swlabr

Immediately what comes to mind is Bill Burr’s bit about drug use in cycling and how we should pit roided up guys against other roided dudes. So maybe the idea came from there.

Also, important to point out that D’Souza is not an MD, just for context. (I mean it should be obvious from him pushing PEs in this way)

“And what is performance medicine about? It’s not about steroids and getting jacked muscles. It’s about being a better, stronger, faster, younger athlete for longer”

Ok but what physically makes you stronger or faster? It’s not, say, confidence borne from the magic juice you’re proposing. It’s the jacked muscles. Borne from said magic juice.

“No one within athletics takes the Enhanced Games seriously,” said Lord Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, on a recent podcast.

I mean that’s just because they haven’t thrown enough money into the pit yet. Hope you’re listening Pete!

“And are these fifteen-year-stale peccadillos in the room with us right now?”

Raytheon: we’re developing a blueprint for evaluating the risk that a large laser-guided missile could aid in someone threatening biology with death

(Ok I know you need to pretend I’m an AI doomer for this sneer but whatever)

corbin's already nailed it. This is just another example of Nazi apologia, in which someone makes death threats that their supporters try to defend in public as just metaphors. I don't think it's essential to refute what the OP was saying, but here's my attempt:

But this is a deeply stupid story with a lede that basically says "I'm unfamiliar with even the most most famous 90s hip-hop". Tan, like many, many, many Internet commenters before him, was quoting Tupac's Hit 'Em Up, which, unless you think Tupac was literally calling out hits on Chino XL, was not intended to be a true threat at the time, and certainly couldn't reasonably be taken as one today.

Yeah, that's not how any of this works. As stated in the article,

The “die slow, motherfucker” line was a reference to a Tupac Shakur song, and Tan later apologized. That 1996 song, “Hit ‘Em Up,” escalated the simmering East Coast-West Coast rap rivalry into a lethal feud; Shakur was gunned down three months after its release.

So the OP is straight up wrong about being "unfamiliar with [...] 90s hip-hop," the research is right there. Also, I am not well versed in rap and rap culture, but I understand that in the 90s, rap and hip hop were intertwined with gangs and murder- thinking that a death threat in a song was not literal and "not intended to be a true threat at the time" is... naive at best, I imagine.

OP also says the threats "certainly couldn't reasonably be taken as one today." I don't think this is true. Let's look at the threats themselves:

[...] Fuck Mobb Deep! Fuck Biggie! / Fuck Bad Boy as a staff, record label, and as a motherfuckin' crew! / And if you wanna be down with Bad Boy, then fuck you too! / Chino XL, fuck you too! / All you motherfuckers, fuck you too! / (Take money, take money) / All of y'all motherfuckers, fuck you, die slow! / Motherfucker, my .44 make sho' all y'all kids don't grow! /

I don't think there's any other reading than the persona announcing their intent to use a ".44" on all the parties listed, which is a death threat for sure. Additionally, IANAL, but according to Greg Hill and Associates,

Death threats in a rap song can constitute criminal threats or threats against a crime victim (Penal Code § 140(a)) even if the victim never hears the song.

So yeah, I think this could still "reasonably be taken as [a threat] today".

Yeah, exactly. My first draft of this included this passage from the post:

If I ran the world, I would want newspapers to do the opposite of that - comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, that kind of thing. I would want it to find dirt on people who were puffed up way too high riding the top of the popularity wave, and find reasons to defend and stand up for people who were vulnerable and getting piled on. Still, it seems like in real life people do the opposite. Again, I don’t think I’m discovering anything surprising here, I just want to make this explicit for people who have otherwise just sort of been noticing it on the fringes of their consciousness.

Basically: "Why can't journalists just give nice guys like us a chance?"

Oh, absolutely. I didn't have the time to investigate her position and whether or not it was a resignation situation. I was mainly trying to show how Scott misses the point entirely and doesn't understand how power works in as few words as I could get away with.

Thanks for the added context, though; it is an excellent point. Someone in Oxman's position is insulated from the kinds of power plays that can oust people in positions like Gay, which Scott does not recognise at all.

Sneering my way through the comments.

Here’s Jonatan Pallesen, whose twitter bio is: “PhD in statistical genetics. I analyze and tweet about questions in science and economics.” HMM.

Another example of targeting in this case is me. I wrote a critique of Claudine Gay's research, which I think is quite strong. (https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1749546447811277119 and https://x.com/jonatanpallesen/status/1740324971430154471)

Putting aside the validity of the critiques, why does this fellow feel the need to look into this research at this point in time? Could it be that he is… targeting Gay while she is in the limelight? Couldn’t be, only the evil media would do such a thing.

And for this I was attacked by the Guardian for things completely unrelated, such as my views on immigration, and previous coauthors.

So I went ahead and searched the dude’s name and “guardian”. Here’s what showed up.

If I were to guess why he was “attacked” (really just reported on accurately), it would be that he was name checked by one of the main parties involved in Gay’s resignation, and the guardian was doing its due diligence and investigating every aspect of the story. That’s way less assuming than Jon’s explanation of being targeted.

It can obviously have a chilling effect if you write a critique of a scientific paper, you risk being called racist by a major newspaper.

Better ways to say what really happened:

• A racist dude sung my praises, the guardian suspected I am racist by association, investigated, and found out that I am indeed racist.
• If you say and do racist shit like race science, people will call you racist, because you are racist

I’m not criticizing Rufo and Brunet.

Why not, you hypocritical fuck?

missing or rather eliding

This is one of those malice/stupidity things except it’s both. The malice is obvious but I genuinely think he is too stupid to see the manipulation at play.

There’s a lot to snark at. A few in particular:

• Scott is irrationally scared of journalism. He talks about it as if it’s an omnipresent, omnipotent spectre that swoops down on people on a whim and destroys their lives when it pleases the spectre. In reality, the “whims” are a confluence of the subject’s presence in the public consciousness and market pressures on reporting.
• Scott has no clue how power works. On one side, you have someone who resigned because of a billionaire-backed witch hunt. On the other, Oxman didn’t resign. Scott fails to see that it’s the billionaire who holds power here, and instead thinks it’s the journalists, specifically the ones that said his understanding of journalism was shit at best.
• This whole post is really an expression/extension of Scott’s victim mentality/persecution complex/“nice guy” personality, where the mean ‘jocks’ (journalists/people scott doesn’t agree with) get to ‘date the hot girls’ (by which I mean, ‘commit lots of mild misdeeds’), while the ‘nice guys’ (the eugenicist sex creeps) are shunned by society.

It was invented in Cesson-Sévigné, near Rennes, Brittany, France.

Ahh, the French. (jk no comment on the french.)

my bad. When I said “class consciousness” I meant a full mental transformation to radical communism, words are difficult