domain:betonit.substack.com
FtttG
27m ago
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple.
You can always add more epicycles. At least in my experience, a man striking an elderly woman is widely seen as a more heinous crime than a man striking a wheelchair-bound man.
FtttG
14m ago
Not universal, but widespread. I do acknowledge there are exceptions. I don't think my psychology is representative of masculinity as a whole, and I don't think you should draw the same inferences from your psychology either.
You’re saying if a man sees a boy and girl drowning (perhaps his children, perhaps not), he always saves the girl?
I think the average man would be far more likely to save the girl than the boy, yes.
Tree
18m ago
You make universal claims about male psychology I can refute with a single example, me.
You’re saying if a man sees a boy and girl drowning (perhaps his children, perhaps not), he always saves the girl?
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
21m ago
Hm, does Compact have any links to the German magazine of the same name?
I don’t think so, no. Although funny enough, the name “Compact” comes from the idea of a “new compact” between left and right. Social conservatism and economic socialism. One might say that it’s rather… third positionist. (Although in practice most of their takes are very basic bitch and milquetoast.)
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
4hr ago
Periodic Open-Source AI Update: Kimi K2 and China's Cultural Shift
(yes yes another post about AI, sorry about that). Link above is to the standalone thread, to not clutter this one.
Two days ago a small Chinese startup Moonshot AI has released weights of the base and instruct versions of Kimi K2, the first open (and probably closed too) Chinese LLM to clearly surpass DeepSeek's efforts. It's roughly comparable to Claude Sonnet 4 without thinking (pay no mind to the horde of reasoners at the top of the leaderboard, this is a cheap-ish capability extension and doesn't convey the experience, though is relevant to utility). It's a primarily agentic non-reasoner, somehow exceptionally good at creative writing, and offers a distinct "slop-free", disagreeable but pretty fun conversation, with the downside of hallucinations. It adopts DeepSeek-V3’s architecture wholesale (literally "modeling_deepseek.DeepseekV3ForCausalLM"), with a number of tricks gets maybe 2-3 times as much effective compute out of the same allowance of GPU-hours, and the rest we don't know yet because they've just finished a six-months marathon and don't have a tech report.
I posit that this follows a cultural shift in China’s AI ecosystem that I've been chronicling for a while, and provides a nice illustration by contrast. Moonshot and DeepSeek were founded at the same time, have near-identical scale and resources but have been built on different visions. DeepSeek’s Liang Wengeng (hedge fund CEO with Masters in engineering, idealist, open-source advocate) couldn't procure funding in the Chinese VC world with his inane pitch of “long-termist AGI research driven by curiosity” or whatever. Moonshot’s Yang Zhilin (Carnegie Mellon Ph,D, serial entrepreneur, pragmatist) succeeded at that task, got to peak $3,3 valuation with the help of Alibaba and Sequoia, and was heavily spending on ads and traffic acquisition throughout 2024, building a nucleus of another super-app with chatbot companions, assistants and such trivialities at a comfortable pace. However, DeepSeek R1, on merit of vastly stronger model, has been a breakout success and redefined Chinese AI scene, making people question the point of startups like Kimi. Post-R1, Zhilin pivoted hard to prioritize R&D spending and core model quality over apps, adopting open weights as a forcing function for basic progress. This seems to have inspired the technical staff: "Only regret: we weren’t the ones who walked [DeepSeek’s] path."
Other Chinese labs (Qwen, Minimax, Tencent, etc.) now also emulate this open, capability-focused strategy. Meanwhile, Western open-source efforts are even more disappointing than last year – Meta’s LLaMA 4 failed, OpenAI’s model is delayed again, and only Google/Mistral release sporadically, with no promises of competitive results.
This validates my [deleted] prediction: DeepSeek wasn’t an outlier but the first swallow and catalyst of China’s transition from fast-following to open innovation. I think Liang’s vision – "After hardcore innovators make a name, groupthink will change" – is unfolding, and this is a nice point to take stock of the situation.
Tree
32m ago
I think people are whitewashing their political opinions by calling them ‘facts of human nature’. You say most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm, but in numerous cultures it was normal to beat women. In honor cultures, even related men can kill them for a smile. Obviously rape was widespread, etc. This isn’t the feminist litany of oppression, men suffered terribly too. I just don’t think you can look at all that and see the instinctive urge to protect women. And I personally don’t feel the discriminatory urge to save a random woman over a random man.
Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties.
That's because they are less of a threat, like a child, or a cripple. Doesn't have anything to do with the inherent biological value of women.
pak chooie
I think the typical English onomatopoeia for spitting is "ptooie" or "ptoo". It has a rather childish connotation, though, and I don't think I've ever seen it used for spitting in disgust. In such a situation, a native Anglophone normally would just write "(spits in disgust)".
self_made_human
Grippy socks, grippy box
2hr ago
A God-tier shitpost I am memetically compelled to spread due to the worms in my brain:
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
2hr ago
There probably isn't a delay, plans to ship it in May to capitalize on the hype were entirely hallucinated by jo*rnalists as far as I can tell. It might take many months yet.
OliveTapenade
1hr ago
Regardless of technical chops, the real value here is of course exposure, a first decent shot at normiefying the whole edifice. Elon may be a fake gamer, the gravest insult I can levy against my fellow man, but fringe interests make for strange bedfellows, and I'm glad to see the first public attempts at rather literal waifutech make the twitterati seethe.
This may speak badly of me, but the Path of Exile 2 incident was actually a big factor in lowering my opinion of Musk. I never particularly liked him but prior to that I had tended to assume that there was a level of baseline stability there.
The PoE2 incident really undercut that for me - it was so obviously pathetic, so clearly the behaviour of a deeply insecure loser, that it was impossible to interpret any other way. It makes no sense in strategic terms, since non-gamers do not care and will not recognise anything about Musk's gamer skills, and actual gamers will instantly recognise that he's never played the game before. It is a move guaranteed to lose him status everywhere. What's more, the stakes are so incredibly low. Musk doesn't need to play PoE2 to get nerd cred. He has easier ways to get that if he wants it. And that's the only prize! Nobody else cares at all, and in fact being on top of a leaderboard for an action RPG is probably seen as vaguely pathetic or dorky by most normies.
It was a childish, ill-thought-out pretence, risks that are all downside and no upside, all for winning a prize that is of no value, and which he could more easily obtain in other ways. It is not the move of a man who has his life together. It is the move of an extremely wealthy person with the emotional maturity of a child and very little impulse control or ability to think ahead.
I have not updated in the direction of thinking that Musk is incompetent at absolutely everything. I believe that he has some skills as a manager and entrepreneur, and his commercial success suggests that there's some real ability there. I have, however, updated in the direction of thinking that even if Musk is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer, he is a brilliant businessman, manager, and engineer who is simultaneously a sad, pathetic little man.
I suppose I should say something about Grok.
I can't really think of much. AI waifus have been around for a bit now, so this isn't breaking any ground. What stands out to me most, I suppose, is how tasteless Musk's advertising of this feature is, but again it's not really news that Elon Musk says creepy or tasteless things, on impulse, on Twitter. I suppose my advice to him would be that if you're selling porn, or selling products morally equivalent to porn (i.e. things that most people regard as shameful or anti-social to indulge in), you need to either have some fig-leaf of pretending that you're not (e.g. CharacterAI markets itself as fun and social), or get in the ghetto. AI girlfriends are a ghetto.
My understanding of gender-critical feminists/TERFs etc. is that they chafe against the ancillary gender roles and social expectations assigned to female people by virtue of their biology, pointing out that the fact they're female doesn't imply that they should be expected to be good at cooking, shouldn't be expected to stay home and look after the children, shouldn't be expected to wear skirts and pink clothing.
Trans activists turn this on its head by actively reifying the ancillary gender roles and arbitrary social expectations, particularly those assigned to female people. Rather than claiming "you are a woman, therefore you have to wear skirts and pink clothing", they claim "I like wearing skirts and pink clothing, therefore I am a woman". They thereby reduce the status of "woman" to the ancillary, contingent gender role, the very thing the radical feminists are seeking to abolish. Radical feminists want to deprecate the ancillary, contingent gender roles altogether; trans activists want to elevate them above all else. Perhaps these goals aren't quite antithetical but they certainly aren't aligned with one another.
Another way of framing it is that radical feminists think that, when assessing a person's identity and the role they should play, our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics. Per the OP, they would rather be seen as e.g. a scientist first and a woman second, rather than as a woman first and a scientist second. All well and good. But there's no conflict between asserting that our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits over individual characteristics when assessing people's identities, and recognising that acknowledging the reality of immutable biological traits is still necessary and unavoidable. Outside of gender medicine, virtually all of the major flashpoints in the trans culture war are domains in which immutable biological traits are obviously more germane to the discussion than individual characteristics: when it comes to one's likelihood of committing a sexual assault, being male (or not) has far more predictive power than basically any other trait; in most tests of strength, speed and/or stamina, virtually any male person will have an insurmountable competitive advantage over any female person (despite your repeated claims to the contrary). It's like the radical feminists are saying "our society places too much emphasis on immutable biological traits" and the trans activists are saying "yeah, we shouldn't acknowledge biology at all!" and the radical feminists are like "no, just because our society places too much of an emphasis on biology doesn't mean it doesn't matter at all". Just because you're a libertarian who thinks that there are too many laws doesn't mean you want to abolish the prohibition on murder.
Shirayuki
1hr ago
Probably true for most people, but I think it speaks to a bug in the human condition more than anything.
It's awfully depressing if the point of building a relationship is to try and fix your inferiority complex...
FtttG
47m ago
They're described as some of the most restrictive in the US, but I don't know what that means in practice.
quiet_NaN
53m ago
The trouble with untruth is that it is hard in advantage to know when it will be harmless and when it will lead to disaster.
Myths work okayish even if most people do not believe that they are literally true. Most people who partake in the Star Wars subculture do not believe that there was a historical person named Luke Skywalker in a galaxy far away. They still can dress up as wookies and go to conventions or debate minor points of Jedi philosophy online, but they are much less likely to engage in harmful actions than a subculture which believes their myths are literally true.
sohois
2hr ago
It did not! Impressively, not only did the developers preserve most of the existing bugs, they somehow managed to introduce new bugs as well. The game remains janky as fuck and you can effortlessly break the game.
They were a few casualties though like the ominous dark brotherhood entrance being replaced with a boring texture, but pretty minor in the scheme of things
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
13hr ago
· Edited 9hr ago
New in Compact Magazine: Neither Side Wants to Emancipate Women
Twice this year, I found myself at conferences where a familiar question surfaced: Why do women not vote conservative? The tone was not hostile, only puzzled. Conservative women asked it themselves, with a kind of weary civility. But none of the answers seemed to satisfy. Some cited the state’s failure to support both motherhood and career; others blamed the lingering shadow of a conservatism that once sought to tether women to secondary roles.
No one could explain why so many women still turn away from even the most progressive forms of the right. Why do they keep voting for a left that consistently throws them under the bus, prioritizing for instance ideologies that deny biological sex and insist on men’s feelings and desires? The answer is simple, although no one wants to see it: Conservatives offer women performative reverence. Progressives offer equally performative protection. But no one offers women the thing they were once promised: freedom.
What freedom? How are you not free?
Of course, we already know that there's something rhetorical about this question, at least in the sense that we can reasonably ask whether anyone is in fact free. It's not an easy thing to nail down, you know? Lenin was asked if the revolution would bring freedom; he responded, "freedom to do what?". You have to specify, it's not self-evident. It's easy to be envious of the apparent freedom of others while also failing to appreciate their own unique forms of unfreedom. The master is relatively more free than the slave, no one can deny this; rare is the master who would switch places. But is the master free, simpliciter? Now it's not so clear. Marxists would say that no one is free, not even the capitalists, not as long as the task of capitalism remains unfulfilled. Capitalism is freedom, to be sure, but it is an unfree freedom, a freedom that poses a riddle that remains unsolved. But, let's stick to the issue at hand.
In the United States, women have leaned left for decades, not out of fervent ideological commitment, but through the steady pull of education, work, and shifting social norms. In 2020, Edison exit polls showed that 57 percent of women voted for Joe Biden, compared to 45 percent of men. Across Europe, too, women often favor center-left parties offering tangible supports: childcare, healthcare, material security.
But the dilemma runs far deeper than electoral politics. It touches upon the very essence of what it means to be free. I remain loyal to the feminist promise, however battered or dimmed, of genuine emancipation for women. This vision is not content to merely manage or glorify womanhood, but to transcend its limitations altogether, to be more than a body assigned a function, to move beyond the scripts of sex and tradition, and to claim the dignity of self-authorship. I never wanted merely to be accepted as a woman; I wanted to be free.
[...]Women do not lean left because it offers a credible path to emancipation. They do so because the right never even tried, and because the left, despite everything, still carries a faint echo of that promise.
What are you "transcending", and how? How do you not already have the "dignity of self-authorship"? What are you talking about?
(I'm going to tell you what I think she's talking about, just hang tight.)
Well, let's start with the objective facts of the matter. Women can already "self-author" themselves into essentially anything. Vice President (admittedly not President of the United States yet, but there's no reason we couldn't get there in short order), professor or artist, blue collar laborer, criminal, and anything else above, below, or in between. There are plenty of female role models to follow in all these categories. To the extent that there still exist "systemic privileges", actual explicit institutional privileges, they're mostly in favor of women now: in university admissions, in hiring, in divorce and family courts, and so on. Women are doing pretty good for themselves! Maybe they weren't 150 years ago, maybe they aren't if we're talking about Saudi Arabia or Iran, but in the 2025 Western first world? What freedoms are they missing?
And yet the author of the linked article perceives that something is missing. She perceives that women, as a class, do not have freedom, do not have the dignity of self-authorship. What do these terms mean? She doesn't say. But nonetheless, we should take her concerns quite seriously. Plainly, there are millions of women who share in her feelings, and millions of men who think she's onto something, and this continues to be the animating impulse of a great deal of cultural and political activity that goes under the heading of "feminism". Millions of people don't make things up. They're always responding to something, although their own interpretation of what they're responding to and what their response means can be mistaken. Plus, the author alleges that whatever phenomenon she's getting at, it plays a role in electoral politics, so you should care about it in that sense as well.
We should again note the author's hesitation to concretely specify her demands. If the issue were "the freedom to have an abortion" or "the dignity of being taken seriously in STEM", then presumably, she would have simply said that. But she makes it clear that the issue is freedom as such, and dignity as such; it's a gnawing, pervasive concern that you can't quite put your finger on. It's an abstract concern. So, we may be inclined to try a more abstract mode of explanation to explain why she feels the way she does.
Human interaction is predicated upon the exchange of value. There'd be no reason to stick around with someone if you weren't getting something out of it, even if all you're getting is some company and a good time. (There is a philosophical problem regarding whether pure altruism is conceptually possible; if you help someone, and you receive in exchange nothing but the satisfaction of having helped someone, then haven't you received something of value, thereby rendering the altruistic act "impure"? What if you don't even feel good about it, could it be pure then? But then, how were you motivated to help in the first place if you didn't even feel good about it? Regardless of how we answer these questions, I believe we can put the idea of absolute pure altruism to the side, because if it exists at all, it surely encompasses a minority of human interactions.)
We want to provide things of value to other people. But value is both a blessing and a curse. You want to have it, but it also weighs you down, it gets you entangled in obligations that you can't quite extricate yourself from. When you have something of great value, it tends to become the only thing that people ever want from you. We can consider Elon Musk as a figure of intense material and symbolic value. He's one of the wealthiest men alive, he runs X, he runs SpaceX, he had a spectacularly public falling out with Trump, and these factors undoubtedly dominate in virtually all of his interpersonal interactions. It's probably a bit hard for him to just be a "normal guy" with "normal friends", innit? Imagine him saying to someone, "when we're hanging out, I don't want to be Elon Musk, I just want to be Elon, y'know? Don't think of me as Elon the business tycoon and political figure. Think of me as, Elon the model train builder, or Elon the DotA player. Yeah, think of me like that instead. That's the identity I want you to symbolically affirm for me". His relations might make an attempt to humor him, although I don't think they'd be particularly successful in their attempts. His extreme wealth alone will always warp his interactions in ways both conscious and unconscious.
It is my contention that (healthy, reasonably attractive) women experience a heavily attenuated version of this phenomenon essentially from birth, which helps explain the pervasive irritation that some women feel at the simple fact of, well, being women. The constant nagging feeling that something is still not quite right, no matter how much progress is made on formal and even cultural equality (or even cultural domination, as may be the case in certain contexts).
If you were born with a female body, then you were gifted ownership of one of the most valuable possessions on planet earth. This is, again, both a blessing and a curse. This confers to you certain privileges and opportunities, but on the flip side, there is no way to ever turn this value off (aside from ageing -- but, even then...), to take respite from this fountain of value. You're in for the whole bargain, all of it, all the time. The value of the female body is a matter of pure economics; it is not based on the internal subjective psychological states of any individual or class of individuals. A man can impregnate many women in a single week. A woman, once impregnated, is tied up for 9 months. Her time cannot be apportioned as freely. Scarcity is the precondition of value; this is the law of everything that is, was, and shall be.
As a natural consequence of the extreme value of her body, the body comes to dominate her relations with others, both materially and symbolically. She correctly perceives that when people (well, men, at least) think about men, the properties they notice in order of salience are "web developer, white, middle class, male, father...", something like that. But when people think about her, the ordering is "woman, web developer, white, middle class...". Her body is what people want, it's what they're seeking; or at least, this is always necessarily a lurking suspicion. This, I believe, is the root of the aforementioned "abstract" concern with "the dignity of self-authorship"; it's not just the ability to become say, a prominent mathematician or artist in material reality, but to have that reciprocally affirmed as your primary symbolic identity by others. That's when we feel like we have dignity: when we can control how other people see us. I don't doubt that there have been times when a woman was being congratulated by male colleagues on the attainment of her PhD, or her promotion to the C-suite, and still there was a nagging doubt in the back of her mind that went, "........but you still see me as a woman before anything else, don't you?" Or, perhaps on the verge of frustration when talking with a male friend, she wanted to say, "look, I know every time you look at me I have this glowing halo effect around me, like you're wearing fucking AR goggles and they're telling you I'm an NPC that will give you a quest item or some shit, but can you please just take the goggles off for one day and just look at me as, well, me for a change?" And, I'm sorry to say, but here comes the really depressing part of the story: the goggles can't be removed. That glowing halo effect is glued to your tooshie, and it's not going anywhere. "Sexists" are at least appreciated for their forthrightness on this point; the reviled "male feminist" is correctly perceived to be simply dishonest about it. I suppose that's a bit of a downer. But, we all got our own shit to deal with. Take solace in the fact that you're just like everyone else in that regard.
Elon could at least conceivably give up all his wealth, his titles, his positions of symbolic authority, and start from zero. Because the male body has little to no intrinsic value, it's easier for men to become a "blank slate". But when your body itself is the source of this overbearing value? That's a bit harder to rid yourself of.
This, at any rate, is a psychological theory to explain the origin of the discourse in the linked article, a discourse that would otherwise seem to fly in the face of all available evidence. But I'm open to alternative theories.
erwgv3g34
4hr ago
I was worried when I saw that it had a custom license, but it turns out it's just a slightly modified MIT license, requiring credit if your project gets big enough. This truly is Open-Source.
ulyssessword
10hr ago
Building off of yesterday's discussion of AI hallucinations, there's a new story about journalist hallucinations. Of course they don't call it that: the journalists "got them wrong" and gave a "false impression" in their articles/tweets instead. They're talking about Alberta's new book ban (pdf of bill) which restricts sexually explicit materials in school libraries. In short, it:
- fully bans explicit sexual content (essentially porn, must be detailed)
- restricts non-explicit sexual content (like above, but not detailed) to grade 10 and up and only if "developmentally appropriate"
- does not restrict non-sexual content (medical, biological, romantic, or by implication)
The journalists were saying that non-sexual content (e.g. handholding) would be restricted like non-explicit sexual content, and therefore be unavailable until grade 10. One even went so far as to hallucinate get something wrong and give people the false impression that he was right and the government edited its releases to fix their mistake, which is why you can't find it now.
Yes, AIs hallucinate, but buddy, have you seen humans? (see also: the "unmarked graves" story (paywalled), where ground penetrating radar anomalies somehow became child remains with no investigation having taken place.) When I set my standards low, it's not because I believe falsehoods are safe, it's because the alternatives aren't great either.
FtttG
1hr ago
I wasn't debating whether it was rationally justified. It's simply a fact of human nature that most men feel an instinctive urge to protect female people from physical harm (an urge they do not feel when it comes to male people, or at least not nearly to the same extent), and that this urge does not discriminate on whether the woman in question is capable of bearing children or not. Indeed, I suspect the average man would think it was a far graver crime to assault an elderly (i.e. menopausal) woman than a woman in her early twenties. So your claim that women are only valued for a "doing" (i.e. the ability to bear children) doesn't really seem to describe male psychology accurately.
Corvos
1hr ago
modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts
Are guns banned in Massachusetts?
quiet_NaN
1hr ago
Overzelous knocking down of 'perceived untruths' can produce a lot of collateral damage;
If someone says "those that are found guilty on good evidence should be punished" then that does imply some caution against not punishing the innocent on flimsy evidence. Here, the ideal is clearly not "do not hold any beliefs, for they may be false". If you kick out a true belief A and believe not-A or end up agnostic about A, then your map will match the territory less well than when you started, and this is very much contrary to the spirit of the saying. I mean, it does not even say "reject any beliefs for which on reflection you have insufficient evidence", it only asks you to abandon beliefs which have been proven false.
As a rationalist, I believe that beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. A belief which can be destroyed by the truth, i.e. a false belief, will not be a reliable tenant.
Also, no beliefs exist in isolation, they form networks, and a false belief is more likely to prop up another false belief than a true one is.
Now you can carve out an exception for some personal things where the belief has other clear advantages despite being somewhat inaccurate. Believing your partner is a nine when a impartial analysis would determine that they are actually closer to a seven is probably permissible in most cases.
As mentioned, I'm currently reading Joseph Henrich's book The Secret of Our Success, his account of how culture shaped human evolution. It includes a chapter in which he argues that culture can impact on human biology without genetics being involved. Some of these seem straightforward and uncontroversial: London taxi drivers developing unusually developed memory centres because of the cognitive effort expended in memorising thousands of winding back streets was an example I'd encountered over a decade ago. There was also some breathless discussion of placebo, nocebo effects, and the phenomenon wherein a witch doctor puts a curse on someone and the person really dies because they expect the curse to kill them (all of which made me sceptical for the reasons outlined here: worth bearing in mind that this book came out nearly a decade ago, and probably took several years to write). But there was one example he gave that I was especially iffy on.
Henrich claims that men raised in "honour cultures" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_of_honor_(Southern_United_States)) have elevated cortisol and testosterone reactions to perceived slights. He goes on to argue that regions within the US which were colonised by Scots-Irish settlers (i.e. Borderers) still have vastly elevated rates of murder and other violence compared to other regions, even after controlling for other factors like race*, poverty and inequality. He argues that the explanation can't be genetic (i.e. people of Scottish descent are unusually prone to violence and aggression), pointing out that modern-day Scotland's murder rate is comparable to that of Massachusetts. His explanation is that "honour culture" shapes human biology at the hormonal level, causing men raised in the South with no genetic predisposition to violence and aggression nevertheless to violently overreact to perceived slights which a more civilised man would brush off. (The obvious implication of such a causal explanation is that the South needs to be colonised educated on how to be more like their Northern betters. PERMANENT RECONSTRUCTION!)
I don't dispute the claim that growing up in an environment in which aggression and violence are valorised could cause your body to pump out more testosterone than it would otherwise - that sounds entirely plausible. And yet, for a book which is essentially all about selection effects, it strikes me that there's a potentially obvious selection effect that Henrich is overlooking. The Scots-Irish borderers who left the British Isles to colonise the United States were not a randomly selected cross-section of their home society: it seems plausible that those who left were disproportionately likely to be unsuccessful at home, perhaps unable to hold down a steady job because of chronic drunkenness or propensity to violence. Ergo, the elevated rates of violence in Southern states could have a (partly) genetic explanation after all. At the minimum, I feel like Henrich could have gestured to this explanation, or acknowledged it as a potential contributing factor. In a book entirely about gene-culture co-evolution, it seems like a missed opportunity to tell a story like "for genetic reasons, the people who colonised these regions of the United States were unusually prone to violence and aggression, and this helped to foster a culture in which it's seen as appropriate to react explosively to perceived slights, exacerbating the salience of traits which a different, more agreeable culture would have taken pains to ameliorate".
*So he's not explicitly denying the 13/52 meme, but rather claiming that it's ultimately caused by white culture rather than black biology or black culture.
ulyssessword
6hr ago
The hoax is also pushed with a degree of nuance. The journalists always cite their sources and never claim it to be true themselves:
From NYT (I bypass the paywall by F12 to inspect the source, and delete < head > ):
The remains of more than 1,000 people, mostly children, have been discovered on the grounds of three former residential schools in two Canadian provinces since May.
No "according to" or anything for that statement, and it was last updated on March 28, 2022, compared to the clarification the First Nation put out in July 2021 (and another in May 2024).
Do people image from geostationary orbit? It's MUCH further away than other orbits: https://satellitetracker3d.com/track?norad-id=25544
I assumed that most imagery was doing using low-earth-orbit (LEO) satellites that watch from 500km - 700km up, like the SENTINEL satellites, and these only have recurring orbits on a period of days, although some of these programs have several satellites following the same orbit.
Am I mistaken about how imaging works? I'm not an expert.
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