BC POLITICS
Saved by @Alex1Powell

This truth! "I don’t know how to convince someone how to experience the basic human emotion of empathy. I cannot have one more conversation with someone who is content to see millions of people suffer needlessly in exchange for a tax cut that statistically they’ll never see..."

 This is why, fundamentally, we can't "come together." The left and the right in America really do fundamentally disagree on what it means to live in a society. There is no calm and fruitful debate that can bridge that gap. You either give a damn about other people or you don't.
To make matters worse, so many of our constitutional and legislative structures make much easier to do evil than to do good. Think about how onerous a lift it's been to get anything close to universal healthcare or to save the environment and how easily Trump has savaged both.
Trump has freely abused immigrants, rolled over human rights compacts, the Hatch Act, the Emoluments Clause and the separation of powers, even stealing money from military schools to put towards his dumb wall and our representatives in congress are seemingly helpless to stop him.
On his way out the door, Trump is charging up the electric chair, reinstating firing squads and turning over Native lands to developers with a Thanos snap while we all sit here and watch. Voter disenfranchisement? Easy! All it took was a 5-4 SCOTUS ruling in Shelby v Holder.
Passing the John Lewis Voting Rights Act? McConnell alone can hold that up and also allow a dozen covid relief programs to expire, condemning millions to poverty, hunger and homelessness. But passing covid relief? Apparently impossible. Can't be done. Senators, to your vacations!
Snatching thousands of migrant children? Boom! Reuniting them? Yeah, about that ... probably not possible. Oh well! Those who benefit financially from cruelty have built an airtight system that makes hurting people so much easier to pull off than helping them. That has to change.
I left an "it" out in one of the previous tweets, but you get the idea...
There are fundamental intra-ideological arguments. But on the left it's "how far should or can we go to help these people and what can we pragmatically get done?" and on the right it's "how can we stop the rich paying one more dime in taxes and business submitting to regulation?"
That's just an unbridgeable gap, sorry.
Typical responses from the right in this thread and in arguments I’ve had with right wingers over the years:
-Don’t take my money in taxes to “force me” to give a shit about the needy. Charity can deal with the poor.
- Why don’t you take in a homeless person if you care so much?
There is just a core disagreement about whether there should be any common enterprise at all, or whether we should live in a world where everyone fends for themselves. People on each side view individualism or collectivity as a moral imperative. We will never agree.
The right views almost any kind of collective societal action that requires taxation, whether of gazillionaires or just them (who knows, they think, they might be a gazillionaire somehow someday!) as theft and evil socialism.
The left views a society that doesn’t care for everyone, especially the “least of these” — the sick and the vulnerable — as fundamentally immoral. And chipping in via taxes as a moral imperative.
There is no middle ground there. It’s just a fundamental disagreement about how you structure a society. And then you throw race into the mix, and the racialized perception of who the vulnerable are and it’s like setting off a nuclear bomb in a society like ours.
Remember: the right, led by outgoing one-term president Herbert Hoover fought FDR tooth and nail to prevent him using governmental action to STOP THE F—NG GREAT DEPRESSION. https://t.co/4TPerJkk4h
Not different from Mitch McConnell’s “let it all burn, and let the covid-poors fend for themselves” attitude now.

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Trump on climate: I don't believe it. Trump on Khashoggi: I don't believe it. Trump on Russia: I don't believe it. Idiocy? A canny game? Doesn't really matter as much as the underlying intellectual autocracy. In this administration only one opinion matters.

It's an assault on facts and reason. It's an assault on good governance. It's an assault on the bureaucracies that are being discounted. It's an assault on science and history. But it is also an assault on one of the underpinnings of democracy.

We live in a system that is grounded on the idea of collaborative government. Leaders may have a final word but even then, there are typically checks and balances. Hopefully, in this case, such checks and balances may work. But they also are being tested.

The president's position that he is smarter than all the world's scientists, than the entire intelligence community, than experts who have studied any issue all their lives, is, of course, asinine. But his belief that government turns solely on his opinion, is monarchic.

Louis XIV reportedly said, "L'etat est moi." That he was the state. Trump asserting that he knows better than all, discounts all advice, that his brain is enough to chart the course for America alone, is essentially saying the same thing.
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Funny, before the election I recall lefties muttering the caravan must have been a Trump setup because it made the open borders crowd look so bad. Why would the pro-migrant crowd engineer a crisis that played into Trump's hands? THIS is why. THESE are the "optics" they wanted.


This media manipulation effort was inspired by the success of the "kids in cages" freakout, a 100% Stalinist propaganda drive that required people to forget about Obama putting migrant children in cells. It worked, so now they want pics of Trump "gassing children on the border."

There's a heavy air of Pallywood around the whole thing as well. If the Palestinians can stage huge theatrical performances of victimhood with the willing cooperation of Western media, why shouldn't the migrant caravan organizers expect the same?

It's business as usual for Anarchy, Inc. - the worldwide shredding of national sovereignty to increase the power of transnational organizations and left-wing ideology. Many in the media are true believers. Others just cannot resist the narrative of "change" and "social justice."

The product sold by Anarchy, Inc. is victimhood. It always boils down to the same formula: once the existing order can be painted as oppressors and children as their victims, chaos wins and order loses. Look at the lefties shrieking in unison about "Trump gassing children" today.
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39.1% of Democrats think that it's wrong to negatively stereotype people based on their place of birth... AND that Southerners are more racist. https://t.co/yp1hviLuBB


65.2% of Republicans think that people shouldn't be so easily offended... AND that Black Lives Matter is offensive. https://t.co/znmVhqIaL8


64.6% of Democrats think that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body... AND that selling organs should be illegal.

48.5% of Democrats think that a woman has the right to do what she wants with her body... AND that prostitution should be illegal.


57.9% of Republicans think that people should be free to express their opinions in the workplace... AND that athletes should not be allowed to sit or kneel during the national anthem. https://t.co/ds2ig1NJFr


Democrats: Men and women are equal in their talents and abilities. Also, women are superior. https://t.co/bEFSmqQguo
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I told you they’d bring this up


I was wondering why that tweet had so many stupid replies. And now I see


Seriously, this was “the night before.” If you’re at the march where they’re changing “Jews will not replace us” and “Blood and soil,” you’re not a “very fine person.” Full stop.


There are 3 important moments in that transcript.

1.) When someone asked Trump about a statement *he had already made* about there being blame on “both sides,” he said the “fine people” line.


2. Trump does clarify! “I’m not talking about the neo-Nazis and white nationalists — because they should be condemned totally “

Okay!

Then adds that there were “many people in that group other than neo-Nazis and white nationalists.”
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Caroline - Real Feminists XX \U0001f1ff\U0001f1e6
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Transition, 'inclusion' etc all have political ramifications. Instead of buying into the remarkably masculinist assumptions of queer theory that the dissolution of boundaries is always good, we should be examining them from the point of group power relations.

Transactivists try to conflate identifying as trans with gay marriage, in attempts to demonstrate the progressiveness of their cause, but the comparators are actually transracialism, trans-abledness, identifying as w/c etc.

The diagram shows the asymmetrical nature of such identifications. Identifying down is colonisation. Identifying up is impossible. The most you can do is improve your individual status relative to your class of origin, which leaves everyone else behind.


It also shows that the classes are occupied. If you identify as disabled, or as a woman, or as black, you are demanding access to spaces and facilities which were set aside for people based on a characteristic which you don't share.

How well tolerated this is gives us a clear insight into which oppressions are tolerated. We're rightly paying a lot more attention to racism, so Rachel Dolezal was fired by the NAACP. Other white women in the US who've tried this have been heavily criticised.
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Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ


The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991." https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.
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Sri Parasurameswara Swamy Mandir, Gudimallam, Andhrapradesh

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In 1937, a trucker got frustrated waiting for his cargo to be unloaded. He later sold his company for $1.1 billion.

Here’s the story of how Malcom McLean made a billion dollars and which startup could be following in his footsteps. (Inspired by our episode with @laurabehrenswu)


In the early 1950s, the shipping industry was a dying business.

New York’s docks were handling half as much domestic cargo in the early 1950s as they had been in the depressed 1930s.

In thirty years, no one had invested significant money in coastal shipping.

Why?

As McLean found out, loading ships was difficult and slow.

A truck or train would deliver items to the port. Each item was unloaded separately, recorded, and carried to storage.

When a ship was ready, each item was taken from storage, counted again, and hauled on-board.


The cost of this labor was significant. As one expert at the time explained:

“A four-thousand-mile voyage for a shipment might consume 50 percent of its costs in covering just the two ten-mile movements through two ports.”


Yet, despite the industry’s issues, it felt little pressure to change.

Foreigners were barred from operating domestically. Cartels ran international routes. And gov. subsidies eased the pain of labor costs.

Reshaping the industry needed an outsider.

Enter Malcolm McLean.
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