NoRelToEmber

> Schaeffer told the Guardian that she “didn’t end up using anything” from “multiple interviews” with Polignano as she came to think that his answers were in part a performance. “He wanted to present himself as a complex character and I think he wanted to present his antisemitism as something that was emotionally earned, or that he had thought deeply about it,” she said.

As a scientist, I simply ignore data that don't fit my theory, and publish only data that does. Since I already know the truth, this makes sure that there is no bad data in the literature that could be used to spread lies.

Especially if that theory is "Prominent co-founders of anti-semitic publishing houses haven't given anti-semitism much thought."

Your answer amounts to "Yes, both those things exist to the detriment of the user, but they were requested for the benefit of corporate app writers, so it's okay that the device the user supposedly owns obeys someone else."

> Ubuntu is now Microsoft's lapdog.

Could you elaborate?

> Your links don't support your claims.

Adrian Hastings has claimed that England's Anglo-Saxon kings mobilized mass nationalism in their struggle to repel Norse invasions. He argues that Alfred the Great, in particular, drew on biblical nationalism, using biblical language in his law code and that during his reign selected books of the Bible were translated into Old English to inspire Englishmen to fight to turn back the Norse invaders. - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation#Medieval_nations

This was in the 9th century. More than a millennium before that, Greek city states realized they had more in common with one-another than with the Persians, and organized along those lines in the Greco-Persian wars: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greco-Persian_Wars

Even Aristotle spoke on the importance of kinship: Also difference of race is a cause of faction, until harmony of spirit is reached; for just as any chance multitude of people does not form a state, so a state is not formed in any chance period of time. Hence most of the states that have hitherto admitted joint settlers or additional settlers have split into factions; - https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext...

> had never met someone who they could place outside their concept of their nation?

You mean like during a war? Or their cultural inheritance of history? The Jews for example have a ~3000 year tradition of passing down stories of their nation interacting with others, e.g. the story of Moses. Even someone who hadn't left their shtetl for generations would have heard tales of other nations, e.g. the Egyptians, growing up.

I'm sure you'll agree that though based on common birth, a nation is flexible - the neighbor you quarrel with becomes kin and ally when a larger threat from further away arrives. But that doesn't imply it's based on nothing, "culturally constructed" out of thin air. So your claim that people didn't travel much supports my argument, through the rootedness required for a nation to form.

A modern falsehood. The concept of a nation is far older - it really should not come as a surprise that defining the in-group based on kinship is an ancient practice. That's what the word itself is derived from - the Latin word for birth, i.e. common birth. Only the scale has changed, and even that not as much as some like to claim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nation

Even groups such as the Navajo fit perfectly well under the 'nation' concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo_Nation

In general, I'd advise more skepticism of such outlandish claims that fly in the face of common sense and instinct.

> In any case, we can definitely say that the map is skewed towards the cultural understanding at the time, mostly Euro-centric

Amusingly, this line commits the same "sin" of Euro-centrism. There was (nor is) no "the" cultural understanding - only "a" cultural understanding. This map, produced by a European culture, is naturally Euro-centric, just as Polynesian maps reflect Polynesian culture and views.

> free access to higher education should be a cornerstone of a democracy

How much do the more affordable community colleges in the US cost?

In the US, the police kill 25 white people per 10 million white people per year: https://mappingpoliceviolence.org/ (the graphic shows per 1 million, but over 10 years)

In France, the police kill 5.5 people per 10 million people per year: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killings_by_law_enforcement._R...

In other words, US police kill 4.5x more white people, than French police kill anyone. But you are absolutely right (despite the cop responsible being charged with homicide) - in one case the guilt is collective, in the other, it's just lone individuals, and no patterns can or should be perceived.

As a bonus, in that killings by law enforcement wikipedia table, there are many countries higher than France. But with a few notable exceptions (the US being one), those killings seldom provoke ethnic riots, despite being much more numerous. So what makes the killings in France so much more salient?

Odd. The wanton stabbing of multiple children in a park in Annecy [1] didn't trigger any sort of us-vs-them reaction. Meanwhile this case, where the officer responsible has already been charged with homicide [2] (and the victim had before tried to speed away, only stopping when forced to by traffic, and again sped away immediately before being shot), is causing nationwide riots. What gives? Why does the stabbing of multiple children barely register, but this case is an explosion?

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-65841666

[2] https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-66075798

They are useful for comparing the ratio of Ivy League vs. nationwide populations. E.g. if a group had SAT scores 300 points higher than the national average, we would expect to see them overrepresented in prestigious academic positions.

It seems to have the highest predictive power regarding chance of admittance (a randomly chosen White is 11.2x more likely to be admitted if they're Jewish vs. if they're not).

Though for the record, those polls considered anyone that identifies as Jewish as.. Jewish, regardless of religion. You can read more at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_atheism

In any case, if you can find the data, you're welcome to do the analysis for other religions/ethno-religious groups too.

Let's further break-up the white student category, if any interesting correlations come up. For undergraduates specifically:

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio  Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16   n/a
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71  1216
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82  1148
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65  1043
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61   966
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate assuming a generous 1284 mean Jewish SAT)

SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216.

The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.

No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias. It's also hard to get consistent demographics from the universities, as they all report them in slightly different ways. Corrections welcome.

[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...

Interesting presentation about the inadequacy of current optimizing compilers. It offers a solution in its conclusion (spoiler):

For some reason we all (especially me) had a mental block about optimization, namely that we always regarded it as a behind-the-scenes activity, to be done in the machine language, which the programmer isn’t supposed to know. This veil was first lifted from my eyes when I ran across a remark by Hoare that, ideally, a language should be designed so that an optimizing compiler can describe its optimizations in the source language. Of course!

The time is clearly ripe for program-manipulation systems... The programmer using such a system will write his beautifully-structured, but possibly inefficient, program P; then he will interactively specify transformations that make it efficient. Such a system will be much more powerful and reliable than a completely automatic one.

> they wanted economic opportunities, and they weren't getting that in Pakistan. An uptick in aid wouldn't change that either!

I did not say aid/investment by accident. It could well be charitable investment, i.e. into farming or other equipment, with no expectation of payback.

As for corruption - if the aid is in the form of food or equipment, that's harder to turn into weapons than cash. If corruption is an issue, the aid can go to their less-corrupt neighbors that accept the migrants, or it can be handled by the same NGOs and such that help immigrants in Europe, if the local authorities are too corrupt to be trusted with anything.

And if none of that works, then why it would work in Europe, if the people involved are the same?

> Decades of this casual attitude

Calling massive humanitarian aid "casual" reeks of trying to blame foreign corruption on those trying to charitably help.

> I feel like this debate only ever gets two sorts of representation, the people who think every migrant is a desperate refugee in need of rescue, and the "fortress Europe, it's an invasion" people.

If we can just convince the "fortress Europe" camp.. or either camp, actually, that sending aid/investment to where the immigrants are coming from can substitute for allowing immigration, then both could be happy. The migrants receive the same aid they would in Europe, and Europe gets to play fortress - win-win.

We're used to goods from faraway China stocking our shelves, sending cargo across the Mediterranean is trivial in comparison.

Summary of the video by Louis Rossmann:

A Massachusetts ballot initiative, that passed with a landslide 75-25, despite $26 million in ads that automakers spent fighting it (claiming it would help racism, redlining, and stalkers), mandated that car owners be given access to their own car's diagnostic information.

Automakers, represented by the legal firm Mayer Brown, tried to get an injunction against this law. During the 2-year long case the judge asked the NHTSA for input, but it remained silent. Only a few days after the judge ruled against the injunction, did the NHTSA speak up and tell the automakers to ignore the law (because it supposedly conflicts with federal safety regulations, based on the evidence-free assertion that people having access to their own diagnostic data is a security risk).

The assistant chief counsel for litigation and enforcement at the NHTSA, who signed the letter telling the automakers to ignore that, law is Kerry E. Kolodziej, who had previously worked for 6 years at Mayer Brown - the same Mayer Brown that represented the automakers.

> I believe the market would sort that out.

"The market" will consolidate grocery stores until only 3-4 nationwide chains remain, whose policies and prices will be suspiciously similar. Almost every market is moving in that direction, and some have already arrived.

> They're killing themselves because they cannot make a living anymore, and this is due to the perpetuated belief that money is central to your worthiness. Something plenty of groups have been trying to fight against, what do we call those again? Com something...

It's nice to talk about those groups in the abstract, but when you look at them more specifically... well, let's ignore their historical record, and focus on the ones in the US. Their central tenet seems to be that white men (and women, when they dare object) are the source of all evil in the US, are solely and inherently racist, and must repent and atone for their current and historical sins for the foreseeable future.

Give up your borders, your identity, your remaining political power, and maybe, if you grovel hard enough, the new benevolent authorities will throw you a few scraps, after they're done redressing your historic wrongs.

You can maybe see why that's not a tempting offer. Learning from history, Ukraine once "accepted" such an offer - gave up their national identity and political power, to join the Soviet Union and its utopian classless society. They were repaid with Russification and the Holodomor. I'm sure they had people admonishing fellow Ukrainians for "acting against their self-interest" by clinging to their nationality then, too.

Or a genetics lab hooked up to a computer...

You don't think Americans losing their participation refusal veto on military action (if they won't do it, the government will hire foreigners for it - whatever "it" may be, foreign invasion or domestic suppression) is dangerous?

The only way I can make sense of your attitude is if you believe wanting to get US citizenship, and being willing to join a military (from their point of view a foreign military) is a sign of virtue, and only good people would do it.

> Piece of paper that would be worth less than a piece of toilet paper, if not for the US military.

After WWII, only a tiny minority of wars fought by the US were in self-defense. Most of the time the military was on foreign soil of countries that never attacked the US. The most their justifications amounted to were terrorist attacks, to which it responded with full invasions that left millions dead.

It took half a century, but people are just not buying "we have to fight them over there, so we don't have to fight them over here" anymore.

If you used the same threshold for what justifies an invasion against the US, as the US does to other countries.. well, you wouldn't mind Chinese drones and bombers flying overhead, liberating you, would you? It's either that, or their constitution becomes worthless.

They've already found a solution: If your own citizens refuse to serve the military-industrial complex, then simply use foreigners:

Join the military, become a US citizen - https://apnews.com/article/army-air-force-recruiting-shortfa...

And the police: Bill to allow noncitizens to become Illinois police officers heads to governor’s desk - https://www.mystateline.com/news/local-news/bill-to-allow-no...

In addition to helping hit military recruitment targets, they also have less attachment to the American people, so they're less likely to revolt if they were deployed domestically.

> Germany uses the term "Positive Action"

Interesting how they never call it "racial discrimination" when it's something they like. I guess they had to come up with a euphemism to avoid the Pavlovian response they instilled.

> Harvard, and many other colleges, has a big base of "legacy" admissions, as well as a certain amount of generational knowledge and connections - you're more likely to get into Harvard if your parents went to Harvard, over and above mere class status.

Let's explicitly look at how this affected race (instead of leaving it to readers imaginations), since that was the issue the court was asked to consider. The student body of the US Ivy League looked as follows, circa 2019 (international students excluded):

                          Ivy League   US      Ratio  Mean nationwide SAT score [1]
  Jewish                  17.2%         2.4%    7.16
  Asian                   19.6%         5.3%    3.71  1216
  White (incl. Jewish)    50.3%        61.5%    0.82  1148
  Hispanic                11.4%        17.6%    0.65  1043
  Black                    7.8%        12.7%    0.61   966
  White (non-Jewish)      33.1%        59.1%    0.56 ~1141 (lower bound estimate)

SAT score seems to offer no benefit, up until the magic cutoff somewhere between 1142 and 1216.

The numbers don't sum to 100% because multi-ethnic students, a few minor ethnicities (American-Indian, Pacific Islander..), and students categorized as "unknown" or "other" by the universities were excluded from analysis. Data on university undergraduate demographics was taken from the universities own diversity reports. Jewish representation was gathered from http://hillel.org/college-guide/list/, https://forward.com/jewish-college-guide/, and https://ejewishphilanthropy.com/how-many-jewish-undergraduat..., taking the lowest estimate when sources conflicted. ejewishphilanthropy.com (eJP) points out flaws in Hillel's data gathering (e.g. showing Harvard as 30% Jewish, when eJP found it only 16%) Hillel seems to have since fixed these flaws, as the estimates they now give are in-line with those of eJP.

No correction has been made to look at only the college-age population of the US, or only at the Northeastern US where all the Ivy League universities are located, so that may be a source of some bias.

[1] https://www.ednc.org/eraceing-inequities-the-influence-of-ra...

Edit: Clarified that the SAT scores are nationwide, and not just of the Ivy League students. Thank you to stanford_labrat for bringing it up.

> Many universities have for too long wrongly concluded that the touchstone of an individual’s identity is not challenges bested, skills built, or lessons learned, but the color of their skin.

This conflates whether racial discrimination is legal, with how much people base their identity on race. Because on the latter question, the universities have concluded correctly - 74% of Blacks, 59% of Hispanics, and 56% of Asians (but only 15% of Whites) say their race is extremely or very important to their identity:

https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2019/04/09/race-in...

He didn't petition congress because congress already legislated on this issue: neither the 14th amendment nor the civil rights act contain exceptions allowing racial discrimination, as long as it's for the right cause (and the courts get to pick which causes are right).

> Not to mention that the people ruled by the Visigoths invited Tariq bin zayed when he invaded across Gibraltar, so that he would remove king Rodrick.

Per wikipedia [1], it was rival factions of Visigoths, that the Moors expertly divide and conquered. I'm sure otherwise you are correct, and with the minor exception of enslaving the locals, the Moors were able to build a bright example or progress and science and tolerance on the land and backs of those backwards savages, sorry, barbarians.

> The popular thought in Spain on “invasion”

Could you explain the scare quotes? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muslim_conquest_of_Spain doesn't shy from using "invasion" without scare quotes throughout the text. Passages like

During one of the multiple raids in 710, the Muslims "made several inroads into the mainland, which produced a rich spoil and several captives, who were so handsome that Musa and his companions had never seen the like of them". The natives of Hispania viewed the Berbers in a similar way as the Byzantines viewed the Arabs, as barbarians, and feared an attack by them.

(From [2] we can infer the likely fate of these captives) sure seem to describe a plain invasion to me, no scare quotes needed. It also doesn't look like the people welcoming the Moors as liberators, as you tried to paint them. But perhaps you know something I don't - history is not my forte.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tariq_ibn_Ziyad

[2] The harem could contain thousands of slave concubines; the harem of Abd al-Rahman I consisted of 6,300 women. They were appreciated for their light skin. [presumably not all the slave women ended up somewhere as comfortable as an imperial harem, but wikipedia is very economical in describing that aspect of Al Andalus] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Spain#Slavery_in_Al...

> So dismissively claiming the trauma of rape is over once it’s over is both wrong, and frankly sick.

I really did not think a sarcasm tag was required, but here we are.

> there is plenty of evidence showing that rape is significantly underreported in Japan.

It would have to be underreported by a factor of 20x, compared to the UK, a country famous for turning a blind eye to rape gangs for years.

> I think history is a bit more complex than that.

I am introducing that complexity. It is the article that omitted it to tell a simple bad guys oppressing good guys tale.

> 1492 Spain as such didn’t exist. The Moors invaded the Visigoths! It was no more a rightful invasion that what the Visigoths themselves did when Rome fell.

So you should have no trouble or qualms justifying the colonization of the Americas or India using that same logic, correct? It's strange how fluid and complex identity is in some cases, but straightforward in others. The Alhambra decree wasn't passed by "Spain" either, but by Castile and Aragon, yet we have no trouble drawing a line between these entities, at least when we want to assign blame.

To add come crucial context the article deceptively chose to omit: the Alhambra decree was passed in 1492, the same year that Spain was liberated from seven centuries of Moorish conquest and colonization [1], during which it had been used as a literal source of Christian slaves [2]. That partly motivated the decree, as "Both Muslim and Catholic sources tell that Jews provided valuable aid to the invaders" [3].

I was also surprised to see the article cite, as reason for opposing reparations for this decree, that it did not extend the same courtesy to the Moorish invaders - all without mentioning they were invaders, or that there had been any invasion or occupation. It even implores Spain to "reconcile with its past", when reconciliation with the past is what brought about the Alhambra decree in the first place.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reconquista

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slavery_in_Spain#Slavery_in_Al...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Jews_in_Spain#M...