viridian

I always found the birkin interesting because of how working class it looks versus its price tag. I grew up fairly poor, and the birkin bags always remind me of the leather purses my aunts, grandmothers, and teachers would carry.

This seems to occur in high fashion a lot, an upscale rendition of something popular among the working class.

side note: the flynn effect is reversing in most developed countries, and started doing so between 1991-1997.

Impossible is almost always a colloquialism, almost everything is possible is you accept a low enough probability of success. We are talking about something less likely than almost anything else ever called impossible.

It's possible in the same way its possible that you will spontaneously phase through the floor due to a particular outcome of atomic resonance. Possible, but so unlikely it almost certainly has not, nor ever will happen.

Might something a small as a grain of sand have phased through a solid barrier as thin as a piece of paper somewhere on earth, at some point over billions of years? Sure. Paper is still pretty thick, and a grain of sand is enormous on the atomic scale, but it's at least in the realm of practical probability. When you start talking about cum(P) events in the realm of 1/1e30 you simply can't produce a scenario with that many dice rolls. If our population was 8 quadrillion and spanned a 40,000 year empire we would likely still never see an individual 11σ from the mean.

>Society is doomed because we stopped silencing disinformation peddlers. We know what happens when Nazis are allowed to spread propaganda freely - because that happened one time in Germany, and we saw the results.

That one time in Germany, actually an 80 year long ongoing event in central Europe. Hitler didn't wake up one day with a novel idea about the Jews and the place of the German people, these were foundational ideas in the culture at least as far back as Wagner.

If anything, this pro-censorship argument is self defeating, because the "disinformation" peddlers that were silenced in the second reich were generally those of the liberal, anglo, and francophilic variety, those who would seek to decenter the goal of a collective German destiny.

Censorship is only ever a good if you find yourself a part of the group that would be doing the censoring.

The US is a major outlier in sentencing for violent crimes and sex crimes. It's not the absolute peak in terms of sentencing, but its somewhere between the Latin American mean and the Middle Eastern mean, which is unexpected given its other human development indicators.

The main rifles I've seen depicted in this conflict are AK pattern rifles, with the rare ancient armalite pattern rifle scattered among them, and a singular SCAR.

Based on where most modern AK manufacturing has moved to (China, like manufacturing writ large), you should instead be asking the Chinese populous to protest. That said, I wouldn't hold my breath on China forming a mass protest culture any time soon, Tiananmen Square is in most people's living memory.

As a heads up, flagging is rarely done by mods, and overwhelmingly done by normal users with sufficient karma to do so, so it probably wasn't Dan or Scott. For example, the comment header for the comment I am currently replying to looks as follows:

richardfeynman 15 hours ago | parent | context | flag | favorite | on: Israels top military lawyer arrested after she adm...

I fail to see how that conclusion is even possible. He's not advocating for anything, he's just taking the opportunity to dunk on Israel.

His actual cloaked argument, insofar as it exists, is that Israel does not uphold these standards you value. You clearly disagree, and of course the sarcasm is unproductive, but he's not advocating barbarity (but levying an accusation of it).

Honestly, thinking it through, there's no way I'd engage the public at all on something like that except possibly a singular utterance that no, it didn't happen, ever, not even close, it's a bold faced lie.

Trying to contextualize or talk about fake news or doing anything else feels very shady to me in that context. You do often see this sort of hemming and hawing from people online during these cancellation campaigns, and I cannot even fathom what inspires them to do anything other than directly and aggressively defend themselves.

Look, I also find sarcasm extremely annoying, it's an anathema to meaningful discussion.

However... your non-sarcastic interpretation is clearly in bad faith, and ratchets up the hostility even further.

Why post this jeering reply?

Recently, any time I see someone railing against about one-sided coverage, it sets off alarm bells for where the person themselves is coming from.

To explain, there was a study of partisan bias I once read, wherein a mixed audience is shown some factually neutral piece of media, then asked to rate the bias of the piece along with some other questions. Naturally, the strongest partisans felt it was the most biased against them (something we've seen replicated in dozens of studies), but the more interesting outcome was that they teased out why the partisans felt the media was so biased. The overwhelming argument from both sides was that the media in question lacked additional context that would specifically justify the actions of their own side, even though that was not the focus of the video.

My big take away from this is that if a person is demanding additional, one-directional contextualization, especially if said context seems like it stretches/moves the topic of conversation, I'm probably reading polemic disguised as truth seeking.

FWIW in my experience is less the monster energy / black rifle coffee audience, it's actually the red bull / white claw audience.

It still feels wrong to me, but that's how it is.

Whatever your own feelings on the matter are, condescending to people with terms like "fee-fees" only engenders more conflict and outrage.

It's a fraction of a drop in an ocean of online hostility and malevolence, but is still a contributor nonetheless.

I think people view it more as an irreparable shattering of the social contract. Society exists, but the rules just don't matter. Many people have become strict conflict theorists, to borrow a term from sociology.