This was the kind of statistic that got waved around in 2020 when we were told not getting jabbed and not wearing drywall hangers’ masks meant we were killing everybody’s meemaws.

LE is based on observed mortality rates. 2020 saw excess deaths that were (correctly) attributed to COVID, which means that absent COVID those people would have died at a later time, ergo COVID decreased LE. There’s nothing arcane about it; the logic is sound.

The measures taken may or may not have been excessive at one point or another until the less dangerous COVID strains became dominant and we figured out who’s most at risk, but the death toll can’t be handwaved away.

Jokic is remarkably resilient for a big man and a lot of it has to do with his style of play. He can’t really jump, he only dunks when it’s absolutely necessary and he rarely if ever contests shots on defense. Unless he gets bored and quits or has some freak injury, he could play full seasons at championship level until he’s 40.

On the other hand, he’s a huge liability on defense as he can’t protect the rim against the more athletic blacks. If he were at least an average defender, he might already have won a couple more rings and be in the GOAT conversation.

The taint of “Racism” comes from your comment section.

This is untrue. Deranged twitterites aside, all Sailer’s detractors have managed to come up with to brand him a racist was his suggestion that Louisiana’s “Let The Good Times Roll” motto may not be very beneficial for blacks to adopt as their modus vivendi. Besides, anyone that delves on the topic of race is bound to be smeared as a racist by some partisan no matter what they say.

The comments section is an integral part of Sailer’s blog and I guarantee you its popularity would tank if he were to turn comments off. It might have made sense in Takimag, whose comments section was full of spammers, basement dwellers and a few actual racists, but the comments here are often on par with the posts themselves in terms of quality.

I didn’t know the man Bump indirectly accuses of thought crime, so I googled “William Henry III”. The results are funny: At the top of the search results page he is correctly identified as an “American literary critic”, but instead of him the photo depicts a young mestiza. So I go over to the Images tab, and the first hits are quotes of his from the azquotes website, but the accompanying photo depicts a man too old to be 44 and too healthy-looking to have a heart attack. The 12th image finally shows someone who looks like he could have been in his 40s, looks unhealthy and is morbidly obese. Now his premature death makes a lot more sense. Bad genes and fat make for a deadly combination.

Still, the search results are weird. Is he being deliberately memoryholed, is it the work of a troll or is it just some random search engine code glitch?

The Jewish population entered the territory legally, bought land legally, improved it legally, started businesses legally, built public institutions legally

And none of that would have helped them had they lost the war in 1948, whereby they would’ve been massacred or expelled or both. Legitimacy is not asserted with paperwork but with real political and military power. The Arabs genuinely believe their land was taken from them and it doesn’t really matter whether that’s objectively true or false; what matters is they continue being hostile towards Israel and they keep losing.

Armenians could claim legal rights to Artsakh — now they’re all gone and none of those rights matter: they lost the war. The modern Turkish state is built on the corpses of Asia Minor’s Christian populations, but nobody bats an eye about that anymore and Mustafa Kemal was even honored by the United Nations. Would any of that have happened had he lost the war in 1922?

when we speak of new territory in Europe today we must principally think of Russia and the border states subject to her. Destiny itself seems to wish to point out the way for us here

See, it wasn’t poor Adolf’s own will to start the war, it was destiny; artists have no agency. And it was a happy coincidence that those new territories contained all those pesky Jew peasants living in shtetls who controlled the world. Two birds with one stone!

As long as you keep calling ‘football’ a game you mostly use your hands to handle the ball with, I highly doubt ‘soccer’ will catch on in the US.

More seriously now, I think that if Americans focused on futebol as much as on their major team sports, they would’ve won multiple World Cups by now. Much of the talent currently in NFL or NBA don’t have the physical attributes to play futebol at the highest level (MLB players maybe yes?).

What’s more interesting is what the racial composition of a top-flight US national team would be, given that the French national team is >50% full black, the English ~30% full black and the rest of the European national teams field more black or half-black players each year.

My uneducated guess would be something more like the NFL rather than the NBA racial composition, because in futebol the West African athletic advantage is mitigated by futebol favoring players with short center of gravity, ergo players with shorter limbs, and also because field vision and individual talent with the ball is important in virtually every position, unlike e.g. the NFL.

Where it gets really scary is where the LLM is smarter than the SMARTEST human and starts to look at humans the same way we look at chickens.

LLMs are just glorified databases and their very structure prevents them from achieving any kind of intelligence or sentience. People in the AI sector don’t say it upfront in public because they benefit from the buzz generated, but if you talk to them privately they will admit that Artificial General Intelligence is very, very far away, if ever achievable.

There’s also the energy requirements issue, as the larger LLMs are more power-hungry and eventually the cost vs accuracy tradeoff might become too unfavorable to progress any further.

You’re being undeservedly harsh on Sailer. First of all, when he published this post, Lira’s death had not been confirmed by a reliable official source, and he had already allegedly died at least twice since the start of the war in the Ukraine. Even Tucker Carlson was very careful in his wording when he tweeted about it.

Other than that, Lira was no hero or paragon of virtue. You call him brave; I’d rather call him an adventurous, risk-taking publicity hound who did all sorts of different things before supporting Putin’s invasion in 2022. It’s all there on the net if you do a simple google search.

He apparently chose to stay in the Ukraine while being hostile to the regime because he thought he could get away with it, being quasi-internet famous and an American citizen, even though he could have been alive now if he stayed at home and stopped posting or made provisions to leave the country.

That said, his death in Ukrainian custody is another proof that the Ukraine is no western country and the Zelensky government is just a bunch of post-Soviet brutal oligarchs who have little to do with democracy (just like Russia, of course). Instead of just deporting Lira and everyone forgetting about him, they now run the risk of making him a hero and losing the propaganda war along with the funding, if his death gains traction.

a lot of light here: