Joshua Jay: “Humans Are So, So Easy to Fool.” - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: I used to hang out with a prostitute who we wrote about in Freakonomics. Her most thankful moment every day was the fact that prostitution was completely illegal, which meant the barriers to entry were really, really high. Her greatest fear was the legalization of prostitution because that would get rid of her local monopoly that allowed her to create lots of profit. And interesting that magicians have not succeeded in any way, shape, or form in creating a guild or a union or anything that prevents regular old people from doing magic.
JAY: I mean, they’ve tried, but it doesn’t work very well. There are societies of magicians, and there are clubs in every town. And these are magic clubs where you can go and learn magic. But again, it doesn’t prevent just anybody from doing magic... what’s to stop somebody from seeing my signature trick and ripping it off? You might think that the solution is patenting it. But actually, there has never been a single example of a magician who’s been able to successfully patent and defend a trick. The closest was Teller in a freak case... magic is a self-policing industry. In other words, Steven, if you get into magic and you steal my closer, there is really no legal recourse for me to stop you. And there’s nothing to stop you from marketing it and putting a video out on it and doing it on TV, but what would happen if you did that is the magic organizations — The International Brotherhood of Magicians, Society of American Magicians — would probably kick you out. Agents who book magicians would not want to book you because I wouldn’t be on the same roster as an unethical magician. You would be ostracized from coming to conferences...
People are trained by Twitter and TikTok and Instagram to have such short attention spans that they’re missing out on really, really wonderful magic tricks that take six or seven minutes. I think magic has come to mean a visual change of a card or a coin that can happen in the blink of an eye. But magic’s so much more than that. I want people to see magic as a form of storytelling, to see magic as so much more than just a card that changes in the flick...
LEVITT: This is a crazy question. I once heard it argued that perhaps Jesus was a really talented magician and had pulled off many of the miracles in a magical sense. Have you ever thought about that?
JAY: That’s a crazy left-field question; I love it. I took a class at university: The Founding of Religions. And we read this book, The Kingdom of Matthias, about alternate messiahs in and around the time of Jesus Christ. And they all practice tricks. I mean, I don’t want to offend anybody here. They all practiced tricks that can be simulated by conjuring tricks in contemporary times. In other words, water to wine is a trick that would have been used in basically all civilizations at that time. Walking on water — I know they say that it often can be the illusion created when walking in a desert. When they create that oasis of hot air rising, it can look like ripples in water. I don’t have any specific insight as to whether Jesus was really good with a deck of cards, but what I can say is a lot of the so-called miracles he became known for are contemporary conjuring tricks... if you fast forward just a little bit in history, there is a demarcation point when we separate so-called black magic from white magic. So, you separate demonic magic, spells, hexes, ordaining of the gods, from conjuring tricks. And in the West, we put that at the year 1584 with the publication of a book called The Discoverie of Witchcraft by Reginald Scot. And this was a book published that exposed magic. But he had the ultimate great excuse for exposing magicians’ tricks, because he said implicitly, “I don’t want to have magicians burned at the stake.” In 1570s, in England — in Elizabethan England — you could be burned at the stake for doing a trick like water to wine. You could be burned at the stake for doing conjuring on the street because they didn’t separate that from witchcraft."
The optimism bias and traffic accident risk perception - "Research suggests that people are excessively and unrealistically optimistic when judging their driving competency and accident risk. In this study, college-age drivers compared their risk of being involved in a variety of described traffic accidents relative to their peers. They also rated each of the accidents along a number of dimensions hypothesized as being related to optimism. In addition, subjects provided global estimates of their driving safety, skill, and accident likelihood. Significant optimism was evident for both the accidents and the global ratings. Optimism increased with driving experience and marginally with age. Those with more driving experience considered human factors to be more important in accident causation; those assigning more importance to human factors also rated themselves as more skillful drivers. For the specific accidents, perceived controllability was a strong predictor of optimism. The findings for controllability are interpreted in terms of other recent data and hypothesized explanations of the optimism bias. In general, it appears that optimism arises because people persistently overestimate the degree of control that they have over events."
Optimists could be more likely to get into traffic accidents
Ex Muslim Atheist - Posts | Facebook - "I love how I need to have a full understanding of the Arabic language and literally a full history lesson so that I’m not taking 5:33 “OuT oF cOnTeXt” but I don’t need to do the same for 5:32. Classic apologetical nonsense."
Comments: "I have been told many times that i need to learn Arabic and as soon that they realize that I am an ARABIC speaker, Muslims end the conversation"
"I've heard the idea that you have to read the entire Quran in order to get the whole context."
Facebook - "You only got one life. How you spend it and who you spend it with matters. This chart shows who do we spend time with across our lifetime. It's a bit crazy to see visualized just how important coworkers are. Life is too short for toxic workplaces."
Ppl wondering why Panda bears are endangered, funny GIFs
Meme - "Kids playing in the 1930s. No cellphones or iPads, just kids living in the moment. Inspiring. *Guillotine*"
Babies wanted: Chinese province may offer a year of maternity leave - "A landlocked province in north-west China, in an effort to encourage couples to have children, is looking to sharply increase the duration of paid maternity leave to nearly one full year, putting it on par with some developed economies in Europe. Shaanxi is seeking public opinion on allowing an additional half a year of maternity leave on top of the current 168 days. That would put the province in the same league as European nations like Germany or Norway. Shaanxi is also considering doubling the length of paternity leave to 30 days for couples looking to have a third child... The southern island province of Hainan is offering one hour of child-raising leave each day, for parents with children under three. The province of Heilongjiang even allows couples in border cities to have four children, due to the below-average birth rate in China's remote northeastern region."
'The coolest thing in Tokyo': Japan's oldest toilet accessory - "Japanese toilets have come to be known overseas for their variety of functions, and one has been attracting particular attention of late -- a speaker that produces white noise to drown out any embarrassingly loud eruptions. The idea for the device actually has its roots in the country's ancient "culture of shame."... In 2013, a U.S. travel agency surveyed 200 foreign female residents in Japan, asking what surprised them most after arriving in the country. The largest number of respondents, or 27%, cited the singing toilets. The second largest group, representing 23%, answered "the large variety of vending machines," followed by 20.5% that said the "presence of large numbers of convenience stores." Another 17% replied that the bidet function of toilets surprised them the most. But when did the sound device debut? The first such product was marketed 1979 by Orihara Manufacturing, a Tokyo-based maker of toilet accessories. The world's first device that electronically simulates the sound of flowing water and doubles as an air freshener was named Etiquette Tone by company President Seiichi Orihara. As the name suggests, it was devised to drown out the potentially embarrassing sound of the final act of digestion. In 1988, Toto followed suit by introducing Otohime, which subsequently became a generic term referring to the devices. In Japanese, oto means "sound," and hime "princess," but when pronounced together the syllables form a homonym for the name of a princess of an undersea kingdom in a famous folk tale. Before developing the product, an internal survey helped the company understand that its female employees were embarrassed not only by their bodies' lack of discretion but by other sounds they make in a stall while disrobing or using female sanitary products. "We initially used a mechanical sound but since 2011 we've been using a recorded actual gurgle of a stream," product developer Tsukasa Matsuyama said. The device can also overlay bird chirping... But the culture of masking the body's indiscretions goes back more than two centuries, to Japan's Edo period (1603-1868). An actual device used to drown out loud gaseous burbles remains intact, at Rendaiji, an approximately 1,300-year-old Buddhist temple in the western Japanese city of Kurashiki that served as a regular place for worship for local daimyos. Called otokeshi no tsubo, or "sound-drowning urn," it stands tall in the back of the temple's guest building. It consists of a bronze vessel measuring about 50 cm in diameter atop a 2-meter-high stone column. When opened, a tap attached to the urn's side releases water that hits a baked clay plate placed on the ground. Voila, ancient white noise... the modern accessories have an additional purpose: to reduce water consumption. Through a survey, Toto found that female respondents flush an average 2.3 times when using a toilet without a sound princess but an average of 1.5 times otherwise. In an office where 400 women work, the device can save an annual 5,500 kiloliters of water and costs of about 3.86 million yen ($34,000), according to the company."
How Video Games Satisfy Basic Human Needs - "Only in the digital realm of video games are people given the opportunity to act as they never would in daily life or as they would act every day in an ideal world ... and then try again if they don’t like the results."
Spiders Are a Popular Video Game Monster. They're Also an Accessibility Problem - "When you first start Grounded, a stylish new survival game from RPG developer Obsidian where shrunken players explore a backyard full of unexpected dangers, the game asks a surprising question: Are you afraid of spiders? “This game contains spiders that are often much larger than the player,” the game informs players. “If you’re super not okay with that, you can enable Arachnophobia Safe Mode in the Accessibility options. This is a visual-only setting that does not affect gameplay or difficulty.”... “I remember when we came to the first meeting with [the research team],” said Grounded programmer Brian Macintosh, “I was hoping I was just gonna ask like, ‘Okay, so what piece of the spider is [scary]? Can we just [remove] the legs? Is that gonna be good?’ And then you were like ‘Nope, it's not gonna be that easy.’... Interestingly enough, another high-profile Xbox game, Sea of Thieves, also accidentally addressed another overlooked phobia with a recent accessibility update. Thalassophobia, a phobia involving large bodies of water or the inability to see below the surface, comes up over and over again when people talk about playing the seafaring game, even if they’re able to get over it because the vast majority of Sea of Thieves does not take place underwater... When it came time to develop Cook, Serve, Delicious! 3?! the goal was to double down on this idea and “make the most accessible game I could possibly make.” The third installment allows players to mute gun shots (“a response to those involved in school shootings with PTSD”), change police siren sounds (“a result of the BLM movement”), colorblind features, motion sickness tweaks, and more. Galindo even added an audio option to turn off car and engine noises because a player spoke to a traumatic experience. Another player had migraines triggered by a certain visual effect, so Galindo added the option to turn it off."
Games need an option to exclude violence. So instead of a sword you can use a pool noodle. Because some people are triggered by violence
Cartoons Were Right? Bending a Rifle's Barrel Backward Will Actually Redirect a Bullet - "So could a maneuver like this actually save your life should you ever find yourself staring down the barrel of a rifle? No, absolutely not. Bending a barrel by hand would require a Superman-caliber feat of strength, and even then it would probably leave a dangerous crimp or pinch in the barrel that would result in a nastier outcome than demonstrated here. For this experiment, the rifle’s barrel was heated and then carefully bent to a specific diameter that ensured the tube’s structure remained intact so that a bullet could potentially still traverse it. In reality, the first time Bugs Bunny tried something like this, both he and Elmer Fudd would have found themselves in the emergency room."
Is “Toxic Positivity” a Thing? - Freakonomics - "DUCKWORTH: Here’s, actually, a fun fact from the scientific literature that was really kind of shocking when it debuted a few decades ago: for a long time, psychologists thought that unhappiness and happiness were almost just the photo negatives of each other. Like, if you’re unhappy, you’re not happy. But it turns out that the correlation between positive emotions and negative emotions is only -0.3. In other words, if it were truly the case that being happy was simply the opposite of being unhappy, you would actually be seeing a correlation of -1. And what this suggests is that human beings are fully capable of feeling — maybe even in the same moment — some happy emotions, some negative emotions, mixed emotions."
NYC Is Dead Forever... Here's Why - "Three of the most important reasons to move to NYC:
Business opportunities
Culture
Food"
Is New York City Over? (Ep. 434) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "ROSE: This president and his fully-owned subsidiaries like Mitch McConnell walk around hyper-politicizing this notion of defunding the police. Everywhere they go, they talk about it — when all the while, they are the greatest proponents of defunding the police in the United States of America.
DUBNER: What do you mean by that?
ROSE: What happens if we don’t get state and local aid? Cops get fired. That’s plain and simple. They walk around talking about how much they want schools to get opened. But they’re unwilling to sign the dotted line to get billions of dollars back to New York City schools...
[How do cities make us] “healthier”?
GLAESER: Well, that certainly has been challenged as pandemics have reared themselves up again. We had a blessed century from 1920 to 2020 when we had almost no significant pandemics, perhaps with the exception of AIDS that struck the urban world. And we noticed an amazing thing, which was that, first, life expectancies equalized between cities and outside areas. And then, life expectancies got longer in cities. In New York, actually — over two years longer in New York. The lower death rates have been attributed to more exercise, more social connection, more active lives.
And finally, happier:
GLAESER: It’s an interesting thing because New Yorkers actually don’t say that they’re happier. In fact, what self-respecting New Yorker is going to tell an interviewer how satisfied they are with their life. But they do, in fact, commit suicide at much lower rates...
Another hypothesis, with some evidence provided by research from the economist Roland Fryer is that when a given police department has been accused of brutality or using excess force, they tend to pull back from their crime-prevention duties...
DOLEAC: I live in Austin. And I think they just voted to cut our police budget by a third. I am very interested to see how that plays out. And so, I think—.
DUBNER: “Interested” — like, with-one-foot-in-the-moving-van interested or—?
DOLEAC: Not that interested. But I mean, I do believe strongly enough in the research that increasing policing reduces crime rates. The broader conversation about reducing police budgets and shifting that money to other social services that could also reduce crime I think are very useful conversations to have. And I’m all for trying some of those kinds of reforms. I think the challenge is that those types of changes are not going to happen overnight. And so, seeing some places cut their police budgets without a very clear plan as to how they’re going to essentially replace those efforts immediately in some other fashion — that makes me nervous...
Rising crime in cities, or even the perception of rising crime, tends to be an outsized factor in driving residents out of cities, especially those with high education levels and with kids. Ed Glaeser, even though he grew up in New York in the midst of the fiscal crisis, has more vivid memories of the crime threat than the bankruptcy threat.
GLAESER: The set of blocks in which you could safely walk was becoming smaller and smaller over the course of the 1970s. I remember having this strategy of muttering loudly to myself in hopes that people would think that I was either a heroin addict or otherwise insane and leave me alone.
Amazing logic. Not bailing out a jurisdiction is apparently the same as defunding a specific service. Great recipe for blackmail - just spend on anything you want (e.g. healthcare for illegal immigrants) and demand aid, and if you don't get it, claim the federal government is anti-police
Omitted variable bias!
Empirical support for the Ferguson effect
The bigger and denser the city you live in, the more unhappy you're likely to be.
When I cite the research to people who diss rural areas, they always get very upset
Why Are Cities (Still) So Expensive? (Ep. 435) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Before the pandemic, San Francisco was running a $420 million deficit. Now, Mayor Breed is looking at a $1.5 billion shortfall...
DUBNER: Now, you’ve asked some of your public-sector workers to forego their increases, at least. Yes?
BREED: Yes, we did.
DUBNER: And how’d that go over so far?
BREED: They have not agreed to do that so far.
DUBNER: So, do you have the option then of furloughing or laying them off?
BREED: Unfortunately, that’s the option if they decide that that’s not in their best interest to do... They believe, of course, that they should receive their raises. They do have a right to them. The city did agree to provide those raises, but that was before Covid hit. So, if we are forced to give you these raises, then I will have no choice. This is not a threat. This is just, I have to be responsible with the people’s money.
DUBNER: So, I understand you are proposing to raise about $300 million via a business-tax increase. I’m curious about that because as you noted in San Francisco, it’s the same case in New York and many other places, so many businesses are already in trouble and so I’m curious how you think a business tax increase will play out during this pandemic? And aren’t you just inviting businesses to either not reopen or to leave San Francisco for someplace where they’re not going to encounter that kind of tax increase?...
Adding new houses and apartment buildings clearly isn’t so simple, but still — what are the causes of this failure?
VIGDOR: So, zoning laws are preventing cities from increasing their density.
This is one obvious cause.
VIGDOR: Once upon a time, you might have read a book when you were a kid where there was a house in the country, and then the house was surrounded by other houses, and then eventually the house was surrounded by these tall apartment buildings and there was an elevated train in front of it and all this kind of stuff.
The book Vigdor’s talking about is The Little House, by Virginia Lee Burton. I would recommend it.
VIGDOR: Reality has turned out somewhat differently than that book. In the later part of the 20th century, what we see is that the little house gets surrounded by other single-family houses and then it remains surrounded by single-family houses forever.
DOCTOROFF: One of the ways to correct the supply problem is to rezone — replan, if you will — permit significantly greater density in the city than we have historically...
VIGDOR: So, up until the ‘60s, people would just come in with bulldozers and what had been a low-rise neighborhood or a single-family neighborhood, it would get redeveloped at higher density.
Voila! Instant density. Meaning more housing supply. But:
VIGDOR: There is a turning point that we see around the 1960s, maybe even into the ‘70s. And you can associate this with what you might call a historic-preservation movement. Once you get people standing in front of the bulldozers and saying “You can’t change the character of this neighborhood,” that is when you start to see an inflection point in the trajectory of housing prices in some of the older cities in the U.S.
GLAESER: It is certainly true that every time you have an empowered local homeowners’ group who says they don’t want this apartment building rising next door, they’re saying no to outsiders...
VIGDOR: The rental rate for a newly constructed apartment unit across the United States has pretty much tracked inflation. But the price index for older apartment units, that is where you see rents are rising much faster than inflation... housing looks like it’s fairly affordable in 1960, in 1970, but then it really jumps between 1970 and 1980. And so, you look around and you say, “Well, what happened in the 1970s that would have made apartments a lot more expensive?” And the answer is landlord-tenant law reforms. So, up until about the mid-1970s in most states, when you rented an apartment, you rented it as-is — which is to say, the landlord didn’t guarantee that the heat worked. The landlord didn’t guarantee anything. The landlord’s only obligation was to give you a key. “Quiet enjoyment” was the legal standard.
But in the 70s, new laws were passed to protect tenants against uncooperative or unscrupulous landlords.
VIGDOR: We moved to a standard called “the warranty of habitability,” which is to say that apartments are no longer rented as-is. Now, if you rent housing to someone, the landlord needs to assure that it is up to code, that it has functioning heat and electricity and running water and all these things.
For newer apartments, whose rents were keeping pace with inflation, this meant changes in construction. But older buildings had a lot of new costs imposed on them, to bring things up to code.
VIGDOR: What’s happened over time with these additional tenant protections and new regulations about the quality of existing housing units, that supply of affordable housing in many cities has really dried up because landlords now have to charge rents high enough that they can defray the costs of keeping the unit up to code, which is creating affordable housing problems even in cities that have experienced no population growth."
Interestingly, pre-covid, even with a deficit the workers got a raise
Nothing will come from nothing. The law of unintended consequences strikes again! But the left will just blame evil landlords
Why the Left Had to Steal the Right’s Dark-Money Playbook (Bonus Episode) - Freakonomics Freakonomics - "Stephen DUBNER: So, you’re a sociologist, but you also call yourself an ethnographer. What’s the difference?
VENKATESH: An ethnographer is that fancy academic term. And all it really is, is that I hung out with people for a long period of time...
If there’s one thing I could change inside a lot of these companies, it’s a sign — literally a sign — that appears on the wall when you walk into their offices, which says, “Move fast and break things.” I think that’s okay if you’re playing Legos. I’m not sure that’s really what we want if we’re talking about families and democracy and society in general...
MCGOWAN: When you work in Super PACs, your role and responsibility is to monitor what the campaign is doing in the public sphere — because you cannot legally coordinate — and work to fill gaps that the campaign cannot or should not be filling. Whether that means reaching voters in a state that they don’t have the budget to reach, because clearly you can tell from filings they’re not reaching voters there. Or if it means taking on harder issues or communications that would be too risky for a campaign... My husband was very senior on the Hillary Clinton campaign and we got married during that election and our lawyers actually had a conversation — the campaign’s lawyer and the Super PAC’s lawyer — about our wedding. And it actually came up, “Should we have everyone sign N.D.A.’s at the wedding?” We thankfully did not need to do that. We just did not talk, as we never did that year, about strategy. And frankly, even if we wanted to, I never saw my husband — we lived in different states the entire campaign and very rarely spoke... we’re starting from scratch every election cycle. That talent disperses. The infrastructure, the technology they build, the institutional knowledge — it all gets spread out. Whereas the right had built their own media ecosystem with FOX and talk radio and Breitbart and thousands of online sites and publishers. And Democrats were relying predominantly on paid advertising, and that felt so short-sighted to me. And I really felt a huge gap on the left was a dedicated space or organization that could continually build and build upon institutional knowledge about how to communicate messages in the digital age that we live in...
MCGOWAN: Political ads on platforms like Facebook and Twitter have become the scapegoat by journalists and by Democrats and Republicans alike. And they’ve really made political ads the culprit of misinformation spreading online, influencing elections. The vast majority of misinformation that spreads online is organic, which means it is not through paid advertising on these platforms. It is through individuals. It is through media outlets, especially on the right. And so, when people call for these platforms to ban political ads they’re really misunderstanding where misinformation comes from and how it spreads... When you ban all political advertisers what you’ve done is you have ceded the platform to the largest pages and accounts on that platform. And the largest pages and accounts on Facebook are right-wing media outlets. So, when you ban political ads on Facebook and do not ban the dissemination of “news or information” from publishers like Fox News and Breitbart and The Daily Wire, you are essentially saying that right-wing media is allowed to spread misinformation in the final week of the election. But the Biden campaign is not allowed to counter that misinformation in real time...
If you take away the ability to microtarget, which is a very controversial concept, it just means that political campaigns and advertisers will need to spend more money on the platform because they will have to reach a broader audience. So, digital advertising will more similarly operate as television advertising does, where you buy at a broader level. So, the folks that stand to gain the most by eliminating microtargeting are the social media platforms themselves that benefit financially...
I want to build infrastructure and deploy the most effective tactics within the bounds of the law that build power. And with power, we can then reform. You know, I think a lot about moral purity tests, which exist on both sides, I’m sure. But I think that there is danger in focusing too much on what we believe is right or wrong and losing in the process."
Although the media is predominantly leftist, that is not enough
Saying the largest publishers on Facebook are on the right so they have an advantage ignores the fact that there're so many more left wing publishers. So the total market share of the ideology is not the same as the size of its biggest exponents
Presumably it is better to win for the wrong reasons than lose for the right ones
Wolves Reduce Deer-Vehicle Collisions - The Atlantic - "By killing deer near these areas, or simply intimidating them into staying away, wolves could keep the animals far from cars. By analyzing 22 years of data, Raynor and her colleagues found that Wisconsin’s wolves have reduced the frequency of deer-vehicle collisions by a quarter. They save the state $10.9 million in losses every year—a figure 63 times greater than the total compensation paid for the loss of livestock or pets... “the people who value the existence of wolves are often not in the same communities where wolves are present,” Raynor told me. Urban wildlife lovers may be happy to know that wolves exist out there, but rural people have to stare at the carcasses of livestock and pets. Wolves’ benefits to the former are abstract and nebulous; their costs to the latter are tangible and bloody. But deer-vehicle collisions “are happening in both urban and rural areas,” Raynor said. “No one is avoiding this problem,” which means that rural people are also benefiting from wolves, unbeknownst to them... Skeptics could argue that there must surely be easier ways to stop cars from hitting deer than, oh, introducing wolves. There are, Raynor says, but they all have problems. Cheap measures such as standard warning signs for drivers don’t actually work. Effective measures such as overpasses for deer are so expensive that “they can really only be implemented at really severe deer-vehicle-collision hot spots,” Raynor said. “What do you do everywhere else? Wolves are cost-effective compared to multimillion-dollar investments that affect one intersection.” (Notably, cars rarely hit wolves; just 21 such collisions were recorded from April 2019 to April 2020, in contrast to an annual average of 20,000 deer-vehicle collisions.) It sounds almost ludicrous to say, but deer-vehicle collisions are a civil-engineering problem that might best be solved by adding wolves... But Guillaume Chapron at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, who studies large carnivores, says the team has not provided enough information about their statistical methods, the degree of uncertainty in their results, or details on how to replicate their analysis... As part of an ecological chain that also involves coyotes, foxes, small rodents, and ticks, they could potentially reduce the incidence of Lyme disease"
Skepticism about "Anti-Science" Claims - "people living in less-developed countries were generally more optimistic about science and technology, expressing fewer reservations. People living in economically advanced countries, in contrast, were generally less optimistic and more likely to express stronger reservations. Our findings can be explained by past theorizing on the “post-industrial paradox”: In contrast to less-developed countries, citizens in more-advanced economies may no longer idealize science and technology as necessary to economic growth and human security. Populations living in more advanced economies are still likely to expect benefits from science and technology, but they may also be more sensitized to the moral trade-offs or risks posed by technological breakthroughs and scientific discoveries."
Hong Kong bus ride helps people sleep - "A Hong Kong tour company noticed patrons falling asleep on its buses, and recently launched a five-hour, 47-mile ride to nowhere... Tickets range from $13 to $51 per person, depending on upper or lower deck seating. Riders also get a goodie bag with an eye mask and earplugs"
Meme - "'Very Right Wing' Europeans Are The Most Satisfied With Their Sex Lives"
Tristan Tate: "I run webcam studios. Lonely men pay us millions a year online watching my models. I once put a girl in a MAGA hat? She made 0 money. All of my customers are left wingers, all democrats."
Liberals have some weird copes to explain why right wingers have better sex, e.g. that they're just deluded
Amaryllis Fox: “What Does This New Version of Mutually Assured Destruction Look Like?” - Freakonomics - "LEVITT: So, a second thing that I found really surprising about your book was the suggestion that a lot of terror groups have, close to within their reach, or within their reach, access to some kind of nuclear capabilities. And as one example of this, you mentioned that the Russians somehow had lost track of over 100 suitcase-sized nuclear weapons?
FOX: Yeah, I mean, the other side of that is that with every passing year, these weapons do begin to fail. They do break down. There are a lot of components that are missing and, because they’re so old, are very difficult to come by. And the technology requires people who are familiar with now 30-year-old technology in order to operate it. So, it is simultaneously cause for great alertness in the intelligence community — and that alertness is certainly there — but it’s also important to recognize that there is a reason we haven’t seen these kinds of attacks...
In the war on terror context, there was this really dramatic oversimplification that the leadership and the media engaged in, which was this, “they hate us because we’re free” narrative — the “they hate us because girls wear miniskirts in Times Square” kind of thing. And I’ve never in my entire time in the Middle East, even in the most traditional settings, ever heard anybody back that up. What I have seen is that over the 10 years prior to 9/11, there was a very consistent drumbeat of expression from the Al Qaeda leadership, from Egyptian Islamic Jihad — a lot of the leadership of Al Qaeda came from E.I.J. — of saying, “Here are the very specific grievances we have.” And one of them was supporting financially the security services in Egypt that were so notorious for torture."
Strange how she doesn't know about how "Baby, It’s Cold Outside" influenced Sayyid Qutb, or how Osama bin Laden wanted the West to "reject the immoral acts of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling's, and trading with interest"
