I keep seeing lefties playing this childish "I know you are but what am I?" game with "snowflake," and it just doesn't work, because it's done with total disregard for facts on the ground and the actual semantic content of "snowflake."
The term "snowflake" denotes fragility, which is a totally appropriate criticism of leftists who claim that they are being harmed or made to feel unsafe by people expressing ideas with which they disagree. Or the people who claimed that they were afraid to walk the streets because of a handful of police shootings (literally single digits per year) which were not clearly justifiable with the benefit of hindsight. Weaponized fragility is a major part of the woke playbook, and it's totally appropriate to call them on it.
Nobody quoted in the linked article is doing this, or anything like it. They're saying that caving to the left was cowardly, and that they lost respect for Aldean because of it. Maybe this was stupid. Maybe the criticism was totally legitimate and the decision to edit out the footage was reasonable. I don't care enough to dig into the details and find out what footage was removed and what the context for that footage was, all of which would be necessary to form an informed opinion here. But I do know that you're using the word "snowflake" as a fully general counterargument and not in a manner consistent with its actual meaning and the facts in evidence. You might as well be saying, "My snowflake landlord wants me to pay rent on time." It's just total nonsense.
I think you're misunderstanding what the casting director is saying here: She's not saying that she's challenging beauty standards by casting an unattractive woman, but that she's challenging beauty standards by casting a (marginally) non-white woman.
This only makes sense if you're working from the premise that we're all socially conditioned to believe that only white women can be beautiful, a premise so stupid that only an intersectional feminist can accept it.
That said, if we all did actually believe that, Anya Chalotra would not be the ideal candidate to disabuse us of that notion.
I should clarify that as private institutions, they don't have to justify their admissions choices. They can admit whomever they want. But there's a certain fiction they're trying to maintain that doesn't really line up with their actual admissions policies, and deemphasizing standardized testing helps to maintain that fiction.
I think I've earned an I-told-you-so here. I've been saying for years that the Big Lie the left has been pushing about standardized test scores being just a measure of your parents' income hurts talented people from low- and middle-income households.
Standardized tests are the hardest component of college admissions to influence with money, and all this "whole person" fluff is trivial for rich parents to buy. By deemphasizing standardized tests, they make it much easier to justify rejecting high-performing low-SES white and Asian students.
It's weird that you see this as some kind of gotcha. The average person knows virtually nothing about economics, so the fact that they can't see through her shtick doesn't validate it. Yes, of course I'm angry that ignorant voters are being led astray by a charlatan, and that my country is being made worse off as a result. If you actually understood the issues, you would be, too.
Good news: Strikes are negative-sum! Because of lost productivity, the size of the pie to be divided shrinks. So it's absolutely possible for both sides to lose. The easiest way for this to happen is for the contract to remain unchanged, in which case the strikers lose pay and the studios lose profits.
In the US, there are about 1,200 cities with population 25k-100k, and 300 with population > 100k. Only 40 with population > 500k.
In fact, only four of the ten cities on that list (Bessemer, Monroe, and Pine Bluff, and Saginaw) have populations 25k have population < 100k. Detroit and Memphis both have populations over 500k, making up 20% of the top 10, despite the fact that less than 3% of eligible cities have populations over 500k.
Small cities aren't more violent on average; they just have a larger pool from which to draw outliers. Also worth noting that every city on that top ten list is at least 40% black, and eight are majority black. Ignoring the predictive power of race for violent crime rates is basically lobotomizing yourself. You can't even begin to think intelligently about crime, especially violent crime, in the US without accounting for it.
But also the average person is kind of dumb and has an irrational hatred of big corporations. Just because they saw evidence we didn't see doesn't mean they interpreted it correctly and acted on it in a reasonable manner. Comically oversized jury awards often come down on appeal.
Likely it's a problem that's hard to solve but easy to verify, like prime factorization. It's hard to factor numbers which are the product of two large primes, but trivial to verify that the product of two primes is the number that was to be factored.
IIRC, NP-complete problems have this property as well.
Also, Asian Americans had very high vaccination rates, and were in fact hit relatively lightly. Lower obesity rates likely played a role as well.
It's not as easy to explain why East Asian countries were relatively lightly hit, even before vaccines became available. I don't think the fact that Japan and Taiwan are island nations with tight border controls (and South Korea is also effectively an island nation, having only one extraordinarily tightly controlled border with North Korea) explains much. These countries all had outbreaks large enough that they should have generated sustained domestic spread, but they peaked at much, much lower levels than in the US and Europe. Maybe genetic factors did play a role after all.
I see the vicious smearing of dissenters as an implicit acknowledgement of intellectual fragility---a sort of memetic defense mechanism. If critics are not merely wrong, but bad, then their arguments don't even need to be considered.
Tabooing of criticism is crucial to the survival of wokeness, because it is, to put it bluntly, a pretty dumb ideology that can't stand up to serious scrutiny. More precisely, it's a midwit ideology. There's a litany of carefully curated concepts and facts (and factoids) you need to learn to fully appreciate it, and because of that, its adherents can easily convince themselves that they know more than those who disagree with them, and that that knowledge is the reason for the disagreement.
On average, that's probably true. There are more people who reject wokeness because they don't know enough than who reject it because they know too much. But the latter do exist, and that's what matters. As you go beyond the Gospel of Woke and start filling in the strategically placed gaps, the intellectual foundations of wokeness melt away.
In particular, wokeness's Achilles heel is quantitative analysis. It appeals most to people who think in terms of narratives rather than data. For example, the idea of redlining being a major contributor to the racial wealth gap makes intuitive sense, as long as you never do so much as a back-of-the-envelope sanity test to see if the numbers check out.
"People who publicly dissent from the current intellectual fads are just afraid of being thought of as uncool, unlike those of us who slavishly adhere to them" is an interesting take.
It really isn't, though. I get that the existence of intelligent people who disagree with you in good faith creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it's tempting to relieve that cognitive dissonance by pretending that they're actually saying something really stupid, or that they're paid shills or whatever, but deep down you know it's not true, right?
Note the "some," which was irresponsibly omitted from the headline. Later in the article, AAA says "a small percentage" of Florida customers will be impacted.
I'm curious as to why they would simply stop offering insurance, rather than raising rates. Are there price controls that prevent them from raising rates to levels where it would be worth offering insurance, or is disaster really so likely that it can't be offered at any affordable rate?
Yes. Activists are claiming that indigenous Canadian women are routinely murdered by white men---often using the term genocide---but all the evidence points to the murders as being overwhelmingly intraracial, just as they are for members of every other race.
The Canadian government spent about $100 million to commission a thousand-page report on the issue. One page was devoted to the question of who was committing the murders, and it just said that they don't trust the stats because the RCMP are racists.
Also, indigenous Canadian women are murdered at about the same rate per capita as white men in the US, so the scale of the problem is being hugely exaggerated.
Ten Second News went away for a while, only to come back as Ten Second News 2.0 Beta. At first glance, at least, it appears to be pretty much the same as it was before. Any new features we should know about?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “No, I Will Not Try That or Even Go to Your Small Town”
I keep seeing lefties playing this childish "I know you are but what am I?" game with "snowflake," and it just doesn't work, because it's done with total disregard for facts on the ground and the actual semantic content of "snowflake."
The term "snowflake" denotes fragility, which is a totally appropriate criticism of leftists who claim that they are being harmed or made to feel unsafe by people expressing ideas with which they disagree. Or the people who claimed that they were afraid to walk the streets because of a handful of police shootings (literally single digits per year) which were not clearly justifiable with the benefit of hindsight. Weaponized fragility is a major part of the woke playbook, and it's totally appropriate to call them on it.
Nobody quoted in the linked article is doing this, or anything like it. They're saying that caving to the left was cowardly, and that they lost respect for Aldean because of it. Maybe this was stupid. Maybe the criticism was totally legitimate and the decision to edit out the footage was reasonable. I don't care enough to dig into the details and find out what footage was removed and what the context for that footage was, all of which would be necessary to form an informed opinion here. But I do know that you're using the word "snowflake" as a fully general counterargument and not in a manner consistent with its actual meaning and the facts in evidence. You might as well be saying, "My snowflake landlord wants me to pay rent on time." It's just total nonsense.
On “The Hollywood Strikes: Contract Law”
I think you're misunderstanding what the casting director is saying here: She's not saying that she's challenging beauty standards by casting an unattractive woman, but that she's challenging beauty standards by casting a (marginally) non-white woman.
This only makes sense if you're working from the premise that we're all socially conditioned to believe that only white women can be beautiful, a premise so stupid that only an intersectional feminist can accept it.
That said, if we all did actually believe that, Anya Chalotra would not be the ideal candidate to disabuse us of that notion.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/24/2023”
I should clarify that as private institutions, they don't have to justify their admissions choices. They can admit whomever they want. But there's a certain fiction they're trying to maintain that doesn't really line up with their actual admissions policies, and deemphasizing standardized testing helps to maintain that fiction.
"
I think I've earned an I-told-you-so here. I've been saying for years that the Big Lie the left has been pushing about standardized test scores being just a measure of your parents' income hurts talented people from low- and middle-income households.
Standardized tests are the hardest component of college admissions to influence with money, and all this "whole person" fluff is trivial for rich parents to buy. By deemphasizing standardized tests, they make it much easier to justify rejecting high-performing low-SES white and Asian students.
On “The Hollywood Strikes: Contract Law”
You said you wanted both sides to lose. I'm just saying they can.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/24/2023”
It's weird that you see this as some kind of gotcha. The average person knows virtually nothing about economics, so the fact that they can't see through her shtick doesn't validate it. Yes, of course I'm angry that ignorant voters are being led astray by a charlatan, and that my country is being made worse off as a result. If you actually understood the issues, you would be, too.
On “The Hollywood Strikes: Contract Law”
Good news: Strikes are negative-sum! Because of lost productivity, the size of the pie to be divided shrinks. So it's absolutely possible for both sides to lose. The easiest way for this to happen is for the contract to remain unchanged, in which case the strikers lose pay and the studios lose profits.
On “An Unforced Error in a Small Town”
Not really. There were over three thousand documented lynchings.
"
In the US, there are about 1,200 cities with population 25k-100k, and 300 with population > 100k. Only 40 with population > 500k.
In fact, only four of the ten cities on that list (Bessemer, Monroe, and Pine Bluff, and Saginaw) have populations 25k have population < 100k. Detroit and Memphis both have populations over 500k, making up 20% of the top 10, despite the fact that less than 3% of eligible cities have populations over 500k.
Small cities aren't more violent on average; they just have a larger pool from which to draw outliers. Also worth noting that every city on that top ten list is at least 40% black, and eight are majority black. Ignoring the predictive power of race for violent crime rates is basically lobotomizing yourself. You can't even begin to think intelligently about crime, especially violent crime, in the US without accounting for it.
On “The $800K McNugget: A Legal Discussion”
But also the average person is kind of dumb and has an irrational hatred of big corporations. Just because they saw evidence we didn't see doesn't mean they interpreted it correctly and acted on it in a reasonable manner. Comically oversized jury awards often come down on appeal.
On “Thursday Throughput: Aspartame Edition”
Likely it's a problem that's hard to solve but easy to verify, like prime factorization. It's hard to factor numbers which are the product of two large primes, but trivial to verify that the product of two primes is the number that was to be factored.
IIRC, NP-complete problems have this property as well.
"
Also, Asian Americans had very high vaccination rates, and were in fact hit relatively lightly. Lower obesity rates likely played a role as well.
It's not as easy to explain why East Asian countries were relatively lightly hit, even before vaccines became available. I don't think the fact that Japan and Taiwan are island nations with tight border controls (and South Korea is also effectively an island nation, having only one extraordinarily tightly controlled border with North Korea) explains much. These countries all had outbreaks large enough that they should have generated sustained domestic spread, but they peaked at much, much lower levels than in the US and Europe. Maybe genetic factors did play a role after all.
"
Per day, presumably indefinitely.
On “YIMBYs, NIMBYs, and Freddies”
Well, yes, that was clearly implied by "leftists."
On “That’s Not How That Works: “The New Right’s Theory of Power””
I see the vicious smearing of dissenters as an implicit acknowledgement of intellectual fragility---a sort of memetic defense mechanism. If critics are not merely wrong, but bad, then their arguments don't even need to be considered.
Tabooing of criticism is crucial to the survival of wokeness, because it is, to put it bluntly, a pretty dumb ideology that can't stand up to serious scrutiny. More precisely, it's a midwit ideology. There's a litany of carefully curated concepts and facts (and factoids) you need to learn to fully appreciate it, and because of that, its adherents can easily convince themselves that they know more than those who disagree with them, and that that knowledge is the reason for the disagreement.
On average, that's probably true. There are more people who reject wokeness because they don't know enough than who reject it because they know too much. But the latter do exist, and that's what matters. As you go beyond the Gospel of Woke and start filling in the strategically placed gaps, the intellectual foundations of wokeness melt away.
In particular, wokeness's Achilles heel is quantitative analysis. It appeals most to people who think in terms of narratives rather than data. For example, the idea of redlining being a major contributor to the racial wealth gap makes intuitive sense, as long as you never do so much as a back-of-the-envelope sanity test to see if the numbers check out.
On “Weekend Plans Post: Before Your Bosses Come Back”
Your bosses actually call you? Like with a telephone?
On “That’s Not How That Works: “The New Right’s Theory of Power””
"People who publicly dissent from the current intellectual fads are just afraid of being thought of as uncool, unlike those of us who slavishly adhere to them" is an interesting take.
On “The Disturbing New Labor Trend: Skilljacking”
It really isn't, though. I get that the existence of intelligent people who disagree with you in good faith creates a lot of cognitive dissonance, and it's tempting to relieve that cognitive dissonance by pretending that they're actually saying something really stupid, or that they're paid shills or whatever, but deep down you know it's not true, right?
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/10/2023”
It turns out that the photos were in fact from the Snow White production, but were using stand-ins for Snow White and one of the not-dwarves.
"
Note the "some," which was irresponsibly omitted from the headline. Later in the article, AAA says "a small percentage" of Florida customers will be impacted.
I'm curious as to why they would simply stop offering insurance, rather than raising rates. Are there price controls that prevent them from raising rates to levels where it would be worth offering insurance, or is disaster really so likely that it can't be offered at any affordable rate?
On “The Disturbing New Labor Trend: Skilljacking”
Essentially nobody actually thinks that, but there are a ton of people who think the opposite.
"
Gee whiz, what an interesting way of thinking!
"
I'm pretty sure that's the joke.
On “A Paucity Of Limits, By Stipulation: 303 Creative v Elenis”
Yes. Activists are claiming that indigenous Canadian women are routinely murdered by white men---often using the term genocide---but all the evidence points to the murders as being overwhelmingly intraracial, just as they are for members of every other race.
The Canadian government spent about $100 million to commission a thousand-page report on the issue. One page was devoted to the question of who was committing the murders, and it just said that they don't trust the stats because the RCMP are racists.
Also, indigenous Canadian women are murdered at about the same rate per capita as white men in the US, so the scale of the problem is being hugely exaggerated.
On “Open Mic for the week of 7/10/2023”
Ten Second News went away for a while, only to come back as Ten Second News 2.0 Beta. At first glance, at least, it appears to be pretty much the same as it was before. Any new features we should know about?
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.