You just double-posted the previous post’s content into this one.

Encouraging young men to spend their time watching violence onscreen actually sounds much better than leaving them to come up with other ways to spend their free time. Violence has gone down for much of Tarantino’s violent career. As far as I’m aware, there’s no evidence fictional violence produces more real violence in aggregate.

Since the story indicates that most white employees also prefer working from home, perhaps the headline could have been “Black workers are normal, only moreso”.

If the cultural turn happened right after 1919, then shouldn’t the percentage have peaked prior to the 1920s rather than in the 1930s?

I find it interesting that the percentage never exceeds 50% in any decade of that graph, even though fiction is mostly read by women.

I was not expecting that bit at the end about his shooting the same guy a few days earlier. It shouldn’t have been that hard for the police to pick him up for that, and even if he was released without bail by a judge, that should have taken a few days by itself. Additionally, if you are talking to someone who shot you a few days ago “It’s whatever” does not sound like an appropriate response to a threat.

Tolkien always denied his work was an allegory. I don’t think we can simply conclude it was inspired by the Great War rather than the myths he has explicitly cited and were his normal object of study.

The problem seems to have been a failure to account for the human religious impulse.

Christ, Marx, Wood and Wei,
Led us to this perfect day.
Marx, Wood, Wei and Christ,
All but Wei were sacrificed.
Wood, Wei, Christ and Marx,
Gave us lovely schools and parks.
Wei, Christ, Marx and Wood,
Made us humble, made us good.

Africa isn’t weird for that pattern. Rather, what we think is normal is “W.E.I.R.D.” per Joe Henrich. Bryan Caplan wrote about that norm elsewhere (first inspired by some ethnography of Mexican villages, which actually reminded me a bit of some descriptions of ancient Rome):
https://www.econlib.org/archives/2006/11/the_envy_of_the.html

Which sitcom was it? Arli$$?

The two shootings you bring up at the top are in fact different and merit different treatment. The man who was shot was supposed to be tased, so the cop screwed up and it cannot be defended as a “good shooting”. Even if he had a warrant out, any sensible department would conduct an investigation to determine what should be done about that mistake. The second case was during a riot, in which the normal procedures of law enforcement for dealing with small numbers of offenders on a scene are insufficient. None of this is to say that people were right to be angry at “due process” (even if cops frequently do get away with indisputably “bad” shootings, like that black guy with a legal handgun shot in his car a few years ago) or that they should have been eager to throw away due process in the second case.

Isn’t “inciting a riot” already a crime?

Doh! I am nowhere close to familiar with Vietnamese naming patterns and assumed too much.

This guy did a more serious investigation of her claims:
https://twitter.com/ThaoHaPhD/status/1375233367084466179

“(somebody with the pronoun “they” who is mad that Yglesias, Greenwald, etc. are on Substack)”
I’m assuming that’s your wording, rather than a quote from the article as is currently indicated.

Yeah, she was initially derided as a phony for renaming herself after her first album (under her real name) didn’t make an impact. But the “poptimists” killed off the concern with authenticity associated with “rockism”. As a die-hard rockist, I will not give an inch to Del Rey.
https://www.vox.com/culture/2019/10/30/20853231/lana-del-rey-authenticity-career-norman-fucking-rockwell
The end of that article states that Billie Eilish is similar, but Eilish actually does fit the rockist mold of authenticity surprisingly well for a zoomer whose work is in a different genre. Siblings writing & recording their own music at home and uploading it to SoundCloud without any record company input is what the Wright brothers of NoMeansNo would have done if SoundCloud had existed in 1980.

This actually seems significantly different from the Columbine (or Texas Clock Tower) shootings you discuss. It’s a spree shooting of three different parlors. He had to drive a significant ways away from the first to get to the second. And the police didn’t find him at the second either, but he was close enough by that when he started shooting up the third the officers on the scene were able to hear and respond (it’s not clear if he was caught there or elsewhere).

The Volokh Conspiracy blog is currently hosted by Reason (previously they were hosted by the Washington Post, and before that self-hosted), but it seems odd to say that post was “at Reason”. Blog posts wouldn’t appear in the magazine, and Reason has no editorial control over the blog. Maybe it’s just me who remembers that lots of old posts (which were sometimes chained together in a way you could link to I haven’t seen anywhere else) can now be found at the new domain even though they have nothing to do with Reason.

For those who don’t want to click through to check, here’s a rot13 of each person’s list:

Carlos:
Evfxl Ohfvarff RG Sreevf Ohryyre’f Qnl Bss Gur Oernxsnfg Pyho Fvkgrra Pnaqyrf Xnengr Xvq Envqref bs gur Ybfg Nex Pnqqlfunpx

Steve:
Punevbg’f bs Sver Qnf Obbg Gur Evtug Fghss Nznqrhf Xblnnavfdngfv Jvgarff

Wasn’t that inspired by the real case of a radiohost murdered by neo-nazis?

I know Steve reads Andrew Gelman, so I wonder why he didn’t make a joke about the Lancet specifically.
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/?s=Lancet

Biculturalism leads to more conflict than genuine multiculturalism. I believe Sailer has noted that immigration into Canada helped weaken the Quebecois independence movement.

I was introduced to Glenn Loury as a “gutbucket liberal” on Bloggingheads.tv, but he had an ideologically varied past and is currently aligned with John McWhorter against the popular nonsense of Ibram Kendi. Reading the end of this post put me in mind of something he wrote recently:
https://quillette.com/2021/02/10/unspeakable-truths-about-racial-inequality-in-america/
One important difference is the emphasis he puts on African-American history as an example of how different things can be. But just as NBC/Scheinhart Wig Company would have a difficult time of making it 1997 again through science or magic, it’s unclear how to put the genie back in the box and return to the rates of social progress seen in the first half of the 20th century.

Larry Summers lost his job after pointing out that the standard deviation is higher for men than women. Something that occurred to me: since IQ is also correlated with lifespan, the earlier deaths of the lowest IQ men could shift the male distribution upward at later ages. Of course, average male & female lifespan isn’t equal, as women live longer.

If you go to https://www.unz.com/isteve/ it results in:
We’re sorry. That page could not be found.

In contrast, only a single Roman writer known to us warned that one should avoid living near swamps because they were full of little animals that get inside you and make you sick

Who?

I never worked in a restaurant, but someone I know was a host in a chain prior to being able to legally serve (due to the drinking age). A waiter complains about being assigned too many black tables, so this host then decides to assign this waiter a black table whenever possible. Waiter blows up at the host, and gets fired, the rest of the restaurant staff side with the host (or at least that’s what said host told me). Moral of the story: the squeaky wheel does not always get the grease.

The one that stands out to me is the Secretary of Education attending a vocational school. People in America often wonder why we don’t have much vocational training like Germany.

it’s model of how to choose the order in which to vaccinate is ridiculous

“it’s” is used for “it is”, whereas the possessive can just be written as “its”. The sentence is a little confusing if you start by assuming the former and then have to go back and replace it with the latter.

You might not like his politics, but Rabin’s a better writer than most at the AV Club now (and better than VDW).

Page at least was never in a heterosexual marriage, unlike so many of the Type 2s Steve is discussing (as well as Vanderwerff).

Never anybody from the middle range of mild-mannered males. Nobody has ever heard of a nice liberal NPR announcer with an indoor-voice announcing he was now a woman.

Why do you keep ignoring the example of Todd (now Emily) Vanderwerff? The one who accused Matthew Yglesias of making Vox “unsafe” by signing that open letter on free speech?

I had not realized The Ordeal of Civility was available via the Internet Archive. My local library has a copy, but it can’t be checked out, and I certainly don’t intend to sit down there for a long read now.

Yeah, the series comes down on the side of nature. The protagonist’s birth mother is a math PhD who went nuts and committed suicide, so as an orphan child she’s smarter than her peers and finishes her work in every class quickly enough to wander around and discover the janitor playing chess against himself. I suppose the fact that it was chess she discovered rather than some other quasi-mathematical topic to devote her substantial spare mental energy was arbitrary. The question is raised as to whether she might also have inherited her mother’s mental problems, but she seems to have gotten luckier on that trait.

I recall that earlier Steve noted gays trumped blacks in cases like that Scrubs actor fired for a slur.

“Wokism” includes a racial element, which is particularly salient now, but it’s not just that. It’s got a whole theory of “intersectionality” which permits white people to claim pokemon points as well and racial minorities who run afoul of it to get cancelled. You can’t explain how it’s tied in to “World War T” if it’s just race.

You have to justify every round

Given the very large numbers of rounds fired in numerous incidents, I find that particular bit hard to believe. “Shoot until the threat is neutralized” seems to be the thinking, and once the shooting starts there’s no need to rationalize an additional bullet.

Steve, why are you tweeting out links you haven’t even read? I suppose twitter has lower standards than your blog, but one would hope you’re engaging in at least a minimum of curation.

Israel is the largest producer and host of international online gambling sites

The linked article does not say that. The headline is “Some of The World’s Largest iGaming Firms Are From Israel”, and it doesn’t bother to compare any other countries’ producing/hosting of such sites or say which is the largest. It says Israel has a “significant share”, but doesn’t put a number on that. The article in turn cites a source which has succumbed to linkrot, but it is accessible via the internet archive, and a live version can be found elsewhere (I think the embassy may have lifted it while only crediting the author for the photos):
https://venturebeat.com/2015/10/23/the-deanbeat-two-decades-of-work-and-1b-in-sales-put-israels-game-industry-on-the-global-map/
That doesn’t claim they are the “largest” either, instead making the more modest claim that they’ve had some recent (though perhaps tenuous) success and now have a “disproportionate” share. Since no actual numbers comparing other countries has been provided, it could well be possible that Israel is the largest, although I suspect the articles would have said that if it could be established.

I expect they believe they have little power to get people to lose weight, given how difficult many who try find it. There are numerous other causes which may have even less hope for success that the media could take on, but they might find it harder to delude themselves about this. They might even have some personal experience in failing to lose weight, although being overweight is now correlated with being lower-class.

The warrant was for a no-knock raid. They are currently claiming they did knock, but there are no recordings of them doing so and the surviving person in the house denies that’s the case.

What cameras? My understanding is that the officers involved weren’t wearing bodycams, and no camera footage was shown in court. As for the neighbor:
https://twitter.com/radleybalko/status/1308924095048933377

My understanding is that he legally owned a gun, which you generally can’t do with a felony conviction.

My understanding is that no drugs were found there. The boyfriend legally owned a gun, which you generally can’t do with a felony conviction.

For those who want to read all of Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, I host it here:
http://teageegeepea.tripod.com/maumau.html

While I have learned in recent years how much worse the alternative to “overpolicing” can be, existing policing still seems needlessly harmful a good deal of the time, and the Breonna Taylor case in the news today would seem to be an example.

Dylan Matthews is right that a grad student isn’t really notable enough to get their own story. She should instead be an addendum to one of the higher profile frauds.

It’s completely normal for a politician running against an incumbent to associate anything bad happening with said incumbent. Trump himself did it when he was in that position. And since Trump hasn’t managed to stop the rioting, he can’t very well claim things will get better as soon as he’s elected. I do think it’s possible that rioters will just get bored later, but that doesn’t make for an effective campaign argument.

Is the problem with Democratic politicians or their constituents? Yglesias recently pointed out that the few Republican mayors of cities large enough to experience unrest haven’t done a better job, and Cochran in response merely noted that in small towns like the one he grew up in it would have been unthinkable for his neighbors to behave in such a way.

In Chicago we actually did have police killing people for gangsters. Some of it stemmed from when the Housing Authority had their own police force (created out of perceived neglect from CPD), which was later incorporated back into CPD.
https://theintercept.com/series/code-of-silence/

So it sounds like if they’d kept him sitting in the cop car, rather than letting him out to lie down as he requested, he might have had better odds of surviving?

I don’t see much evidence of him having his wits available. The stuff he’s saying wouldn’t get him out of any arrest. The closest he comes to even attempting that is saying “I ain’t like that”, although it was unclear what specifically he was denying there. At best he might have gotten an ambulance to arrive sooner, which would just result in him being handcuffed to a hospital bed and transferred to jail later.

This video is just sad. It’s not a case of some arrogant punk who thinks “I don’t feel like getting arrested today”. It’s someone freaking out.

No, I don’t think I’ve been to their website directly, just stats founds in mainstream publications.

I didn’t say typical intraracial violence was a “hate crime”. The very point I was making was that Jews could be the main target of hate crimes yet overall at a lower risk of crime because “hate crimes” are such a tiny percentage of crimes. My impression is that even when these Orthodox Jews are being violently assaulted it’s rarely lethal (admittedly, that was back when the NYPD was successfully inhibiting typical knuckleheads from carrying guns).

And I would like to devote some more space to the effectiveness of the NYPD. You talk about “so many New Yorkers” being victims of crime, and perhaps that’s becoming more the case now (although it also should be noted that none of the people shot recently were white and I don’t think asian either) and it was definitely the case in the past, but for a while NY really had it together. And I was arguing recently with someone about how rioting has predictably increased the homicide, resulting in more loss of “black lives” than can be reasonably attributed to police (particularly in NY, where the cops shoot people less often than the national average), and they were inclined to throw up their hands about how any effective law enforcement must infringe on civil rights. The NYPD had shown for years that effective law enforcement can result in less crime, less incarceration and even fewer arrests once the crime rate drops sufficiently. When NYers get fed up with crime again, they could return to that. And while other cities might not have the budget to afford the same ratio of officers to civilians, most could move in that direction, and considering the high costs of crime it would be worth the pay for more officers.

Something you could have mentioned but didn’t: Jews are the group most targeted for hate crimes in the U.S. Specifically, visibly Jewish Orthodox types in the greater NY area (ulta-Orthodox Jews also form some of the most officially “impoverished” communities, which per Scott Sumner shows how misleading poverty statistics are). This can be the case even if they’re less likely to be attacked compared to the general population overall because hate crimes are such a small fraction of total crimes. In terms of total crimes, young black males with less than a highschool education would be the most likely to be victimized, which would be in accord with “privilege” rankings except for particularly stupid “intersectional” ones which simply stack race and sex on top of each other rather than letting them interact as relevant for the outcome of interest.

“It would seem to me that caste discrimination is religious, racial, and ethnic discrimination.”
Language has long been one of the defining features of an ethnic group, but different castes speak the same language. The cross-cutting cleavages of caste and language has been given as the reason that the various parts of India didn’t develop into nation states. Pakistan is officially caste free due to being the country for Muslims, but it was initially dominated by Urdu-speaking Mohajirs who weren’t actually from any of the Pakistani states but instead from northern India. Eventually they ticked off the Bengali speakers in East Pakistan enough that they actually did split off to form a Bengali-speaking nation state, but an emphasis on Islam has so far been enough to keep the remaining components of West Pakistan united.

I blogged about it over a decade ago. And I still haven’t gotten around to reading “The Ordeal of Civility”.

Ezra responds to that characterization here:
https://twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1280960056733782018

Peter Moskos, who actually was a Baltimore cop for a while, said that basically all the homicides he dealt with stemmed from the drug trade (though that did include stupid beefing). That’s one guys view, but another thing worth considering is the impact on international homicide rates of access to US drug markets. That’s why latin America is more homicidal than Africa.

I’m struck by how Asians feel entitled to argue in public in the Los Angeles Times about Is It Good for the Asians?

It’s not that odd. It’s commonly argued that patriarchy is actually bad for men, so feminism is good, and that racism is bad for whites, so anti-racism is good (Scott Alexander had discussed the former as part of a motte-and-bailey argument, libertarian economists used to argue the latter when Jim Crow was in effect). She’s arguing against opponents of her position who are grounding their opposition in a form of self-interest, so it’s natural to argue against that. I didn’t see any evidence in those excerpts that Asians had ever actually benefited from affirmative action, but then I don’t think she actually believes that part of her argument.

More recent immigrants may be […] less likely to experience the effects of systematic discrimination.

So recent immigrants are privileged relative to their U.S born offspring? That seems extremely counter-intuitive to me.

The sons of slaveholding families married into families that had the most non-slaveholding wealth, and thus got back up near the top of the wealth distribution:
https://voxeu.org/article/intergenerational-effects-large-wealth-shock

I think that unrealistic hope and optimism has a lot to do with this. People are assuming that cops and the criminal justice system are to blame for a lot of the bad things that happen to black people. Remove them and the bad things go away too.

Everything the refund the police people say isn’t wrong. Getting more mental health professionals to deal with the crazy people instead of the police is not a bad idea.

But overall the people who want to eliminate the police aren’t facing facts. They don’t like the facts and want to avoid them by substituting wishful thinking for real thinking.

I find it hard to believe that many places will do more than a limited reallocation of funds and replacement of police with other personnel, if they even go that far. Wholesale radical experiments with public safety don’t seem very popular.

I’ve been staying in as much as possible since my employer shifted to having us work from home, only going out for groceries once a week. So it was just today that I saw my usual grocery store is boarded up, presumably due to last weekend’s riot. The next closest one was a Whole Foods, an imperfect substitute. I guess next week I’ll check if the nearby asian grocery is open.

I hadn’t noted the page number to Roth’s book when I read Stuntz, so I looked up the citation via Google Books:

Roth notes that the end of the nineteenth century saw southern homicide rates surpass those in the Southwest, and saw a sharp rise in black homicide. See Roth, American Homicide, 387. The latter phenomenon happened in the North as well (ibid., 194-96, 387). Before the last years of the nineteenth century, whites were the more homicidal group. See, for example, the lower black homicide rate pre-1890 (ibid., 398).

This disparity is not new; it has existed for well over a century. When historian Roger Lane studied murder rates in Philadelphia, he found that since 1839 the black rate has been much higher than the white rate.

When I read William Stuntz’ “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice“, he said that while the black rate has been higher in recent times (I think since the Great Migration), in the 19th century the white rate was higher in both north & south. His citation was to Randolph Roth’s “American Homicide”. Stuntz compared the then largely-rural black population moving to cities and increasing their crime rates to the Irish immigrants, whose home counties in Ireland had relatively low rates despite the same people being quite criminal once they moved to U.S cities.

I’d happily give the “best jobs” to people who do the best job. I wouldn’t want to die on an operating table out of your desire not to be “pathetic”.

How was it worse?

I had previously heard that Canadian multiculturalism was better than their older bi-culturalism where Anglo vs French Canadians basically hated each other.

If the problem with Boris’ action was the quantity rather than the quality, then Trump taking in some would seem to be helpful.

I thought your argument got off to a very wrong start by rather off-handedly asserting that the alternative to racial essentialism “cannot be” and then proceeding to ding any alternative theory for failing to be essentialist. That’s what the phrase “begging the question” originally referred to, but you seem to think your proof-by-assertion overrides that.

All that aside, I’d like to ask you a question about one of your other assertions: what is your evidence that the people of Africa have less capacity for civilization than the native inhabitants of Australia or New Guinea? Remember that those people are as distantly related to Africans as anyone else on earth. And don’t ask me to prove some alternative theory, I can point out shortcomings in your argument (which is hardly the default theory of anyone but you) without that.

I don’t know about her first two examples, but the male lead of “The Lovebirds” is Kumail Nanjiani. He would have been classified as caucasian prior to the 1980s, but now he’s officially a Person of Color and the reviews I’ve read of the film indicate that both leads are wary of the police due to the assumption that they will be racist (are there any notable instances in the U.S of police being racist against south Asians?).

That’s ironic, since Paul is usually considered to have shifted Christianity away from the Jamesian variant focused on Jews to one angling more for evangelizing to gentiles, who weren’t required to adhere to kosher rules.

I personally have always found most entertaining the interpretation of Koenraad Elst that Jesus wrote Revelations after Pilate faked killing him, but the rest of the New Testament was watered down stuff written later in an attempt to avoid ticking off the Romans.
http://koenraadelst.bharatvani.org/books/pp/index.htm

On the contrary, the standard line I hear nowadays is that every non-European is a “POC”, and even Europeans like Saami and Ashkenazi are sometimes said to have “pokemon points” as well. Amash’s statement is correct, though he could have just said “European descent”. And I’m all for people avoiding flack via saying correct things rather than absurd things.

To be fair to the late colonel, he did have a lot more possible spellings to choose from.

A good example of a left-wing social scientist who published “right-wing” findings is Oscar Lewis. That work was attacked by other leftists as “blaming the victim”, and his defenders mostly stuck to noting that Lewis’ Marxism was indisputable.

In other words, most sub-Saharan Africans today are descended from Bantus, who are, historically, a genocidal conqueror race rather like the Yamnayas-Aryans of Eurasia.

But the Bantu farmers didn’t swiftly drive hunter-gatherers to oblivion. The Shum Laka people survived for at least 1,000 years in the heart of Bantu country.

My impression was that the Yamnaya wiped out agricultural societies in northern Europe rather quickly, while denser societies in southern Europe were less of a replacement scenario. Per Zimmer, the Yamnaya would presumably consider the Bantu to be real slackers in the genocide department. I should note, that sub-Saharan Africa retained macrofauna longer than other places, whereas they were quickly hunted into extinction in the Americas, and also retained hunter-gatherer populations longer than, for example, Europe and most of Asia. A common explanation is that they evolved alongside each other, rather than suddenly arriving with an overwhelming advantage the other couldn’t adjust to. Presumably that was the case for disease here vs during the Columbian exchange.

William Stuntz complained in “The Collapse of American Criminal Justice” that SCOTUS made rulings intended to address the inequities of the Jim Crow South, but unfortunately rather than narrowly target the problem they made with substantive requirements or explicit anti-discrimination rules they instead made facially neutral general rulings on procedure nevertheless inspired by those southern cases which hampered the functioning justice system of the north. A similar interpretation is possible regarding what happened with legislative changes, although I would note that currently things like political correctness act through many non-legislative channels and that might continue to be the case even in the absence of the threat of lawsuits after the SCOTUS victories Steve imagines at the end of his article.

It’s also likely that there is a height gradient among Native Americans. The tallest, such as the Blackfeet, appear to be up around the Canadian border with the shortest in North America down in Central America.

That’s somewhat surprising, since Allen’s rule is that colder temperatures should result in an animal having a lower surface area to volume ratio, typically meaning shorter limbs and a stockier frame. On the other hand, the “pygmy” phenotype seems to be associated with jungles and the peasants of agricultural civilizations seem to be shorter than the typical non-pygmy hunter-gatherer.

Nuclear power is ALREADY safer than coal. People died because of the tsunami which hit Fukushima, and one person was killed by a mechanical crane in the reaction to the disaster at the plant, but the same would have happened if it were a coal plant. Three Mile Island didn’t have the casualties of Chernobyl either. As was already pointed out, Germany is not afflicted with tsunamis and earthquakes and like Japan, so they didn’t switch because of safety risks at their own plants. They switched because of low-information voters.

That paper is from back before the replication crisis made people sufficiently skeptical of many studies. I know Andrew Gelman savaged a similar paper on arm strength being correlated with a taste for redistribution.

Like I said, I prefer general theories. The Bell Curve was extremely controversial when it was published, and remained so afterward. That the NYT has gotten worse and will tolerate even less science doesn’t change which extreme taboos still seem to constitute the “heartland”.

I mostly prefer more generic theories of political correctness, but I agree with Dan Moller contra Steve Sailer that the black-white IQ gap is the “heartland” rather than high Jewish IQ. Cochran/Harpending’s paper got some positive press when it was first published. He provides some evidence for that difference in his paper.

I don’t think 13 year olds in Harlem are watching prestige TV from the people that brought you The Leftovers. Get Out and Django Unchained perhaps, but not a subversion of a deconstruction of comic book superheroes.

I really hated Brick, disliked Looper and didn’t care about Last Jedi. Extrapolating from that trend, maybe this will finally be the Rian Johnson movie I actually like.

The best movie about an old white man disinheriting his worthless offspring in favor of an immigrant is Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino.

Up until Steven Spielberg’s landmark 1998 D-Day movie Saving Private Ryan, Hollywood may have devoted more attention to the U.S. WWII effort against Japan than against Germany.

That seems surprising to me, although I’m younger than you. We’re generally less interested in Asia than Europe so far fewer have heard of the Rape of Nanking compared to the Holocaust, its easier to get actors to play Euro-baddies than Japanese, and a lot of the fighting in the Pacific was over islands nobody cares about in a long slog against an outmatched enemy. I think we tend to find armies more interesting than navies as well, although I suppose a more maritime nation like the U.K could see things differently.

Your point about the surprisingly low variance in Mexico reminded me of Greg Cochran recently arguing whether we should expect Saudi Arabian wealth to result in more brains.
https://twitter.com/gcochran99/status/1201670758130274305
I’m curious what the variance is there, although it’s possible that the really wealthy royals don’t take part in such tests.

I never watched “Lost”, but Lindelof and Perrotta’s TV adaptation of “The Leftovers” was good enough I figure I’ll check this out eventually.

It’s spelled “Levitt”, not “Leavitt”.

Carlos Reygadas’ film “Silent Light” is set in Mexico but in the Plautdietsch aka “Low German” language of its Mennonite characters.

Beginning with the word “clueless” and prior to the word “2008” you’ve got a large block of text needlessly linking to the article the reader is already reading.

Vulture has a profile of the trans writer Andrea Long Chu, whose POV seems to bolster Bailey’s theory about autogynephiles vs the “always a little girl on the inside” narrative:
https://www.vulture.com/2019/10/andrea-long-chu-on-her-debut-book-females.html

Maybe they have to use scare-quotes because Italians were always legally considered white in the U.S:
https://entitledtoanopinion.wordpress.com/2013/02/24/pathetic-that-this-even-has-to-be-pointed-out/

As I’ve mentioned before, Robin Hanson has proposed requiring such insurance, but for everybody. There wouldn’t need to be a separate kind of insurance for gun-owners in that situation either:
http://www.overcomingbias.com/2019/09/who-vouches-for-you.html

There’s supposed to be a “Werther effect” where publicizing suicides results in more suicides, and now people in the media are moving to conceal the names of mass-shooters so as not to incentivize fame-seekers. I wonder if once defenestrations became a “thing” in Prague it just naturally occurred to more people as something worth doing.

School shooting were a big deal years ago, but I get the impression that mass shooters tend to target other public places now. The reason that the Aurora Colorado shooter chose a midnight screening was that he wanted the crowd to be full of adults.

The D.C sniper is a counter-example to your generalization, although that was also early enough that there wasn’t much call for rifle legislation.

Some recent mass shooters have used rifles, but Brevik and the Virginia Tech Shooter amassed rather high bodycounts with just handguns.

I’m actually surprised that rifles outnumber shotguns above. A sawed-off shotgun was once commonly associated with criminals. Sawing off a rifle, on the other hand, rather defeats the point of a long-ranged weapon.

I didn’t click through to the article. Did it explain what the ISAS changed its name to?

this music biz veteran’s correct anticipation of what Kids These Days would be into after the long reign of the Blues: more linear guitar-riffing with nerdier references.