Interesting, thoughtful stories

I hope this does as well or better than other alternative policing programs, because it’s likely to get a lot of attention:

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Because of the media. Statistically, it isn’t. (as you know!)

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Yeah, every time I see that I think, “Thanks, Faux News.” :weary:

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All of your points are 100% valid.

And I still wonder: Given that Jackie deflected the question re her ancestry and that she was definitely treated as “White”, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that enough of the right people (media/trend-setters/talking heads/Kennedy’s political opponents) had never considered her ancestry or had categorically decided that she had zero African ancestry… her denial being accepted. But that leaves the question of how things could have turned out if she had instead openly embraced her ancestry when asked and stated that a long-ago ancestor was a Black man. I also wonder if her denial in whole or in part had anything to do with her children. She was extremely protective of them, and it was the fucking early 60s.

We don’t know if she knew about it, as it’s likely she was just repeating family lore- which stated above is common. She likely accepted the story that she had a Jewish ancestor and did not question it.

The sort of DNA ancestry tests did not exist in the 60s, so family lore and more traditional forms of geneology would have been employed to map the family lineage. As regularly happens in shows like Finding Your Roots, family lore is often upended by genetic testing. People find out all sorts of things based on that…

So, how can it possibly be denial, if she had no idea, which is the most likely thing here.

But either way, she was not Black in these of being cultural Black, because she was very much part of white, elite, culture and came from wealth and privilege. It’s doubtful she would have ever questioned that.

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Speaking of science…

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… a press release optimized to speedrun the mainstream media, describing a “breakthrough” that will never be heard from again?

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ScienceAlert

Never heard of it. Is that one of those AI-generated websites, full of AI-written content? :thinking:

More like a (“unique”?) melding of disciplines… sounds like. The site appears to be a re-poster-of-clickable-science-related stuff. Please see my (pending) response to milliefink below.

Who knows. Possibly yes. For what it’s worth, here’s what they choose to say about themselves:

Per the article, the source is Nature magazine.

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-06600-9

… it seems to me 9 out of 10 unique meldings of disciplines are pseudoscientific woo, even in otherwise reputable publications

YMMV

The article in Nature is about a measure of complexity kind of like entropy but considering historical processes, to try to measure how much they depend on those versus random origins. Seems kind of vague to me, but I could imagine it might be useful talking about abiogenetic precursors, bringing in some biological ideas before actual biology kicks in?

Then the press release paints it as a revolutionary new unification of sciences that might unlock the secret of life’s origins and…yeah, no, just a measurement is not that at all.

I do also get the impression if talking about life and its possibility in space is a field where people and publications just kind of drop their critical reasoning, though. Like the “this molecule is associated with life on earth, let’s ignore there’s no reason to think it would be here” stories. I’ve run into astrobiology journals a couple times, and it’s always been things that seem well researched and reviewed, but are based on entirely nonsense ideas like looking for chlorophyll on exoplanets. So I don’t know.

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Steve Shives on debate culture…

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Robert Reich points out what we should learn from the Gilded Age, because some of the rich have been using those same old strategies again:

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And…

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I dont know if it’s the questions or Gay’s answers, but that piece was kinda… disappointing.

Yeah… I think it’s the questions, maybe…

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Jason Sudeikis Yes GIF by Apple TV+

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