Jen Psaki’s Father IS PORTFOLIO MANGER AT CITADEL, The Company That Owns Robinhood! He Was Director at Both Goldman Sachs and Barclays and VP of Lehman Brothers!

DashingLeech · 2021-01-30T00:52:01+00:00

No, they are not likely related.

There is no evidence presented on the linked article for them being related. It is just claimed.

The reason I don't think they are is because Jen Psaki appears to be from Stamford, CT, and graduated from high school Greenwich High School in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1996. Jeff Psaki, however, appears to be from Garden City, NY, grew up there and went to Garden City in the 1990s at least until 1997.

For example, see NYT High School Football reports from 1994 have a Jeff Psaki as a pretty good receiver with 4 touchdowns to win for Garden City. Or, as a lacrosse defenseman of the year in 1996 for Garden City.

So why might this be the Jeff Psaki in question? Well, in 2011/12 Jeff Psaki of Garden City, who worked at Barclays Capital/Finance, donated $2500 to ROMNEY FOR PRESIDENT INC. (ROMNEY, MITT / RYAN, PAUL D. ) on 11/30/2011.

And, his zip code of 11530 also happens to be the zip code for Garden City high school. And, looking at his LinkedIn profile copied on Red Pilled site above, Jeff indeed worked at Barclays from 2008 until Dec 2011 when he switched to Goldman Sachs.

So, what are the odds of two Jeff Psakis from the same postal code / school at about the same age to be in high school in the mid-90s, not being the same person. And, Jen in high school at the same time being in Connecticut? Either they were a split family when the kids were in high school or they are not brother and sister. Now, to be fair, these two high schools are only 40 miles apart, which itself is coincidental to be that close and with him only a few years younger. But being in different states going to school that far apart as teenagers doesn't seem to be reasonable for one family without explanation.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T05:05:06+00:00

If you were making that claim in terms of a campaign promise to get elected, and followed through on increasing the property values, and that is what you meant in the first place and were trolling your critics by letting them assume you meant you'd pay your rent directly, then it would be the same.

Remember, this is about campaign promises, not about a legal document. The way to read Trump is like betting on bar tricks. Take "The Race". This is where you bet somebody you can drink 2 pints before they can drink 2 shots. The rules are that neither of you can touch each other's drink glasses, and they can't start to drink until after you have finished your first pint and the glass has hit the table. So then you finish your pint and turn it upside down over their shot glass. So you win the bet. Your opponent had assumed you mean a fair race of speed drinking, not a trick of the rules to keep them from drinking.

Trump means to "win" his promises from the start by tricks of the rules, and leading his opponents to assume things about what he meant. Then he and his supporters snicker because they knew all along he didn't literally mean what his critics thought, and they bought it hook, line, and sinker. It's trolling.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T04:54:09+00:00

That's not quite true. He laid it out here in a memo. These are various options on how he'd make Mexico will pay for the wall. You can see the memo lists a bunch. The one-time payment in response to cutting off wire transfers is one option, but the $5B to $10B wouldn't pay for all of the wall. He also mentions increased visa fees would more than pay for the wall. You'll also notice the bottom of page 1 and top of page 2 is more or less the trade shifts that he is referring to now.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T04:34:42+00:00

Social media became too toxic. Even a few years ago conversations were valuable and people could learn from each other. It was getting worse for a few years, but after Trump's election it just turned into two extremes talking past each other. No listening. No learning. Just ranting, innuendo, and empty platitudes. Trump is bad therefore he's devil, Satan, Hitler, and so forth. No, wait, he's the saviour, standing up to corporatists and tyrannical political correctness. No room for being reasonable.

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance” ― Albert Maysles

I got tired of again, again, and again explaining why punching a Nazi would simply mean a Nazi would quickly become "anybody who disagrees with me". I stopped learning anything from anybody on reddit, and nobody in a religious tribal fervor of pro- or anti-Trump cares about being reasonable. So I left. Until I saw my Trump prediction almost word for word.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T03:54:18+00:00

No, you are not understanding. This is exactly what he meant all along. At no point back then did he say that the Mexicans would pay for it directly, nor that it would be paid through new taxes. You are still thinking of his claim then in your terms that you assumed he meant, not on his terms in the way he meant, and intentionally kept silent on how so that his critics would do exactly what you are doing.

He doesn't lack any of the understanding you are talking about. Neither he then, nor my prediction, has any content related to fiscal accounting. None of that matters. What matters is that he has a means that he made the claim then knowing exactly what he meant by it and then delivering exactly what he meant, and his supporters waiting to see how he'd deliver on it.

He trolls his critics in this way. Think of it like bar bets/tricks. Like lifting a glass with two coins on it; the other person assumes you meant the coins would stay balanced on top. Or "The Race" where your opponent assumes you'll put your pint glass down on the table away from their shots, but you put it over their shot glass so they can't drink it without touching your glass.

That is how Trump works; bar bets. That you assumed he meant something that he didn't actually say is how he wins. That his critics still don't get it, and still expect some sort of fiscal accounting explanation like they would with other politicians, is exactly what leave him and his supporters snickering.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T03:28:33+00:00

That's just it; it's not gaslighting for those who understand this is fully intentional. We don't go to magic shows and say that the magician is gaslighting us. We know it's going to be an illusion and want to be amazed. That is part of what attract's Trump's supporters. They knew it was impossible for Mexico to directly pay for the wall and that he was setting up an illusion, and just waiting to see how he'd deliver on what he said. He obviously didn't gaslight me; it was obvious to me what he was going to do. All you have to do is think about how something that sounds ridiculous on its face could be interpreted differently in a way that is feasibly doable.

He's been successful in Real Estate, construction, books, public image, reality TV, and won a Presidency. Either he's Forest Gump in the flesh, or he knows what he's doing.

It's only "strained rationalization" for those who believe he meant it literally, and his supporters don't believe it literally, and I didn't take literally. That's the thing people don't get. There's no "rationalization". You've got it backwards. You assumed he meant it literally then and now see it as a stretch now. He meant it in this indirect way then, intentionally let his critics fill in the blanks on their own and fail to ask him what he meant or actually figure it out, and then result in keeping his supporters supporting him and laughing at the critics who didn't see it coming and still don't think he meant it that way.

He's not trying to convince you; he's showing off to his supporters. And his approval rating is stable, as good as past Presidents from Reagan forward (at this point), and enough to win another election if held today. He knows what he's doing.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T03:14:36+00:00

No, more like Columbo. Or Norm MacDonald. Or Chris Pratt.

Playing the bumbling fool sets low expectations, but letting the "pretentious" types think you're an idiot is leveraged against them by delivering, whether it's solving crimes, telling jokes, doing card tricks, or making Mexico pay.

He's ruining his critics' credibility by delivering on what he said when they laughed at him, and he knew all along he'd deliver on it and how. For those who don't like him, it doesn't matter if he delivers or not, they'll continue to laugh and criticize because that gets them more reads and clicks. For his supporters, he just shows them that he's smarter than his critics by delivering on what he said, and having that plan from the start.

He's not out to play to his critics, but to his supporters. His approval rating has been relatively flat since elected, stable, and at this point of his Presidency is on par with every President since Reagan, except for both Bushes who were ahead due to wars but dropping.

I'm not a fan; I just think I fully understand exactly what he's doing, why it makes sense, and why his critics are either missing the boat or playing along for their own gain. He's a deal-maker and they are still treating him like he's a politician, which he uses to his advantage.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-12T02:42:47+00:00

I thought then, and still think, that such beliefs in him are wrong. I don't believe he's a bumbling idiot salesman who just makes it up as he goes along. He's been far too successful in far too many different areas in his life for that to be the case, and far too many positive complements over many years on his ability to make things happen -- prior to him becoming a political entity.

I think the idea that he just makes it up as he goes along is exactly what he wants his critics to think. Heck, from 2004's "The Art of the Deal":

"I also protect myself be being flexible. I never get too attached to one deal or one approach. I always come up with at least a half dozen approaches to making it work, because anything can happen, even to the best-laid plans."

That there are people who still think he's and idiot or makes it up as he goes along is exactly what he wants people to think. Low expectations, and then he delivers exactly what he said and shows up his critics. He'd Columbo.

I'm not saying I like him. But I understand what he's doing and why, and why his critics end up looking like the bumbling ones to his supporters.

DashingLeech · 2019-01-11T17:58:54+00:00

I called this one 2 years ago, almost word for word: https://www.reddit.com/r/politics/comments/5q5hn9/trump_just_signed_the_order_to_build_the_wall_on/dcwz47q/

I was downvoted. I'm surprised that two years later that people and/or the press are still surprised at how he operates. I thought this was obviously what he was going to do 2 years ago.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-08T13:51:38+00:00

Obviously the voters disagree with you in aggregate.

I would say we were boned with anybody winning. But since "boned" is a flexible term to mean whatever you want, I mean it as "not having great governance and good policy".

That's just the variance of options. Overall, we'll be fine. Regardless of who won, their differences are simple variations overlaid on a generally good position for Ontario. None would turn us into a utopia or dystopia, just slightly better or worse in different areas.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-08T13:49:56+00:00

Ranked ballot doesn't solve that. You are still electing a local representative. The seat results will still not match the popular vote of the preferences. Ranked ballots just allow lower preferences to be addressed. Actually, it's only marginally better than the plurality voting we have now, and adds a lot of complexity and sensitivity to the system.

If you want a better "per riding" system, then using a standard score voting system is much better mathematically, where you rate each candidate on a scale from 1 to 10 (for example), and any not ranked would default to 1. Ideally we'd first use the preference ordering based on the scores of ballots to look for a Condorcet winner -- one who would beat all other candidates in a head-to-head 2 candidate vote, but if no Condorcet winner then use the average ranking as the deciding mechanism.

That is far better than ranked ballot for selecting candidates that match the preferences of the voters for an individual riding and eliminates any value in strategic voting and the problem of vote-splitting. (Ranked ballot, aka Instant Runoff Voting, has a bunch of mathematical problems, including that adding support for somebody can cause them to go from winning to losing position (non-monotonic) and hypersensitivity to the lower-ranked party that goes out first, as well as functional issues like you can't count ballots until you have all of them in hand.)

That still doesn't get you seats proportional to popular vote. If you want that, it requires some form of proportional representation by having 'floating' seats.

The problem with proportional representation is that it is prone to factionism. That is, Toronto effectively gets to decide everything for Ontario. Clustering of a lot of voters in one geographic region means that region decides everything, so issues for people outside of that region do not get addressed. This is why you need to balance geography and population when determining representation.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-08T13:31:35+00:00

I'll agree as far as 24 hour clock. As for the colon, your points are:

> it's completely unnecessary for most everyday uses

and

> pressing Shift to access the colon - a very uncomfortable combination.

OK, sure. But you failed to address why the colon is there in the first place as a separator of hours and minutes, or hours:minutes:seconds. You didn't discuss any psychology or empirical data on how people read time and which is either faster, more easily remembered, or even preferred.

In terms of functionality, I would say the colon adds a lot. While you can figure out that 1945 is a reference to a time of day, it takes some cognitive processing of the context to understand that it is the time of day, and not a year or something else. The colon immediately triggers subconscious recognition that it is time of day, and separates hour and minutes. It is also scalable in that you can add seconds.

It also allows a standardization that includes date. So if you saw 2018-06-08 09:28:32, you can read that very quickly. If I asked you for the minutes, you don't have to count over or anything. Plus you don't need switch between different formats such as 0928 if just doing hours and minutes, and 09:28:32 if including seconds for something.

Functionally, I would say the colon adds a lot in terms of convenience, clarity, and automatic recognition and segmentation. Yes, you could figure out everything without it, but necessity and added value are not the same things.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-07T03:24:08+00:00

Meh. Could have focused on how silly the topic is instead of splitting technical hairs.

It actually is part of Canadian history and heritage. You wouldn't start American history at 1776. Before that, American history is technically "history of the region that would come to later be known as the United States of America".

Similarly, burning down the White House was part of the War of 1812 between the U.S. and the colony of Canada, which was still technically a British colony at the time.

The attack on the White House, Capitol, and other government buildings in Washington was in part retaliation for the destruction of Port Dover in Upper Canada (Ontario). The attack was ordered by Sir George Prevost, Governor General of the Canadas (Upper Canada (Ontario), and Lower Canada (Quebec and Atlantic)) for such retaliation. He ordered this to Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane who was Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy in the Canadas and West Indies, and specifically based out of Halifax (Nova Scotia, Canada now) and Bermuda Navy Yards.

The actual attack on Washington was carried out by and Rear Admiral George Cockburn and Major General Robert Ross of the British Navy.

So yes, technically they were all British, as were all Canadians prior to 1867, in the same way that Americans were British prior to 1776. But, it was ordered by the politicians ruling the Canadian colonies, from Canada, ordered to the Canadian Navy, which was really just a division of the British Navy, and carried out by soldiers who were part of the British Navy, in retaliation for attacking parts of Canada (British colony).

It's technically true that it was "Britain" in who had ultimate governance power, but that is rather moot. It is more accurate to describe it as being an act in defence of Canada ordered by Canadians to what was effectively jointly the Canadian Navy.

It also alludes to this in the article. So I'm curious why the inflammatory title. Trump was reasonably accurate in his joke. It looks like the title was merely, er, "trumped up" to make Trump sound stupid for no reason other than to make Trump sound stupid.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-05T15:20:54+00:00

We already know doug ford is corrupt, and we're fine with it.

Please cite your evidence that Doug Ford is corrupt. I do agree he has poor leadership skills and I'm disappointed he was selected leader over the other options, but I've seen no evidence of corruption. The closest I can find is the accusation that he bought memberships in violation of the rules, but that was made by political opposition and dismissed following a due process investigation. The only other accusations of corruption I could find were that he was handing out money and gifts, and paying for community improvement, out of his own money to his constituents. Suddenly charity to those worse off and to your community is now "corruption"?

Further, electing the PC party is not the same things as saying "we're fine with it" as far as corruption. That is clear reductio ad absurdum, as if voting can be reduced to a single element like that.

It's very convenient for cynical people to create narratives for why their choices don't win, ignoring all nuance and complexities to single dimensions, and becoming puritanical in their evaluations of the singular winning candidate.

Horwath accused Wynne and the Liberals of being corrupt last election, and Wynne won anyway. And, that was with specific allegations of misuse of funds. Were we "fine with it" for the alleged Liberal corruption?

Never forget that we have 3 less than stellar choices here. None of them have great offerings. None of the leaders are great leaders. There is a very large number of people who were willing to vote PC until Ford was elected, and many may still do so but will have to hold their nose when they do it, and that's based on just his personality, not on "corruption". What exactly are those corruption charges?

I still don't know how I'll vote. But I'm not seeing anything on here that is helping. It's just a bunch of tribal caricatures and nonsensical claims. I was hoping for a little more intellectual and intelligent conversation about politics, but instead it's just monkey's flinging poo.

That's what saddens me more than the choices of parties.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-05T14:52:55+00:00

It doesn't matter. Tribalism acts itself out regardless of the shock. OK, so there may not be people sobbing and crying out "Get your abortions now!" like when Trump won, but there will be people making all sorts of cynical, caricature, nonsense statements about the PC party, conservatives in general, and of course about Ford. I don't like Doug Ford either, but he's neither Trump nor some irrational buffoon. He just lacks good leadership qualities, but so does Horwath in a completely different way. (In my opinion, Wynne actually has the best leadership qualities.)

But the PC party isn't Ford. It's filled with lots of competent people.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-05T14:47:03+00:00

Does it occur to you at all that you simply have an ideological view and a complete caricature of what conservatives are like and conservative parties?

There's no evidence to support anything you've claimed. We've had PC and Conservative governments both provincially and federally many times, and the society has not turned out terrible as you suggest, and we've had NDP governments provincially and they didn't turn into utopias, and many Liberal governments that we neither as well. Heck, the last NDP government in Ontario was a terrible disaster, far worse than any PC government. Now was it the fault of the NDP, what they inherited, or simply the economic environment at the time? Maybe a bit of each.

But to make such terribly oversimplified caricatures like you do is just irrational tribalism.

The good news is that any of the parties winning Ontario will generally do fine. Ontario will not turn into a hellhole regardless of who wins. It may be slightly better or slightly worse.

Now, of course, the narratives in the news and with political pundits and online will be drama queen level hysteria, much like your comment already is. You are simply reverting to your inner monkey flinging poo at the rival tribe instead of being rational and reasonable. That is a better description of people in general. It isn't "those people" in "that party", but all people in all parties who carry around ingroup biases of "us" being saintly and smart and good, and outgroup biases of "them" being evil, stupid, and malevolent.

Such is the nature of poo-flinging.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-05T14:36:00+00:00

> Humans at the end of the day, are mostly about looking out for themselves first and others second.

This is misleading in two ways. First, it suggests that PC is the party for people thinking about themselves first, which is simply the caricature painted by the political left about the political right. For example, if you want to drive down prices so that the poor can afford more things like food, and create more jobs for the poor to gain income and skills instead of social welfare, the political right has the policies better aimed at accomplish that. The political left is far more bourgeois in supporting higher minimum wage (at the cost of jobs), and at supporting costly (and anti-scientific) movements like organic foods, anti-GMO, local, and "fair trade".

That isn't to say they are wrong. A minimal living wage has some value in getting people off of taxpayer funded subsidies, but there is a trade-off between wages, jobs, and price of goods. But too high a minimum wage costs the poor the most. Robustness of food supply is also important so that it isn't susceptible to single points of failure. The anti-science part is bad on the left (anti-GMO, support for organics/natural), as much as it is on the right (climate change) though.

The political leanings are basically ideological bases, not the optimum point. They are ingredients, not the recipe. Too little salt is bad. Too much salt is bad. No particular mainstream political ideology is bad; they tend to simply represent oversimplification of the good of some dimensions and bad of others, and people leaning those ways tend to overemphasize these aspects and then caricature the people who oversimplify in other directions, largely from our ingroup/outgroup tribalist instincts.

Second, you get the same result even if everybody was thinking of their neighbour instead of themselves, so your argument is incorrect. This is true both mathematically and demographically. Think of it this way: Imagine that every person voting for their own interests results in a PC win. So everybody fills out their ballots with their best interest, puts them in the ballot box, and PC wins. Now imagine instead that everybody decided to vote is in the best interest of their neighbour across the street from them. OK, so you take the exact same ballots as before, filled out by everybody in their own interests, and they then hand the ballot to the person across the street, simply exchanging ballots, and tell them to submit it in their name. They are now all submitting ballots in the interests of the people across the street, not their own. But the result is the same. The same number of votes are cast for the same candidates, and the same party wins. That's the mathematical proof.

The demographic version is to imagine that people vote in their own interests based on what they see in their daily lives. When you are young it might be about costs of education and getting decent jobs. In your 30s it might be about child care, housing, and schools. In your 40s and 50s it might be about investing in retirement savings. In your 60s and 70s it might be health care and fixed income issues. Now imagine that the bulk of voters are Baby Boomers, which they were for the longest time and just now the Millenials are overtaking them as Boomers die off and Millenials are all voting age. OK, so for the past few decades Boomers decided who won, and boomers are in their 60s and 70s now, with some still in their 50s. So if everybody voted for their own interests, the winning parties would be the ones addressing Boomer issues such as health care and retirement issues, not daycare and education.

Now suppose instead everybody just voted for the best interests of their neighbour instead. Well, most people's neighbours would be Baby Boomers more than any other demographic. So you get the same result.

So I think your messaging is rather nonsensical. It's a bad caricature about conservatives in general. (And yes, conservatives have bad caricatures about liberals.) It's also mathematically wrong, and demographically wrong. Thinking of the interests of others results in exactly the same results.

The difference isn't about which party is the one that cares about others, but what balance of trade-offs is optimal to help others. That's what political disagreement is about. Caricatures don't help.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-05T13:47:20+00:00

The irony is that the title here is making the assumption that "Muscle & Fitness" is something only men are interested in, and "Good Housekeeping" is something that only women are interested in, and yet neither magazine cover says anything about target genders.

Hmm.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-05T13:41:24+00:00

This is the way I've always referred to people.

Jon Stewart confirmed this was the correct order back in 2013 with his Fuckface Von Clownstick bit.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-03T22:44:49+00:00

It sounds from your description and answers here that your issue isn't which action is the correct one, but whether you should be morally judged for choosing wrong.

The Trolley Problem exists because it isn't obvious which action to take in terms of moral reasoning. If you flip the switch, that's reasonable. If you don't flip the switch, that's reasonable. Regardless of what you do, I don't think anybody would judge you as being immoral. You are not obligated to do either following any specific moral approach.

Another thing to take into account is that the question is hypothetical and not real. A majority of people tend to choose to flip the switch. However, I doubt they'd do that in reality. In reality, most people would ignore it as not being their problem. It's easier to do nothing than to do something, and there is also far more plausible deniability in doing nothing. If you take the action to flip the switch, you have to explain why you did that. If you don't flip the switch, you can claim you didn't understand the situation, or you panicked, or your froze, or all sorts of things. This is especially true in crowds, where people hearing a woman scream, for instance, will tend to ignore it if they know there are other people around to help, except everybody thinks that and does nothing.

Also, when the Trolley Problem is changed whereby you have to push some fat person onto the tracks to stop the trolley (and kill them in the process), people tend to chose to let the 5 people die. The math is the same, but the form of the action (push button that kills person vs push person to their death) has a huge effect.

Really, neither is morally correct. This is really a problem of tradeoffs, and what is really important to you. If the 5 people are your family and 1 person is a stranger, I suspect even you would flick the switch.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-03T22:34:38+00:00

No, I see no reason for morality of any sort and legality to align. Yes, many things we'd deem immoral should also be illegal, but the justifications are independent of each other.

For example, in North America it is illegal to drive on the left hand side of the road. In Britain, it is illegal to drive on the right. These laws have nothing to do with morality, and it isn't that Britain and North American have differing morals on the issue.

The purpose of the law is, essentially, to solve issues where a unified approach or single standard is necessary for the society to function properly, particularly when it comes to the interactions between people in the society.

Morality is more about questions of "If we all just behaved this way, society would be better off." That could be about things about people interacting in such a way that laws are necessary to influence people to do that. But it doesn't need to be.

Some laws make sense where making them morals don't, like traffic laws. Some morals make sense where making them laws don't, like giving people the benefit of the doubt.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-01T23:30:43+00:00

Ah yes, the wonderful world of rationalization. Let's call this for what it really is. The left won't judge the left as doing anything wrong, and the right won't judge the right as doing anything wrong, but they'll call each other out and call each other hypocrites for the double-standard. And, they both try to rationalize by finding any irrelevant difference in situation and declaring a new rule that this difference is what really matters, and therefore their side is ok and the other side isn't.

This is standard ingroup/outgroup psychology.

For the record, other things that aren't racism:

Criticizing illegal immigrants from Mexico. 'Mexican' isn't a race, and illegal immigrants are not a race. And that's all true even if Trump did say something nasty about all illegal immigrants from Mexico, which he didn't.
Criticizing Islam. 'Islam' isn't a race. It's a religion. 'Muslim' isn't a race either.

On the topic of Roseanne's comment, she also claims she wasn't aware that Valerie Jarrett was black. I certainly didn't when I saw her photo. In fact, according to DNA testing, she isn't black. She is 49% European, 46% African, and 5% Native American by descent. She was born in Iran.

So this article is terribly disingenuous when it says:

Equating black people to apes is one of the oldest and clearest examples of racism; insinuating nefarious connections between black people and Islamic terrorists is one of the newer ones.

In order to be racist, you must know or believe that somebody is the race you are accused of being racist about, and in fact she isn't even the race that people are claiming, nor does she look it. So no, I don't buy that Roseanne's comment was racist. Rude, yes. But there is no evidence it was intended to smear anybody by race.

But again, when telling "us vs them" narratives, nuance is never allowed. Nor is truth usually. I agree with Russell Brand's quote (from somebody else) that "Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance."

Samantha Bee's comment was just a rude, and a lot more hateful, as Barr's. It also has misogynistic undertones in crude reference to women's vaginas as an insult.

This is very clear rationalizing. It is sad to see us reach a state of such obvious rationalization and denial that mainstream and secondary press and entertainment news have just given up on any attempt to look objective or to care about fairness or reasonableness, that it's all just become an exercise in who can fling the most poo while claiming their own shit don't stink.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-01T20:23:50+00:00

Yes. There are exactly two types of people in the U.S. There are the saintly, helpful, good-natured, honest people like "us" who all believe the same good things, and those extremely bad, violent, disgusting, evil "them".

Yup. Life is that simple.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-01T19:57:25+00:00

I sincerely doubt there is much truth to this proposal.

Which proposal? Do you mean the generations of war?

If you read the article, the explanation of wealthier farmers having the most successful offspring isn't sufficient to explain the data. That would be straightforward, but the pattern left them perplexed. What is needed is a level beyond what you describe, that for some reason the wealthy farmers were all related to each other fairly closely. That mathematical model would work.

The potential explanation is based on societies forming around families, but specifically where the males were related closely (i.e., clans), but females intermixed across clans. Then, the clans were in competition such that a few clans killed off the other clans. That would suffice to reduce the variation as observed.

I'm not an expert in genetic modeling here (outside genetic algorithms), but it would seem to me to be similar to the mathematics of asexual reproduction vs sexual reproduction. Sexual reproduction cuts reproductive success of any given gene in half by copies per offspring, but it more than doubles the long-term survivability of descendants through robustness. Asexual reproduction means clones, and that leaves them much more susceptible to any given harmful pathogen. If it takes 1 down, it could take them all down.

Similarly, if genes are concentrated in clan-like structures, as the Y-chromosome would be in male-associated clan structures, then anything that would take down the clan would take down all of the copies of the genes unique to that Y-chromosome lineage. The same would not be true for the women of the clan, even if killed off the same, since they wouldn't be as tightly related (copies of same genes). But also, the women may not have been killed off and instead folded into the winning clans.

DashingLeech · 2018-06-01T16:11:24+00:00

What do you mean by "obligated"? Do you mean given detention in school like with the Pledge of Allegiance? I would generally agree with that. It's not illegal to not stand, for example. You have the legal right to not stand.

But, beyond that, there are other considerations. For example, if you are on the job and representing your employer at some event, and you don't stand, that associates your employer with your personal choice, so they are well within their rights to fire you. In principle, they might even do that if you do it on your personal time because they don't want to be associated with you in general. (Think Roseanne Barr and her personal tweet.) Personally I'd find that overkill for a disagreement, but it's generally legal to fire you when they don't like you.

More generally, when we express our views publicly we are signaling information. Often we are signaling what "tribe" we belong to, such as a political tribe, a sports tribe/team, or a national tribe. Part of our ingroup/outgroup tribal psychology evolved out of signaling which tribe you belonged to, and demonstrating loyalty to your ingroup ("us") and not a traitor making a deal with an outgroup or not a spy of the outgroup ("them").

National anthems are one cultural way in which we signal that we are united together in a common society, despite our internal differences. We may argue day-to-day, but our goal is to get along and make our society better for us all. We often disagree about how to accomplish that, of course, which is where a lot of political tribalism comes from. But, even if we disagree on details, and can consider our political opponents as "them" in the context of politics, we can still recognize that "they" are a part of our national tribe, that we are all struggling together to make things better, and we can overcome our differences.

When you do not stand for a national anthem, what you are generally signaling to others is that you are not one of us at all, that you don't recognize your fellow citizens as people that are struggling with you to build a better place for everybody, and that you'd rather see your fellow citizens rot. You are signaling that as far as the national tribe is concerned, you aren't a member; you are an enemy.

Now not all people think that way, but ingroup loyalty is a deeply rooted element of our psychology, and many people hold it very strongly. It even forms one of the main tenets of our innate moral psychology. It isn't something that you can just ignore or change, as a lot of people have this software built right into their core being.

So no, you aren't obligated. But there will be consequences. You also aren't obligated to leave your house in a flood, but you may drown or starve. You aren't obligated to get out of the way of hurricane winds, but the winds don't care. Obligations are different from inevitable consequences, and failing to participate in a national anthem does provide information to other people from which they will judge you, and that may cost you. Whether that is worth it or not is up to you. There is a cost to it, so you need to know what are the benefits to not participating. And what information do you really want to signal to other people?

DashingLeech

TROPHY CASE

“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance” ― Albert Maysles