I saw someone describe Twitter Nazism as "secular Satanism," and that's kind of the vibe I get from a bunch of the modern far-right.

That's probably part of it, but I also think there's a kind of general factor that attracts certain people to the perverse and socially unacceptable.

That brings back vivid memories of seeing the box at the video store as a kid and assuming it was a werewolf movie. Having looked up the plot, I have to say it sounds really stupid.

Your reaction to reading about something like BCCI shouldn't be just "wow, look at how crazy these guys were," it's ought to be "look at how crazy they had to be to get caught."

While things are not set up this way now, block chains can be made more resistant to money laundering than the existing financial system. It must be pointed out that existing KYC/AML schemes fundamentally don't work, and that's largely by design.

In a sane, humane, and numerate society, the fact that two tribes somewhere differ to some degree in the frequency of genes that play some causal role in some socially significant trait would be an object of legitimate scientific curiosity, but I'm not exactly convinced we live in one.

Of course, as Issac Asimov pointed out in one of my favorite pieces of science communication, the Earth isn't a sphere in the strictest sense. It's simply very close to being on.
hermiene.net/essays-trans...

Based broadly on the sort of arguments made by Lewontin, my deep suspicion is that a scientificly rigorous investigation of the topic will tell us that "human nature is the same everywhere" is true in roughly the same way as "the earth is round."

"Race" isn't really a useful way to think about human populations, but that doesn't mean that all populations are identical with regard to causal variants for the traits in question.

Setting aside the existing body of poor, often fraudulent research on the topic, the ethical question for me is, "How much should we try to quantify the genetic contribution, if any, to group differences in behavioral traits?"

Marlo to the security guard after shoplifting from a corner store.

🎂

At a time when the regime seems committed to looting everything that isn't nailed down out of America's public institutions, it's never been more important to articulate a common civic vision.

I'm surprised he was bad in that particular way. If you'd told me he had ties to a high-profile pedophile, I'd have assumed it was some French intellectual.