Pictures are trash, but: I bought my entire Thanksgiving dinner from the preppie Swiss Colony website (plus a pie from the local store) - no one on the team wanted to slave in the kitchen for six hours, and total cost was like $150 after Hunni coupons. #highly_recommend
The one exception is this 2lb tenderloin, which I'm going to make into a Beef Wellington while errybody else chills.
We also copped the X-mas tree.
*There are a bunch of other items, I'm just lazy and not photographing them.*
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I too am a "trained journalist (as well as a academic!)" I am an official columnist for @spikedonline - I can write about fact or opinion, focus the USA - and sat through training in journo standards and methods before taking the post.
(2) One of the problems/amusing realities in upper-middle class society today is that virtually everyone is an "expert" - defined as having a four-year or beyond degree from a good-to-elite college in a specific field.
Today, you can get MA level terminal degrees in Sales.
(3) Because of this surplus of "experts," we constantly hear this question: "Do you think you know more about my field than meeeeee?!"
Often! I've made quite a few big sales myself. Having an MA in Sociology does not convey the same level of unique knowledge as being a pilot.
My own frank answer: it's not hard to cut a $5.35 trillion dollar budget, and absurd to have one. If King, I would end all 'Build Back Better'-style "stimulus" tranches, and cut the budgets for most government programs -certainly including defense and foreign aid- by 25% or more.
(3) Anyone thinking "That's insane" or "Reilly's trolling" should recall that the 'biggest ever' 1996 Clinton/Gingrich budget was - in constant dollars, IIRC - $1.56 trillion.
We've seen massive spending growth, unpaired w improved state performance, under both Obama and Trump.
There are some major and obvious logical problems with the John Oliver/anti-Littman argument that the recent 4,000% increase in "trans kids" is due simply to increased social acceptance and has nothing to do with 'ROGD.'
A short thread...
(2) First, a core talking point on the left is that societal acceptance of "LGBTQIAA2S" people is NOT on the rise - that there has been a back-lash since ~2016, and that hate crimes and other metrics used to track tolerance are up.
(2) Even if you argue that's^ not true - which I mostly do - the patterns of trans identification we see don't track at all with growing general acceptance.
The phenomenon is almost totally concentrated among kids, mostly upper-middle class and white...usatoday.com/story/news/nat…
(2) There were peaceful BLM rallies, but the Summer of Floyd also included the CHAZ city-state, the burning of the Lake Street district and and an active police station in Minneapolis, 120 days of active rioting in (of course) Portland, the sacking of the Mag Mile in Chi, etc.
The key element of any bogus "racism" (etc) study is the default assumption that all races/sexes/probably social classes would currently behave identically if it weren't for "oppression."
Thus, if you find Black men get arrested at 15x the rate of Thai women, you "found bias."
(2) This might sound like a straw-man - accusing ideological opponents of ignoring all cultural, historical, regional, genetic, stochastic, etc variables - but it actually describes probably 30-50% of academic research and ~every story on bias you read in a regular newspaper.
(3) "Problematically, we find that newly-arrived Hispanic immigrants are stopped by the police at 3x the rate among the population of all drivers (paraphrase)!!!"
Sure...but how'd they do vs the more relevant 'population' of "dudes speeding really really fast?"
While I have fun on twitter, what I'm saying about slavery is not esoteric or very debatable. There is a VERY high correlation between current or past slave or serf-holding states and extreme poverty/under-development, due to their massive under-utilization of human potential.
(2) This is true by every metric I've ever seen in a POLS conference paper or during my own casual research: current slave states (Mauritania, Sudan) vs free states, states ranked by year of emancipation, formerly slave regions of states compared to free regions, just on and on.
(3) It obviously is true that SLAVE-MASTERS made money off slavery, and also that it has been used profitably - in the std "more gains than losses" sense - for things like dangerous agriculture.
But, the awkward, amoral question of overall value here is: "As compared to what?"