Americans Struggle with Graphs - "much of “the public” struggle with even the most basic charts and graphs, let alone complex visualizations... do people in the mass-media “routinely” assume log scale axes are widely comprehensible? If it’s the latter, and they’re overestimating the world’s quantitative abilities, how many other important data stories are lost on general audiences? I know from personal experience, this is an easy mistake to make. If a big chunk of your day is spent in a python notebook or your lunch conversations often veer toward what’s new on arXiv, you might be in the same boat. Stanford/Duke professors Dan/Chip Heath call this the “Curse of Knowledge.”"
Paul Rivers on X - "Lol classic clickbait. Why don't people who live in dangerous areas go running?"
Alexander on X - "This seems to be a popular explanation for why low income people run less. It seems like a lot of people implicitly associate low income with dangerous inner-city areas. While these are low income areas, most low income individuals are in rural areas. Yet we still see they run less - they also hike less despite being in more rural location! This is also where the poverty-obesity link is strongest: the rural poor. They aren’t not running because their town of pop 10,000 is too dangerous. “Too dangerous” isn’t even a great explanation for the urban poor, who also engage in higher risk behavior across the board. Why does someone choose to use recreational drugs instead of run? Not because it’s a safer hobby. We have to ask why people make the decisions that they do, but most of the explanations along the lines of, “they would totally do that if they could, they really want to” are wrong. They don’t want to."
memetic_sisyphus on X - "There’s a debate style that just showers your opponent with endless words hoping they never pick up on one point and keep them constantly on the back foot. For many this style is highly convincing (see destiny’s audience). The same thing happens for people when they read a book. These types of people will immediately believe everything they read in a book, because it’s large and they think it’s impossible to publish a lie. This is also why they’re so against publishing “bad” books. Because if they accidentally read one their whole world view would change."
Mickamious on X - "Australia is seriously screwed. First Dutton asks you to dob in your family or friends for anti-government views or if your views have shifted in nature…. Now this.. Government can under new surveillance laws MODIFY your social media posts. Its an information war, make no mistake"
Andrew Hammel on X - "Most 🇩🇪 central stations are surrounded by junkies, lunatics, drug dealers, rough-sleeping drunks, and beggars. Germans know their politicians will do nothing, so they've given up. But visitors wonder why 🇩🇪 can't solve this humiliating problem & lose respect for the country."
Police station mocked for photo of knife haul – that includes a spoon - "A British police station this week lauded themselves with a picture on Twitter designed to showcase their efforts at tackling knife crime — but didn’t quite scoop up the coverage they were hoping for thanks to the presence of a rogue spoon in the image. The Regents Park Police force announced that it had “conducted weapons sweeps, dealt with a person injured from a van reversing on them, reported a burglary, and collected all these from @scope charity shop who diligently didn’t want them to get into the wrong hands & disposed of correctly & safely,” read the tweet. But with that glaring spoon, cue the chorus of internet mockery. Journalist Tim Pool pointed out a butter knife also made the cut."
Meme - Hackney MPS @MPSHackney: "Haggerston SNT have conducted a weapons sweep on Stonebridge Estate finding a number of items. #GDSW #OpEquinox"
stevefromaccounting @holloworot: "Your doing Gods work out there. Lost my mother to a bike wheel"
Hackney MPS: "Thank you. And we're very sorry to hear that."
Olivia (she/her) on X - ""Can my husband find out who I am voting for in the Presidential Election?" 🗳️ We've been getting this question a lot, so we rounded up some helpful facts. Please share this 🧵"
very moisturized on X - "This is a 33k like thread inventing a fake abusive relationship with a (Republican) spouse who will beat you for voting Dem and talking to him in HR lady speak about keeping your vote “private”. These people really beat off to weird fantasies of political victimhood."
Wolf of X on X - "5. This is 7 yrs old Tom. One day he told his schoolmates that his uncle was Superman. Kids made fun of him and no one believed him. Then his mother made a call, and asked her brother-in-law to take him to school one day. And Henry Cavill, of course, was delighted to do so."
Meme - "When the plan B doesn't work. it's time for Plan C *Boxer getting ready to punch woman in stomach*"
Meme - "I forgot to turn off the flash *4 young girls looking at photographer*"
Visegrád 24 on X - "Many are shocked by the news that Iraq’s parliament is about to lower the marriage age for girls from 15 to 9. There are examples from other countries too. In Sudan it’s 10 In Afghanistan & Yemen, it’s from “puberty” but in reality 6, 7 and 8-year-old girls are also married off"
Thread by @wanyeburkett on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - " In an every day sense, people who live in bad urban neighborhoods in the United States are less affected by actual violence than they are by young men who have hardened themselves to violence. The issue is one of the almost constant implicit threat of violence. If you’re paying attention, what you notice in nicer neighborhoods or in suburbs is that nobody in your every day life is posturing in a way that’s designed to indicate to that they are ready for physical violence if necessary. I have a theory that men are more sensitive to this than women, which might explain why some conservative men appear to liberals to be more, “afraid” of big cities. I think what’s happening is that these are men who are especially attuned to implicit threats of violence and who are correctly picking it up everywhere they go in urban areas. When my wife and I are out in a city I will often clock a guy doing this and then it will distract me for as long as he is present in my environment and my wife can sometimes get kind of annoyed because I seem distracted and she’s not sure why. This is another case of perception being reality. That distraction I’m feeling, that sense of uneasiness, that’s an actual thing that actually exists in the actual physical world. It is in principle measurable, though it appears in no statistical record. In fact, pretty much every middle-class norm is designed to make strangers feel comfortable, to signal loudly and repeatedly, “I am not a threat to you.” In bad neighborhoods the opposite is pervasive. Young men, even those who might not necessarily want to harm you, nevertheless signal by default that they are ready for violence if necessary."
Church Kicks Out Woman And Gives Her Donation Back Because She Wants To Separate From Her Husband
Meme - "Islandton Church of God of Prophecy
Dear Brooke,
This letter is to inform you that it was unanimously decided in our Feb. 9th business conference that your membership in our local church should be terminated. Since
you refused to accept the letter that we sent you in November, that outlined the reasons for this action, I will briefly review them here.
1) You initiated the separation in your marriage to Josh, without good cause, stating that you wanted to begin a relationship with another man. It seems you have no desire to keep your family together, and this has caused a great deal of hurt to you, your husband, your children, and many others. [This is being unfaithful to the marriage vow that you took before God.]
2) You have continued to post many un-Christian, and even indecent pictures and messages on various social media sites over the past many months. You have also been very negative and critical of many of our church family, I believe, to try and take the attention off of your real needs, which you deny.
3) You have refused counsel or advice from your husband, your pastor, and many of your close church family, who really care for you and have tried to help you. Brooke, contrary to what you try to convince us, you are really not in a very good place right now.
Brooke, taking this action was not an easy thing for the church to do. There have been many prayers said for you and your family over this past year plus. There wasa great deal of sadness in our meeting over having to do this. You and your family have been a very important part of our church for many years, and I know that we still love each of you very much. We are hoping that God will show you His will in all this, and that you will also desire to do His will. Please let us know if that happens.
Sincerely,
Pastor Bernie Levesque
Note: We all felt it best to return the tithe check you recently gave to Jeanette."
António Guterres on X - "Nearly 80 years have passed since Nagasaki was incinerated by an atomic weapon. It is not enough to remember what happened. We must never allow such devastation again. The only way to eliminate the nuclear risk is to eliminate nuclear weapons."
Patrick Fox on X - "If you eliminated every nuclear weapon on planet earth tomorrow, the world would see the return of conventional wars on a level it has not known since 1945. The fear of nuclear weapons has ushered in a previously unheard of period of relative peace between the great powers."
FischerKing on X - "This is an excellent documentary. It follows a single cow. You watch her give birth to a calf, provide the milk we drink, you see her graze in the fields and socialize with other cows. And then when she shows signs of age and illness, you watch her human handlers, whom she trusts, shoot her in the head. I’m not a vegetarian, but I see the occasional discourse about it on here. I think if you don’t have some misgivings about killing nice animals and eating them you’re probably a little heartless. At the very least people should have better understanding of where their food comes from."
ib on X - "I don’t begrudge anyone who eats meat, but it does strike me as odd that even this level of sanitized violence is too much to even watch, let alone carry out, for so many who do"
memetic_sisyphus on X - "When my father in law got his first couple of cattle and it came to the slaughter, he said the other cows just watched their fellow cow, they had spent all their lives with, get killed and simply went back to chewing on grass. He said he never felt better about eating beef."
Meme - Jonatan Pallesen @jonatanpallesen: "A three strikes law for violent crime would prevent more than half of all violent crime in Sweden. This is because most violent crime most crime is committed by just 1% of the population."
Wilfred Reilly @wil_da_beast630: "Almost all felony crime - 66% in the recent New York study, 78% in the "Bukele test" is committed by ~1% of free young males. If that's an exaggeration at all, it's not much of one. What we do with that information, as a society, is up to us.
This is actually why "not all men" (Blacks, teens, "rednecks," etc) is not just a deflection. It's totally fine for older women - say - to point out that they are simply not in the group that commits 80% of murders. But, it is...ALSO logical for young guys to point out that literally 99% of them are not murderers either, and they are heavily over-represented among the cops who catch killers."
The Left Has an Authoritarian Problem (but Doesn’t Know It) - "The hidden truth of authoritarian psychology is that there are always people like that. There are always people who will fill the power vacuum, who want to rule and order and dictate. Every movement has authoritarian leaders. Every movement has people who want to gain power and use it harshly. Every movement has leaders who wish to control, manipulate, and crush. So to spend time talking about authoritarianism as if what changes is in the leadership is futile. Nothing changes in the leadership. What changes is in the people they presume to lead. Indeed, leaders are irrelevant if no one will obey them. It requires a lust in the masses for authoritarians to punish their enemies, to create and enforce norms for which dissent is not allowed, to promote intolerance and hatred. Authoritarian leaders are pathetic stooges if the masses are uninterested in them. So “Are there authoritarian leaders?” isn’t the primary question—the primary question is “Will the people submit?” It doesn’t matter if Congresswoman Maxine Waters tells protestors to “get more confrontational” if they don’t like a trial verdict; it only matters if everyone thinks that kind of authoritarian fear-mongering is okay. Will they submit? Do they want leaders to boss others about, to lead them to aggression? This truth maps onto decades of authoritarianism research in my own field of social psychology. That research has largely been built around personality and attitude scales that measure authoritarianism. These scales are not built to measure authoritarian leaders; rather, they are built to measure authoritarian followers... Thus, most of what we know about authoritarianism—most of the actual data used in the primary questionnaires that have come to define what we think about authoritarianism—is about the people who follow, and not the people who lead... Our work over a thirty-year span suggests that changes in the authoritarian status of governments were predicted by the predisposal of the populace to authoritarian followership traits like collectivism; but authoritarian governmental changes had comparatively little effect on followers’ psychology. This work suggests that certain psychological features predispose followers to accept authoritarian dictatorships. This empirical fact is quite remarkable. So many things influence the rise of dictators that have nothing to do with the internal culture—military power, foreign politics, the status of a nation’s immediate neighbors—that it would seem like the cultural beliefs of the followers in the populace hardly matter. And yet not only do they matter, they matter primarily. They are central. An authoritarian dictator may take over a country, but if the people never wanted that to happen, it won’t last. A democracy may be installed from the outside, but if the people want authoritarian leadership, it won’t last... Authoritarians don’t merely enforce reasonable rules or obey those rules—they want a strong leader to crush and silence their opponents. They want that leader to hurt people for the benefit of their group. The authoritarian is thus vastly different than the person who merely complies with authority. In fact, merely obeying authority is largely a positive thing as far as it goes. If students in my classes refused to do what I ask of them, no one would ever learn. If they interrupted my lectures to discuss Taylor Swift, or yelled at their fellow students about line dancing, or wrote “Luke stinks” on top of the notes I was trying to write on the board, then there would be little point in my class. Their obedience accomplishes a positive goal. We teach children to respect their teachers because it is a positive thing to respect their teachers. Similarly, we want people to obey the law. We want them to respect the authority that tells them “do not murder.”... The classic definition of authoritarianism is that authoritarians want a strong authority figure to hurt others (called “authoritarian aggression”), to enforce radical group norms (called “authoritarian conventionalism”), and to require submission to those norms (called “authoritarian submission”). Authoritarians want to obey strong authority figures, but they are largely motivated by a desire to have their group dominate other groups... The distinction between good and bad authority can be seen in remarkable work on parenting by Cal Berkeley professor Diana Baumrind. This work suggests there are two primary dimensions of parenting: Responsiveness/Warmth and Authority/Control... parents who score high on authority but also score high on responsiveness are Authoritative. They expect obedience but they listen to their children and show warmth to them. In my experience, it occasionally surprises some Americans that lots of research suggests kids have the best outcomes under Authoritative parents. Indulgent and Neglectful parents tend to raise unhappy and unsuccessful kids. So parents with no authority at all don’t do very well. Parents who have nothing but authority—cold authoritarians—also don’t do well. But parents with a combination of authority and responsiveness raise successful kids at very high rates. This work highlights an important point for our larger study of authoritarianism. The proper substitute for authoritarianism isn’t chaos. The proper substitute is good authority that is responsive to the populace. We need leaders. Authoritarianism is essentially a desire to put strong-but-bad leaders in power. The proper substitute for authoritarianism isn’t to put no leaders in power, but to put responsive and warm leaders in power. We shouldn’t want less leadership; we should want better leadership.
Left wingers keep getting upset at the idea of left wing authoritarianism, and insist it doesn't exist
Left wingers hate authority and want to punish their opponents, so you get the worst of both worlds
Thread by @owenbroadcast on Thread Reader App – Thread Reader App - "theres a 4chan post about how super intelligent characters on TV shows often make no sense, because its usually a normal writer imagining what its like to be super intelligent, which is impossible likewise this type of comedy is normal people imagining what its like to be weird
"being weird" is characterized by being unintelligible or off-putting to the average normal person. so when a normal person tries to be weird, they naturally just become unintelligible and off-putting - because from their point of view (outside of it), thats what being weird is. thats why in proto-internet "XD i'm so random" was how people presented as weird or interesting. being weird or interesting has an element of randomness or not adhering to strict social codes, from the outside. but thats not what it actually is."
Anonymous 2 hours ago No.48556304 >Meme - "SHERLOCK. So apart from tumbir fanbase, why doesnt /tv/ like this show?"
"its a sitcom not a detective show."
"Because it has smart characters written stupidly.
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is a smartly written smart character. When Chigurh kills a hotel room full of three people he books to room next door so he can examine it, finding which walls he can shoot through, where the light switch is, what sort of cover is there etc. This is a smart thing to do because Chigurh is a smart person who is written by another smart person who understands how 'smart people think.
Were Sherlock Holmes to kill hotel room full of three people. He'd enter using a secret door in the hotel that he read about in a book ten years ago. He'd throw peanuts at one guy causing him to go into anaphylactic shock, as he had deduced from a dartboard with a picture of George Washington carver on it pinned to the wall that the man had a severe peanut allergy. The second man would then kill himself just according to plan as Sheriock had earlier deduced that him and the first man were homosexual lovers who couldnt live without eachother due to a faint scent of penis on each man's breath and a slight dilation of their pupils whenever they looked at each other. As for the third man, why Sherlock doesnt kill him at all. The third man removes his sunglasses and wig to reveal he actually WAS Sherlock the entire time. But Sherlock just entered through the Secret door and killed two people, how can there be two of him? The first Sherlock removes his, mask to reveal he's actually Moriarty attempting to frame Sherlock for two murders. Sherlock however anticipated this, the two dead men stand up, they're undercover police officers, it was all a ruse. "But Sherlock!" Moriarty cries "That police officer blew his own head off, Iook at it, there's skull fragments on the wall, how is he fine now? How did you fake that?". Sherlock just winks at the screen, the end.
This is retarded because Sherlock is a smart person written by a stupid person to whom smart people are indistinguishable from wizards."
Taylor Swift Data on X - "🚨 Taylor Swift 𝘐𝘚𝘐𝘚 attackers were hired as security guards for concert They had chemical 𝘣𝘰𝘮𝘣𝘴 and planned to drive car into 20,000 fans before attacking with machetes and knives"
Drew Pavlou 🇦🇺🇺🇦🇹🇼 on X - "This is what terror supporters mean when they talk about “Globalising the Intifada”"
Dr Charlotte Proudman on X - "Men have tried to silence Taylor Swift by ‘slut-shaming’, criticising her for being single, unmarried & childfree. When that failed, they resorted to violence and terrorist threats. Now they’ve succeeded—she won’t sing in Vienna. This is how misogyny works, and it makes me sick."
Wilfred Reilly on X - ""Men." This approach is unbelievably annoying, and maaaay be quietly radicalizing me. There are essentially no normal men issuing terror threats to the concerts our ladies go to on girls' night. In EVERY case, the people doing stuff like this - recent Islamic migrants, ghetto and Antifa thugs, "trans women" - are members of some tiny, dysfunctional pet group that every mainstream feminist/left-wing organization coddles and cossets. I mean, just sayin'."
Opinion: The Canadian dream is on life support - The Globe and Mail - "For much of the past decade, I spent time going back and forth between the United States and Canada. It used to be the case, especially after the election of Justin Trudeau in 2015, that when returning to Canada I was greeted by good news. The country was imbued with a sense of optimism. The beginnings of an economy that worked for everyone. A renewed confidence on the world stage. The country felt ready for the future... The Canada of 2024 feels like a different country. When I returned to Canada in late 2023, I was shocked by what I saw and heard. It felt as if almost everyone I encountered now, of all ethnicities, backgrounds and ages, were angry. Friends complained about the impossibility of buying a home − homes that had been affordable when their parents came to Canada. Family members worried about car thefts and other crimes. People were making plans to leave − even those who had recently arrived. Nor was this limited to my immediate circle. In conversations at the local YMCA, the coffee shop and around Toronto, there was a genuine, visceral frustration. People felt stifled by the dismal state of the economy and the poor state of housing. They were working harder and, thanks to inflation, making less. The price of food (and everything else) was rising. They worried about their kids’ safety. There was a ceiling on their ambitions. The political leadership of the country had failed them, time and again, and was now unable to address ordinary people’s concerns... Driving through the Greater Toronto Area, I saw how much more congested everything had become. There were too many people with too few places to live. The increasing number of homeless people on the street. The rise in violent crime. The staggering toll of the opioid crisis. The unprecedented wave of international students, many of whom were sold a bill of goods that turned out to be faulty. The hangover from COVID-19 restrictions, almost a form of national PTSD. The pervasive feeling that success is out of reach in Canada, and even if you work hard and are successful, the government will come collecting more than they need − and then proceed to waste it, overspend it or lose it. What I realized soon thereafter was that this country was witnessing a systemic political failure, a complete inability of politicians to get change done in ways that manifested at the dinner table. An extreme form of PR and image-management had begun to take over delivering on policy in concrete ways − and the entire country was noticing. Nor was this an accident, the unfortunate consequence of polarization or inequality, but the deliberate result of multiple policy failures − as well as failures of will. I realized that this systemic government failure amounted to something worse than just incompetence or ineffectiveness. It was a betrayal of the Canadian dream... Canadians are not fools; their discontents have good reason. “Canada’s per capita GDP has been shrinking 0.4 per cent a year since 2020 − the worst rate for any developed country in the top 50,” noted the esteemed investor, Ruchir Sharma, in May. Investment and job growth is driven mostly by the government, while “private sector action is confined to the property market.” So the government spends, is unable to restrain itself or get results, while speculation and real estate investments drive the economy. Along with the systemic political failure, this may be an economic crisis in the making. For many Canadians, the cost of living has become unaffordable... more than half of Canadians are living paycheque-to-paycheque. Many in my generation have been entirely shut out of prosperity − betraying the promise of progress for millions. One sees neighbourhoods plagued by drug abuse and crime. Statistics Canada has reported that we are witnessing a 16-year spike in violent crime. The homicide rate in Canada today is the highest it’s been since 1992. And Canada maintains one of the laxest criminal justice systems in the Western world, one where someone can cause the death of another and leave prison after six months. If America went too far in the direction of mass incarceration, Canada overcorrected in the opposite direction with mass leniency. One thing, though, is still a constant: The disproportionately largest victims of violent crimes, and specifically homicide, are Indigenous people and racial minorities. At some point, one would think that the deaths of so many innocent and vulnerable people would elicit outrage − yet life goes on as normal. Each life is precious, and when violent criminals get off easy, or without punishment at all, they learn the terrible lesson that this country does not take its own laws seriously, so why should they? When the law loses its power to deter crime, either because of prosecutors not moving forward with cases, or because of a general laissez-faire attitude toward violent crime happening in other neighbourhoods, it is the marginalized who are harmed most. Yet, Canadians cannot even read or share news on social-media platforms such as Facebook and Instagram. It is an Orwellian experience − in the literal sense − to see one’s own articles censored and silenced in a country calling itself a democracy. This is the result of an ineffectual attempt by the Canadian government to force the biggest social-media company on the planet to pay for articles. Either Canada should not have taken on such a fight, or if it did, should have dealt more tactfully and strategically with a company known to leverage its strength. Normally, in a democracy, social ills can be addressed by public officials. But Canada’s own political institutions have been riven by corruption and personal ambition. And now also potentially by foreign influence. Each controversy and scandal leads people away from crucial time and policy attention that could have been spent on fixing the country’s major issues. At the parliamentary level, most members of Parliament are so frightened of speaking for themselves that they are rendered powerless. This defies the very essence of the British parliamentary system, upon which Canada’s system is based, which empowers MPs to speak on behalf of their constituents and represent their true voice in the people’s chamber... The social situation deteriorates. The housing shortage is chronic. Economic stagnation is severe. The political crisis may be even worse. At this moment, there is a backlash building. Evidence for this is everywhere − most recently in the riding of Toronto-St. Paul’s, which just elected a Conservative MP for the first time since 1988 − and it would be wise for leaders in office to take notice. They should admit something went wrong, re-examine old assumptions and pivot."
