of a possession. The master is only the master of the slave; he does not belong to him, whereas the slave is not only the slave of his master, but wholly belongs to him. Hence we see what is the nature and office of a slave; he who is by nature not his own but another's man, is by nature a slave; and he may be said to be another's man who, being a human being, is also a possession. And a possession may be defined as an instrument of action, separable from the possessor.
"Some people have difficulty running their lives and it would be better for them if someone else ran it to some extent" is a defensible proposition. "Some people should be the literal property of other people" much less so.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
7hr ago
[comic sans]UAP DISCLOSURE UPDATES[/comic sans]
The mood in the UFO community has been rather dour lately due to a string of disappointments and setbacks, but Rep. Eric Burlison of Missouri dropped some promising indications this week that Congress has not forgotten about the topic and full disclosure may very well still be in the works:
"We're pursuing a hearing date. We've got a list of people that we're looking at. We're actually looking at potentially doing two. One with some people that are direct whistleblowers, who have had direct, and when I say direct, they had eyes directly on or have personally encountered UAP. In their formal operations."
"Not somebody out and about like Joe Blow out there that saw something. There's thousands and thousands of people like that. We're talking about people that worked for the Pentagon, worked in a government program, where they worked in and around this technology. Whether it was through crash retrieval, or through reverse engineering, that's what we're pursuing right now."
"The next hearing after that, once we're able to get information, we're looking at doing some interrogatories, which is where you take some of the things that have been said in these briefings, in these open hearings under oath. And then we send a formal letter as a committee, asking for answers from, whether it's Tulsi Gabbard, or whomever it is that we need to be asking these questions of. And then which would send up the potential second hearing, which would hopefully be able to clear people like Tulsi Gabbard to come forward."
"And I've been told she's very... friendly when it comes to this topic. That she wants disclosure. She wants to help bring about disclosure on this topic."
naraburns
nihil supernum
9hr ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold?
Er, well, no, but historically? Yes, sometimes. The "proprietarian" theory of childhood and the relative personhood of minors is a separate but related question, which Aristotle uses illustratively and which remains analogous even today.
"Some people have difficulty running their lives and it would be better for them if someone else ran it to some extent" is a defensible proposition. "Some people should be the literal property of other people" much less so.
Sure, but my whole point is that the difference is one of degree rather than kind, and that much of law and culture is devoted to keeping people at least somewhat enslaved, while simultaneously obfuscating that fact. I would think it obvious from what I wrote, but in case it's not, I certainly do not endorse chattel slavery! Not do I endorse milder forms; I do not even particularly endorse our current cultural approach to the subjection of children. This is what makes the puzzle a proper puzzle, on my view--that the approaches we have adopted toward managing the lives of others strike me as at once both too great and too small.
Capital_Room
rather dementor-like
15hr ago
the modern mainstream left seems to model ideas as akin to infectious diseases, which can spread from person to person merely through contact
Yes, but are they really all that wrong to model them — or at least some ideas — that way? I mean, isn't this a key part of why, traditionally, heresy was considered such a serious matter? Doesn't the "contagion" model somewhat follow from Dawkins's original "meme" concept; not to mention previous thinkers like Bernays and McLuhan on mass communications?
I mean, this is probably an area where I'd agree that "the Woke are more correct than the mainstream," and that your moderate centrist (classical liberal) sort are way too dismissive of the potential importance of memetic hygiene.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
8hr ago
Are children possessions? Can they be bought and sold?
Er, well, no
Surrogacy businesses everywhere in sudden disarray.
quiet_NaN
14hr ago
The insane thing is that they imagined that cop killing would be a step towards defeating ICE. That firmly places them in the bottom political intelligence percentile of the broader SJ movement.
It should obvious to anyone that the US in 2025 is not China ca. 1930. It is very much not like there are millions of wokes just waiting for a signal to put down their pumpkin spice lattes and pick up their assault weapons and wage a civil war against the USG. They don't have the guns, they don't have the training, they don't have the stomach and I would argue that most of them do not have the ideological radicalism which enabled Mao's troops to win through atrocities. Sure, they might cheer on Hamas, but they would likely shy away from Hamas-level violence in the US. The slogan of the BLM riots was "defund the police", which misguided as it is, is notably different from "shoot the pigs".
It is obvious that the less violent resistance to ICE seen in California is a much less suicidal way to express their dissatisfaction with Trump's policies. If this is successful in affecting policy remains to be seen, the way I see it, Trump can use the publicity to highlight how he keeps his campaign promises, and he does not really care how much it will cost to continue the deportations despite widespread disruptions, it is not like he is fiscally responsible or anything.
But escalating to a firefight with the feds is terminally stupid.
Also, the group managed to have an excellent gender balance for a terrorist cell (four cis-women, two trans-women, four men, presumably cis), but their racial composition is Problematic. One of the women might be Asian, but all the rest is White. Let us hope that they were not shooting Black cops from their position of privilege.
Also, why post a picture of one of the guy's Mexican wife? That guy just tried to murder cops, he could be in a polycule with bearded North Koreans and it would not be relevant. Put the picture of his wife in once she is wanted or charged with anything.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
14hr ago
· Edited 14hr ago
For example, how would this situation be handled in India? [...]
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them.
When dealing with questions of punishment, we always have to confront the problem of how the authority figure's prosocial motivations can be disentangled from the pleasure he gets from enacting the punishment itself. Can they even be disentangled? Is it possible that they're always one and the same?
For the suburban Karen who calls CPS because her neighbors let their son ride his bike without a helmet, the wellbeing of the child is of secondary importance at best. Her primary motivation is the feeling of power she derives from being able to commandeer an instrument of state violence.
In your case, the violence is not even mediated through the state, but is dished out by the man's own hands, "with a good conscience" -- this makes the charm all the more seductive. Are we to suppose that the man is not secretly, or not-so-secretly, hoping that his wife will someday commit a transgression which merits some familial intervention? An "evolutionary genealogy" of such a system might reveal that its primary and originary purpose was as a system of ritualized violence, with its usage as an instrument of "justice" being vestigial or epiphenomenal.
There are no pure assertions of "negative" restrictions on rights -- there are only positive assertions of rights. "You should not have the right to do X" can be rewritten as "I should have the right to punish you for doing X". Or, more explicitly: "I want the right to punish you for doing X".
And people still wonder why feminists get up in arms over the concept of "traditional family structures". In the system thus described, is it ever the wife who beats the husband for his transgressions? She can try, and she may even have the support of the community on her side, but due to physical asymmetry, it's unlikely to end well for her. She can get male relatives to do it for her; but the prerogative of deriving full enjoyment from the act of punishment remains with the man. That hardly seems fair.
wayfarer
15hr ago
When people get on their high horse and claim that using drugs to solve your problems is a crutch
Well obviously.
But when I broke my leg I got a crutch.
What the fuck I was supposed to do? Crawl? Walk on leg with broken bone, injure it further and howl in agony?
Crutches exist for a reason! There are stupid way to use them, I guess, but typical use of crutches is extremely useful in an obvious way!
I do not have problems solved by Ozempic as far as I know, but if I could pop a safe pill to solve procrastination issues I would do it!
I ran into the following tweet (xeet?) over on X:
https://x.com/DaveyJ_/status/1942962076101603809
I would feel bad for simply posting this as a naked link, so I guess I have to add on some half-baked analysis and commentary on top:
This is horrifying. Rarely, so you see examples of behavior that is clearly "legal", in the sense that there's no clear crime being committed, but with so much potential for harm to unwitting bystanders. I'm unfamiliar with the scope of child endangerment laws in the US, but I'd be surprised if they covered this or, even if they theoretically did so, whether they'd be enforced in that manner.
(I don't claim to be an expert, but my understanding is that these laws typically require a prosecutor to prove that a guardian knowingly and willfully placed a child in a situation where their life or health was directly endangered. The behavior of the sister-in-law is profoundly reckless, but it falls into a legal gray area. A defense attorney would argue she had no intent to harm her children and that the danger was hypothetical and probabilistic, not immediate and direct. Proving a direct causal link between her online activities and a "clear and present danger" to the children would be incredibly difficult until, tragically, one of the inmates actually showed up and acted on his threats.)
At the same time, is it a problem worth solving? How do you reconcile that question with my earlier claim?
Well, that's a matter of impact or scale. Laws have costs associated with them, be it from the difficult to quantify loss of freedom/chilling effect, enforcement costs, sheer legislative complexity, or what I'm more concerned about, unexpected knock-on effects/scope creep where a desperate attempt to define the problematic action results in too wide a scope for enforcement:
What if it turns out to affect single moms looking to date again? Their new partners are far more likely to abuse their kids, but should such women thus be arrested for putting their kids at risk? Should people be forbidden from writing letters to inmates, or falling in love with them, or sex with them?
Is it worth it to specifically criminalize such behavior?
Despite my abhorrence for it, I'm not sure it is. I think the fraction of people who would be stupid or insane enough to act this way is small enough that the majority of us can treat this like a horror story and ignore it.
Another way to illustrate my intuition here would be to consider being a doctor or legislator reading an account of some kind of ridiculously horrible disease. Maybe it makes your skin fall off and your guts come out while leaving you in crippling agony (I'm like 50% certain there's an actual disease like this, but it's probably something that happens to premature infants. That, or acute radiation poisoning I suppose). Absolutely terrible, and something no one should go through.
Yet, for how horrible it is, this hypothetical disease is also ridiculously rare. Imagining it happens to a person every ten years, and makes medical journals every time it happens because of how rare it is. I would expect that doctor, or that law maker, to both be horrified, but if they were rational individuals considering the greater good, I would strongly prefer that they focus on more mundane and common conditions, like a cure for heart disease. There are lower hanging fruit to grasp here.
Now, the biggest hurdle holding back the poor family in the story I've linked to is a simple one: the Overton Window. If, for some unfortunate reason, the number of women crazy enough to act that way rose significantly, society would probably develop memetic antibodies or legal solutions. This might, sometimes, become strong enough to overcome the "women are wonderful" effect, if such women are obviously being the opposite.
Sometimes it's worth considering the merits of informal resolution systems for settling such matters, even if they have other significant downsides. For example, how would this situation be handled in India?
(I'm not aware of a trend of Indian women being stupid enough to act this way, though I can hardly say with any authority that it's literally never happened)
Firstly, the extended family would have much more power. This is the rare case where both the husband's side and the wife's own family would probably agree that something needs to be done, the latter for reputational reasons as well as concern for the kids. She'd probably end up committed, if she wasn't beaten up or ostracized to hell and back. The police would turn a blind eye, should she choose to complain, they'd be profoundly sympathetic to the family's plight and refuse to act against them. And if they weren't, they'd be even more sympathetic to the idea of their palms being greased. The most awful outcomes would become vanishingly unlikely.
As a wise mullah once said: "What is the cure for such disorders? Beatings."
This isn't necessarily an overall endorsement of such a legal framework, or societal mindset. I'm just pointing out that, occasionally, they tackle problems that an atomized, quasi-libertarian society like most of the West can't tackle. I'd still, personally, prefer to live in the latter. While it's too late for the gent in question, you can reliably avoid running into such problems in the first place by not sticking your dick in crazy. Alas, as someone who has committed that folly, it's an even bigger folly to expect people to stop...
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