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Our Promise to You in 2023 [Bari Weiss, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
December 31, 2022
207 views
O

• The Free Press is a media company built on the ideals of honest, independent journalism.
• It is supported by a coalition of readers from all over the world and of all political persuasions.
• The Free Press has broken news and driven the conversation with investigative stories and provocative commentary.
• It has been cited in The Economist, The New York Times, Canadian Parliament, Reuters, Fox News, and NPR.
• Paid subscribers are encouraged to join for $8 a month to support the work of The Free Press.

Published December 31, 2022. Visit The Free Press to read Bari Weiss’s original post.

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Clarifying Some Common First Amendment Terminology [Ken White, The Popehat Report]

By Spencer Chen
In Ken White [The Popehat Report]
December 30, 2022
202 views
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  • When First Amendment experts say “First Amendment exception,” they’re generally referring to the limited, historical set of exceptions to the First Amendment that allow the government to limit speech based on its content.
  • The exceptions aren’t exceptions to the proposition “the government can’t do anything to restrict anything that might be understood as speech,” because that’s not the rule.
  • When we say “this is a First Amendment issue” or “the First Amendment applies to this dispute,” we’re saying “there’s a set of law based on the First Amendment that you have to apply to this dispute to resolve it.”
  • This doesn’t mean “the person speaking automatically wins” any more than “you have a right to trial by jury if you’re charged with a crime” means that you have a right to be found not guilty.
  • We have to apply the relevant First Amendment test to determine if the speech falls into the incitement exception to the First Amendment.

Published December 30, 2022

Visit The Popehat Report to read Ken White’s original post

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TGIF: One Last Time for 2022 [Nellie Bowles, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
December 30, 2022
299 views
T
  • The Biden administration ended the year flush, signing a $1.7 trillion spending bill, including $50 billion in aid to Ukraine and half a million in funding toward artificial intelligence that will detect microaggressions online.
  • The border crisis continues to escalate, with November seeing the highest number of border crossings yet.
  • Stacey Abrams raised $100 million through her PAC this most recent time, yet she owes vendors at least $1 million.
  • George Santos, a New York Republican congressman-elect, admitted to “embellishing” almost all of his compelling story.
  • America’s graduate schools are hellbent on making thousands of unemployed people fated to wander the country reminding us that they have PhDs.
  • The faculty of MIT have signed a pledge asserting that they value free expression and debate.
  • Stanford University has released a list of verboten words so crazed, so long, so thorough, that it would truly take a four-year $250,000 degree to learn it.
  • Stanford president is under investigation for faking his past research and one of his professors has had to pay more than $29 million for
  • Our latest Twitter Files: Internal documents at Twitter showed the company rigged the public debate about Covid.
  • Meanwhile at our friend TikTok: Nice, quirky TikTok, which would never do anything bad, has been tracking Forbes reporters.
  • The fall of Roe has created nightmare scenarios.
  • McConnell negs Trump: In another sign that Republicans are really ready to ditch Trump, Mitch McConnell was brutal on the former president in a recent interview with NBC News.
  • A Roomba’s-eye-view on the toilet: New smart Roombas, exploring your house and documenting its various nooks and crannies as it cleans, can share those images back to Roomba headquarters.
  • The New York Times declares Louisa May Alcott a man.
  • Remember Wi Spa? End of the year, end of a mystery.
  • Life expectancy in the U.S. keeps falling.
  • Fun startup going rogue to blot out the sun.
  • The end of 2022 we deserve: Because we live in a Clown World, it is only right that the end of this year saw a showdown between Andrew Tate.

Published December 30, 2022.

Visit The Free Press to read Nellie Bowles’s original post.

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What We Learned in 2022 [The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
December 30, 2022
229 views
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  • Sebastian Junger on underdogs: Empires don’t win every war.
  • Thomas Chatterton Williams on self-restraint: Learning to hold my tongue (and tweets).
  • Masih Alinejad on freedom: The future (in Iran) is female.
  • Jennifer Sey on marriage: Putting my marriage first.
  • Jay Bhattacharya on government power v. people power: Government power v. people power.
  • Alex Perez on real friends: Who my real friends are.

Click HERE for original. Published December 29, 2022

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My ten favorite movies of 2022 [Matthew Yglesias, Slow Boring]

By Spencer Chen
In [Slow Boring]
December 29, 2022
287 views
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  • Matthew Yglesias shares his ten favorite movies of 2022, plus a late-breaking favorite from 2021.
  • He wanted to highlight the range of movies that came out this year, from arty films to blockbusters.
  • He notes that many established directors are shying away from stories set in the present day.
  • His favorite movie of 2021 is “I’m the Worst Person in the World”, a movie about a contemporary college-educated resident of a city in a rich country.
  • His top movie of 2022 is “Tár”, a poster child for the death of cinema argument.
  • His second favorite movie of 2022 is “Top Gun: Maverick”, a triumphant return of the non-MCU blockbuster.
  • His third favorite movie of 2022 is “The Stars at Noon”, a plot-lite, vibes-heavy look at white people moonlighting in the developing world.
  • His fourth favorite movie of 2022 is “She Said”, an adaptation of Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey’s book about their reporting on Harvey Weinstein.
  • He praises the movie for front-loading professional women’s outrage at Trump’s impunity.
  • Steven Soderbergh’s Kimi is a great little paranoid thriller that taps into the psychological and sociological factors that shaped reactions to the Covid pandemic.
  • Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey is a great example of how freshening up story templates with a more diverse set of heroes can be successful.
  • Thor: Love & Thunder is a satire of MCU films occurring inside the MCU itself.
  • Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis is a bracingly ahistorical biopic that is faithful to itself.
  • Avatar 2: The Way of Water is an extremely idiosyncratic project that cost $1 billion and is the most genuinely immersive moviegoing experience.
  • Not Okay is a streaming-original black comedy that addresses contemporary reality and the ethical ambiguities of our modern world.

Click HERE for original. Published December 29, 2022

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If You Hate Billionaires, Stop Fixating on “Undeserving” Billionaires [Freddie deBoer]

By Spencer Chen
In Freddie deBoer
December 29, 2022
261 views
I
  • The movie Glass Onion is a sequel to Knives Out, but the characters are too broad and the mystery isn’t interesting.
  • The ending is unconvincing and forced, with Edward Norton’s billionaire character seemingly about to lose everything for no good reason.
  • The fixation on whether billionaires “deserve” their wealth is a sideshow, and undermines the deeper critique of the structural class position of billionaires.
  • A more radical critique would have been to have a brilliant and deserving billionaire character who is still a malign force.

Click HERE for original. Published December 29, 2022

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Sorry, I Still Think I Am Right About The Media Very Rarely Lying [Astral Codex Ten]

By Spencer Chen
In Scott Alexander [Astral Codex Ten]
December 29, 2022
190 views
S
  • The media very rarely lies, but often presents true facts in misleading ways.
  • Commenters proposed counterexamples of the media lying, but upon further examination, these examples were found to be true facts presented in a misleading way.
  • Examples of this include Fox News’ Senator Rand Paul Claims Statistical Fraud In States Where Trump Lost, The Daily Sceptic’s Twice As Many Vaccine Deaths As COVID Deaths In US Households, Poll Finds, Los Angeles Times’ The Flu Has Killed Far More People Than Coronavirus. Why All The Frenzy About COVID-19?, and Infowars’ FBI Says No One Killed At Sandy Hook.
  • In each case, the media was not making anything up, but rather presenting true facts in a deceptive way.
  • Censorship is not a primitive action, as it requires subjective judgment calls about which sources’ true facts are important vs. irrelevant, which sources’ studies are valid versus flawed, and which sources’ points that you don’t have good responses to are too annoying or conspiratorial to take seriously.
  • People want to believe that the bad people are doing something fundamentally different than the good people, but wrong people are just trying to reason under uncertainty and evaluate the relative strength of different sources of evidence – the same thing we’re doing.
  • Confirmation bias and motivated reasoning are just misfires of normal Bayesian reasoning and mis-applied reinforcement learning, respectively.

Click HERE for original. Published December 29, 2022

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Can A Tarot Card Reading Be Defamatory? [Ken White, Serious Matters]

By Spencer Chen
In Ken White [The Popehat Report]
December 29, 2022
191 views
C
  • Defamation requires a provably false statement of fact, not an opinion, insult, hyperbole, or rhetoric.
  • Professor Rebecca Scofield of the University of Idaho is suing Ashley Guillard, a Tik-Tok personality, for defamation after Guillard released a series of TikTok videos accusing Scofield of plotting and ordering the murders of four students at the University.
  • The question arises whether it is defamatory to offer an opinion based on magic, such as tarot card readings.
  • Professor Scofield may have an easier time proving defamation based on statements made by Guillard that do not explicitly reference tarot card readings.

Click HERE for original. Published December 29, 2022

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Drink Your Way to Sobriety in 2023 [Teddy Kennedy, The Free Press]

By Spencer Chen
In [The Free Press]
December 28, 2022
274 views
D
  • Katie Lain realized she had a drinking problem in 2011 while sitting on a beach in California.
  • Despite trying AA meetings, 30-day challenges, workshops, cleanses, and spiritual retreats, she could not seem to quit.
  • In 1972, John David Sinclair moved to Helsinki to work at Alko Laboratories and test his theory that it was possible to find a cure for Alcohol Use Disorder.
  • Sinclair’s theory was based on Pavlov’s dogs, which showed that if a reward was taken away, the desire for it would eventually stop.
  • Sinclair tested this theory on rats and found that if they were given an opioid-blocker before drinking, they would eventually lose the desire for alcohol.
  • The same theory was tested on humans and found that nearly 80 percent of people who followed the protocol saw major reductions in drinking.
  • Katie Lain hit extinction after nine months and has now been sober for four years.
  • Drinking came naturally to me, but I realized the extent of my problem in 2007.
  • I tried 12-steps, SMART Recovery, Moderation Management, and more, but nothing worked.
  • I found The Sinclair Method, which requires taking naltrexone while drinking in order to reach extinction.
  • I took the pill, tracked my drinks, and formed new habits and routines.
  • Gradually, my consumption started to drop and I had my first sober week, then month.
  • After eight months, I was able to attend a holiday party sober.
  • The Sinclair Method is effective, but not widely known due to lack of money and cultural bias.

Click HERE for original. Published December 28, 2022

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Over a Hundred Years Later, People Are Still Shocked by Non-Representational Art [Freddie deBoer]

By Spencer Chen
In Freddie deBoer
December 27, 2022
176 views
O
  • Non-representational art has been shocking people for over a century, yet it remains popular in art museums.
  • Technical skill in the visual arts is not necessarily a prerequisite for creating non-representational art.
  • Pablo Picasso, Mark Rothko, Marcel Duchamp, and Piet Mondrian all had the ability to create representational art, but chose to move towards abstraction for various reasons.
  • The crisis of representation, which arose from advances in photography, caused many artists to turn inward and express their own emotional inner lives.
  • AI art is creating a new crisis of representation, which may lead to an increased value for art that foregrounds the artist’s emotions.
  • Despite the rise of poptimism, the fear of being looked down upon for appreciating non-representational art still exists, and this may be beneficial for the avant-garde.

Click HERE for original. Published December 27, 2022

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