PolygonSheep

If I made a gift of "The Turner Diaries" to your local school library, would you "censor" it?

> Also I'm assuming someone is pumping him full of every drug available to prevent his decline as much as possible.

This seems very similar to claims I heard from Republicans about Biden a year or two ago.

If you eat a bowl of mixed blueberries and raspberries, it actually does taste like blue raspberry. It's a mixture of the two flavors.

That security guarantee to Poland turned out quite expensive in the end.

Mozambique, too. We should bomb them.

It's even got the bayonet fixed so there's no confusion about their terrorist intentions.

> The busy supermarket saw people standing directly beside the target perplexed and completely unharmed. This was extremely localized.

I saw that video too and I'm happy the bystanders in that case were unharmed but that was 1/2000 (or 5,000?) explosions. I wouldn't necessarily extrapolate the supermarket video to the other several thousand explosions.

Yes.

I think the political impossibility was that somehow "lab leak" got coded as right/Trumpist. I seem to remember a lot of scientists signing a big open letter that it definitely wasn't a lab leak and to say otherwise was a potentially racist conspiracy theory.

Coming back from that is, in my opinion, the "politically" impossible bit.

Thanks for leaving so we don't have to deal with you!

> Kim Davis debacle

One Kentucky county clerk refused same sex marriages to people ten years ago, was then jailed for it, forced to do it anyway and this is evidence that many people feel they have the right not to deal with LGBTQ+ people in all the years since?

I agree, it was totally reasonable and worth it.

Was Onn ever a "real" brand? I had always assumed it was just a private label brand.

What this reminds me of is the free speech vs. 1st Amendment doesn't apply to private companies discourse in the sense that the spirit but critically not the letter of the amendment is broken

Where do you find the really funny ones?

> Israel should have done a better job of protecting Palestinians from Hamas, as they are now doing:

They've protected over 10,000 Palestinians so far!

As someone living in the South, I would really appreciate it if you stopped tarring everyone who lives in a Southern state as a "racist horrible person". There are many millions of people who live in the South.

Some of them are racist, millions of them are not.

Just out of curiosity when did books getting "banned" come to mean "it was taken off the shelves of the library"?

It seems like hyperbole to describe such books as "banned" in any meaningful sense of the word.

> Musk meanwhile seems to be bound and determined the continue to make Twitter a place, not were people converse, but a town square full of the worst members of society get to have their anger amplified in what will eventually be nothing more than an echo chamber.

To me it was like this before Musk, just the political polarity of it was reversed.

Houstonian here. non-White, non-evangelical Christian families seem to have no trouble here. The area I live in is near 50/50 white/Hispanic. I myself grew up in a non-religious family here and no one ever gave us grief for it, then or now. I know many LGBTQ adults here who also have no trouble.

I don't know about trans kids as I don't have any direct experience with that but I can't imagine it being an issue any more than any other city.

I'm often disheartened hearing tired tropes about Texas just being rednecks, klansmen, and bible thumpers. Yes, they do exist, as they do in California or Oregon or New York. But they are not anything like common. I can't even remember the last time I saw a confederate flag outside a historical reenactment context.

Xbox?

> While I don't think this was intended - there is a movement to use place-names as preferred by their inhabitants, rather than their "colonial" names

Kind of off-topic, is it just me or is this really inconsistently applied?

Like we have Kyiv (pronounced "keev") instead of Kiev because that's the Ukrainian way... but the country itself is still pronounced (in English-speaking media anyway) as "you crane" instead of "Ooh-krah-ee-nah " which is much more how the natives would say it.

I can think of probably a dozen examples where the quote-unquote "colonial" name is still in widespread, respected use even though the "native" form would be fairly trivial to use or start using.

American born and raised here: I always ensure I wash my hands thoroughly after handling raw chicken but I've never worn gloves or ever seen anyone doing it to cut chicken at home.

I have seen it in restaurants but that's more to keep the food from being contaminated by hands, not the other way around.

For me it's just too much comes off as sensational and emotionally manipulating. My mental health improved quite a lot after I stopped all news consumption in 2015.

I just pulled up cnn.com as I think most people would agree that's a pretty mainstream/middle of the road outlet (I'm sure half will complain it's the Clinton News Network and the other half will whine that it's right of center, or whatever). I see: Trump secret documents (seven articles in a little cluster on the left third of the page), some guy got convicted of a murder from 1996, another murder, hair-straightening products linked to uterine cancer, murder, rape, murder, murder, rape, Ukraine, murder, Ukraine, flesh eating bacteria, something about Elon Musk, something else about Trump, and sleeping less than 5 hours a night is apparently not good for you.

I'm sure all of it is quite accurately reported. I would bet my life that the picture of the man convicted of the 1996 murder of Kristin Smart displayed on cnn.com really is a picture of the man who was convicted and not a picture of some other man who was not convicted of the 1996 murder.

For me it's not "fairness" or "bias" but just that I am sick of hearing about murders, Trump, Ukraine, and celebrity gossip so I no longer tune in, or go to the websites, or read anything from the news. I get much the same vibe if I pull up foxnews.com or rt.com or what have you.

I would say it's not that I don't trust large news organizations to accurately report objective facts. They seem to do this about as well as anyone could ask. It's rather that I don't trust them to inform me in any way that makes my life better or makes me a better person. I'm not sure what the term is for this, something which is true but has zero relevance in your life and also makes you depressed. To me it's just a bad bargain.

Maybe life was better when media was more local and instead of CNN I would pick up a copy of the town newspaper and read about things actually happening in my town, done by people I might actually know (or only be 1-2 degrees of separation from), stories about places I live and work on a daily basis and stories written by people who don't live very far from me. I didn't get to experience that so I can't say either way.

My question is why get so fancy? Why not just use a racial/gender quota system? Just say "we want X% from demographics A, B, and C" and then hire the best you can from those groups and call it a day?

That way you can just dial in the exact amount and types of diversity you want.

> many institutions have a history of seizing land from Indigenous groups

The institutions themselves did? How many Ivy League founders forcefully dispossessed indigenous groups specifically so they could build a university on their land?

I'm not talking, like, how the land Yale University is on was once owned by the Mohegan, Mashantucket Pequot, Eastern Pequot, Schaghticoke, Golden Hill Paugussett, Niantic, and the Quinnipiac and other Algonquian speaking peoples and then some white dudes forcibly relocated them and then years later some other white dudes got together and founded a school which became Yale.

If dispossession makes something prestigious then why isn't every college in America prestigious? They were all built on land seized from indigenous groups. Many in the South were built or benefited from the labor of enslaved black people in addition to that. By this logic the most prestigious universities in America really ought to be clustered in the deep South cotton belt. This strangely doesn't seem to be the case.

It seems to me prestige and some form of exclusion have to go hand in hand. This might be in terms of cost to attend, or coming from the "right" ethnicity, or coming from the "right" family from within the "right" ethnicity, or having the highest SAT score, or some mix of these.

If the Ivy League was open to any and all comers it would no more prestigious than any community college because anyone who wanted to could attend. I don't see why Yale couldn't build bigger buildings and open a bunch of satellite campuses in all 50 states if they wanted to. But if they did that it would be like Gucci selling $15 shirts at Walmart. It would utterly destroy the brand even if the quality remained the same.

> This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).

What would the numbers look like if you did the math for plumbers, programmers, farmers, or any other trade? Suppose your dad was a welder and he taught you about it from a young age, gave you skills, put in a good word for you with his boss, which gave you a leg up on the people trying to get into the trade from nothing. It doesn't seem much different from me to the PhD thing. This is not even getting into whether (or to what extent) intelligence/personality is heritable. PhDs will spend a lot of time with each other, and mate with each other, and their kids will be PhDs because they were raised in a PhD environment by PhD parents and the cycle will repeat again. I could have told you that without a study.

> Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis.

Well yeah. If they had enough prestige to go to a prestigious university they would have done so before earning their PhD. Either the most elite universities in the US are leaving a ton of $100 bills on the sidewalk by ignoring non-prestigious PhDs, or it's not a meritocracy and never was.

He must have done quite a lot of rotting in the whole three weeks he was a national security advisor, especially considering that role has nothing much to do with purchasing components, uniforms, or anything else really.

I don't think Michael Flynn did a lot of purchasing of parkas and submarine hull castings.

I do feel a shift in the way people talk about things. There used to be a lot of class-based commentary. Stuff like Walmart abusing workers, CEO pay, Chinese sweatshops, fight for $15. I can't remember the last time I heard about Walmart underpaying their workers and placing them on welfare so the taxpayers can subsidize their low prices. Did this all get fixed?

It seems like it's all gone now. It's all now about identity politics. It's okay to work your employees to death and have them piss in buckets so they can pick 1,000 Prime orders per hour as long as you say the right things. How much does a Black Lives Matter tweet cost? How much does it cost to throw up a couple of rainbow flags? It's a pittance. But by doing this you can look progressive without actually doing anything progressive. "Sorry, we can't pay you a living wage but we will respect your pronouns!"

These things are very good but I feel something has been lost. If forced to choose I'd much rather have a world where unskilled workers don't have to live hand to mouth than one where we get ruthless free markets with rainbow flags. Every time I see a self-proclaimed progressive talk about the inviolable right of private companies to do whatever the hell they want I throw up a little in my mouth. Private companies should have no rights, only privileges.

The same arguments was true for asbestos as well. Asbestos building materials are totally harmless if left undisturbed. But eventually that wall will have to be be repainted/sanded/drilled into/knocked down.

What good is paper ownership if you can't actually use your property?