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PoIiMath Profile picture
PoIiMath
@politicalmath
Marginally compelling & occasionally accurate, sometime writer, engineer, cake-baker
12 subscribers
Nov 16 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
Here is Roger Ebert's first paragraph of his review for "The Mummy" and it is why he was the greatest film critic to ever live Image Ebert was a gem and I will never hear a word against him. He loved movies. He loved stupid movies and brilliant movies. He loved trash and genius. He loved watching directors pour their heart out onto the screen, even if they failed.
Oct 1 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Ta-Nehisi Coates and I agree that there is a line. When people cross the line, conversation between the two sides is no longer possible. That line for both of us is the dehumanization of others.

For me, that means celebrating their death, believing that the world is a better place without them

For Coates, that means "hurling epitaphs" at people

youtu.be/UaeoDlLNnok?si… This is *extremely* instructive

My hard line is you have to believe that the world is better if I am alive

Coates' hard line is that you have to use the proper pronouns. Coates' hard line is "my team has to win or you are beyond saving"
Sep 18 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
OK @CatoInstitute , we need to have a talk

I'm looking into the data source for this chart, which was used by @Time magazine.

Time links to this Cato article on politically motivated violence

cato.org/blog/political…
Sep 18 • 12 tweets • 3 min read
This account looks like it's run by an unstable schizophrenic but that's just because I'm constantly trying to talk both about what *should* happen and also what *is* happening

Both those things are important but they are very different There are tons of things that should happen but that won't happen because we've spent years dissolving the preconditions that make the "should" possible
Aug 16 • 7 tweets • 3 min read
This is disingenuous. Have you been to the Smithsonian museums recently? Almost every exhibit is left-coded and makes constant reference to left-wing politics

They want the GOP to leave all their cultural victories inn place and not complain. No dice.
The Museum of American History has a costume from Storm in "X-Men: Days of Future Past" & the caption is (I'm not making this up)

"As #BlackLivesMatter went viral in the summer of 2014, one of the first Black woman superheroes was fighting discrimination on the big screen"
Jul 28 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The "Nazi bar" problem can be easily re-purposed to become the "gay church" problem Image There is something I don't like about people who can't see the obvious next steps of their own metaphors

Do you really want to set up a world the way you're suggesting? Because other people will follow suit and they will do so with the rationalizations you gave them
Jul 27 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
There is something really weird about the Tea hack geocode data and I'm having trouble putting my finger on it Let me make an example with a place I used to live: Salt Lake City

The vast majority of population on this map is in SLC. Sure, there are people in Ogden, there are people in Provo, there are even people in Tooele (or so I've been told)

But the ratio seems all wrong Image
Jul 11 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Whenever you see an article about measles in the US and how it is the result of falling vaccination rates, keep in mind that
1) measles in the US is almost always due to a foreign introduction
2) measles is far worse in Canada and Mexico right now Image There are huge measles outbreaks across our borders (over 3,000 cases in Chihuahua, Mexico) and, as it turns out, there are also outbreaks in the states that touch the impacted regions Image
Jul 11 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
I talk a lot about how the Romney campaign was a turning point in American politics but I had forgotten how the Romney campaign's finance co-chair was audited by the IRS and the Dept of Labor *during the campaign* as a strategy to destroy him

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Van… I'm reviewing a bunch of old stuff and @NateSilver538 defended these audits as totally normal and, quite frankly, that was a bunch of stupid bullshit

archive.nytimes.com/fivethirtyeigh…
Jun 27 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Everyone who is into politics needs to think hard about what the Zohran Mamdani victory means for the future of American political alignment One thing that occurred to me this week is that young people on the left have been told by their intellectual elders (professors, older statesman) that far left-wing policies are obviously workable and good and beneficial but that Americans just won't vote for them
Jun 19 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
I really cannot emphasize to the left how much they have over-played their hand on the "trans kids" stuff When I was living in Seattle, a mom in my small group found out that her 1st grade daughter was being fed trans propaganda at the public school

She very politely asked that her daughter be excused for this. Not that they stop doing it, just that her daughter not be a part of it
Jun 4 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
The renaming of the USNS Harvey Milk is such a perfect example of a smarter right-wing that has learned how to set a narrative trap

The Navy "leaks" that they are going to rename the ship, leveraging the volume and scale of the media to spread wide this info /1 The predictable outrage ensues. Nancy Pelosi calls it "shameful, vindictive erasure", which is not a thing she said about people tearing down statues of the founding fathers

The governor of Maryland says this name change is "lying about history" /2

Jun 2 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
In the last 5 years, there are 3 big narratives that everyone will eventually agree the libs got 100% wrong

1) Covid school closings
2) Biden's decline
3) m2f transgender athletes Image Just keep this in mind b/c the defense against the first two is "oh how could we have known?"

You could have known if you had just listened to the people talking sense. Your bubble is too perfect and it is self-destructive. You need to listen to more people.
May 31 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
It is incredibly damning that a Harvard statistics PhD student is so socially isolated from the larger nerd and tech scene that he felt comfortable making this statement Let me give an example of how I use AI that is transformative

So I've got this project that is scraping out data and putting it haphazardly into a DynamoDb table. I want to screw around with this data in Excel, so I want to export the data as a csv.

None of Amazon's tools are good for this, I google it, stack overflow, probably about an hour of looking for solutions

I ask Claude how to export a DynamoDb table as a csv file. 10 minutes later I have the data loaded into Excel and I'm running various analysis on it
May 26 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I don't know how to solve this problem in a free market but when I signed up for gmail, it was advertised as "free unlimited email forever". That's what I signed up for

Now I have to pay Google or get rid of half my email. I feel tricked. I can't give up my gmail account, there's 20 years of emails in there!

And Google's interface for clearing up space is intentionally bad. It's intentionally painful so that you will just give up and pay the money.
May 20 • 9 tweets • 2 min read
Let's talk about this. "Show me the legislation" is a head-fake. We aren't in the legislation phase of this project

But every lab meat company markets itself as the future of meat and calls for an end to natural meat. Every single one. Biocraft: "Farmed animals live shorter and more brutal lives today than ever before. In the USA, 25 million of them are killed every single day. We say enough is enough"

Enough is enough, huh? Oh that's probably just harmless rhetoric.
Apr 24 • 4 tweets • 2 min read
Every time a conservative brings up the Obama IRS scandal people are like "actually that was fake"

But the IRS paid $3.5 million to these groups and publicly admitted that it illegally targeted conservative groups

But maybe the IRS lied when they apologized, who knows "But they also targeted liberal groups"

Yes, that was certainly the talking point that was used in their defense. It's a bummer that you only know the talking point you were fed and never actually read about the end result

metrovoicenews.com/irs-admits-it-…
Apr 23 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
There comes a point where you just can't talk your way out of it any more

At that point, even attempting to talk your way out of is rightly viewed with suspicion

Tyler's argument is basically No True Scotsman for intellectual elites

No true intellectual elite would act this way. Sure, most of our elites did act that way, but that just shows that they weren't true intellectual elites, who would never act that way Image
Mar 16 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
I got lots of stuff wrong during Covid, but the thing that I got right (and that I'm most proud of) was a pattern of researching source materials, finding and promoting large-scale studies, and letting that information drive my thinking My best piece during Covid was against mask mandates in schools. I did a systematic review of large scale studies which all pointed the same direction:

1) Covid is not a big danger for kids
2) student masking is not an effective mitigation

marginallycompelling.com/p/the-case-aga…
Mar 16 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
The difficulty here is that, if we are going to blame the US for not spending 12 cents to save a baby girl, we also have to ask why the organization that literally hands the medication to people can't spend 12 cents

Do they not have 12 cents? No one in that org had 12 cents? If the left had spent the last decade telling us that America was good b/c we are saving thousands of lives every day, there would be little appetite to cut this funding

But they didn't. They told us America was shit and we're all awful people who make the world worse
Feb 28 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I don't have strong thoughts on Ukraine so I'm going to watch this thing with zero wisdom and just say what I see

OK, Trump is saying he can't shit on Putin and then expect him to make a deal. But then he immediately shits on Zelensky saying "he's got a lot of hatred" (implying very strongly that this hatred means Z can't cut a deal). That's... crass.