That's what some will say about the Haskell programming language, but many other people have an easier time reading the same thing in slightly more explicit Scala code.

No it isn't. Eversor said Shapiro has nothing to lose and little to gain, but AOC has a lot to lose and about as little to gain. I said Shapiro has nothing to lose and a lot to gain, AOC has a little to lose and nothing to gain. Words have meanings.

Her district is a lock, but that's not her problem. Right now, she's a figure with a national profile. If, somehow, she ended up looking ridiculous, or if she were "schooled" by someone like Shapiro, who's a boogeyman to many on the left, it could ruin her reputation as someone who's on the vanguard of the Democratic party.

And as far as what Shapiro has to gain. He's not a nobody. He's got his following on the right. The most he has to gain is that maybe he'd shed some of the stigma that's people on the left associate with him, if he somehow managed not to make himself look foolish -- but the cards would be stacked against him, because all it'd take would be a single soundbite that could be misconstrued as offensive, never mind if he said something that was actually insulting, and it'd be tweeted like there's no tomorrow. So he's got very little to gain.

But that's not how these kinds of debates are consumed. Shapiro doesn't argue in good faith and nobody on the left is going to be impressed by it, if anybody on the left even pays attention when he's talking. Right-wing Shapiro fans will edit it down into Wicked Zinger Box Meals (available now at KFC[sup](R)[/sup]) and vigorously beat themselves off to Shapiro owning a lib. The needle won't move. Literally the only person who has anything to gain is Shapiro, who gets to brag to his kids about interviewing a congressperson who didn't end up going to prison.

And yeah, Shapiro is kind of a nobody. He's internet famous at best. Internet has low standards.

He's... pundit famous. He's on TV all the time too.

If all you have going for you is being on TV you're still probably a nobody, I mean how far can you possibly go just banking on tha

Americans have low standards.

I don't doubt that the echo chamber(s) would totally distort whatever would happen in such a debate. But all it would take is a single video of AOC saying something dumb or looking like Shapiro got the best of her (or in some other way really whiffing it) for her to suffer a setback. Her position is actually fairly precarious, and there are plenty of Democrats who want her to fail; and many of them would probably raise (at least some) similar objections to those that Shapiro would raise, and would attack if they saw blood.

Either way, there are countless unexpected reasons why something bad could happen. It's easier to just not do the debate and accuse Shapiro of catcalling.

This is an interesting dynamic that seems to come from the Democratic party being so politically diverse: center-left Democrats who would cheer on Republican attacks against fellow Democrats who happen to be sufficiently to the left of themselves, mostly perhaps out of fear that a real 'socialist' could never win. It feels kind of like how lighter skinned members of the African-American community sometimes join whites in throwing darker skinned blacks under the bus in order to advertise themselves as being comparatively more palatable to their oppressors.

Can you clarify this?



[/COLOR]She didn't accuse him of it, just made a comparison to catcalling. Man says something ridiculous expecting to get something, gets ignored, gets mad.

Yeah, that could've been written more clearly. She'll likely win her district, so if she has anything to lose by debating anyone or doing something controversial, it's not losing the election in November. She's worried about other stuff (as I suggested, one thing she has to worry about is losing her status as posterboy for millennial socialist politics with a national profile, but regardless of what the reasons are, it's riskier to debate Shapiro than to turn him down).



You're right. I hadn't actually seen her tweet firsthand. I'd only seen reporting on it. I'm kind of stunned that secondhand descriptions of these exchanges are so wildly inaccurate, but I really I shouldn't be.

I hope she wins, but I dunno if it's likely. I live in that district and she'd certainly help, but there are a lot of people loyal to Joe. Her big win so far has been getting people out to vote.

And of COURSE people freaked out and misrepresented her response. it's exactly what they'd do if they debated.

Oh, why hello my fellow New Yorker.

I know that's what would happen if they debated, and maybe I'm being too sanguine, but I also think that one of the great advantages of her (and not just her, but any politician) debating someone is that it would force her to articulate her views and take a definite stance (presumably, while being questioned by someone who would try to challenge her vigorously) in a high profile way, which would make her accountable to her views. Promises made in debates can be the definitive instances of a politician's promises in the course of a campaign. (Obviously, it'd be even more definitive if she debated a politician, and, preferably, a Republican opponent, and not some random internet famous right-wing pundit, but you can't always get what you want.)

But, no, her election is essentially a lock. She beat Joe Crowley in the primary in June, so she's the Democratic candidate for NY-14. It'd be an astonishing upset far more surprising than her victory over Crowley if her district went Republican (in 2016, Crowley won 82% of the votes in that district).

https://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/2018-midterm-election-forecast/house/

538 released its forecast for the House. The historical charts are interesting.

Pretty striking how it contrasts with presidential wins. Reagan and Nixon both won reelections why quite wide margins, Reagan winning reelection with 58% of the popular vote (in 1984) and Nixon winning 60% of the popular vote (in 1972). I wonder if gerrymandering can explain why the Democrats continued to hold the House during those elections, or if it's more people were voting for candidates from both parties.

From wikipedia but this makes a lot of sense:

Kinda interesting that the biggest red shifts are in the first election cycle after a democrat was elected president.

.

http://observer.com/2018/08/pentagon-most-americans-are-too-fat-stupid-to-enlist-in-the-military/amp/



huh weird, you mean rapacious policy decisions have consequences?? an educated, healthy, secure population is critical for national security???

That doesn’t sound right. Obviously there are just too many regulations. The free market will solve this problem.

(You can safely ignore the thesis of this article. The author doesn’t know what they’re talking about. There is a general intelligence factor explained by genetics but IQ isn’t a good predictor, it correlates most strongly with parental [i.e. even adoptive] SES.)

I was going to quibble with this ever so slightly, but then I read the truly stupid title of the article. Edit: And at any rate I read what you wrote more carefully and see that you were only dismissing IQ rather than genetics in general

https://cryptome.org/2018/08/predator-priests.pdf

Things like this are disgusting, and reminds me of a core sociological fact: organizations protect themselves. Corporations, political groups, religious organizations, really any place of group identification has some degree of coverup to it, where people will protect other members.

This is why analyzing social structures and analyzing concepts like privilege (god i hate that word) is difficult. No, it's not always the government, or laws. People are also self-governing by de facto social structures. When it's awful, you get things like the mafia, or Catholic dioceses covering up pedophilia. And fighting corrupted self-governance is insanely difficult.

don't forget the academy

Don't mistake me, I'm also dismissing the genetic theory.

There is obviously some kind of heritable general intelligence factor but there is absolutely no known way of measuring it. Everything written on the subject is bald-faced pseudoscience. These pseudoscientists use IQ as a proxy for general intelligence factor even though IQ is entirely explained by culture and training. (Yes, you can study for an IQ test.) All we "know" is that there is a correlation between IQ, SES, and inverse with fertility. That means low IQ people have SLIGHTLY more kids than high IQ people. If you're talking to a king-size *******, that's where the discussion ends: stupid people have more kids. Except an IQ test doesn't actually say that someone is stupid, it says that they're poor. So really what it means is that poor people have SLIGHTLY more kids than middle class people.

But that's also not a ****ing actionable interpretation of the data, is it?

Poor people have kids in their 20s. Middle class people have kids 15 goddamn years later and have to deal with a ****show of fertility problems. Middle class people wait until they're financially secure, by which point their eggs are pickled. Poor people are smart enough to realize that **** isn't gonna get any better for them, so you might as well start having kids before your cartilage gives out. They ****ing aren't the stupid ones.

For a country where public educations are being systematically denied to the poorest, where scientific reasoning is denied because it's inconvenient for the elites, where a good private education costs trillions of dollars, where for 3/4ths of the public the media has been replaced with partisan propagandists who can't even legally call themselves journalists, I can't imagine what kind of demented mind could conclude that Americans are getting dumber because of poor breeding.

I just read most of that article, and I can't even imagine how the author came to the conclusion that genetics have anything at all to do with what he wrote about. Remarkably bad writing which suggests that such people can't be trusted to even talk about things like IQ with an air of being scientific.

This is like the political version of those articles that report on some single scientific paper on nutrition with all sorts of ridiculous conclusions, e.g., "recent studies suggest you will get skin cancer if you eat more grapefruit (but only if you are obese)".

"Clearly the only reason someone wouldn't vote for Hillary is because they are genetic garbage." in 700 words.

In a lot of ways I think the movie Idiocracy made a dangerous choice by using supposedly declining genetics as a plot device. It's not even necessary for that to be in the movie for a lot of important points to be made, but apparently people like it. What's disturbing to me is that this guy is a sucker for the crude interpretation of the movie, and he's supposed to be an intelligence officer? I thought the whole point of being in the intelligence services was that you learned to deconstruct your own biases in order to make objective assessments based on all the information available to you. Sheesh

.

The future will be inherited by the people who are there! Stupid people are having too many kids! That's why I've got 10, gotta outbreed the stupid people!

And then bomb them overseas

Is that why people get dumber in that movie? I can't really remember, but I always thought the idea was that if culture is vapid and and dumb, the next generation will have a dumb, watered version of culture to pass on to their kids, and their kids will have an even dumber, more watered down version to pass onto their kids, until it gets so bad that the Rock is elected president.

Yes, it is literally, "white trash" are getting knocked up and having 12 kids, but educated upper middle class couples keep waiting until they are basically infertile.

For the history nerds here:

http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capitalisback/CountryData/Germany/Other/Pre1950Series/RefsHistoricalGermanAccounts/BuchheimScherner06.pdf

Great paper on the role of private/public ownership of industry in Nazi Germany. Basically, the thesis is that the level of control the Nazi government exerted over private industry has been vastly overstated, and private ownership was not merely 'nominal', as is often asserted by people who want to make a Nazi/socialist connection.

Basically, the Nazis did implement certain controls, but left much of the scheduling of manufacturing open for factory owners to choose, and respected contracts - they did not often force any factory into any kind of production. Instead they did their best to offer multiple contracts and work on factory owner's terms. So long as they suited the war effort. Price controls could also be flexed.

The Nazis did not control investment at any point, either.

Really the two "classically capitalist" features the Nazis are missing are in price controls and a lack of truly competitive markets (Hitler literally abolished businesses that had too little cash..). It was state directed capitalism, pure and simple. And relative to other countries actually intervened less in their businesses it seems than other countries, even during the war. I find it amazing that the myths about Nazis being left or socialist still exist.

The more you study history, the more you realize there's a slew of really bad American authors who want to rewrite every historical event to the conclusion that America got it all right and every other system is a communist failure. Or something like that. It's really annoying.

Really the biggest feature of the Nazi economy that this paper brought to my attention was how blatantly corrupt Nazi government was. Basically, Hitler wanted support from the manufacturers and believed in the idea that they would be more efficient left to their own devices than with strict state control of production. To win their support, he'd effectively use the pen to advantage the people who supported him with really nice contracts. It let him create a coalition of bootlickers. Of all of the people in Nazi Germany, the bootlickers had by far the most autonomy, privilege and control over their own choices than any other group.

I've never really looked into this in any kind of detail, but I was under the assumption that the Nazi system was designed around corruption, meaning, it chose winners and losers based on personal loyalties to Hitler and the regime. Not so much a kleptocracy, in that the primary goal wasn't necessarily for the leaders of the regime to exploit their power to increase their wealth, but still, an economic model based on personal loyalties. (Neopatrimonialism.)

Is this controversial? I don't have time to read the article right now, but I was under the impression that they had at least some control over investment, and that this was in which they elevated winner (and demoted losers).

Pretty much, yeah. You could earn many "favorable deals" by being on good terms. Like during the era of Nazi privatization, they would sell off state property for cheap to people they approved of. People who also needed assistance in manufacturing war goods could rent state-owned property or be given help from the state.

I would argue that the Nazis had a kleptocratic element. I mean, for workers all of this sucked beyond the first couple years. They lost all union representation, working hours went up, and real wages did but the selection of available goods decreased even before the war, then with the war severe rationing meant common people pretty much got economically shafted. During this time the wealthy grew wealth substantially. Not to mention they raised wealth by literally stealing it from Jews and conquered states. The social hierarchy was more complicated, in a sense, with ethnic Germans being kind of "middle tier", but the Nazis super ripped off everybody below them.



The Nazis wouldn't typically step into a factory and tell them to build more machines to manufacture certain weapons, for instance. They would instead incentivize it through contracts. The United States and the Soviets were more top down in military production.

Factory owners could decide which contracts to accept, and where to invest their profits. In fact, they could flat out refuse to accept contracts, and there are real examples of factory owners refusing to accept their contracts.

The most centralized the Nazi economy really got was with the Reichswerke Hermann Göring, but it was regarded as a failure and the Nazis were selling off its assets during the war.

Part of this came up because TIK, who is a surprisingly good history youtuber who does God's work in responding to common myths about WW2, made an awful video calling National Socialists socialist, which led to a new wave of discussion online.

Here's the video:



Putting it simply, his chart at 18:39 is completely wrong. The problem in relation to what I read above was whether the U.S. was substantially more "capitalist" than the Nazi one. I think people really underestimate how nationalized U.S. war production was and underestimate how capitalist the Nazi one was, because, well, people with certain political beliefs want to try really really hard to create narratives that favor one type of conclusion.

Pretty much the entire video and his entire response video were super wrong, and I won't get into all of the wrongness here unless people want to talk about it.

There's also a side note: victory in WW2 had very little to do with economic organization (at least, I can find no substantial correlation with how top down the system was). The United States was a manufacturing beast during the war, but had a massive comparative advantage for production during the war. Turns out, when your best manufacturing centers are never bombed, it's easy to produce quite a bit, even when your weaponry is manufactured using outdated and poor manufacturing methods (the U.S. couldn't even produce stamped steel weapons until the last few years of the war, long after the Nazis and the British mastered stamped steel in small arms). The United States lagged behind in manufacturing methods pretty hard. But hey, having a nice rail network, free of enemies, and massive amounts of natural resources? Now that's a recipe for being able to produce a ton of ****.