This image going around purporting to explain two-lane roundabout usage nicely demonstrates why these intersections are confusing and dangerous.

The image says that the right lane is for turning right and the left lane is for turning left, but that *either* lane can go straight, suggesting that the blue car is allowed to t-bone the red car when it turns across its lane. In fact, it's much more typical that the right lane *must* turn right, as can be seen in the markings on this real-life two-lane rotary in Warwick, RI.

This obviously makes way more sense and the image is just simply confused about that which it is attempting to explain.

The messaging around hiding your vote from your husband is of a kind with arguments against home schooling, because it can conceal abuse, or arguments about having parents leave the room when kids are at the doctor, so that the doctor can find cases of abuse, and so on and so on.

In each of these cases progressives want to rudely insert themselves into an existing relationship -- a primary relationship, the kinds of relationships on which you build a society.

This is extremely rude and presumptuous and insulting and also, yes, it will catch some predators, but at the cost of inserting yourself where you don't belong millions of times for every serious case of abuse you uncover.

Liberals are of course *entirely* aware of this dynamic and *accept my point of view uncritically* when it comes to defending the rights of criminal suspects in literally every other context.

It's just marriages and parent/child relationships that they're willing to subvert in order to get tough on crime and abuse. Amongst my worst critics are a handful of cretins and liars who seem to simultaneously hold the view that it's critical to defend the rights of somebody who almost certainly committed a serious violent crime, but also that they just can't understand why anybody would be against routine intrusions into the lives of parents against whom no credible evidence of abuse even exists and that my doing so implies something nefarious about me.

The deeper point revealed by this obvious truth is that we're all individuals, not avatars for our group identities. "You can't have that job, because people who look like you have dominated in that role for the last 100 years and it's time to give somebody else a chance" is basically incoherent, because I'm just a singular individual and either I get the job or I don't. Whether people like me did or didn't get the job in the past and whether people who look like you did or didn't get the job in the past collapses into a single point where one of us gets the job and one of us doesn't. American individuality is fundamentally at odds with social justice. It's zero sum. They make opposing, incompatible claims about the world. Either you and I are individuals who should be treated as such or we're pawns in a bigger game. You can't have both.

The country literally devolved into riots and practically every institution, from your local PTA to the largest corporations and government agencies, remade itself in response to the lie that police hunt minorities for sport

https://twitter.com/jamessurowiecki/status/1844835702753619974

I’m sorry, but that happened. That all happened. It just happened. Not a long time ago. It just happened. Yes it’s also true that some people recently said some things that are untrue about FEMA. To what end? What were the consequences? What burned down? What was looted? What institution that you are part of completely remade itself in the image of this lie? How many television ads were premised on this line? How many moments of silence at sporting events asked you to reflect on this lie?

One of my most strongly-held is that beliefs are developed primarily from emotion and that if you felt the same immediate, knee-jerk, emotional responses that your opponents feel on any given issue, then you would believe as they do. You happen to feel different emotional responses, so you’ve developed commensurate beliefs.

Conservatives aren’t particularly good at this, either, but it’s particularly funny that the “veil of ignorance” understanders, who spend 75% of their time on this website talking about how empathetic they are, seem completely unable or unwilling to grant this. A good exercise to go through is to create a table with three columns labeled, “issue,” ,”my position,” “my emotional response to that issue” and see if you can come up with even one thing for which your emotions do not match up with your preferred policy.

Libertarians were wrong about this. Prohibition decreased alcohol deaths. This is obvious and straightforward and really shouldn’t be controversial. We legalized marijuana and usage went up. We made opiates more available, more people died. When alcohol was prohibited, fewer people drank it and we had fewer alcohol related deaths.

This is very simple stuff. Obviously you can still oppose prohibition for other reasons. But this is right. There’s a lot of dishonesty about some very basic aspects of drug and alcohol prohibition.

https://twitter.com/jeremykauffman/status/1842550795298079138

I remember once being at a bar with a good friend, a good, kind person, and telling her that I had to leave because I was conducting some technical interviews at work the next morning and wanted to be sure I was well rested. She was asking a bit about it, and as I described the process, which by tech standards wasn’t all that rigorous, but which did involve more than one technical round, you could see her face kind of scrunch up. The whole thing clearly sounded elitist and snobby distasteful to her; and after all, “you’re just my buddy who hangs at the bar where we’re all equals, who do you even think you are that you can gatekeep a job in this way?”

The feeling was unmistakable, like that feeling you get when you’re on a date and you know you’re not impressing.

This is the emotion on a broader scale that is underlying a lot of liberal thinking about immigration. When you start talking about vetting, about standards, about earning potential, even about criminality, their faces start to crunch up like, “who do you think you are, anyway? Who are you to judge other human beings? To put a measure on their worth?”

They feel this way about job interviews, about college admissions, about immigration policy. This is why you get into these weird debates where they try to beat you on a technicality with the language of legality. None of that is real, or at least it’s not primary. What’s primary is that feeling they get when you start talking like this. They are extremely emotional about it and the policy follows from the emotion. It’s primary, immediate, reflexive. It’s all in the way their face scrunches up when you mention it. The idea that they’ve arrived at that position because they understand the contours of the debate better than you, because they know the law, because they have looked at all the data, because they’re just simply moron, gosh darn it, couldn’t be more absurd. Their face scrunches up when you start talking aboutstandards in admissions. It’s involuntary, reflexive. Every single piece of data they’ve ever learned about immigration is marshaled in defense of that initial lowering of the eyes and raising of the corners of their mouth.

What's going on here is that we used to have two categories that our discourse is anchored to:

1. Illegal (crossed the border illegally)
2. Legal (came through as part of an orderly, planned process)

And now we have a third category: the migrant. They often *come* illegally (or quasi-legally, given that all asylum claims, no matter how spurious, have to be taken seriously) and then are granted temporary legal status once here.

This is breaking the distinction we're accustomed to assuming in our discourse. I would submit that this isn't all that difficult to understand, but there are obvious incentives to obscure it.

I would encourage the group that’s thinking about forming in response to these most recent attacks to consider carefully what is being suggested here

https://twitter.com/lionel_trolling/status/1839703868277453136

I don’t know why the fact that Islamic fundamentalists are far too stupid to understand when they’ve lost is supposed to be relevant. I mean, it’s like who are you talking to here? Why is this directed at the west? Why wouldn’t this statement be directed at the successor to Hezbollah as a warning to them that they will be obliterated just like Hezbollah just was?

It tells you everything you need to know that these people think this statement is something the west is supposed to take seriously and not plainly warning to our enemies.

People have just kind of gotten used to it, I guess, but it’s actually insane that it’s possible to get 15 convictions. Like that literally shouldn’t even be possible.

https://twitter.com/tedfrank/status/1838917777299476540

You really cannot overstate how completely our national conversation about crime has disconnected from reality. In no country that actually mass incarcerated its citizens would it be possible for someone to have 15 convictions and still be free on the street. Therefore, the United States quite plainly does not have a mass incarceration problem. You can’t have a reasonable conversation about this with normal people, because they all take for granted that we do. So basically everybody except me and like five other people on the Internet are wrong about the most basic facts of the case. It is my burden in life to know this thing nobody else knows and to be completely incapable therefore of having normal conversations with my neighbors.

The primary cause of homelessness is not a lack of money, it’s a lack of functioning relationships. You become homeless when you’ve burned through everybody in a position to have once cared about you.

https://twitter.com/memeticsisyphus/status/1838634148518342991

Like a lot of poor people, when I was deep in poverty I survived because I had a mother I could move in with for a while, a friend with an air mattress who let me stay with them when I had overstayed my mom’s welcome. When my drug addicted uncle was on the verge of homelessness, he came and stayed with us. When my mother later was kicked out of her boyfriend’s house, she stayed with me for a couple of days, and then with a friend for a while until I could help her get set up with a place.

There are like five or six different charts that keep popping up in my feed over the last few days some of which purport to show that mass shooters are disproportionately white and some that show they are disproportionately black. Since I have no idea which of these charts are based on real data and which aren’t, I just want to make a higher level point about this data, more generally, and how it’s used to tell various stories.

Basically, there are two kinds of mass shootings and similarly two kinds of school shootings. The first kind is the more sensational kind that shows up on the news and in our nightmares, where a gunman walks into a public place and starts executing people indiscriminately. These kinds of shootings are relatively rare, if sensational, and the majority of the perpetrators are white.

The other kind of mass shooting is where a shooter is targeting an individual or a group, maybe at school, maybe somewhere else. Maybe it’s a group of people standing on the street corner or at a party. He may only intend to shoot one or two people, but he’s not exactly an expert marksman and he doesn’t care that much if he hits bystanders, so often many people are shot, and it qualifies in the data as a mass shooting. These kinds of shootings are much more common, they make up a much larger share of all homicides in any given year, and the shooters are disproportionately black.

So, basically, what you can do is shift around your definition of, “mass shooting“ depending on what kind of story you want to tell. Progressives do this in order to have it both ways. When they want to tell a story about how common mass shootings are, they use the more inclusive definition to increase the numbers. But when they want to make a racialized point about the whiteness of mass shooters, they use the more narrow definition. What I’m just describing here is the broad direction of the data. The more kind of sensational, rarer mass shooting, the kind we all picture in our head when we hear the phrase, “mass shooting” — those shooters are indeed disproportionately white.

If you want to include all of the more normal, routine, everyday mass shootings — five people shot at a party, four shot while waiting for the bus, some kids caught in the crossfire on a porch — then those shooters are disproportionately black.

You can obviously chop the data up however you want, but if you lump them all together when you’re trying to make a point about the prevalence of mass shootings, but then separate them when you’re trying to make a racialized point about the unique evils of white people, Then that’s quite plainly dishonest.

This chart is a black pill that demonstrates that most people cannot read and interpret the presentation of data. For example, 99% of people who read this chart come away thinking that the departure happened in 2010. But that’s ridiculous. 2008 and 2009 were particularly low years for pedestrian fatalities (probably because of the great recession), but the chart clearly shows that 2011, 2012, 2013, and even 2014 were well within the recent historical range. 2010 to 2014 is on this graph very obviously a continuation of the trend evident from 2000 through 2008. If you drop out the two low numbers from 2008 and 2009, it’s basically a flat line from 2000 through 2014.

The departure, again quite obviously, occurs around 2015.

This is extremely important. If you want to understand what’s going on here, then you need to understand that the departure occurred in 2015, not in 2010.

Why does this matter? What happened in 2015? We dramatically changed policing after Ferguson and the publication of the Ferguson report.

This explanation fits with the timeline and it proposes a direct causal mechanism that is unique to the United States. All other causal mechanisms — the cars got bigger, people are looking at their cell phones, etc — are just as true in Europe and everywhere else, yet the numbers only went up dramatically here.

What was different here is that starting around 2015 we stopped giving out tickets for reckless driving and everything else.

Again, this is the only explanation that is both concordant with the timeline and that explains a unique rise in fatalities in the United States. It’s a sign of just how mushy most people’s brains are that they will look you right in the face and say, “the problem is that cars got bigger!”

Only in the United States? And starting suddenly in 2015? The cars have been getting bigger all over the world and, even just focusing on the United States, complaints about the sizes of SUVs have been around since the 1990s. The cars have been getting bigger for 35 years. The number is fatalities Rose dramatically starting in 2015.

Like so many things in our current discourse, I feel similarly about liberals. Like, what I think is that I know what they think they mean by, “having been born somebody else,” but they don’t understand what I think I mean by, “having been born somebody else,” which means I actually have more information than them and I understand this problem space better than they do. In fact, I understand their own position better than they do, because they literally cannot even conceive of the opposite position. The biggest clue here that I’m right is that of course literally everybody can, “imagine what it would be like to be somebody else.”

Short of brain damage or mental retardation or something, this is a universal human capability. Literally everybody can do it.

What we’re being asked to do, though, is something much more extreme, which is to accept the claim that you actually could have been born somebody else, that your soul was floating around in the ether and then randomly assigned to a uterus at conception.

This insane metaphysics is far beyond imagining yourself as somebody else.

I think one reason I’m not bitter about the wealthy the way a lot of leftists are is that I bit this bullet very early on. My parents had lots of opportunities to save money. They did not. My parents had lots of opportunities to prefer investment over consumption. They did not. My parents could have stayed together and worked it out instead of cashing out the 401(k) and blowing the money within a year. They did not. My parents could have paid attention to the real estate market and upgraded to a home in a more desirable area that would have appreciated in value. They did not. My parents could have afforded to create a college fund for me. They did not.

There is nothing about my parents’ position in life that was not the result of their own choices. I learned from their mistakes, made very different choices, and surprise surprise I have more money than they did at the same age. It seemed to me as a teenager that the inputs were related quite directly to the outputs. I tested that theory and it’s obviously true.

And that’s great news! We definitely wouldn’t want the world to be some other way! So we’re very lucky that this is how it is.

Just in the first 10 minutes of this he puts the video interviews of suspects in the park that night up against footage from the Netflix show. In the show, the kids are playful and laughing. They are a little aggressive with some cyclists, patting them on the back as they bike past. They come upon some older guys robbing someone and stand back, mouths agape, surprised and perhaps even horrified by what they're seeing.

Meanwhile, in the real life interviews they all admit that they entered the park to do violence -- to beat on people and rob them -- and, further, that this was a favorite pastime, something they'd done many times before.

It's shameful. In the show, they stumble upon other people doing a robbery and are horrified. In their testimony they admit that they entered the park to rob and beat people.

It's just so completely shameful. How do you make such straightforward propaganda and live with yourself?

This kind of stuff has pretty negatively polarizing effect on somebody like me. I think if you just broke it down to its most base level, you'd find that not many issues have a bigger gap between what normie liberals think and I what I do.

https://twitter.com/wil_da_beast630/status/1826798196632551711

Even where we have disagreements, my views on, say, abortion or immigration or welfare remain consistent (if not perfectly so) with mainstream normie liberalism. But I just cannot understand knowing anything about this case and nevertheless choosing to feature these men specifically in the party's biggest night.

Observe that countries around the world have wildly diffferent customs and cultures. Observe that I rather quite like our culture and customs just the way they are. Observe that culture is in some sense zero sum. Are you still baffled? Is this chain of reasoning really so hard to follow? Just do a kind of reductio ad absurdum. Replace every American with somebody from a Muslim country. Do things get better here for women and gay people? Do any laws regarding religious freedom change? People around the world believe different things! They have wildly different views on American-style freedom. They can change the law!

This exact conversation appears in city and urban planning subs ad naseum and it's always this same fight about whether it was the decline of manufacturing or the darkly malevolent hearts of white people that led to urban decline.

No mention of crime or riots. Also no mention of technology, of the baby boom, of the pollution in cities before the Clean Air Act. No mention of the automobile, which is probably *alone* enough to explain a significant portion of suburbanization.

They only know dumb race and class arguments.

In an every day sense, people who live in bad urban neighborhoods in the United States are less affected by actual violence than they are by young men who have hardened themselves to violence. The issue is one of the almost constant implicit threat of violence. If you’re paying attention, what you notice in nicer neighborhoods or in suburbs is that nobody in your every day life is posturing in a way that’s designed to indicate to that they are ready for physical violence if necessary. I have a theory that men are more sensitive to this than women, which might explain why some conservative men appear to liberals to be more, “afraid” of big cities. I think what’s happening is that these are men who are especially attuned to implicit threats of violence and who are correctly picking it up everywhere they go in urban areas.

As usual, the problem here is that people do not understand insurance as a concept and intuitively believe that it’s unfair to be asked to pay extra for something that involves large tail risks for the payee when they don’t think they’ll personally contribute to those higher costs We knew that the previous owner of our house had cats and we could smell an odor when we were looking at the house, but what we hadn’t totally realized until we moved in is that the cats had been urinating in the eaves. I have expended considerable effort since moving in trying to eliminate that smell and the truth is that it will probably never totally go away. I just have to close that area off. You’re being asked to pay additional rent not because your specific cat will cost the landlord exactly $500 per year, but because allowing cats over the long-term introduces significant additional risk for the landlord.

It’s a big problem for society that large shares of the population are completely incapable of following this straightforward logic and they nevertheless have broad collective political power to enact absurd laws that correspond with their childish intuitions about fairness.