DB Cooper

Skydiving

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

Daily reminder that more than half of the adults in America cannot read at a 6th grade level.

The days of landing rovers on mars are limited, dear comrades.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

“For those of us with an educational psych background, it’s especially disturbing because group averages tell you remarkably little about the abilities or potential of the person sitting in front of you���”

Good Bayesian’s are hard to come by…

Using group averages when making decisions under incomplete information (which is the norm) is an epistemically valid practice.

Accumulating the requisite degree of individuating info needed to fully discount known group averages is an unreasonable expectation, i.e., cost prohibitive.

[Alex @notcomplex_]

A reminder that poverty doesn't cause crime:

A Basic Income experiment spent €26.9 million over 2 years on 2000 low-income people (less than 300/month).

Absolutely zero effect on crime of any type.

[Martin Sellner @MartinSellner_]

Demographic image of Frankfurt, Germany on New Years Eve.

This is a crime. We are losing our nations.

[Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_]

The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was a philosophical and moral disaster.

Not just in hindsight (which is the claim older conservatives are now making), but using information available at the time.

The disastrous consequences should have been clearly foreseeable to any intelligent person alive at the time who had not been successfully psyoped by the KGB paymasters of the 60s counterculture movement.

Sadly, there were few such. The Soviet infiltration of the American counterculture had a vast footprint, and very few people realized at the time that this was not a grassroots phenomenon, but an organized propaganda and funding effort by the second world.

Those who did were dismissed as cranks and loonies, and it was only once the USSR collapsed that we had direct access to primary sources telling us it was all 100% true.

Some people in the west refuse to believe it to this day.

One of the direct results of this program, the CRA64, effectively abolished the freedom of voluntary association, not just in the cases it covered, but in general principle... through the precedent that it established.

And the goal was to abolish all other freedom, too.

The argument was made that discriminating in housing, employment, etc, by private individuals, on the basis of race, was unfair. This was the rationalization under which the bill passed into law, and which has subsequently been enshrined as the secular religion of the left.

But this idea assumes that the state has both the power and the right to force private individuals to make private decisions according to the state's definition of fairness.

This was the death of American libertarianism, a blood sacrifice on the altar of kindergarten classroom values, with every American citizen in the role of the four year old child.

This was the thin end of the wedge, the Marxist recipe for a totalitarian USA.

First, Wickard v. Filburn established the new reality that the power of the federal government was not limited to those actions enumerated in the constitution. It could, in fact, do anything.

It could tell you what you could and could not own, eat, drink, wear, buy, sell, read, write... anything.

Remember "prohibition"? Because it happened before Wickard v. Filburn, it required a constitutional amendment for Congress to take your beer away. Today, they could just do it.

They can do anything.

Second was the CRA64. This established the precedent that the fed not only COULD do anything, but SHOULD do anything, provided it thought doing so would make the universe "more fair".

With this second step, all legal and philosophical barriers to totalitarianism were knocked flat, and the only thing that remained for Marxists to do was conduct the long march through each and every American institution, painstakingly constructing and selling the "fairness" rationalizations for each policy which would gradually place every aspect of individual daily life under federal government control.

Six decades later, here we are.

The fact that it is obvious in retrospect, but was not obvious at the time, seems to have led some people to believe that the "civil rights movement" was infiltrated by communists.

No, it was instigated by communists. The communism was coming from inside the movement all along.

Principled, non-communist classical liberals would have said "Yes, racial prejudice seems mean and unfair, but we cannot possibly allow the state to enter into every aspect of life to purge the unfairness from it."

And perhaps some of them did. But they were shouted down, and then erased from history, by others.

By the same people who spent have spent the last six decades puffing themselves up about having "marched with King".

Those were not classical liberals. They renounced any claim to the title when they sold their libertarian birthright for a bowl of equality soup.

And, and yours.

They sold yours, too.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@cremieuxrecueil The best—and by “best” I mean, the height of unironic bad faith—rejoinder I’ve heard to this is that the best predictor of local homicide rates is the previous year’s homicide rates.

[Avery Daye @AveryDaye]

Denmark tracked 321 Palestinian men granted asylum in 1992.
63% were convicted of a crime
22% received a prison sentence
55% were on welfare by 2019

They had ~999 children
34% convicted
13% got prison sentences
37% received benefits in 2019

Total cost to taxpayers (1992–2025):
~$246–319 million — or ~$800,000 per man

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@CharlesNegy @cremieuxrecueil And the administrators/professors have co-signed the grift while legitimizing it with the imprimatur of grade inflation.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@GarbageHuman24 “B” in a walk.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@RealDianeYap Sacrificing your civilization on the altar of not-being-racist, is not the win these people believe it to be.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@dr_duchesne @TonyJef39967151 There exists a fervent and sincere wish among the median white individual to engage with the other, driven in part by an adherence to logic and a commitment to universalist principles.

This inclination is an impolitic and naive threat perception failure.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@Sean__Last So, in the absence of sufficient time horizons, SSRIs are not only defensible but necessary???

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@iamyesyouareno

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@LionBlogosphere A society’s mean is arguably more important than its elite output and 50% of adults in America cannot read at a 6th grade level.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@cremieuxrecueil I’m obviously speculating here, but Vance gives every appearance of being the brightest of the four candidates by some appreciable degree.

[Nathan Cofnas @nathancofnas]

Letter from the administration of Wadham College at the University of Oxford in 1968 shows how universities dealt with student protesters before the feminization of academia

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@TABYTCHI @MedGold_ I can confirm #1 in a walk.

Due to the nature of their work, cultural inhibitions surrounding nudity become almost nonexistent in relatively short order.

This is well known within clinical healthcare.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@nerdc0re84 @robkhenderson A lack of agency perhaps?

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@JayMan471 Durability of Calvinism

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@EPoe187 Bo, I thought I’d try to balance out the steady stream of derision and invective you undoubtedly receive with a reminder that your honesty and integrity is as appreciated as your insight on this subject. Keep it up.

[DB Cooper @DBCoope57765104]

@wesyang @NateSilver538 When omission stop qualifying as a lie?