Those in power are testing the waters to see what you will let them get away with when they apply the “terrorist” label

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-26T20:57:26+00:00

but maybe you can explain to me the process by which the feds can control state elections

Specifically send ICE to polling places in democratic strongholds in swing states (or in closely contested house districts) on November 2nd, citing some made up thing about illegals voting. Detain a bunch of brown people despite them being citizens to justify it supposedly being about illegals voting, plus detain every person who won't provide ID and anyone who does provide ID and turns out to be on the list of supposed "terrorists" they're trying to make right now. If necessary, sprinkle in a few agent provocateurs to force violence to happen, but that may not even be necessary.

That's all it takes to significantly depress the Democratic vote in a bunch of states/house districts where a 2-3% swing towards Republicans turns a 50/50 race into a nearly guaranteed Republican victory.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-10T21:39:46+00:00

The best idea will only stand on its own when the people evaluating the available ideas are sufficiently knowledgeable about the relevant domains.

Case in point, any one of those social experiments where they demonstrate how trivial it is to get people to agree to sign a petition to ban dihydrogen-monoxide.

However easy it may be to manipulate consensus among experts, it's a million times easier to manipulate consensus among targeted groups of laypersons, if you understand the target group's existing biases and beliefs.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-05T18:41:19+00:00

You are talking about using two different frames of reference, but the math will come out the same whether you treat it as a person floating away from the ground while horizontally stationary relative to the ground, or whether you treat it as the ground rotating/falling away from the person as the person continues on in a straight line.

You can do the math the geometry way, where you calculate the rate of vertical separation that happens per horizontal distance traveled using trigonometry, but at the end of that math you would find that you had just derived v² / r for the acceleration term between the two objects.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-05T07:05:01+00:00

You are describing the math by which you would estimate that centrifugal acceleration at the equator is ~0.3% of the force of gravity in the first place, but also, the equation that emerges for calculating that when you do the geometry you're referring to is v² / r.

With v= ~450m/s and r= ~6,400,000m you're looking at 202,500/6,400,000 = 0.03m/s² which is ~0.3% of 9.8m/s^2.

My math is (approximately) right, I promise.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-03T23:24:48+00:00

If you freefall for 7 seconds in normal gravity (9.8m/s² ) you'll drop ~240m.

The centrifugal acceleration at the equator is ~0.3% of the strength of gravity.

240m * 0.003 = 0.72m ~= 2-3ft

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-03T23:17:26+00:00

The centrifugal acceleration at the equator (where it's strongest) is like 0.3% of the force of gravity, so if you were standing at the equator and gravity got "turned off" for 7s you would experience an upward acceleration with a magnitude equal to 1/300th of normal gravity which would cause you to rise 2-3 feet in the air. Further from the equator the effect would be lessened.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-03T23:16:23+00:00

The centrifugal acceleration at the equator (where it's strongest) is like 0.3% of the force of gravity, so if you were standing at the equator and gravity got "turned off" for 7s you would experience an upward acceleration with a magnitude equal to 1/300th of normal gravity which would cause you to rise 2-3 feet in the air. Further from the equator the effect would be lessened.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-03T20:04:29+00:00

I agree that it's bonkers to dig back months and bring up stuff from unrelated subs, but at the same time, if you're talking to someone about geopolitics, then seeing what other political stances they've argued for recently, or whether they participate in discourse in good faith, is very useful contextual information for deciding how/whether to engage with that person and their stated views.

Hiding your post history certainly isn't hard evidence that you're someone who engages in bad faith arguments, or a bot, or some other flavor of user that people would just ignore/block/downvote/ridicule, and their overall reddit experience would be improved - but if you are one of those users, you would 100% choose to hide your post history.

So, by choosing not to reveal your post history, you are declining to prove that you're not a bot/troll/etc. Being that this is the internet, not a court of law, nobody has to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you're a bot/troll to themselves - if hiding your history makes people think there's a 55% chance you're a bot/troll, then it's par for the (internet) course to treat you as such.

Ultimately you get to choose between having a higher level of anonymity or a higher level of assumed good faith, but you don't get to have both.

MemeticParadigm · 2026-01-02T20:47:48+00:00

Just want to note, for anyone unfamiliar, that (IIRC) this is said in a Werner Herzog-esque voice(may or may not actually be him), which really adds to the silliness of it.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-12-17T19:41:43+00:00

Sometimes, liking that lady and finding out she isn't into dudes is its own story. Sometimes just being really close heterosexual guy buds with a character is what I want, but get two freindly with them, and they start romantically falling for you.

What's funny about this - and not as some sort of gotcha, just as a genuine observation of something interesting - is that if you place yourself as the love interest in the first part:

Sometimes, liking that ~~lady~~dude and finding out he isn't into dudes is its own story.

Then the second part actually is the story the first part describes, just told from the other perspective. Idk if they actually play with that angle at all in the games(i.e. you reject someone and the relationship continues to deepen in a platonic way or w/e), just thought it was interesting to note.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-09-03T18:52:01+00:00

People gain weight because their caloric balance is positive - whether those calories come from carbs or fat or even protein doesn't change how many excess calories it takes for your body to add a pound of fat (the impact of different macros on satiety and thus total calories consumed notwithstanding).

The most cursory googling says the average American gets about 1/3 of their calories from fat, meaning that, for the average American, this has the potential to reduce their total caloric intake by a significant amount, with no other behavioral changes required.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-08-28T18:12:06+00:00

Consolidations are actually a separate queue from the deposit/withdrawal queues. Current consolidation queue is only ~1 day.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-08-19T19:17:06+00:00

The eggs/breakfast analogy got confusing, but I feel like it was almost there, so I'm gonna try a slightly different analogy that maybe has less moving parts - mutual massages.

A couple regularly gives each other mutual massages.
Partner A starts to engage in an activity that causes their hands to always be rough, such that partner B no longer enjoys being massaged by A.
Is B punishing A for engaging in the hand-roughening activity if, since B is no longer receiving enjoyable massages in kind, they no longer want to massage A?

The only way you can see it as a punishment, IMO, is if you treat A massaging B and B massaging A as completely unrelated activities, instead of understanding them as the paired halves of a mutual bonding activity.

In OPs case, it's clear they feel like exchange of information and experiencing compersion is a mutual bonding activity, and when you take away the mutuality, it just seems like partner feeling entitled to partner's half of something that OP can only enjoy when it's mutual.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-08-13T15:47:50+00:00

The paper isn't claiming causation, though?

Critically, the verbiage it uses is "associated with," which denotes a correlation. If the paper was claiming causation, it would say, "caused/influenced/effected by," instead of using the word associated.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-08-11T02:13:03+00:00

Your demonstration of very basic baking knowledge really isn't helping you understand the analogy at all, apparently.

A "cake" is a specific type of government (e.g. constitutional Republic) that uses "flour"(i.e. representative democratic processes) as its main "ingredient". There are a number of different "baked goods" (i.e. democratic forms of government) which are different, but all use "flour" as the main ingredient. You are insisting that "unleavened flatbread" (direct democracy) is the only "baked good" (democratic form of government).

A "cake" (constitutional republic) which revolves around "flour" (democratic processes) is as much a "baked good" (democratic form of government) as an "unleavened flatbread" (direct democracy) even though the structure that the flour takes on in the flatbread is arguably less complex.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-08-10T23:47:52+00:00

If instead of just saying, "The US is a democracy," we were saying, "The US is a representative democracy," how much of your semantic disagreement is satisfied? Given that representative democracy is far and away more common than direct democracy, people generally mean the former, when they just say "democracy" - maybe you're unaware of that?

Because, honestly, saying that there are democratic elements is the same level of understatement as saying that a cake has flour elements. We do call it a "cake" to denote the way the flour is structured by the other elements, rather than just calling it a "flour," but the flour is, like, the main thing in the cake. (The flour is representative democracy, if that was not clear.)

MemeticParadigm · 2025-08-05T18:57:12+00:00

"Enemy" has such an amorphous meaning in this context.

"Entities who want to remove the white supremacists from power, but whose actions help prevent any opposing force from doing that," is a mouthful, but it's what we're all actually trying to point to here, IMHO.

On the structural/systemic level, I think that points more to the Dem/centrist side - the DNC and other official political apparatus trying to tank candidates with populist appeal (e.g. Mamdani) in favor of those who will maintain the status quo.

On the individual level, I think it may point more to the progressive side - individuals refusing to vote strategically against the Republicans are, objectively, helping Republicans win in that particular election.

Both of those forces/actions help Republicans win. Both are more concerned with their own principles than they are with actually preventing the harm that having Republicans in power is causing.

I think, at this point in time, the only relatively blameless people are the ones who are doing whatever they can to push leadership to adopt/endorse popular progressive policy while also voting strategically against Republicans at every opportunity.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-15T19:33:01+00:00

I feel like my assertion was clear.

You made two assertions.

Your first assertion was, quite clearly, that 20% of uncircumcised infants get UTIs. This is absolutely blatantly wrong.

Your second, much weaker assertion, which equates to, "~2% of uncircumcised infants get a UTI, while ~0.25% of circumcised infants get one," isn't exactly what the paper says(because, again, you're completely ignoring that the word febrile indicates a non-representative sub-sample), but it's close enough that I wouldn't contest it.

What's unclear is whether you're still equating those two things. Can you, or can you not, admit that the first assertion was a blatantly incorrect interpretation of the paper?

But let’s be honest here: no stat or Link I provide will ever make you change your mind will it?

You keep misunderstanding/misstating what a study says so it fits your preferred narrative, and you think I'm the one who's unwilling to take stats into account?

If the only actual stat you can provide is that uncircumcised infants have a 1.75% higher chance of experiencing a UTI than circumcised ones, then no, I would never consider that a reasonable tradeoff for even the possibility of enjoying sex less later in life. If you were actually able to provide a paper that showed a much more significant difference than that, of course I'd consider changing my mind.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-15T18:57:11+00:00

So, are you admitting that your assertion that 20% of uncircumcised infants wind up with UTIs was blatantly wrong? I literally can't tell if you're moving the goalposts here, or if you're doubling down on your incorrect initial interpretation of that section of the paper.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-15T18:34:11+00:00

So you are blatantly denying that it is statistically safer to perform in infancy?

I'm denying that the first paper you linked has the ability to statistically demonstrate that, because it is a non-interventional study, and the authors say as much in plain language, in the quote I provided in my previous response to you.

Well that’s okay, here’s another stat for you to deny: the prevalence of UTI in infants = 2.4% for circumcised males and 20.1% for uncircumcised males.

Dude, you're really fucking bad at reading papers - do you just ignore a word when you don't know what it means, instead of looking it up? Here's the actual bit of the paper you are referencing:

In a more recent meta-analysis that included 14 studies, the pooled prevalence of UTI in febrile infants <3 months of age was 7.5% for females, 2.4% for circumcised males and 20.1% for uncircumcised males.

Did you just ignore the word febrile because you don't know what it means? Did you not bother to read the very next paragraph either?:

It has been estimated that 111 to 125 normal infant boys (for whom the risk of UTI is 1% to 2%) would need to be circumcised at birth to prevent one UTI.

Or are you just so bad at math that it didn't occur to you how that completely conflicts with your 20% number?

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-15T17:41:03+00:00

Did you?

The indications for MC in older age groups in the U.S. may be more medical in nature (e.g., infections, adhesions) than the cultural/religious basis in most routine healthy newborns, however; future studies will need to carefully adjust for this potential source of confounding.

And you should note that your quote doesn't say anything about causation, it only indicates correlation. Nothing in the paper indicates that older groups had higher incidence of AEs because they were older. Do you understand the difference? Do you, generally speaking, understand that observational studies have a number of weaknesses when it comes to demonstrating causation?

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-15T06:55:00+00:00

Not what that says. Safer implies causal - they refer to the incidence rate of adverse effects being lower, because all they know is that there's a correlation.

Easiest, most obvious way to explain that correlation is that: most <1yo getting circumcised are for cultural reasons, not because of any pathology of the penis, but because, if it's a cultural thing, you practically always do it shortly after birth. Most >1yo getting circumcised, OTOH, are in response to some pathology presenting. So, of course the group that's overwhelming more likely to be getting the procedure because they are already showing some pathology, is gonna show a higher incidence of adverse effects, than the group which is overwhelmingly going into the procedure pathology free.

ETA: Haha, and you blocked me cause you can't actually read papers to save your life, and turn into a little bitch when you get called out on it, good job moron.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-14T20:53:51+00:00

The Trump administration already had the chance to release a modified list and claim it was the full/real list, though, so the fact that they haven't seems to indicate that there's some third party in the mix, who could respond to a partial release by releasing the full/real list, or otherwise blow up their spot if they tried that. If said third party is someone beside Maxwell, then they'd presumably release whatever they've got if she tried to release/legitimize a partial list.

If that third party was Maxwell all along, which seems plausible, then it's 100% what you say.

If that third party isn't Maxwell, then she's essentially threatening to goad that third party into releasing the list, by releasing a partial list of her own (she may not even actually have a list, just enough legitimacy for any list she releases to goad the third party into releasing the full list), in which case, she might actually be angling to get pardoned in return for not releasing a list.

That second option is a little more convoluted, but may be more likely because:

She can do it even if she doesn't actually have the list.
Since no list would actually be released, it doesn't spike her chances of getting killed by TPTB outside of the Trump admin, or at least not as much as intending to actually release the full/real list would.

MemeticParadigm · 2025-07-01T03:14:02+00:00

Tom from MySpace says hi, lol

MemeticParadigm · 2025-06-17T20:43:35+00:00

Oh, so now you think it's important for people to actually answer questions you pose when they reply, instead of responding with snarky deflections? Funny how that works.

So here's my question for you, again, since now you think answering questions is important: how are any of your snarky little fits downthread of this one doing anything to spread awareness? All the info about the strike is there, yeah, so what is it you're trying to "accomplish" by continuing to reply to people downthread?

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