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This is becoming a problem in latin america as well and you see people importing culture wars issues that are not really relevant to their local politics and further muddying the waters and distracting from the actual issues facing them

Colombian here - that phenomenon has been present since I can remember. Lots of upstart people here wanting or feeling like they're part of the culture of the USA just because. Go to r/Colombia and see how many of those Dunning-Kruger commenting balls of ignorance profess a stupid and weird hatred for communism and socialism, and they don't even know what those words mean, let alone tell them apart.

Another part of it is that the "international" section of our media is just about regurgitating whatever they say at CNN, FOX or whatever they have there, so the information almost always is arriving already biased (for example, they made here a big deal about the mishap of Biden's mental block at that debate, but they have never mentioned all the links between Trump and Epstein). Though I'd concede the phenomenon has aggravated due to social media, our hiperconnected reality and the increased amount of people moving there, legally or not.


>weird hatred for communism and socialism

Communist and socialist (by name) regimes in South America have caused more trouble for their own citizens than any leftist (by name) regime has caused for the world of capital. I don't think those posters necessarily absorbed that opinion from the US, in fact I think the US absorbed a lot of its own anticommunism from refugees. Historically it has been the business community advocating for détente and trade.


Absolutely. What troubles me in this discourse about "socialism" is that when it's brought up it's USSR and Cuba as opposed to Scandinavia. Northern Europe countries, despite the weather and high taxation rates, consistently occupy the better part of all kinds of lists trying to assess the level of happiness and social cohesion. Of course there are other reasons for it, such as a largely mono-ethnic population, but I doubt their vast social net hurts.

> a stupid and weird hatred for communism and socialism

Tell me, who grew up in socialism, under communists rule, why this hatred is "stupid and weird"


/steps around millions of bodies/

“let’s try it one more time!”


Because currently most socialist, or kind of socialist, countries globally have a higher quality of life than countries like the US.

Of course, what we need to acknowledge is that this shit is complicated and there's nobody that's one thing. There're no purely free market Capitalist nations because that would lead to crimes against humanity beyond our comprehension. There're also no fully communist nations anymore - when there were, they lead to crimes against humanity beyond our comprehension.

Everyone, everywhere, has a mixed system. Whereby the public sector exists, operates, and owns some stuff. Some public sectors own more than others. Those that own, say, education and healthcare SEEM to be doing better than those that don't. Their citizens are healthier, more educated, and seem to be doing better overall.


If this is in reference to Gaza, it is because the situation in Gaza is happening with US support and supplies.

Not necessarily, for a small but very elucidativo example see the 'amigx' 'amigues' 'latinx' thing.

At least Brazil has had a significant amount of levantine immigration and a few refugees recently, so it's not out of place to sympathize with the Palestines wrt the incursion


The UK also has a problem with the right wing trying to import American "culture wars" issues for their own benefit, and it has nothing to do with Gaza — specifically, they bring in the US talking points about trans issues, using "woke" as the next step on the euphemism escalator now that "politically correct" has worn off, blaming millennials for everything, and a conspiracy theory about 15 minute cities (despite almost all of the UK being within 15 minutes of all the important things already, including the car-focused bits like Milton Keynes and small Welsh hamlets like Abermad).

Still, at least it means the Tory party completely forgot about wanting to bring back the hunting of foxes on horseback.


> they bring in the US talking points about trans issues,

The Cass report is certainly not a "US talking point".

https://cass.independent-review.uk/home/publications/final-r...


These all seem like really bad examples, panic over trans people has some very real, very British sources and 15 minute cities (and related concepts like LTNs and the ULEZ) is not something regularly discussed in the US.

Much better examples are US Southwest/Californian concerns around water scarcity being imported to places where water is not scarce, or similar concerns around emissions from electricity generation being imported to places that use high amounts of renewables/nuclear energy. Another example is civilian disarmament fear mongering switching from being about cheap handguns to "assault weapons" after DC v Heller.


The reaction to George Floyd in UK was quite strange, with "don't shoot" protests and "defund the police", when the UK police is not even armed and gets paid like half of their American counterparts.

That's not a bad one, although issues of police brutality and overfunding definitely aren't unique to the US

Police regularly having tanks and other epic equipment from war is definitely unique to democracies.

That's true, autocracies usually just deploy the military domestically!

Although the pushback against trans activist policy has come mostly from the right in the US (with some notable exceptions - Kara Dansky of Women's Declaration International, for example), it's a different story in the UK.

Around the mid-2010s, two events occurred in close succession: the Conservative government of the time proposed a policy of gender self-identification, and trans-identifying male prisoner Karen White was charged with sexually assaulting female prisoners while he was incarcerated in a women's prison. He was later convicted and it was uncovered that he'd been sent to the women's prison due to his "female" identity, despite having previous convictions of sexually assaulting and raping women.

The reaction from women was immense, organised on Mumsnet and other forums, mostly by left-wing feminists. After a lot of protest and publicity, the Tories dropped this policy. It was only later on they changed tack with policy proposals that shifted the balance away from trans activism, mostly to draw a line between them and Labour.


Cis women who rape women and cis men who rape men have always gone to prisons aligned with their gender identity. The issue with the normalization of rape in prison is unrelated, and should be solved without throwing trans people under the bus

This ideological argument was attempted back then too, but it's rejected by most people, who see the reality of the situation: men being locked up in women's prisons.

It should be no surprise to anyone that such a policy is very unpopular. Prisons are separated by sex for good reason.

Trying to pretend that some of these male criminals are women just because they said they are is not a particularly convincing argument.


Pretty interesting how being anti-prison rape is considered an ideological argument. But hats off to the real winners of this situation: the bisexual rapists who get to rape no matter what ideology their captors have, I guess.

This might seem clever, but it ignores human biology and sociology.

Sociology of the society as a whole perhaps, but the first three letters of LGBT are not magically immune and the fourth letter is not magically capable.

And physiologically, someone whose outie was surgically modified into an innie is going to have just as many difficulties topping as a natural born woman.


[flagged]


I remember hearing about some boy who was sent to a prison for a minor offence, was raped, got HIV.

Regardless of your intent, which I cannot know because I am not a mind-reader, what you write here therefore still comes across as if it was ~"it's only bad when pre-op trans women do it".


Please refrain from deliberately misreading my comments.

Sexual assault and rape is terrible, no matter who the perpetrator or victim is. On this, I assume we agree.

The issue here is policy changes that remove one of the most important safeguarding measures to prevent this in the prison system: segregation by sex, so that all male inmates have no physical access to any female inmates.


> On this, I assume we agree.

I am glad. There is no intent to misread, hence my caveat between the commas and the tilde: this is merely how I did perceive it.

> one of the most important safeguarding measures to prevent this in the prison system

I assert, and I thought demonstrated, that this does not in fact seem to be an effective safeguard.


It is an effective safeguard for protecting female prisoners from male prisoners.

There are different safeguards within each prison to protect prisoners from others of the same sex. VPUs for example.


The UK prisons are a total clownshow atm, recently there was a string of female prison guards that were jailed for having sex with (male) prisoners, filming it, and of course smuggling drugs, etc. Also Prisons have run out of space so many offenders were let out early.

- https://metro.co.uk/2024/07/02/inmate-filmed-sex-wandsworth-...

- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-67955865


Jesus, sounds like it's just the UK prisons trying to project their awful "justice" system on their own victims. I give the American justice system a lot of shit based on my personal experience with it, but it sounds like police in general are struggling with maintaining their representation of justice in the modern era, especially with how publicized it can get when they fail to deliver.

All government funded systems in the UK have spent the last 14 years struggling, because the UK government of that era tried to get over the recession caused by the global financial crisis in the late 00s by cutting absolutely everything they could possibly cut.

Wow, I did not realise that US has provided supplies to Hamas to start the war and still backs up it's denials to ceasefire proposals.

[flagged]


Israel is clearly the moral side of this conflict. This conflict began only because Hamas attacked and captured hostages. And it only continues because Hamas refuses to let them go.

I think people in other countries have trouble believing this motivation because they don't see how a country care this much about a regular citizen. But today, IDF recovered Farhan al-Qadi, and the whole country celebrates it. Can you imagine random people in US celebrating that Evan Gershkovich got release in the recent exchange with Russia? I doubt most american citizens even heard this name.

This whole thing will be over when hostages are back. Whoever captured and holds them is the devil who made all of this happen.


This whole thing will be over when hostages are back. Whoever captured and holds them is the devil who made all of this happen.

There's the devil who made the hostage situation happen. And the other devil (and his allies) who made the calculated decision to allow Hamas to flourish for so long, and who apparently (now 11 months into this disaster) has never been particularly interested in resolving the hostage situation in the first place.

Both are ultimately responsible, and deeply immoral.


It seems like Hamas knew they could trigger an overwhelming response from Israel, and so they sacrificed innocent Palestinians to do it. They were correct, yeah? They wanted to make Israel look bad in the eyes of the world. And now we get pictures of dead Palestinian children. Israel may equate Palestinians with Hamas, but I don't think that is a universally held opinion in the rest of the world.

> Israel may equate Palestinians with Hamas

Does it? Israel provides them with food, water, electricity. Treats them in hospitals. Warns them about incoming strikes. I don't know any other country in the world which treats a hostile population like that in time of war. I also don't know a single other war with such a low civilian-to-combatant killed ratio. Usually it's somewhere around 9; in this war, the estimates are around 1-2.


Yeah thats the original point but I think he means aside from that, the order itself also drops a suggestion to the judge as to the nature of the case before hearing it.

The order itself might be injecting a subconscious bias to the judge.


I think maybe the judges can tell how important cases are based on the charges. I don't think the implication is that someone is somehow reviewing the case prior to it being heard and using some judgement based on some (likely unknown as it has not yet been presented) evidence to order them, but that charges that carry less penalty or that are are already classified as lesser (i.e. misdemeanor compared to felony) are sorted prior to ones that are not.

I don't think the people sorting the cases (which could be the judges themselves) have any additional information that the judge doesn't readily have available, so I'm not sure there's much room for bias of a substantial nature.


That’s good point. The authors of the original papers the “hungry judge” idea also did work on what they call “priming” which would include what you suggest. I don’t know if that has been replicated though.


This is not an example of the priming effect, which describes how one stimulus affects the reaction to a different stimulus, but is simply an example of suggestion for a common stimulus. The priming effect itself has come under fire in recent years for failure to replicate.

Examples of priming include what was studied in the Priming Intelligence study, which primed groups of participants with the idea of either professors or the idea of hooligans, then tested how they performed on an intelligence test. It purported to discover that those primed with the idea of professors performed better. This is an example of a widely discussed priming study that has failed replication.


It's not as if the judge does not have all the details of the case prior to sentencing. The order can't possibly supply more information than the fact that he just sat through the trial himself days or weeks prior. At least in the United States, the same judge who presides over a trial is the one who sentences the convicted. The only time a defendant gets different judges for anything is early in the process, like during arraignment.


Knowing the details and being subconsciously influenced are different questions. Ambient music in stores doesn’t change the prices, products, or a shoppers needs yet it still influences buying behavior.

Suppose a taste tester is asked to rank something on a scale of 1-100, but before giving a number they need to presort them into terrible, ok, good, great then go back to each group and give a specific score to each item. My guess is there would be different clustering vs someone doing the same task in one go.


Adding to this, even knowing the subconscious biases doesn't necessarily mitigate them. Kahneman talked about how he was still subjected to such biases, even though he was an expert in studying and identifying them.


What ‘subconscious influence’ are you assuming here? The cases are ordered in a known, public, obvious way by known, public, obvious criteria. Are you thinking that a judge would not know the difference between the severity of charges if they weren’t grouped together? That he would be inclined to think a jaywalking case sandwiched between two murders was just as serious? This argument seems unlikely in the extreme.


I’m suggesting the exact opposite situation, ie groups of equal severity create a subconscious bias even if it’s the Judge that makes them.

A jaywalking case seems meaningless when sandwiched between just about anything because objectively it’s not serious. However 20 murder cases and you might start benchmarking things to the pedo cannibal not each case on it’s own merits.

If all you see is 20 white collar crimes row with several 10+ million dollar cases someone who ‘only’ stole 100 thousand seems almost meaningless even if objectively it’s a lot of money. And that exact loss of objectivity is a problem.


What loss of objectivity? What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.


> What loss of objectivity?

Bias is a loss of objectivity.

> What you are describing bears no relationship to the study or… any real case that we’re discussing.

Study says before lunch cases are meaningfully different than the after lunch case, thus it’s a like with like grouping.

I referenced a known effect where grouping like with like can create a subconscious bias. Sure it’s best known in other contexts, but there’s little to suggest sentencing is somehow uniquely unbiased.


The study involved parole boards, not initial sentencing from an initial trial.


So these people have already received fair sentences, and they have to serve them out? What's the problem?


I remember a cuban buddy I worked with told me about how you had to be careful with pizza in Cuba cause sometimes they used molten condoms mixed in to save on cheese

Probably an urban legend but thats the level of shortages you get in these regimes. Similar things happened to us in Venezuela. There was a scandal in my town because people were mixing in cardboard with a typical shredded fish dish. In Maracaibo, women we're being assaulted in the streets to cut off their hair and sell it to make hair extensions.

It gets really crazy.


Exactly. A travel agent works for the client, not the airline. Its their job to advice the traveler of any hidden fees.


Ignoring the reasons why this happens is just as bad as ignoring the consequences.

The need for security is just as much a force of nature as the need for innovation. Unless you provide a solution for both, the cycle will keep repeating.


There's a code of ethics for a reason.


I havent done the numbers but you are probably right.

Orbits are very unintuitive things. For starters they're much higher than a suborbital trajectory.

You would also need to pre-target to stage in orbit and at that point you're locked into that trajectory unless you brought A LOT of extra fuel. This would inevitably be slower and less flexible regardless.

The only way for this to have any advantage is to stage a ton of nukes in orbit at different trajectories, which is politically insane.


I really want to believe in this but I bet you the study has some major methodological flaws regarding all protests that end up in nothing.

I live in venezuela, we've had millions of people on the streets multiple times and we still get screwed over every single time. The dictatorship endures


I've been using Bravecto and Nexgard for the past 4 years and it really should be emphasized how much of a seismic shift these meds have been.

I've had dogs all my life and live in a very tick-prone area. Nothing ever really worked, to be honest. It was a constant battle of attrition. I had to spray the house with nasty chemicals every few months cause that was pretty much the only thing that kind of tipped the balance against the ticks. I frankly don't know how we didn't get Lyme disease, we were exposed for decades.

Since these new meds appeared, ticks have completely disappeared from our property. They only provide 1-3 months of protection, but they're so effective at eradicating the parasite population that I've only had to use 3 pills in the past 4 years.


There might be external effects happening at the same time here.

I grew up on a island with a lot of ticks. Being a kid and spending time on fields and in forests, we constantly had to remove ticks before heading home.

But now 2 decades later, visiting the island again as an adult and expecting having to do the same after walking around the forest, we didn't find a single tick on ourselves, when it would easily have been a couple of ticks each in the before-days.

So many parameters being different though, so hard to reach any conclusion, maybe my blood is less attractive, maybe we weren't physically intensive enough, maybe the wrong season, but maybe there are other chemicals at play too that wasn't there before.


The thing about being a very rational person like this, is that you're very easy to manipulate.


? I don't get your remark


I think he's saying that you're too willing to believe the reasonable, plausible explanation that falls out of Occam's Razor, as opposed to accepting whatever embattled fringe theory of the day also fits the available evidence.


It is almost like Occam's Razor proposes some type of probability distribution, not discounting the fringe completely but suggesting as a heuristic that the most simple is most likely.

Some people though seem to like this Anti-Occam's Razor that the most complex and interesting explanation is most likely even though they have to know from everyday experience that is simply not true and not how the world works.


Said every conspiracy theorist ever.


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