A mildly interesting account.

British North America
Joined September 2018
THREAD OF THREADS A majority will be about history, but a few will be about politics, art, and other random topics:
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The Brazilian election was stolen:
Essa é para quem entende de matemática no Brasil: Total de eleitores que compareceram às urnas: 1º turno: 125,3 milhões 2º turno: 128,2 milhões — aumento de 2,9 milhões Votação dos candidatos: Lula: de 53,9 para 64,2 milhões (+10,3 milhões) Flávio: de 56,1 para 59,8 milhões (+3,7 milhões) Caiado, Zema e Cury declararam apoio a Flávio. Diante desses números, fica a pergunta: como explicar essa virada?
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The Cheesecake Factory is lowbrow. But THIS… this right here is highbrow. What would we do without the sophisticated taste of our elites?
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Everyone, pat yourselves on the back. We did it. We saved humanity from the next ice age. Your car, your barbecue, your coal-fired electric power plant, have been played a critical part in an all-important mission:
Fossil fuel emissions may have prevented the next Ice Age wired.com/story/ice-age-begi…
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
Ce qui est inquiétant en France, ce n'est pas tellement la situation économique ou politique, mais le profond décalage entre la réalité et le logiciel mental des français. Personne n'est mentalement préparé à ce qui va arriver. Le breakdown mental sera cataclysmique pour beaucoup, comparable à celui d'un communiste convaincu vivant la chute de l'URSS.
🇫🇷 France's protests are turning into something MUCH BIGGER than a weekend of unrest. Huge crowds are flooding the streets over soaring living costs and concerns about democracy. In Paris alone, police counted 110,000 demonstrators. And the movement isn't winding down. Protest organizers are already building toward a nationwide GENERAL STRIKE on November 5. What started as street protests is becoming a sustained challenge to the French government. Writer: Oliver
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The older you get the more you realize that politics are psychology: the vast majority of people believe what they do as an extension of their ingrained personalities. They don’t reason from first principles, or adjust policy based on data: they’re woke lefties or tradcons or AI doomers or accelerationists because the political shoe fits the mental foot. Few ever change sides, and if so only after contact with the results of their politics (and usually not even then). Because to do so wouldn’t be updating an opinion, but changing their entire self, and nobody intentionally casts themselves into that confusing abyss.
Dario Amodei was so worried about Y2K that his high school teacher still remembers it decades later. He’s been a doomer for much longer than I thought!
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“Houston, we have a problem:”
Burn this image into your brain and never forget it.
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This is what strong evidence looks like:
The decline of the hedgehog is mainly caused by the huge recent expansion of the badger population. In both time and place there is a strong negative correlation between badger numbers and hedgehog numbers. The scientific evidence that an increase in Mr Brock may well be the chief cause of Mrs Tiggywinkle’s demise is overwhelming. There’s the direct evidence – the hollowed-out prickle-bearing skins left behind after a badger eats a hedgehog. Only badgers can open a hedgehog after it rolls up in defence with prickles on the outside. Foxes and dogs cannot. Badger predation is often found to be the main cause of hedgehog death in studies in this country. There’s the timing evidence. The decline in hedgehogs coincided with the rise in badgers since the latter’s protection began in the 1970s and was strengthened in the 1990s. Anecdotally, there are clear-cut cases to show this is likely to be cause and effect, not coincidence. Kew Gardens had a thriving hedgehog population until the mid 1980s when badgers first arrived there. Today, says the Royal Botanic Gardens’ website, “Kew is teeming with badgers”. There are now more than 20 badger setts and hedgehogs are hardly ever seen, and if they are don’t last long. Habitat change and development cannot be the cause in Kew, because there has not been any. There’s the spatial evidence. Throughout England hedgehogs (great worm eaters) have vanished from worm-rich pastureland, where badgers thrive, and cling on only in suburban gardens and amenity grassland, where badgers so far have not penetrated much. Even here, as one study put it: “the probability of hedgehog occurrence in suburban habitats declined towards zero in areas of high badger density.” As a general rule, wherever badgers are present at a density higher than about one main sett every four square kilometres, hedgehogs are absent. In most of rural England, sett density is two or three times higher. There’s the behavioural evidence. Back in the 1990s, ecologists discovered that the smell of badgers alone is enough to deter hedgehogs from entering an area. And hedgehogs released into areas of excellent habitat high-tailed it out of there if they smelt badger. They do not wait to be eaten. There’s the international evidence. Sweden has also blamed its decline in hedgehogs on rising badger numbers. In the Netherlands, scientists reported this yearthat hedgehogs are now confined mostly to urban areas, despite roads and development, because of the spread of badgers in rural areas. There’s the experimental evidence, which is the clincher. The randomized badger control trials, carried out between 1998 and 2006 in 30 different parts of the country, provided an opportunity to see what happened to hedgehog numbers if badger numbers were reduced. In pasture land, where hedgehogs are mostly extinct, there was of course little effect. But in “amenity grassland” – parks, lawns, gardens, playing fields etc – there was a dramatic explosion in hedgehog numbers in those areas where badgers were culled: hedgehog density almost trebledfrom an average of 0.9 per hectare to 2.4 per hectare in just five years. By contrast in the control areas where no badgers were culled, the hedgehog density remained unchanged at 0.3 per hectare over the same period.  So we know one way to increase hedgehog numbers: reduce badger numbers. No other approach has been demonstrated to have such an effect. Given that badgers are highly effective predators of bumble bees (those who try to study bumble bees complain that most of the nests they find get dug out and eaten by badgers) as well as of ground nesting birds, and that they carry bovine tuberculosis, there is little doubt that lower badger densities would be good for the ecology of the British countryside as well as for farming. There is nothing natural about the density at which badgers and foxes live in Britain today.
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
"Hispanic" is an administrative categorization and not a real ethnic group. Cubans are very different phenotypically and culturally than Mexicans. This should not be shocking.
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The Palestinian cause has compelled swallowed the left. It’s so bizarre.
A large protest against Marine Le Pen and her party has started in Orleans. They are now out marching in a sea of Palestinian flags.
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Seriously. By “trooning out” (non-derogatory), Elon’s daughter indirectly killed like 14 million people.
Elon Musk’s daughter coming out at transgender is his villain origin story.
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Third world building standards:
🇰🇪 An 18-storey building under construction collapsed in Nairobi, Kenya Numerous people, including construction workers and nearby pedestrians, are trapped under the rubble.
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
Gorbachev's anti-alcohol campaign is another counter-example to the claim that prohibition doesn't work. It massively reduced mortality among men, but also crime and various other alcohol-related problems. They only reverted to previous levels after it was abandoned. Sure, it was a huge mistake in the context of the time because it destroyed the consumer market and the state budget, but this was due to the specific Soviet context, with extreme reliance of the budget on the turnover tax for revenue and the rigidity of the planned economy. Excise taxes on alcohol are already pretty high in most developed countries, but as much as I enjoy drinking, there is probably a good case for raising them even more. This is arguably true even in countries that are past the point where the elasticity of tax revenue they generate with respect to the rate has become negative.
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And no one will be held to account for this wrong prediction:
10 years ago, you were constantly told Great Barrier Reef was essentially dead Wrong at the time Today, spectacularly wrong, with last 5 years top 5 for coral cover Sources: xitter.cf/BjornLomborg/status/21… Wrong already then: theconversation.com/great-ba…
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
Oh my…. This not good This very bad.
European spreads are exploding. France leading the way. la coloscopie
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
🔴🇫🇷 ALERTE INFO - Des nouvelles images montrent ce qui s’est passé à Limoges et a provoqué l'incendie de la Mairie. Que remarquez-vous ? (@lepopulaire_fr)
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
To understand this dramatic decline one has to keep in mind the following: 1. Scholarship (careful documentation, proper citation, analysis, developing arguments on the basis of extensive knowledge of prior arguments), the invention of universities, BA, MA, and PhD degrees ----- are all White male accomplishments. 2. As universities became hostile to White men, and masses of females, blacks, and immigrants were brought in, together with DEI, scholarship could not but decline dramatically. Generally speaking, women don't work as hard intellectually as men; and black women are only interested in the study of black women, which means the study of a group that has 0 scholarly legacy. 3. All the fields of knowledge were invented by White men: sociology, economics, history, philosophy, all the sciences, anthropology, archeology...Other races have a hard time understanding or appreciating these disciplines. Indians and East Asians focus primarily on career oriented disciplines, which don't require Dissertations.
🧵The number of humanities dissertations produced annually has declined by almost half, according to a new analysis. The same report shows that language related to power and identity surged while treatments of “Western,” “European,” and “American” turned increasingly negative.
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The French 10-year bond yield crossed 5% today. France is going bankrupt. I love France but this is a good and necessary step that will help it shake off socialism, even as it’s simultaneously shaking off the mistakes of mass immigration. France is going to be at the forefront of history over the next few years, leading the way for us all. Keep your eye on it.
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This is normal, I’m sure:
🇫🇷 After mass looting attacks, French business owners are hiring Chechen security guards to protect their businesses.
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Living through the end of civilization is endlessly fascinating:
Finland has a disturbing online trend called "rot streamers", who are usually substance abusers who do retarded and degenerate stuff for views and generate huge audiences. Recently, a 23-years old Finnish female streamer "IdaSofya" k**led herself on Tiktok live.
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The Matthew Principle retweeted
They made up a polling firm, made up polls, and got included in major aggregators… Their polls were featured on MSNOW.
Absolutely incredible… "Wedgewood Polls" just admitted they are a fake polling firm and made up their polls. Their fake polls have been posted in both the NYT and Nate Silver’s averages.
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