U.S. Politics: Leaving On A Jet Plane

[OldGimletEye]

9 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Oh, Sam Harris is well acquainted with the Gish Gallop, that's for sure, but what I find particularly distressing about him is the way he'll breezily dismiss factors he personally finds unimportant. Example: In debate with Ezra Klein, Klein said, hey, there's a long American history of people using what they insist is science to "prove" that black people are inferior and unworthy of debate, and any discussion of The Bell Curve has to exist in that context. Harris, of course, pooh-poohs that as irrelevant, claiming that data alone will settle this issue. When I heard that I just clutched my head.

There were statistical errors in the Bell Curve. And Raj Chetty's study on race and poverty, pretty much destroyed the thesis in the Bell Curve. Interesting, Sam Harris doesn't know that.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

11 minutes ago, TrackerNeil said:

Oh, Sam Harris is well acquainted with the Gish Gallop, that's for sure, but what I find particularly distressing about him is the way he'll breezily dismiss factors he personally finds unimportant. 

Yeah this. He does the same thing regarding the economic, historical and political factors related to Islamic extremism. For him it's all about religion. 

When it comes to IQ, this is an incredibly complex and nuanced topic. What defines IQ? What do IQ tests actually measure? How much is it nature or nurture? And I say again, if Harris were sincere, he'd have engaged with the authors of the article. 

2 minutes ago, OldGimletEye said:

There were statistical errors in the Bell Curve. And Raj Chetty's study on race and poverty, pretty much destroyed the thesis in the Bell Curve. Interesting, Sam Harris doesn't know that.

It's amazing how the Bell Curve, which was published over 25 years ago, keeps popping up every so often. Chomsky sums it up best I think.

 

[GrimTuesday]

All this talk about the IDW and the right wing grifters has me thinking about big brain boy Dave Rubin and his interview with Marianne Williamson, and the subsequent video by Creationist Cat which I just wanted to share in case anyone needs a chuckle today.

Also if anyone wants to go through Trump's 1776 Commission's report, here it is. I'm sure it is very sane and not at all a psychotic mess of white christian identitarianism

[Ser Reptitious]

2 hours ago, Tywin et al. said:

Bari Weiss' name was mentioned. If you can have her as a guest, where does that leave us?

I'm confused. Did you mean to say "can't"? 

Anyway, I think it'd be amusing to interview her, but only ask her questions that are not even remotely related to "cancel culture". 

[DMC]

Yeah, to (futilely) try and streamline this discussion as it approaches Day Three, while I don't know much about Bari Weiss either, from what I do I wouldn't say she qualifies.  Her pathetic schtick, to my knowledge, seems to be focused on "anti-wokeness" and accusing the left of anti-semitism and fascism.  While incredibly stupid, that in and of itself is not trafficking in toxic hate speech (albeit I suspect some Muslims and/or Arabs may object to that). 

Anyway, we can quibble all day about where the line is between "legitimate" conservative thought and crazy, racist, inciting extremists.  But does anyone here seriously want to argue against the notion that most of the others mentioned - namely Coulter, Ingraham, Conway, O'Donnell, Shapiro, and Milo - decidedly belong to the latter category?  As do, like Kal mentioned, the MCs that still voted to object immediately after insurrectionists tried to assassinate their colleagues?

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

Alex Trebek is trending on twitter... let's see what's going on... Oh Jesus.

[mormont]

That is one hell of a list.

https://www.npr.org/2021/01/18/958079495/i-beg-your-garden-trump-adds-hero-names-to-statue-garden-unlikely-to-take-root?t=1611010461359

full list here, go nuts with it.

https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-building-national-garden-american-heroes/

[Morpheus]

Clearly just a repurposed Jeopardy script including answers.

[Varysblackfyre321]

2 hours ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Not so much. Harris' career rally took off with End of Faith and Letter to a Christian Nation. He then rode the coat tails of Hitchens, Dawkins, and Dennet when movement atheism became popular. Arguably he peaked with is 2010 TED talk for The Moral Landscape. I still think it's a really good talk actually.

Then he started engaging with actual moral philosophers who were criticizing his book, proving how petty and intolerant of criticism he really is. His interaction with Massimo Pigliucci really pissed me off because I had a lot of respect for both of them at the time and I couldn't figure out why Harris was going at him the way he was. Very childish and weird. Then came his exchange with Noam Chomsky which was... something. Academia may have started souring on him at this point. Still, he had a good deal of respectability and was getting interviewed on TV and Radio.

Then Batfleck smashed him in the solar plexus on the Bill Maher show. Harris was promoting his book on mediation at the time. Sales of that one didn't do so well. Then came the Charles Murray / Vox affair. If I cared enough to still be on the fence about him, I wrote him off completely after that. Now he's a fixture of the IDW and his own podcast.

I would also say when he got into the anti-Sjw shtick it helped keep him in some relevancy.

Example;Saying government agencies should profile Muslims or people who look like them—for security. He even fear mongered about the reluctance to do something so illiberal would fuel the far right 

He went onto bitch about in his interview with Rubin on how people misinterpreted him saying he of course wasn’t talking about racial profiling when he said we should profile people who look like they could be muslims.

which helped Rubin get clout, and  would help infect a lot of discourse on YouTube from atheists who were his fans—a lot of them being cis white heterosexual men.

No longer was one of the biggest threat to personal freedoms in America  conservative Christians who would happily turn America into a theocracy, and who actually have large amount of political and social power to the typical Atheist YouTube—but the dreaded SJWs.

[mormont]

I’ve been pondering the most absurd thing about that list, and I think the hands down winner has to be including indigenous people who did not fucking want to be ‘Americans’ and fought and died for the right NOT TO BE on a list of people representing ‘American values’. Alongside, it hardly needs be said, some of the folks who perpetrated genocide upon them. 

[DMC]

12 minutes ago, mormont said:

full list here, go nuts with it.

That's a whole hell of a lot of statues.  Of a lot of people that already have a lot of statues.  I'd say this is his response to the Green New Deal, but it appears more targeted than that.  From the EO:

Quote

Sec. 5. Funding. (a) The Secretary of the Interior shall provide funding, as appropriate and consistent with available appropriations and applicable law, for the establishment and maintenance of the National Garden.

(b) The Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities, in consultation with the National Council on the Arts and the National Council on the Humanities, respectively, and the Task Force, should target spending one-twelfth of the discretionary funds available to their agencies on commissioning statues of individuals set forth in section 3(c)(i) of Executive Order 13934, as amended by section 3(b) of this order, for placement in the National Garden, as appropriate and consistent with applicable law.

Right, cuz this is what Interior and the NEA should be spending their money on.

[Zorral]

This is a little later:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parler-website-back-201539015.html

But still unavailable.

[Kalbear]

The Parler website being up is not particularly noteworthy. 

Migrating their entire backend and most of their frontend to a non-AWS system quickly - especially when most companies don't even want them - is going to be a LOT harder. 

[maarsen]

16 minutes ago, Zorral said:

This is a little later:

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/parler-website-back-201539015.html

But still unavailable.

I imagine the slow restart is due to the fact that the Russian intelligence service guys still move their lips when they read.

[Fragile Bird]

1 hour ago, Deadlines? What Deadlines? said:

Alex Trebek is trending on twitter... let's see what's going on... Oh Jesus.

Don't leave us hanging on, man!

[Xray the Enforcer]

3 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Don't leave us hanging on, man!

Trump wants to put a statue of him in a "famous Americans" garden

[Week]

1 hour ago, GrimTuesday said:

Also if anyone wants to go through Trump's 1776 Commission's report, here it is. I'm sure it is very sane and not at all a psychotic mess of white christian identitarianism

Uh...

Quote

Indeed, the compromises at the Constitutional Convention were just that: compromises. The threefifths compromise was proposed by an antislavery delegate to prevent the South from counting their slaves as whole persons for purposes of increasing their congressional representation. The so-called fugitive slave clause, perhaps the most hated protection of all, accommodated pro-slavery delegates but was written so that the Constitution did not sanction slavery in the states where it existed. There is also the provision in the Constitution that forbade any restriction of the slave trade for twenty years after ratification—at which time Congress immediately outlawed the slave trade.

• Compromises ok because compromise -- the exact nature of the compromise is UTTERLY irrelevant because COMPROMISE.
• Threefifths compromise -- totally OK to not give suffrage to an enslaved population because we didn't give their owners AS MUCH CONGRESSIONAL REPRESENTATION
• Fugitive Slaw Law -- OK, this one sucked but uhh ... it didn't sanction slavery in Northern states!
• Listen, the Slave Trade? Also, wicked bad, so we got rid of it the very instant we could TWENTY YEARS AFTER THE CONSTITUTION BECAUSE COMPROMISE

21 minutes ago, Kalbear Total Landscaping said:

The Parler website being up is not particularly noteworthy. 

Migrating their entire backend and most of their frontend to a non-AWS system quickly - especially when most companies don't even want them - is going to be a LOT harder. 

Curious your take on this article -- I work in the space, as a non-techie, and thought it pretty good/interesting.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/parlers-new-serverless-architecture/

Bonus: the headline would be a great thread title -- Parler's New Serverless Architecture

[Kalbear]

12 minutes ago, Week said:

Curious your take on this article -- I work in the space, as a non-techie, and thought it pretty good/interesting.

https://www.lastweekinaws.com/blog/parlers-new-serverless-architecture/

Bonus: the headline would be a great thread title -- Parler's New Serverless Architecture

Yeah, that's pretty much my take as well, with the proviso that Parler did not remotely not use all the bells and whistles AWS provides. They certainly did, because it's cheaper and easier to do so and their techies that work at Parler are not, shall we say, particularly competent given that they allowed people to gain administrative access and scrape 57 TB of data because they didn't have basic security protocols in place, and they kept all of that incredibly valuable PII data (like legit SSNs and driver licenses) in completely unsalted, unencrypted data just...hanging out there. 

The good news, if you can call it that, is that they are VERY well funded by the Mercer group and can throw a lot of money at people. The bad news is that they have a whole host of challenges in store.

[Deadlines? What Deadlines?]

16 minutes ago, Fragile Bird said:

Don't leave us hanging on, man!

I was going to say, "You want the good news or the weird news?" As a Canadian, I approve of President Trump honoring my country in this way. Alex will be right there next to fuckin' Harry S. Truman, son!!!

America, you sexy bitch, congratulations on the greatest President ever!

13 minutes ago, Xray the Enforcer said:

Trump wants to put a statue of him in a "famous Americans" garden

 

[Zorral]

50 minutes ago, maarsen said:

...Russian intelligence service guys still move their lips when they read.

Wouldn't count on that, if I were you.

What's the worst mistake in warfare? Underestimating the enemy. Today's discussion has been extensively about exactly that -- making fun of our enemies, as we've been doing for 60 years or so, has only got us more beleagured and they more powerful.

Also that 3/5th clause?  That was to make sure the South was at least equal if not at greater population for representation in the House.

That abolition of the African slave trade, which couldn't happen before 1820, didn't mean it couldn't go on. But Virginia particularly wanted the African slave trade to the US closed down, because of the competition of less expensive African labor coming into the dometic market against their much more costly, English-speaking, 'seasoned labor in the market to the rapidly opening new slave states.  It was protectionism, pure and simple and driven hard by Jefferson and his cohorts.

But as far as the ever more lucrative African slave trade under the U.S. flag and on U.S. ships to Cuba -- that was entirely different and increased every year until 1862 when the war of the rebellion shut it down for good.  it took that long.  Many many fortunes in Boston and New York particularly were made this way.  New York City was the queen of sailing African captives on New York ships to Cuba under the U.S. flag.  So the British navy couldn't board them and search for these illegal traffiked persons.