the-moti

[the-moti]

I think with these embeddings they usually measure similarity by cosine of the angle, which is equivalent to projecting to the unit sphere and measuring distance there. Even a random point on the sphere should be very far from every word. Maybe more interesting would be to look for words that are close to many differences between words, but not close to any individual word, or something like that.

lmao actual investigation into the mathematical essence of the slur

[the-moti]

This seems like a particularly extreme case of the thing where Kamala Harris did badly in traditional safe Democratic areas, but not so badly she lost: winning by small margins in places where previous Democrats won by large margins. It's also important to note that Democrats have been doing well in special elections and likely will continue to, for two reasons: First, the party that doesn't control the Presidency tends to have an advantage in special elections because their base is more angry and thus more fired up, and second, Democrats have had an advantage in special elections for a few years thanks to their increasing performance in politically engaged, high-education voters and worse performance on politically disengaged and low-information voters, who tend not to vote in special elections.

A 24-year-old pro-choice Democrat, Keishan Scott of Bishopville, just won a South Carolina state representative special election by a massive 41-point lead over his Republican opponent.

He outperformed Kamala Harris's results in the same county in the 2024 presidential elections by over 37 points.

That underperformance by Republicans is probably not gonna be to the same degree everywhere in the country, but I believe this is a testament to just how unpopular they are.

I hope this is a good sign for things to come.

Oust the Trump Regime

Abolish the Republican Party

[the-moti]

The argument that some chess hustlers in the park secure agreement to play chess under false pretenses (i.e. that they won't cheat) and therefore it's not truly consensual is actually pretty plausible though.

yeah I mean I don't think there's anything wrong with playing chess. as long as it's between 2 consenting adults

[the-moti]

uh I'm pretty sure the job of a safety inspector is to notice safety problems and then inform someone with the power to fix it, so he's still not quite there yet.

happy pride

[the-moti]

This poll assumes the series will remain seven books long, which seems like a problematic assumption. It's possible that George RR Martin writes at least seven books in the series without finishing the series, and it's not clear what this counts as in the poll. Indeed, I think this is more likely than him finishing the series in seven books. Also if another author finishes the series it will likely be more than seven books. It's conceivable that GRRM finishes the series in more than seven books but that seems like one of the least likely outcomes.

Please reblog for sample size!

[the-moti]

But aren't most of the Gandhis that ruled India unrelated to Mohandas/Mahatma?

The Mohandas Gandhi family is a dynasty in the sense of most American familial dynasties. I’ll admit I stretched the truth a bit when I said “two powerful familial dynasties” rather than “one powerful familial dynasty and one much smaller dynasty of a few politicians and a couple leaders here and there,” but sacrifices have to be made for brevity. Mohandas didn’t even start it, his grandfather and father were both powerful court officials.

feels like it doesn't quite count as a dynasty when it crosses political boundaries like that, then again his great grandson extended the dynasty's rule to a slice of Kansas:

Shanti Gandhi (born 10 February 1940) is an India-born American cardiovascular and thoracic surgeon and was a Republican member of the Kansas House of Representatives, representing the 52nd District from 2013 to 2015.

At his request, the news media did not mention his ancestry to Mahatma Gandhi during the 2012 campaign. Gandhi later said he was surprised the media honored his request. Gandhi said he simply wanted to be known as a heart surgeon, father and friend to many; he did not want to win election from the name recognition of being a descendant of the famous Indian leader.

aww friend to many, that's sweet.

[the-moti]

Wikipedia says it's a French air base that has a Singaporean unit there for training in addition to several French units. It is truly a wide definition.

Do Americans realize that for the most part other countries just do not have military bases in foreign countries. And of the other countries that do its like usually less than 5. The fact that we have huge carve outs in the territory of so many other countries just for power projection is actually fucking unusual

[the-moti]

Isn't this also influenced by the fact that the Romans believed these gods really existed? Like from their point of view these gods were real entities that humans had an imperfect understanding of and discrepancies between one culture's picture of a god and another culture's picture of the "same" god could reflect ignorance on the part of one or the other. From the modern point of view if there's a bunch of differences between representations of two gods that's evidence that the two gods might not derive from the same tradition because what we care about are the patterns of belief and practice but from the Roman perspective that's not the most important thing.

How conscious were the Romans of the fact that the interpretatio romana was bullshit?

I don't read much in the way of primary sources on Roman religion, but I've never seen anything that indicates doubt about like "oh Odin is really just another name for Mercury".

When you read the ancient historians at least when they talk about foreign gods you get the strong sense that they're just parroting received wisdom without probing any deeper. "In Carthage they worship Hercules as..." For a modern comparison, imagine a historian occasionally using outdated psychological terms, terms that he doesn't really understand on a deep level - certainly not enough to recognize their conceptual weaknesses - but which are still current in the intellectual milieu of his time. He uses the terms to provide pat explanations of people's motivations because those are the words he knows and it's not important enough to his bigger project for him to delve too deeply into the correctness of every little thing. "FDR did [action] because of [Freudian explanation that sounds plausible on the surface]." To future generations this will be a baffling minor annoyance but you can understand where the author was coming from. And since ancient historians weren't primarily concerned with comparative religion, they fell back on shallow, commonplace tropes in the same way.

In general ancient writers were generally very weak on ethnography so I don't think there was like some significant movement trying to recognize the deep differences between like Egyptian and Roman religion. Plausibly someone was saying that but I've never seen it (but corrections are welcome!) and an author as eminent as Plutarch could write directly about religion (thinking here of his work on Isis) and assume that Isis was cognate with different gods from other pantheons without pause.

[the-moti]

This is how it works already.

I was recently in a conversation that generated the concept of the "IQ-band Electoral College."

So. Y'know. That's a thing we could do, if we wanted US politics to be Even More Entertaining.

[the-moti]

If stuff is destroyed without an act of Congress it shouldn't take an act of Congress to rebuild it, though, right? Just start enforcing the previously written law again.

OK the reason that I really worry that anything Musk destroys won't be rebuilt even if the dems win in 2028 is that a lot of it was built in a different time, and congress now is totally non-functional and works mainly by inertia and obstruction. Sure the program was popular, people are sad it is gone, but what you can expect is a bunch of "Oh we would like to restore that program but maybe not quite like that" from swing congresspeople even if there's a filibuster-proof dem majority. Reachin the point where Obama-era functionality that passed the ACA and CFPB can seem out of reach. They know how to dissipate blame, that may be the only thing they know how to do at this point.

[the-moti]

What % of countries in the dataset are in Africa and Latin America? Just looking up the number of countries in Africa / Latin America / the world and not trying to harmonize, I get 39% of countries are in those two regions. 18 out of 50 would be 36%. Assuming the percentage in the data set is similar, does that really provide evidence for the thesis of the original two posts?

Kind of fascinating that the last bastion of the rules based international order is mostly in Latam and Africa. The Hague group consists of 9 states that aim to actually enforce ICC / ICJ rulings and UN resolutions regarding Israel.

Belize, Plurinational State of Bolivia, Republic of Colombia, Republic of Cuba, Republic of Honduras, Malaysia, Republic of Namibia, Republic of Senegal and Republic of South Africa.

[the-moti]

I mean the Dien Bien Phu scenario was also a conventional army, right? One of their key advantages was the placement of their artillery.

I feel like the USA's peculiar lack of success at dealing with it has given the average tumblr user a somewhat over-optimistic view of how successful irregular guerrilla resistance against a motivated and materially superior opponent usually is.

[the-moti]

a bunch of different guys ... including Einstein. He contributed to that one too!

Guys, Einstein didn't have to be some super genius to come up with all that stuff. It was all if not quite obvious at least a natural continuation in the context of developments in physics at the time and well within the reach of many other physicists who would have figured it out if Einstein hadn't existed.

[the-moti]

Isn't this kind of thing exactly what happened in Rome for about a hundred years before Caesar's assassination? There were lots of drama in the streets around official political acts where the side with more swords didn't go all the way to massacring the other. It took a long time for the situation to deteriorate into civil war (and then get better, and then back into civil war, and then get better again, and then more civil war, when finally the republic collapsed and these kinds of votes started to matter less). I feel like any Roman familiar with their history would have been able to understand this.

South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol's attempt to impose martial law collapsed after 190 Members of Parliament barricaded themselves into the National Assembly chamber and voted to end martial law while the military tried to break in to stop them before they could vote. Many members had to climb a fence at the back of the building to break in to get a majority of the 300 member body in the room to vote.

[the-moti]

Well they certainly would have been dramatically worse off if they lost any significant amount slower!

So it turns out it's possible to type the entire sentence "During the Holocaust, the average German benefitted from the genocides." and not realise how insane that claim is.

If I ever found myself claiming the holocaust was good for the average german I'd use my pattern matching skill to say "huh, wasn't that the point of it according to nazi ideology? Why am I agreeing with nazi ideology on this point?" Then I'd meditate on what exactly has to be true about someone for thier murder to be for the public good, I'd breifly ask myself if that was true of the jews, and when I concluded no I'd ask if it was true of the ethnic group I was trying to defend in my origional argument either.

But you know, I lack the deep moral convictions you need to be an anti-racist in one of the least racist countries in human history.

[the-moti]

I mean I do think that they would use a knife missile in this situation instead of orbital bombardment if they didn't want to go with some kind of deniable assassination strategy.

2025 goals: 1) writing a subscriber-only Substack article with precise details of the White House's security protocols during mass protests, including the coordinates of specific positions where they place their assets, and calling it an OSINT project, 2) getting into a heated debate with Max Boot about the ethics of doing so, and 3) being the first person ever killed by the US government via orbital bombardment

[the-moti]

It refers to ninjas who wear an all-white ninja outfit, like Storm Shadow from G.I. Joe.

@ca-dmv-bot why did you make this decision