Argyrisphd

Only in relation to our imagination can nature be called beautiful or ugly, well-ordered or confused.
Spinoza

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@diogenisd Σύμβαση είναι μην χολοσκας

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@JDHamkins We can say it's true but Quine wins: tools and predictions matter more than metaphysical ghosts

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@LivreVenir Παντού τα ίδια δηλ σε μεγαλύτερο ή μικρότερο βαθμό, στη Δανία πόσο ισχύει αυτό;

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@Bati_Goal77 Για να πουν κάτι. Να υπάρχουν ηλικιακές διαβαθμίσεις λέει το ΠΑΣΟΚ. Να χαμε να λέγαμε

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@EleniIoannaVai Έκλεβε μωρέ για αυτό ήταν ανταγωνιστική. Αλλά είχε ρίξει κ τ ποιότητα εδώ και καιρό

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@DvsDvs60195368 Στο Χ είστε πολύ δυνατός, ακούμε με προσοχή

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@HRessed Έτσι το χουν εκεί

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@EricTopol @statnews @adamfeuerstein What about the french vaccine?

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@cinarozcan19 @itswpceo If u r not satirical u mix some real points with one-sided Russian narratives and oversimplifications. The Kurdish analogy and the claim that Ukraine “brought the war on itself” through minority oppression are by far your weakest arguments.

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@SilentHillPost τπτ

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty."

This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart.

Let's look at the data.

First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%.

But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time.

Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect.

Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings.

What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families.

Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities.

Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior.

Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods.

So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012).

And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real.

Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic.

It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative.

It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory.

It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive.

And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy.

The alternative is simple and old.

A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition.

Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.

[墓碑科技 @mubeitech]

德国 DW 电视台拍过一部关于巴黎郊区移民的纪录片。
镜头对准了生活在同一片区域的两个群体。

一边是大约七万人的法国华人。
在巴黎北郊的欧贝维利耶，他们建起了欧洲最大的服装批发中心。
这批人的生活方式很简单：
起早贪黑，开小作坊、看店、跑货运。
赚了钱继续投入生意，遇到难处自己想办法扛。
平时低调安静，很少向政府伸手要特殊补贴，也不上街制造混乱。
几十年下来，越来越多家庭买了房，把生意做了起来。

另一边，是同样生活在这片街区的北非移民群体。
从整体上看，他们在当地的经济融入相对滞后。
但纪录片捕捉到了一个细微却现实的心态变化：
一种把自食其力者视作威胁的情绪，正在悄悄蔓延。

按片子里的观察，
一些融入受挫的人，习惯以受害者自居，觉得社会欠自己太多。
可当他们转头看到身旁的华人时，心态变了。
他们不仅没有去学怎么做生意，反而把华人当成了竞争对手。

这种敌意到底从何而来？

最现实的冲突在于：华人的日子越过越好，受害者叙事就越难自圆其说。
大家同样是外来者，同样面对异国他乡的壁垒。
甚至华人刚来的时候连法语都不会讲，更谈不上本地人脉。
如果有人靠一天干十几个小时，能把日子一点点撑起来，
那句“我们过不好全怪外界不公”，就很难再理直气壮地说出口。

一个闷头自立的人，往往会让习惯归咎环境的人感到刺眼。

更深层的错位在于对财富的理解。
在很多索取者的认知里，财富是一块固定死的大饼。
他们看不到那些批发店是怎样一箱一箱货物搬出来的，
只觉得华人的店铺赚到了钱，就是占了自己的便宜。

再加上华人素来习惯忍让，遇到纠纷往往选择息事宁人，
这种心态上的失衡，很快就落成了现实中的治安麻烦。
抢劫、尾随、街头袭击，接二连三指向这群只想安分过日子的人。

靠双手养活自己、靠信誉积累财富，放在任何健全的社会都是最基本的尊严。
但如果一个地方习惯了把受害者身份当成通行的筹码，
那个默默把日子过好的人，
往往最先成为被针对的对象。

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@odigitis Σύντροφε κάνε μία φούσκα με τη μυξα σου

[King David @KingDavid9y]

Every single word!

Juan Carlos Girauta Vidal, a Spanish lawyer, writer, and Member of the European Parliament👇

“You did not listen to Israel — the vanguard of the West in the face of barbarism. You chose instead to condemn its right to self-defense, whitewash its terrorist enemies, deny the horrific crimes of October 7, and spread lies about genocide. Today, those who are destroying European cities are waving the Palestinian flag.”

[Brivael Le Pogam @brivael]

You've probably seen the video. A young Frenchwoman in Paris, in tears, begging looters to stop. "Why are you doing this? That's not what we stand for."

Some accounts are mocking her. "She voted for it."

I won't. Because what you see on her face is not stupidity. It's a disease that has infected the entire West, and it has a name: suicidal empathy.

The term comes from Gad Saad, an evolutionary behavioral scientist at Concordia University in Montreal. A man who fled the Lebanese civil war as a child, and who knows what it looks like when a society falls apart. His new book, Suicidal Empathy: Dying to Be Kind, is the follow-up to The Parasitic Mind. Here is the thesis, and why it concerns every one of us.

Empathy is one of the best things about us. It evolved for a reason: to care for our children, our kin, our tribe. It was calibrated for a world where the people you felt for were the people around you, and where empathy always came paired with its counterweight: the instinct to protect your own and to recognize a threat.

Suicidal empathy is what happens when that mechanism misfires. When it fires at the wrong targets, in the wrong amounts, with no brake. When we feel more for the criminal than for his victim. More for the stranger who breaks the rules than for the citizen who follows them. More for how compassionate we look than for what our compassion actually produces.

Where does it come from? Four layers.

First, biology. Empathy is a spotlight, as the psychologist Paul Bloom put it. It lights up the one face in front of you and leaves everything else in the dark. The crying migrant on the boat is visible. The thousands of future victims of a broken system are statistics. A spotlight is a terrible tool for running a country.

Second, our own civilization. The West is the civilization that put the victim at the center of its morality. Christianity taught us to care for the stranger, the poor, the weak. It was one of the greatest moral revolutions in history. But cut off from its other half, justice, responsibility, the duty to protect your own, it turns into something else.

Third, ideology. In The Parasitic Mind, Saad described idea pathogens, ideas that hijack our reasoning. Suicidal empathy is the emotional counterpart: an ideology that hijacks our compassion. It sorts the world into oppressors and victims, then demands unlimited empathy for whoever ranks as the victim, whatever they do.

Fourth, status. In the age of social media, empathy has become a display. Posting "refugees welcome" costs nothing and earns applause. The bill goes to someone else: the working class, the suburbs, the women walking home at night.

The results are everywhere. Criminals treated as victims of society. Sexual assaults by migrants met with lenient sentences. Self-defense branded as aggression. Borders treated as cruelty. Saad's conclusion is simple: a society dies when it would rather display infinite tolerance than use its survival instinct.

Now the part I'll add myself, and that few people dare to say.

On average, women score higher than men on measures of empathy. It's one of the most consistent findings in psychology, across cultures, and it makes perfect evolutionary sense: for most of human history, the survival of children depended on it. It's a strength.

But it means an ideology that weaponizes empathy will hit women harder. And the data shows it: in country after country, young women have moved sharply to the left of young men, especially on immigration.

This is where men have a responsibility.

Not to mock. Not to lecture. Not to say "she deserved it." Empathy has always needed a counterweight, and that counterweight was the protective instinct: the one that draws lines, says no, and stands between the threat and the people it loves.

Men abandoned that role. They were told it was toxic, and many believed it. So they stayed silent at the dinner table, at work, with their partners, sisters, daughters and friends.

That has to end. Men have to have this conversation, honestly and with respect: compassion that cannot say no is not compassion. It's surrender. And the first to pay for it are women.

Many women already understand this better than anyone. Some of the bravest voices in this fight are women, precisely because they are the first to feel the danger in the street.

A civilization rests on a balance: compassion and strength, openness and borders, mercy and justice. When one side swallows the other, the foundations crack. What we are watching in Europe is what happens when empathy has no counterweight left.

Look at that young woman again. She isn't the enemy. She's what this ideology made of a generation that was told kindness would be enough.

Our job is to make sure she's the last generation that has to learn it this way.

[Ulrich @UlrichFY]

Il faut comprendre que trois peuples vivent désormais en France.

Les boomers, mentalement bloqués en 1991, dans ce que Fukuyama appelait la fin de l’histoire. Ils croient qu’on a mis l’histoire sur pause, que tout va bien. Certains croient encore que la Chine est un pays pauvre en voie de développement, c’est dire.

Le second peuple, c’est la nouvelle France. La France des jeunes LFIstes et des migrants. Les deux allient leurs forces, à savoir leur bêtise, leur ressentiment et leur sauvagerie, pour construire le shithole que sera la France demain.

Le dernier peuple, descendant des boomers, c’est la France des Nicolas qui paient. Ceux qui sont pris entre le marteau et l’enclume, dernier rempart avant l’effondrement global du pays. Sans eux, tout s’effondre. C’est la population docile et travailleuse, celle sur laquelle l’État compte plus que tout pour faire durer son système. Ce sont, à bien des égards, les derniers des Mohicans.

Détail subtil et important : c’est le seul des trois peuples qui n’apparaît pas sur la vidéo.

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@oldfileles Και τον Παππά τον "ηθοποιό"

[Vasilis Chronopoulos @billxronopoulos]

Tο συντηρητικό National Review: Καταγγέλλει εσκεμμένη υποβάθμιση του Starshield που «τύφλωσε» την Ουκρανία εν μέσω ρωσικών επιθέσεων. Μιλά ευθέως για "Aid and Comfort" στον Πούτιν — την ακριβή νομική φράση του αμερικανικού Συντάγματος για την προδοσία.

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@katianna14 Το δεύτερο γμτ μου

[Argyrisphd @HdRakis1]

@LivreVenir As poume venture capitals?