#xhxhxhx

[myconetted]

saw @xhxhxhx's "for you" feed on twitter after he did a few days of blocking and hiding nazi tweets in hopes of getting better recommendations

opened 4chan and read some extremely racist posts

twitter is literally worse than /pol/ now

[nour213]

Life in the Gaza Strip has become non-existent. All necessities of life have been destroyed. There is no food, no water, and no hospitals. My house has also been destroyed😭 Therefore, I and my family need your help🙏 and to help your friends. Help me with my attached campaign and share it with your friends.

@goes54667752 @hinamie @perezhilton @fefairys @xhxhxhx @cohst @etiragram @blackberryvision @zbakery @nostalgebraist @onecornerface @fefairys @awidevastdominion @hope-for-the-planet @hirespokemon @heycasbutt @y2kaestheticinstitute @yetisidelblog @yesterdaysprint @nintendo-box @neildylandy @virgo-punk @dannimatic @theperezhilton @theperezhilton @o @onecornerface @solardrifter @sephirona @staff @sinesalvatorem @rejectingrepublicans @republicansaredomesticterrorists @

[tototavros]

Are you... a lawyer? A legal historian? An amateur enthusiast?

You seem to know a lot about law and think a lot about law.

I wish I understood law, like, at least in some general sense. It would be cool to be able to read about important court cases and so on and be like "oh, these are the implications of this", as you seem to do.

Do you have recommendations for how a person such as myself with a passing interest in this but not a whole lot of time to dedicate to it (it seems very time consuming a subject to learn) can learn more about it?

An amateur historian at most, law is just something I'm currently learning about and one of the best ways for me to learn about things is to talk about but it, trying to reason through it etc., so I'm naturally in my 'annoying amateur' hour on this. I did similarly for Haskell and want to thank everyone who stuck around through that, as my position naturally receded from "omg best thing ever" to "real neat".

Mostly it came about as I was trying to find podcasts that weren't annoying talk-radio-replacements as most politics podcasts end up becoming, and I found National Security Law which did a good job of "discussing the controversy" on various things (surveillance, int'l drone strikes, etc.) and even deeply discussing individual cases in their Deep Dive series (Youngstown Sheet & Tube Co. v. Sawyer aka the Steel Seizures Case is my favorite of them, if you want a place to start). I mentioned this show at a party to @xhxhxhx and he told me about a show I've come to like even more, called Divided Argument, which got me to start listening to the actual Supreme Court arguments (Oyez does the Lord's work in packaging them as podcasts).

After that, I picked up some casebooks for cheap to read, got about halfway through each and ended up bored, although I cannot recommend that enough as a way of understanding accepted modes of legal reasoning.

I don't really track legal academic work very much, but Will Baude (co-host of Divided Argument) has smashed it this year with fascinating papers covering the ineligibility of Trump for President under the 14th Amendment and the scope of the Privileges or Immunities clause of the 14th Amendment, both from an originalist perspective.

The Federalist Society has a YouTube channel where they put up a bunch of different videos each week from various chapters of the Society, which I find to be often quite informative, although these days, more and more, I use it for understanding the bases of legal-political positions I strongly disagree with, but occasionally they have some neat deep-dives into e.g. the developments in bankruptcy law which have led to the recent controversy over the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy and opioid litigation.

[mourning-again-in-america]

@xhxhxhx referred me to this concept, and I don't agree with Dworkin as presented, but it makes much of what I hate about the practice of law make more sense.

It's a very good framework for those who are law-making officials, or assistants to lawmakers, and of course law schools need to train those, but i think it has a very dangerous influence on those who are arguing on what the law is, or those who are attempting to find the law in a given situation.

And in those cases, it seems horrifyingly common for people to reach for "well, the law's unclear, and it should be <policy>" just as it's argued "there's ambiguity, so <policy>", and I have a metaphorical allergic reaction to anything that promotes that kind of thinking, partially because I don't have interest in law-making, but partially because I see too much of what seems to be law-making disguised as law-finding throughout legal history, and I want it to die the true death it deserves.

[etirabys]

the “people all have traits that other people envy and it’s hard to map a hierarchy of human superiority within a social graph” is patent bullshit, but I did receive a shock to my system when xhx “3000 word econ/law effortpost (that trade easy punchlines for context every time) with a separate references section” hxhx told me yesterday that he always envied how ?fluid/easy/readable? my effortposts were. There’s nothing as queer as folk!

[tanadrin]

@xhxhxhx replied to your post: more fodder for my hypothesis of...

wow, what happened in Sparta between 480 BCE and 371 BCE?

Devereux goes into detail later in the series, but basically: the Spartiate (citizen) class collapsed because while it was possible for a family to lose Spartiate status, it was impossible to gain Spartiate status. And if you could no longer afford to be a member of one of the citizen’s mess groups, you lost Spartiate status, even if you had gone through the agoge. Although supposedly there wasn’t distinction of wealth between Spartiates, this was never actually true, and the division of land lots, called kleroi, gradually became more and more concentrated in the hands of the wealthiest Spartiates and the two royal families. Coupled with a devastating earthquake that triggered a big round of deaths and inheritance (consolidating land) and killed many helots (losing helot labor meant kleroi becoming less productive), the size of the Spartiate class dropped by 80% within a century. The population as a whole was growing steadily in this time, just not the number of Spartiates.

There were some half hearted attempts to respond to this demographic collapse, but since doing so would require the redistribution of the kleroi, this was blocked by the richest Spartiates and the kings, who had the most to lose. What really would have saved Sparta would have been abolishing the Lycurgian constitution, but attempts to do so failed (even though every other social class seemed to absolutely despise the aristocracy), and eventually the base of Spartan wealth--the labor of the Messenian helots--was lost when Messenia broke away for good.

Turns out having your state be ruled by a tiny aristocracy that maintains its position through terror and is forbidden from engaging in any economically productive activity is a bad idea! who knew.

[youzicha]

How many people died as a result of the Chernobyl disaster?

Nobody knows! I would guess at least 10,000, and maybe several times that. (Though these are lifetime cancer deaths, so some of them have not happened yet.)

There is a Wikipedia page with different estimates, and they vary a lot. As I understand it there are two main sources of uncertainty. First, around 600,000 conscripted soldiers worked as “liquidators” after the accident (240,000 in the first two years), and it is not known well how much radiation exposure they received. At the time, the guidelines were to limit each person’s exposure to less than 50 rem (500 mSv), which is already high and could cause several percent of the workers to die in cancer. But immediately after the accident workers were sent in quite recklessly and certainly there were many cases of workers getting much higher doses. Doses were not monitored well, a single worker in a company would be given a dosimeter, but the rest of the company were all doing different tasks, in proximity to different hotspots. Then afterwards, doctors were instructed to not mention radiation exposure on death certificates, so the official statistics are not reliable. In more recent year there have been some epidemiological studies, but it’s still not completely clear.

The unreliability is a general problem. In the years following the accident, people in Ukraine completely distrusted the official information from the Soviet government (with good cause), and people suspected that any cancer, birth defect, etc was due to the accident. This apocalyptic mood caused a lot of stress with real negative impacts (e.g., a large number of probably unnecessary abortions). But I think according to later research the cancer rate was not actually significantly higher, so apart from the liquidators it’s hard to point to specific people who died because of the accident.

I think the most official and trustworthy source is a report from 2005 by the WHO and Russian/Ukranian/Belarusian governments. (Admittedly, the tone of the report sounds like they are trying to downplay the impact, probably in response to the alarmism described above). But this report runs into the second source of uncertainty, the cancer risk from very low radiation doses. The simplest model (“linear, no threshold”) just says that the risk of getting cancer is proportional to the radiation dose. But nuclear apologists like to say that animals have been living with small amounts of background radiation forever, so we must have developed some way to repair damage from very small doses.

It would be nice if the apologists were right, because both nuclear accidents and bomb tests give small radiation doses to very many people. However, at least the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, in their “consensus report” Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation (2006) adopt the linear-no-threshold model, because it is consistent with all experimental data and is biologically plausible. The best statistical data comes from studies of atomic bomb survivors in Japan, but in low ranges it’s inconclusive:

Atomic bomb survivor data for solid tumors combined provide statistical evidence of a radiation-associated excess at doses down to around 100 mSv; these combined data are well described by a linear no-threshold dose-response […] It is abundantly clear that direct epidemiologic and animal approaches to low-dose cancer risk are intrinsically limited in their capacity to define possible curvilinearity or dose thresholds for risk in the range 0–100 mSv. For this reason the present report has placed much emphasis on the mechanistic data that can underpin such judgments. […] Mechanistic uncertainties remain, but the weight of available evidence would argue against the presence of a low dose threshold for tumor induction based on error-free repair of initial DNA damage. In summary, the committee judges that the balance of scientific evidence at low doses tends to weigh in favor of a simple proportionate relationship between radiation dose and cancer risk.

Now if we turn to the WHO report, the interesting table (on page 115 of the pdf) predicts 8,930 extra deaths from cancer over the lifetime of the exposed people: 2,200 among liquidators (200,000 people, average dose 100 mSv), 1,600 among special control zone residents (270,000 people, average dose 50 mSv), and 4,600 excess deaths among other residents (6.8 million people, average dose 7mSv). Most deaths come from the many people with very low exposure (7 mSv), so we will never see any statistically significant increase in the cancer rate, and people who don’t believe in linearity can always say that it’s an overestimate. As for timing, the report says that the minimum latency is 10 years and average latency 20-25 years, so by now more than half of the eventual cancers will have already happened.

The Greens (the EU parliamentary group) thought the WHO report underplayed the impact, and comissioned a very readable rebuttal report. The rebuttal makes two points. First, the radiation risk factor used by the WHO report is in the lower end of the literature, and other studies estimate up to twice as many deaths per mSv, so by picking a value in the upper range the number could double to about 20,000 deaths. Second, Chernobyl scattered radiation all over Europe. If we use the WHO’s estimate of amount of radioactivity released, but don’t just consider the 6.7 million most exposed people and instead consider all the very small doses all over the world, we get 30,000 deaths (using the WHO risk factor) or 60,000 deaths (with the high risk factor). Of course, this assumes linearity for extremely small doses.

Isn’t this a pretty curious situation? If you think of a Chernobyl victim, what comes to mind is probably someone who lived in Pripyat and maybe stood on the “bridge of death” to watch the fire. But if we believe the Greens, those people are basically a rounding error, and almost all of the impact of the accident comes from seemingly completely healthy people in e.g. Germany who got an immeasurably tiny increase in their lifetime cancer risk. It reminds me of when Scott Alexander considered costs and benefits of marijuana legalization and decided that the only thing that matters is the impact on drunk driving.

Here’s two concluding thoughts. First, don’t get complacent. The radioactive cloud happened to drift north-east, which is the direction with the lowest population density. The wind could equally well have been blowing south towards Kiev, and then the impact would have been much worse. And of course, if a power station in France explodes there would be even more people nearby.

But second, even if we assume a high estimate, 60,000 cancer deaths over ~60 years is only 1,000 deaths/year. I don’t have any Soviet numbers at hand, but for example in 2000 coal power plants in the U.S. were causing 30,000 deaths/year during normal operations, and Soviet industry was much dirtier than in the West. I think it’s a safe guess that the Soviet Union had bigger pollution problems than Chernobyl.

[shacklesburst]

xhxhxhx replied to your post “Rank the Länder from worst to best.”

How would you rank Munich and Bavaria if they were different Lands?

Munich is a great city. Probably the greatest in Europe, from a standard of living perspective at the very least. I love living where I live, right at the heart of it. Politics isn’t the worst, but I don’t really follow that anymore. The rest of Bavaria is great as scenery, thought I could do without some of the country folk’s biases. What’s really good or bad about one or the other isn’t really something I can rank, because it doesn’t really touch me in any way in my daily life.

But I’m just a city person in the end, so what do I know. (Although, of course, for most of my life I haven’t lived in Munich.)

[schwul-kat]

thank you!

[ask-gpt]

SEC. 215. ACCESS TO RECORDS AND OTHER ITEMS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT. /n Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861 et seq.) is amended by striking sections 501 through 503 and inserting the following:

SEC. 215. ACCESS TO RECORDS AND OTHER ITEMS UNDER THE FOREIGN INTELLIGENCE SURVEILLANCE ACT. /n Title V of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (50 U.S.C. 1861 et seq.) is amended by striking sections 501 through 503 and inserting the following: ``(a) Data Privacy Enforcement System.-- ``(1) Compliance.--The Director shall establish and maintain an independent data privacy system to meet the oversight, development, and evaluation requirements of the Department of Defense. ``(2) Standards for protecting data under the database.-- The Director shall establish requirements for the protection of stored data, including the following: ``(A) Standards for protecting stored data under the database, including, at a minimum, the minimum security safeguards required in regulations promulgated under chapter 102 of title 10, United States Code. ``(B) Standards for protecting stored data to ensure compliance with Federal procurement requirements. ``(C) Standards for safeguarding stored data at other Federal agencies. ``(C) Requirement regarding data security required.--The Director shall review the requirements of the Department of Defense and other Federal agencies regarding the protection of stored data over the database and ensure they are adequate to keep data from being placed on the Internet or other electronic infrastructure. ``(D) Requirement of security measures.--The Director shall ensure that all security measures in place to protect stored data under the database are in place to the maximum extent practicable, including the following: ``(i) Requirements for keeping data under the database for at least 120 days; ``(ii) Requirements for keeping stored data until at least 90 days after an investigation is conducted in connection with an investigation referred to in subparagraph (B)(iii); and ``(iii) The security of all stored data. ``(3) Reports to Congress.--The Director shall periodically submit to the Committee on Appropriations of the House of Representatives and the Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation of the Senate information on and recommendations relating to compliance with this subsection. ``(b) Authorization of Appropriations (Sec. 208) For necessary expenses for the mission of the Air Force, $18,000,000 shall be made available for fiscal year 2007 for the implementation of the Director's data protection oversight program described in section 102(a)(2)(A) of title 10, United States Code. For necessary expenses relating to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, $13,000,000 shall be made available to carry out this section. [[Page 130 STAT. 2550]] In addition, $15,000,000 shall be made available for appropriate research and development costs for the Office of the Inspector General under section 102 of title 10, United States Code, to carry out any research, development, test, or evaluation program within the Department. The Director of the Bureau of Intelligence and the Bureau of National Intelligence shall each serve not less than three years in

[myconetted]

@xhxhxhx has been playing yakuza games lately and boy does it showcase some amazing features of japanese culture. like the racism and misogyny and social conservatism and conformity.

by god the racism is so bad. pretty much every non-japanese ethnic group is depicted in garish stereotype. chinese and korean mafia members, especially antagonist characters, are depicted as more belligerent and less honorable than True Japanese Yakuza. they speak in gawky accents that sound more like an american speaking badly on purpose than a chinese or korean person speaking with a heavy accent. like "ahrrey-gat-toh!" as if they're trying to punch each syllable through their mouth. i don't even want to get into the ways they depict black and brown people. the word "minstrel" should suffice.

and the women in this franchise? well the bar is already pretty low because this is a game about guys bein' dudes and glamorizing the yakuza. a lack of good female characters is to be expected. but damn. they sure do love introducing most female characters as helpless damsels with zero agency, and often the few times they do exhibit agency, they're fucking things up somehow. entire plotlines where you get to be some poor little girl's white knight. usually the moral of the story or the happy ending involves becoming a mother and embracing family life. or getting out of The Business that turned them into a cynical husk, so they can learn to love again. because that's the best thing that can happen for a woman: she gets a good man and starts a family :).

anyways this post isn't really about anything. definitely not a call to action. it's just kinda wild to see. i really want to visit japan because of all the cool attractions, but shit like this really harshes the vibe.

[nour213]

Stop for a moment✋🏼 I want you to know that helping you as much as you can makes a big difference for me and my family I know very well that your hearts are pure, but you do not know that I am in great need of your help My family hopes every day to rebuild itself again Your help helps me achieve my family's dreams. Donate to me and share my campaign widely Please pray for us in the Gaza Strip so that this war will end

https://gofund.me/826b417b

@cosmic-collective-system @eolo @todaysdocument @rejectingrepublicans @ibtisams @fuckyeahchinesegarden @y2kaestheticinstitute @ursulaklegun @animentality @cheezbot @hinamie @freegazafromhamas @rejectingrepublicans @quirkyturtle11 @wnq-writers @todaysdocument @xhxhxhx @cheezbot @valovita @goes54667752 @freegazafromhamas @zegalba @xchexv @shencomix @sabertoothwalrus @solardrifter @sephirona @3lawzdef1ant @480pfootage @2000ish

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

@admiral-craymen replied to your post “I'm up late for work because I'm having a really bad cold and I'm basically dead to the world, but I'll probably be getting good...”

You sure have been sick a lot lately. I hope you feel better soon.

Thanks. It just seems like I'm getting worse and worse each week that goes by, though. I guess I'm starting to think of colds as some sort of test/consequence/penalty for my behavior, which makes sense in a way, but is also very scary.

[thegreatjackal]

xhxhxhx

  have these as reaction pics but i don’t know how...

this looks like something from Regular Show

have you never watched gravity falls

[etirabys]

normal friends

[jenlog]

Tsubasa Shibahime, Haruko Haruhara, Nonon Jakuzure

i haven’t watched kare kano unfortunately :(

Haruko Haruhara: OH GOD NO || She’s okay || She’s good I like her! || Hnnng! I love her! || She’s perfect 10/10!! || *:・ﾟ✧ Mythical Waifu Level *:・ﾟ✧

I don’t actually remember much about flcl other than that it was really enjoyable to get through in one sitting, and haruko’s interactions with everybody were great

Nonon Jakuzure: OH GOD NO || She’s okay || She’s good I like her! || Hnnng! I love her! || She’s perfect 10/10!! || *:・ﾟ✧ Mythical Waifu Level

i don’t know what to say other than that she is The Best