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Evil (Political) Scientist Profile picture
Evil (Political) Scientist
@knrd_z
President of the American Political Science Association (in exile)
Potato Of Reason Profile picture Ana Profile picture stratemeyer Profile picture 4 subscribed
Apr 17 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
10 pieces of proven investment advice for these volatile times:

1) You need to be addicted to stimulants. One pack of cigarettes or coke a day, those are rookie numbers. "I'm afraid of a heart attack." You know what prevents heart attacks? Winning-- these men are in their 90s.
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Image 2) Survive a Holocaust. If you're white, move to South Africa, and if you're black, any other part of Africa. You need the protean survival instinct that only the looming threat of impending doom can cultivate. Afterwards, you'll get backaches when the market's about to crash. Image
Jan 30 • 27 tweets • 6 min read
I am going to steelman 'systemic racism', as an intellectual exercise. What it could mean is sometimes misunderstood even by its 'theorists', like this one who considers it a form of neo-Marxism. In practice many proponents use it this way. Part of the problem is ‘systemic racism’ refers to a purported empirical phenomenon and a theory meant to explain why it occurs. We need to impose clarity over the discussion and its concepts, otherwise we will rule the whole dilemma incoherent outright.
Mar 6, 2023 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Annals of important social science: researchers find 100% percent of the bad concept they just made up is committed by people they don't like. Black nationalist terrorism was on the rise, but then it the very notion disappeared. You can tell they have thought very seriously about their concepts and how to measure them properly, and that social science isn't nothing more than a political practice
Feb 27, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
All this time, lawyers were overproduced, driving down their wages, causing smart people to select out, leaving a middling nuisance class-- the question is simply how to contain them (1.3 million is Dallas sized) You can generalize this to many of the professions. 'Law' isn't what it was in the '60s. See also 'therapy': back when it was called 'analysis' it attracted some of the world's brightest ppl, now the lazy and incompetent. Change the ppl, change the field
Feb 21, 2023 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Re-reading Thucydides and it reveals so clearly that political science is redundant, a mistake. I went to one of those quant programs that derided the Classics and now realize it was a self-preservation maneuver Unrelated, but I've written syllabi for a few friends the past year and browsing others it's sad how they've converged without coordination. Stale, remedial, boring-- US Politics and International Relations aren't Calculus, to be taught from a thick book titled the subject matter
Feb 20, 2023 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
"Anti-violence" is the new totalitarianism's lynchpin. You can respond, directly and justifiably, to physical violence, so power evolved into distributed deprivation where its sociopath toadies can titter, "not touching you." What it masks is, yes, unlimited latent violence I believe power dynamics are expressed in a country's playgrounds. Everyone remembers the unctuous child who would torment other kids till they socked him, after which he would be _rewarded_ for telling the teacher. Now the teacher still exists, but as a collective abstraction
Jan 28, 2023 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Well-deserved dunks on schooling lately, but they don't go far enough. Sending your kids to 'inner-city schools', if you have any means to avoid it, is child abuse: it's the same as beating your kids and you should feel tremendous guilt over it I am making a different point than my general one on the low quality of education. Supposedly 'well-meaning' people routinely send their kids to schools that-- without exaggeration-- are tantamount to getting physically beaten
Jan 1, 2023 • 10 tweets • 3 min read
Already in the 1950s degree inflation was underway. Like 'the dollar', the names 'university' and 'college' remained unchanged while the reality moved rapidly beneath them. (From Paul Fussell's Class) Image By 1972, 43 percent of young ppl went to college. Adjusting for inflation it was still 13 percent, and probably it's only 13 percent still. 76 percent of white youth now enroll in college-- it's high school. Image
Oct 25, 2022 • 14 tweets • 7 min read
Someone posted this in a group chat last night so, naturally, "can't work today boss, have to research RACE WAR." Let's go Image Starts out with a short narrative, in 1969, of a beloved chemistry teacher who confronted a few black students about breaking his window. They sucker punched him and attempted to burn him alive ImageImageImage
Sep 9, 2022 • 13 tweets • 6 min read
As I've written about before, most civil war violence is homicide and a large portion of is simply homicide the state allows to happen. People are easily fooled: take away the theater-- subtract a few tanks, some artillery-- and they believe the 'thing' is gone too. You see this turn up in on-the-ground narratives of almost every single civil war. Yes, people die in battles and bombings, but much (sometimes the majority) are petty rivalries that are allowed to escalate into homicides of opportunity.
Jan 19, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
_All_ 87 studies reviewed in this meta-analysis find a negative and statistically significant relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust.

Why won't progressives listen to #Science? h/t @yaboizots Yes, I incorrectly overstated the results. I'm reading through the studies that comprise the meta-analysis and might do a much longer thread on those in the future.

Oct 25, 2020 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
On the topic of civilizational decline, a short thread on the decline of the Greek and Roman civilization might provide some insight.

Remember, this is historical information and any resemblance to current civilizations that may or may not be in decline is incidental. Starting with the Greeks, it seems they overextended themselves with foreign adventurism. While they brought their Hellenistic culture to barbarians, their home country was ruined.

I’m sure civilizational collapse was worth spreading Greek curiosities around. Image