alendit

Meh, while obviously true, it's on the one claiming a causation to prove it, not on the others to disprove it.

Which works approximately all the time against Western powers? Influencing / manipulating public support is the strongest weapon the non-Western adversaries have right now.

People seem to be struggling to hold two, not-even-conflicting thoughts at the same time: the school bombing, even though clearly accidental, is reprehensible from our moral perspective and is a direct product of callous way the intervention has been conducted AND the Iranian leadership would happily sacrifice thousands of "their own" children to get an edge in this conflict by reducing the political support for the further escalation. We are talking about the regime which killed tens of thousand of "their own" citizens just a couple months prior.

What I notice quite often is a sort of "LLM derangement syndrome" where people start flagging the most innocuous figures of speech and speech pattern as "clearly LLM".

Quite ironic when we are talking about an article which argues for extending the benefit of the doubt.

B&W is awesome. But Populous has been the first game to wow me and will forever have a place in my heart.

You are suffering from the survivorship bias in its purest form. I really hope nobody follows your advice.

"we show that the observed Flynn effect, its turning point, and subsequent decline can all be fully recovered from within-family variation. The analysis controls for all factors shared by siblings and finds no evidence for prominent causal hypotheses of the decline implicating genes and environmental factors that vary between, but not within, families."

"Stupid people have more kids" is exactly such a prominent causal hypothesis.

As far as I understand it, it's saying that IF the upbringing is the problem, then on the level of the society, not on the level of individual families. I.e. there doesn't seem to be any evidence that some families bring up their children better than the others (on average, all thing being equal yada yada).

The basic fact is that the world is by virtually any objective measure of human well-being in the best place since the start of the recorded history. And still there are people (even in this thread) who see the sky falling and the world ending tomorrow if not today. Somehow it became a mark of an ostensibly grounded and serious person to be cynical and pessimistic about the world's affairs. The only thing that Pinker tries to show, is that this cynicism is not backed by the facts.

Interestingly, the very people the "social justice warriors" claim to fight for reaped the most benefits of the social and economic progress. Well-deserved, of course, since they started way behind. But it makes you wonder, why the SJWs are as unhappy about the state of our society as they ever were? A cynic would say, they are afraid of losing their metaphorical jobs. I'd rather believe that they just lack the insight into just how much worse the life was not so long ago.

The growth of the blockchains will slow drastically, as the flaw in 'Metcalfe's law' - which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants-becomes apparent: most people have nothing to sign for each other! By 2020 or so, it will become clear that the blockchains' impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

This is slippery slope fallacy. The argument against mandatory donations is exactly that - it's makes donations mandatory, while opt-out gives you choice and just changes the default.

If you seriously fear for your life as a registered donor, it should be not too much work to check one box.

Did you read the article? Patients were pushed to the top of the list, no donor was given subpar treatment, that would be murder.

On the other hand, it can be equally traumatizing for the victim's family to see the perpetrator get off with a slap on the wrist.

We don't have to go into the extremes either way.

Also, the desire for punishment is is not about seeing the perpetrator suffer, but about paying for the damage they've done. If someone bumps your car, would you describe the desire for the guilty party to pay for the damages to be a mental illness?

You analogy isn't really on point. It's more of a difference between a controlled reaction (targeted gene splicing) and randomly smashing pieces of enriched uranium and watching what happens (non-site-specific mutagenesis).

> Limiting free speech

This accusation is very vague and it could mean anything. It's surely more limited than, say, in Sweden. It way less limited than in Saudi Arabia.

> banning political opposition

Russian parliament consists of 4 parties, 3 of those are oppositional. I'm sure there is a number of banned NGOs, but totalitarian countries usually don't have this kind of political plurality.

> arresting dissidents

Notice they don't arrest people for being a political dissident? Khodorkovsky was brought up on tax evasion charges (which he undoubtedly committed). Pussy Riot was charged with hooliganism (which they undoubtedly committed). Were the trials politically motivated? Sure! Is it unique to totalitarian states that people who oppose the establishment come under higher scrutiny? Please...

> persecuting people for their sexuality

Now we are venturing into the cool-aid area. Modern Russia never prosecuted anyone for their sexuality. Homosexuality means attraction to the same sex and people are free to act on their attraction in Russia. There are a number of openly gay public figures. Russia has laws protecting LGBT minorities from discrimination. I would venture further - Russian government's policy right now is as progressive on LGBT rights as possible in Russia. The populace is hugely homophobic, ranging from 'being gay is a disease' to 'gay must be stoned'. It's the same in most of the former Soviet republics - even in the Lithuania over 80% of people consider homosexuality a perversion [1].

And by misrepresenting the fact about the state of the LGBT community in Russia the Western media only make Putin's life easier, since he can present it as a 'them-versus-us' issue internally. Compare [2]

> invading neighbour sovereign states

Is the emphasis here on 'neighbour'? Because if invading other countries is a sign of totalitarianism than the list of totalitarian countries will have some very surprising names on it.

> I don't know about you, but I think "totalitarian" draw a more correct picture

Which is your good right. I just don't see enough facts to support your opinion that Russia is a ' state [which] holds total authority over the society and seeks to control all aspects of public and private life wherever possible.' [3]

[1] http://www.delfi.lt/news/daily/lithuania/apklausa-daugiau-ne... (use google translate)

[2] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/05/russia-...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Totalitarianism

> In any case, it seems to be that the threat to democracy will come from these paid trolls that seek to influence the minds of the western citizens.

We need some kind of Ministry which would spread the Truth to the masses to counteract this threat.

> Right now the Kremlin is likely undergoing an intense debate on how to spin the downing of the recent Russian flight as something other than a reaction to the Russian air war in Syria.

They can always claim that ISIS hates Russia's freedom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKRHgmHzK0 .

"Hand over the jew gold you jew, i know you have two bags, one real one fake, give me both."