I keep seeing this promised. But more Charlie Kirks have died than ICE agents, to date.

Where is the ambient horizon lighting coming from in the right-side of the picture?

The nature of reality is such that you can believe a very silly thing and have it impact your life in no meaningful way. People have been wrong about the nature of the universe for millennia and continued to get by. The oddball who believes in native moonlight and stargates isn’t going to benefit tangibly for being correct or suffer tangibly for his misbelief. In many cases - thanks to the proliferation of internet subcommunity echo-chambers - they may actually suffer (socially) for reconciling their beliefs with reality if they can’t bring their friends along for the ride.

But, again, when they have extremely limited influence over their surroundings (this guy is not, presumably, running an astronomy lab or charged with funding improvements to municipal mass transit) their zany beliefs don’t really matter. Correctness doesn’t benefit them and incorrectness is more fun.

My friend is adamant that 30 years ago the “real” Sun was orange but got replaced with a white LED.

I would be curious to know where he thinks the LED is plugged in. Also, why this particular LED is so fucking hot.

Don’t be a tankie.

The Socialist Fraternal Kiss

However I didn’t choose Boulder, Colorado to ask a national question

It’s in the nation. I don’t see why you wouldn’t.

I chose Boulder for its population size, which is proportionally the same as what the NYT has done.

Pulling a sample is going to get you results consistent with the national average when the people you select are representative of the average

You can say that about the 49% as well.

Sure, but you can control for that in your sampling.

My thought is that turning up in Boulder, Colorado and asking the first person you see if they like chocolate, vanilla, or strawberry ice cream then claiming everyone in the city likes vanilla is misrepresentative.

You don’t ask the first person you see. You ask fifty or sixty people, get their demographic data, and then feed that into a big pot. Then you pull some of them back out again based on the statistical norms across the whole country.

The principle being that you’re not trying to get the “average” person in Colorado. You’re trying to get the “average” person nationally, with a random sample of Colorado residents feeding that model.

It is, though, when the selection is functionally binary.

Better / Worse / No Opinion isn’t going to get you a ton of extra information with more responses.

You might be inclined to interrogate individual responses and ask how things have improved / worsened / remained unchanged. And, at that point, a surveying a guy who became a Bitcoin millionaire against a guy who simply enjoys watching his browner neighbors get The Purge treatment matters more. But from the perspective of the “Are things better?” question, the answer is the same.

I’m reading 32% as “Actually I’m loving this fascism, it’s great” and the remaining 19% as “When you’re at the bottom of the well it’s hard to go lower”.

Neither seem stupid.

Okay, but explain why serial sex pest and bad joker impersonator Jared Leto got cast in the leading role?

If you look at the wikipedia page on defensive gun use, you see that since it’s not centrally tracked and many go unreported

The definition of “defensive use” ranges from “discharged weapon at assailant” to “announced possession of weapon at scary noise”. So much of it relies on taking police reports at face value, no questions asked.

But the real issue IMHO, which is unfortunately not tracked AFAIK, is how many gun crimes are committed with legal guns. IE, legally purchased/owned guns by a non-prohibited gun owner. That IMHO is some data that would really help settle the issue.

I haven’t seen anything to suggest legality of ownership translates to defensiveness of use.

And none of this addresses the central problem of gun ownership - suicide. You are the person most likely to be killed by your own gun.

it’s better than the rest of TX that I can find. I’m open to suggestions.

Texas Tribune is still good, even if they’ve been on the downswing due to budget cuts. Houston Landing might have been good, but it flamed out when they couldn’t find enough advertisers or build a subscription base fast enough. I enjoyed City Cast Houston from time to time, but they’re gone now.

sigh

I forgot Propublica

They’re definitely good.

YMMV for a lot of these. The Guardian is notoriously transphobic. The AP and Reuters are a grab bag of real news coverage and naked propaganda pieces. Big City Papers are inevitably mouthpieces of the local reactionary billionaire, leaning heavily on the “If It Bleeds It Leads” rule of thumb.

My own local paper - the Houston Chronicle - is lousy with native advertising and reactionary hot takes.

Not the worst paper in the world, but this town used to have no less than six major periodicals of record. They were all strangled by media consolidation. And the last paper standing is barely more than a coupon book for the real estate industry, with a conservative newsletter spliced in.

:-/

You can definitely mine a bit of gold out of that pile of turds. But you could also go to the library and receive a much higher ratio of signal to noise.

reading books is impossible and too time consuming

Nobody said it was impossible. But you’re crazy if you think reading a long book isn’t time consuming. You’re not absorbing the material if you aren’t taking your time with it.

Might as well sprint through the Louvre as speed read Anna Karenina.

Anyone who has read a Free Press article or Ross Douthat column or subscribed to The Economist knows this isn’t true.

Conservative Intellectuals are a dime a dozen. The Ivy League is full of them. The courts are packed with them. Legions of Ben Shapiro wanna-bes goose step across Twitter and Facebook daily.

Reading skills won’t make you progressive if all you’re reading is Rand and Heinlein. Intellectuals wrote The Bell Curve and justified the invasion of Iraq. Education is not ideologically neutral and being “smart” does to turn your vote Blue.

The Causation on this is backwards. Progressives venerate academia. Academics don’t venerate progressivism.