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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Not all people are logical. I had a coworker who honestly thought all women were better than all men and all dogs were better than all people, in every category, for both. She argued that endurance was a more important athletic skill than strength for humans but not for dogs and that speed was only important if it was significantly faster than humans can run. You could argue her into the tightest of corners and she’d walk through the walls because she didn’t have any internal logic.

    She was really capable in an academic sense, but it was impossible for me to consider her smart. She was pretty fun though, and wasn’t shitty to the men in her life or anything, bizarrely. She did not make it known to them in any way and she behaved perfectly kindly towards them, she just didn’t respect them. She was like the inverse of the better husbands in mad men (minus the cheating and/or abuse- I only watched the first season, so I don’t know how bad it gets).

    I wouldn’t really say we were friends, because it made it really hard to respect her, but we were friendly in the huge, hostile office with 95% of the staff at least twenty years our senior.


  • You can read it. You could also read it as early as this review in the winter of 1982-83. The article begins on page ten with the relevant mention on page 11.

    If you scroll to page 50-51 of the pdf that was declassified, you’ll see a transit slip (the missing page 48 in the book is because it’s a blank page in the book following a section that ends on an odd number, like the missing pages 18 and 52). I’m guessing that piece of paper was the relevant document and it was found being used as a bookmark in this book. Scroll further to page 56 of the pdf, to see the supplementary reading and that’s what I’m basing my skepticism on. The Wikipedia page is just a helpful summary.






  • I’m an American immigrant in Germany, and I do encounter US defaultism, but the thing that always strikes me most about American tourists or new Americans studying abroad at the beginning of the semester is almost the opposite. They believe that they can loudly speak English in a college town in public without being overheard or understood and they’re very wrong.

    I teach German to new arrivals here, and at least one of my students was in a bar once with an American who reassured him that “nobody understands us,” to which people at two neighboring tables answered that they could just fine.

    Of course, the underlying assumption is that Europeans, like Americans, don’t commonly master foreign languages (I don’t necessarily blame Americans for our foreign language skills: it does come up a lot less in the US than in Europe and imo, it’s one of the biggest flaws of our education system that kids often start learning a foreign language at age 11-12, with some districts I’ve heard starting as late as 15-that’s obviously a huge handicap).

    The most deeply seated example I know is probably the utter confusion most Americans have at hearing that insulting people is illegal. I don’t hate that insults are forbidden, but my preference would be for them to be legal. That said, during my nearly ten years in Germany and my over twenty years in the US, the majority of Americans I’ve known have held their tongues on uncomplimentary things much more than the majority of Germans. That’s due to a bunch of cultural factors, but the important thing for me is that even though there’s a law that ostensibly limits speech here and not there, the law doesn’t actually cause self censorship or a chilling effect on expression (between the two comparatively, I’m sure there are countries that speak more freely than Germans, and that might be due to a combination of cultural factors and legal protection).


  • Tbh, I used that phrasing specifically because you were snippy about someone else making a claim based on their own experience and I was trying to prod you about the evidence you’re using.

    When people kill each other “for no reason,” there’s often still a reason (though not an excuse)- territory in the case of gang or murder of romantic partners, protection or survivor’s benefits for your own family for soldiers killing in war, or people accidentally letting a killer instinct loose during play for people who get into brawls or similar. Even horrific crimes like genocide are committed out of a dual protective of kin/and aggressive of outsiders instinct.

    The Wikipedia lists possible reasons, but we don’t actually know why animals do this when it’s actively harmful to them yet.

    I don’t see how that supports that humans are one of a few species that kills for no reason, if we know that other animals kill in scenarios where it hurts them and we don’t actually commonly kill each other for no reason.