The Daily Stormer wants International Women’s Day replaced by “White Sharia Day”

The simplified version of Russian history I was taught included the detail that the Russian Empire had very few Jews until Catherine the Great’s Partition of Poland. Greater Poland had had a significant Jewish population for centuries (for various interesting historical reasons) and suddenly a lot of them were living in Russia. The Russian imperial government elite generally did not perceive this as a good thing.

@Kupo

I’m pretty sure the only people who find clearly stated boundaries to be a buzz kill are the kind of people who want plausible deniability when they purposely overstep boundaries.

This. This is pretty much the entire rationale for all the pushback around consent. “I know your boundaries, but I intend to break them to get my dick wet, because that’s all that matters to me.” It’s always the subtext of any “well what about if we’re both drunk and she’s tipsy, but not blacking out and it’s a full moon on a Tuesday blah blah blah” excuse-making I’ve seen in online discussions of the topic, as if it’s some kind of transaction being bartered. And I just wish I could break into the conversation and say: Here’s a nutty idea: how about you respect your sexual partner enough to consider not only her pleasure (a stretch for these guys, I’m sure) but also the aftermath of the interaction? Because while society has conditioned men to be proud of their “conquests,” women do not get that kind of social validation, so mayyyyybe she’s well within her rights to regret the encounter if she’s had her boundaries tested.

Ah, but what’s the point of talking about that stuff? Doug Ford’s gonna do away with updated sex ed curriculum anyway and let the parents do all the teaching about sexual politics, gender identity, consent and the fantasy aspects of pornography because an overworked single parent is totally equipped to handle those topics, right?

*sigh* This province is so very screwed….

Oh and Tillerson’s out. Yayyyyy….

As awful as Tillerson is, he constituted what passes for a moderating influence in the Trump WH.

I think the move to fire him and put in Pompeo is a step towards war with North Korea. He’s made some frightening saber rattling comments.

Either the talks with Kim Jong Un will get cancelled or will happen and go horribly awry. This will be held up as proof that diplomacy won’t work and we need to do a preemptive strike.

Bust out your Juicy Couture track suit and trucker hat and put Paris Hilton back on TV. It’s 2002 all over again!

http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Paris-Hilton-Ew-Gif.gif

@opposablethumbs

No, not the same at all. The beauty of Poisson is that it’s a very simple model based on binomial data (straight up yes/no, present/absent) where the answer is usually no/absent and only occasionally yes/present.

The thing I forgot to mention about the analysis in that paper was the bootstrap simulation. Basically, they estimated the number of bites before tasting chocolate based on past data, then bit into a thousand chocolate chip cookies to test how many times they would taste chocolate in that first bite and compare actual vs predicted tastes. Well, really the computer tasted a 1000 virtual cookies, but where’s the fun in that? How likely would it be that in tasting a 1000 chocolate chip cookies they would never encounter the taste of chocolate? Very unlikely. Hence more likely that instead it’s been a sugar cookie in the last 22 years.

The stuff you’re talking about is more complicated. Too many variables, complex systems, lots of unknowns, lots of interactions. Not a binary yes/no with a single variable. And it’ll never apply at the individual level–this person, this cigarette, or that storm, that locale on that day. All we can talk about is averages for groups of people—smokers vs nonsmokers–and regions/time periods–hundred-year storms, but not exactly what year in that century the storm will hit.

There’s a fair amount of complicated statistical modeling and analyzing a multitude of variables to try to narrow things down. But there are so many confounding factors that causation is very difficult to pin down. We do a much better job of analyzing stuff that already happened to understand overall patterns than we do predicting specific details of either past or future events.

Ran out of time to edit…sorry, misread your question at first.

You’re right, we’ll never be able to predict at an individual level.

Most medical research relies on longitudinal studies to help figure out risk factors. Lots of people studied over time and comparing those who get lung cancer or breast cancer vs those who don’t, and finding that smoking or HRT is a common denominator in one group vs the other. Followed up by other types of studies and additional similar studies. And then there are studies with patients and their survival over time to figure out what other kinds of risk factors might be involved and the effects of different treatments. Thus, people with breast cancer are now subdivided into different groups based on various molecular markers that are associated with responding better or worse to standard treatment. It requires large groups and analyzing trends and averages. And most medical studies are retrospective–stuff already happened! That also limits predictive ability, identification of causation.

At the end of the day, it helps a particular doctor predict the *likely* prognosis for a particular patient and choose a treatment strategy that is more likely to help that particular patient, but it’s never certain because we’re all unique, our contexts are all different, and it’s complicated. And there are lots of people who get lung cancer who were never smokers (or exposed to cigarette smoke as children), and plenty of smokers who don’t get lung cancer, so obviously there are other factors involved too.

All of that is something that a simple little Poisson model with a single binomial variable can’t cope with.

EJ (The Other One):

Finland might have been different because land wasn’t that rare. Western Europe basically ran out of unused fertile land to place under cultivation during the late 12th – early 13th century. This caused a labour surplus, shifted bargaining power decisively against the landless peasantry, and probably fuelled the growth of towns even further.

Since Finland has a pretty much limitless expanse of forests and lakes and more forests and more lakes, it sounds plausible to me to say that this power shift might never have happened there. I have no idea if this was indeed the case.

That’s a good question. Population density was certainly lower in the north, and I have this general impression that social stratification was always driven by population growth in agricultural societies all over the world – hence the relative equality in low-density hunter-gatherer or marginally agricultural societies. I don’t know if it depends on labor vs. capital balance, or what.

There was also significant agricultural expansion in Finland and Sweden during historical times. I think this clearing of land wasn’t so much limited by labor, but by how much of the land (generally poor soils in a cold climate) was worth cultivating with given agricultural technology. From about 18th century onward, the economic value of forest as timber source for global trade became a serious consideration.

I understand that in Russia the economic conditions were very similar to Sweden/Finland, yet serfdom was instituted for the bulk of population, and the aristocracy was distinctly more posh. May be a random cultural difference, who knows. Serfdom may have been less common in the very sparsely populated northern parts of Russia.

Looks like WaPo is backing my North Korea war theory up. Not in so many words, but the implications are clear.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/2018/03/13/tillerson-vs-pompeo-two-very-different-views-of-north-korea/?utm_term=.fb129716cad7

Gulp

It’s amazing to me. No matter how many times tax cuts for the rich fail to deliver on the middle class prosperity that Republicans promise, a certain subset of American will still always believe that the next tax cut will finally work. It’s just bizarre to me. And nothing you can say will sway these people. Tax cuts are almost like a religion in the US. The culty fundamentalist type of religion. No evidence for it is required. No evidence against it is enough.

@WWTH

Ayup, it’s always “This time it’ll work!” The Laffer Curve can never fail, it can only be failed.

Guarantee void in Kansas.

It’s the same shit with talking to Conservatives about Dougie’s moronic sex ed talking point. Sorry to bring it up again, but I was pushing back on the nonsense last night on Twitter and the conversations went something like this:

Con: “Ford’s right! This sex ed curriculum is meant to promote the Liberal agenda!”

Me: “It’s not nearly as exciting as you think it is. It’s basically just naming body parts and acknowledging LGBT people exist.”

Con: “Everyone knows gay people exist! We can’t get away from them! But this about sexualizing children and it was written by a pedophile!

Me: “Not what ‘sexualization’ means and no it wasn’t written by that guy you’re alluding to. That’s a conspiracy theory. They’re just telling you that your body will change come puberty, sex and masturbation are things that exist and gender isn’t fixed.”

Con: “No! Biology says 2 genders! Liberal propaganda!”

Me: “Ah, so that’s what where the ‘Liberal agenda’ comes in. You just want to hold on to anti-trans bigotry as the last acceptable target in the culture war.”

Con: “Libs call everyone who disagrees with them ‘bigots’! Science says I’m right!”

Me: “I’m sure that’ll bring the grieving parents of trans kids some comfort that you were convinced you were right.”

Con: *block*

Now there may be one or two puritans of Christian or Muslim extraction that really are that ashamed of human sexuality, but without fail, the problem wasn’t about the timing of each module or about who wrote it, it was about teaching children about trans individuals and gender expression, with the subtext being “You’re making kids empathize with trans people too early! They haven’t had time to let popular culture and peer pressure harden their attitudes about trans people as predators or traps! Wait until they’re in their teens and have become sullen arrogant 4chan trolls before trying to teach them that trans people are human! Or never, we’ll take that.”

It’d be refreshing if they were just honest about what they want to do, but there’s always a dozen layers of sophistry and bullshit you have to dig through, just like everything the right talks about.

Folks, I’m getting a bit paranoid here. Been trying to access the Discord, turns out I can’t even log in, server’s apparently down, the Discord page to get info on that is also down, and every other unrelated “is x down ?” site I’ve tried I can’t access either. But everything else works fine. And the Discord twitter account doesn’t mention anything.

So I’m starting to think someone’s selectively blocking what I’m doing (and being pretty bad at it if I manage to send this). Anyone else having problems ?

Trump has announced he wants a Space Force. He needs to treat NASA with more respect if he wants a manned space program.

Valentin, thank you for the clarification. Ukraine, it seems, has had several centuries of unfortunate neighbors making life difficult.