This is the effect of having an authoritarian in charge. The propaganda that gets produced is done to convey a sense of power of the person/party, its popularity, and the scale of the internal and external “enemy threat.”

I think a lot of people have their fingers crossed on this one.

I really think there are two different aspects to the classification of the threat. It’s actually pretty analogous to the Afghanistan War.

First, neither Al Quaeda nor Hamas represent an existential threat to their opponents. The US hasn’t really faced a believable existential threat since the collapse of the USSR, Israel hasn’t really faced one since the 80s. Countries in Eastern Europe face an existential threat from Russia. And so on. Killing 1200 (or 3000) people, no matter how brutally or unjustified or evil it seems, it does not threaten to destroy the state of Israel. It is, of course, now an existential threat to Netanyahu, which is one reason why it’s being pursued with such enthusiasm.

The second aspect builds from the first and questions whether the solution pursued by Israel (and the US) were both efficient (ie proportional to the threat so as not to divert attention and resources from other threats) and effective. They have to be expected to achieve specific and measurable goals and timelines.

The ability to pull off an Oct 7th might have been equally well but more efficiently and effectively with intelligence and commando units, and Israel would have been given free rein by most of the planet to do so.

Hamas never posed an existential threat to Israel.

Are the Indian soldiers a UN unit or is that their regular uniform?

Oh, I mean the guy himself. I know two women who knew/worked with him.

I always took Paradise as more funny than creepy because I interpreted it as a parody of stereotyped guy/girl behaviors and agendas rather than advocacy, but the guy himself wasn’t someone you’d particularly want to see your sister dating.

Seventeen is also easier to fit into lyrics. Dancing Queen by ABBA. Sexy + 17 by the Stray Cats (although the song was about ditching high school classes). At Seventeen by Janis Ian (who was singing about herself at 17). Paradise by the Dashboard Light by Meatloaf (again about both being high schoolers, but he’s a bit of a creep anyway).

I might be giving my age away here.

This is something that the CIA actively engages in. It’s not quite at the covfefe level of “we meant to get caught,” but they do occasionally put out the word that they like it when they’re perceived as ham-fisted bunglers as it makes it easier to get away with stuff.

That’s pretty much what all of the site aggregators were. I ran a couple of communities on yahoo and some other sites. There were also services like Archie, gopher, and wais, and I am pretty sure my Usenet client had some searching on it (it might have been emacs - I can’t remember anymore). I remember when Google debuted on Stanford.edu/google and realized that everything was about to change.

Syncs can be really weird. I have an account on another instance which constantly runs far behind .world. I’ve made double edits only to have the last one take.

No, because he’s actually quite mad and belongs nowhere near any kind of power. I can see his conspiracy theories appealing to the Q type, but most of them are going to go for Trump. He’s polling this highly because he’s an unknown. As more people start paying attention to who he actually is, he will be the Herman Cain of the race.

The Kids Who Lived.

You’re right, but it depends on how you want to think about it. They’re not necessarily graded on a curve, but with standardized tests you usually have both a history and a design target. They’re intended to produce (for example) a normal curve with a specific mean (eg mean IQ = 100) and they’ll adjust the test year over year to keep within those bounds. In other words, the grades don’t change but the test does.

Curves exist because failing 90% of your class is a really bad look.

I’ve been graded on a curve, and I’ve done it myself a couple of times. IMO, it’s usually a sign of a bad class (too much material being crammed in) or a bad teacher (didn’t get the concepts across to the majority of the students).

That said, it’s usually done when it’s needed to prevent a significant portion of the class from failing. I remember a chem exam I took where a 16/100 was a C.

The basic idea is that grades are normally distributed (ie a bell curve) which allows you to find the average grade range and shift the letter grade (eg a C or C+). There’s some professors who take the idea too far and rather than working off of an actual normal distribution try to fit the procedure to a simply skewed distribution or use it to pull down an 85/100 to a C, but in my experience that’s the exception to the rule, especially in math/science courses.

Also, iirc this is a parody account.

He went from looking like The Mandarin from Iron Man to wish.com late stage Tyrion.

Probabilistic curves are pretty much the opposite of what we normally mean when we say “free will.” If the assumptions were correct, we’d tend to use the term “non-deterministic.”

I tend to lean in the direction of Stanford neurobiologist Robert Sapolsky who believes that it is deterministic but not predictable due to the complexity of the parts and their interactions.

This is known as the Whorfian Hypothesis, aka Sapir-Whorf theory. In generalized-to-the-point-of-inaccuracy terms, the idea is that language constrains thought. It’s one of those ideas that we can perceive as intuitively correct but that does not stand up to experiment.

There are, for example, languages that don’t have words differentiating green and blue, and others whose counting numbers don’t include specific words for numbers larger than two. Some languages have no words for cardinal directions but use terms like “mountain-way” and “ocean-way.”

Experiments do seem to support a weak version of Whorf - people from cultures with “missing” words can differentiate between green and blue for instance, but it seems to take a bit longer. There’s also a paper indicating that people who don’t use cardinal coordinates have a better innate sense of orientation when, eg, walking corridors in an enclosed building.

I’d personally fall between the weak and strong position because I do not believe in free will and do believe that semantics are a significant driver of behavior, but that’s a step beyond where most of the current research is. There’s research into free will, but none that I’m aware of that pulls in cognitive semantics as a driver.

I’ve never been out in Russia, but I know we’re persecuted there. Same for Poland. I’ve never been out in Uganda (I haven’t been there yet), and although I’ve been to India the social circles I moved in meant I didn’t encounter anything like what the community members find there.

What I find curious is that Americans use this as a lash particularly against Islam, while at the same time a large part of their population not only supports LGBT-phobic legislation in the US, but also the evangelical community that actively lobbies for the death penalty for being LGBT in Africa. I can sympathize with the plight of Russians under the violent and murderous dictatorship of Putin without saying that the average Russian is correct on their opinion about the LGBT community. If Russia were to invade Uganda and kill 50k civilians, there would be an outcry against it and anyone who said “But they hate The Gays” would hopefully be ushered peacefully out of the room, as the two are orthogonal.

Is Israel killing 40-50k people to secure gay rights in Gaza? Or have they been supporting Hamas because it allowed them to avoid a two state solution?

Trust me - we are not strangers to the idea that other oppressed communities have parts that are still prejudiced against us. That neither justifies genocide nor does it relieve us as individuals from acknowledging such extreme moral wrongdoing. If an unarmed person shot by police turned out to have opposed marriage equality, that doesn’t excuse the moral requirement to oppose that action.

So unless you think that anti-LGBT legislation and violence justifies terrorist activity including the slaughter of civilians within the US (it does not), I respectfully suggest you review your premises.

Do Americans hate us? The only people I’ve been verbally and physically assaulted by have been Americans.

So are you saying that Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians aren’t transphobic, or that we should go Gaza on Texas?

There’s entire branches of research on this, but I think one of the easiest ways to approach it for starting out is to think of the word “womanly.”

having or denoting qualities and characteristics traditionally associated with or expected of women.

I would strike the word “traditionally” from that definition since we’re talking about a comparative and differential analysis and concentrate on the “qualities and characteristics” part. Although most people in the US today wouldn’t think of it this way, imagine the perception of a woman army officer commanding male troops in 1845. You can take the same approach when looking through history or across cultures. What roles, qualities, and characteristics are associated with “women” and how do they differ and evolve?

There’s some complexity when you get into the details - indigenous cultures change when they come into contact with, say, colonialism, and the people who studied them might themselves be observing through their own prejudices. History is replete with examples of British colonialists being unable to properly deal with things like the egalitarian democracies of the northern indigenous peoples or the matriarchal social structures. Picture the used car dealership where the salesman still insists on engaging with the man even though it’s the woman buying the car.

Semantics is the study of the meaning of words, and semiotics is the study of symbology. When we’re talking about these things, we’re talking about how the ideas and symbols associated with the idea-token “woman” differ.

The reason why this is important is that this is the crux of the transphobic argument. Their argument is cultural, not biological (although like I said, even their biology is sketchy).

I think a great study that includes cross cultural anthropological analysis of the role of women, as well as politics and economics, is David Graeber’s The Dawn of Everything.