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Posts
22
Comments
1,095
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Nice of the British state to step in and save HP from its own failure to do due diligence.

    When are they going to step in to make my landlord spend the service charges on keeping the building in good repair?

  • And don’t start me on “evidence-based medicine”. I’m mad as hell such a phrase exists.

    You shouldn't be. Its origins have nothing to do with distancing medicine from 'alternative' or 'complementary' medicine. Those can be evidence-based too, if someone does the trials. The problem was (and still is) that medicine in general was not being tested properly. And even when it was, the designs were too biased and sample sizes too small to say anything useful.

    Testing Treatments is a decent explainer which includes some of the history. And AllTrials is an initiative to try to force Pharma to publish all its trials, not just the ones that are good for profits.

  • Browser (Firefox).

    I just tried opening the feed from a thread set at a good zoom level and it is better? I don't understand how or why. But I may have found some kind of solution by accident.

  • You start off by claiming that humans can't recognise their biases and end up by saying that there's no problem because humans can recognise their biases so well they can programme it out of AI.

    Which is it?

  • No. Kids work out language from exposure. Baby babbling is them working out how to make the sounds they hear. Sounds which don't exist in a first language are hard for adults to learn but any child brought up hearing those sounds will be able to make them and, if they were exposed for long enough in early childhood, they will know how they go together to produce meaningful speech.

    Young children brought up with two or more languages will take a little longer to reach various speech milestones than their monolingual peers because they have a much more complicated puzzle to solve. But they'll end up sounding like a native speaker in both languages.

  • You don't get to make up your own definition. Apartheid is physical separation enshrined in different laws for different populations.

    Do you even know what a West Bank settlement looks like? Did you imagine the settlers as jolly villagers living amongst the Palestinians, subject to equal persecution by Israel?

    Do some reading.

  • Look, you just posted:

    You yourself concede that Israelis are living within Area C, so it is not exclusively segregated to Palestinians/Arabs.

    It is really hard to know what is going on in your head for that to make sense. Whatever it is you're reading, it's not given you any handle at all on what is going on, or even what Apartheid is.

    There are some excellent Israeli sources. Try , B'Tselem and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions.

  • How is it ruining their lives? They haven't even been tried yet, let alone sentenced.

    These are the kids who will turn into the adults that will ruin, and end, many lives. Early intervention is the best option.

    Not that the US criminal justice system is good at this kind of thing but ... they're white, middle-class kids. The chance of them getting a custodial is way, way lower than if one of them accused a Black kid of, say, stealing their rucksack.

  • Yes, that's the divide within 'radical feminism'. The trans-exclusionary TERFs and the trans-inclusionary TIRFs. They both start with "gender is a social construct" but the TERFs have somehow got from there to biological essentialism. They're a minority of a minority. But they tend to be middle-class so they make a lot of noise.

  • It's usually used perjoratively by the left, tbf.

    In the established party-political sense, Liberal is now clear enough. But liberal as a term of political discourse is complex. It has been under regular and heavy attack from conservative positions, where the senses of lack of restraint and lack of discipline have been brought to bear, and also the sense of a (weak and sentimental) generosity. The sense of a lack of rigour has also been drawn on in intellectual disputes. Against this kind of attack, liberal has often been a group term for PROGRESSIVE or RADICAL (qq.v.) opinions, and is still clear in this sense, notably in USA. But liberal as a pejorative term has also been widely used by socialists and especially Marxists. This use shares the conservative sense of lack of rigour and of weak and sentimental beliefs. Thus far it is interpreted by liberals as a familiar complaint, and there is a special edge in their reply to socialists, that they are concerned with political freedom and that socialists are not. But this masks the most serious sense of the socialist use, which is the historically accurate observation that liberalism is a doctrine based on INDIVIDUALIST (q.v.) theories of man and society and is thus in fundamental conflict not only with SOCIALIST (q.v.) but with most strictly SOCIAL (q.v.) theories. The further observation, that liberalism is the highest form of thought developed within BOURGEOIS (q.v.) society and in terms of CAPITALISM (q.v.), is also relevant, for when liberal is not being used as a loose swear-word, it is to this mixture of liberating and limiting ideas that it is intended to refer. Liberalism is then a doctrine of certain necessary kinds of freedom but also, and essentially, a doctrine of possessive individualism.

    Keywords --Raymond Williams