A friend posted the following on Wednesday:

Dear everyone posting That Video to Facebook today:
Yes, there was another shooting. VA this time, caught on live news.

Yes, the murderer (no, he doesn't deserve to be named) filmed his victims' deaths and immediately posted them to his Facebook and Twitter.

No, you're not obligated to help him out by publicizing them. All that does is put attention on the wrong person, make the victims' friends and families miserable, inspire imitators, and give the murderer exactly what he wanted. So please, knock it off.

(...)

He was more timely than I, but I've still got a few short things to add on.

(1)

In the days since, we've learned that the killer wrote a manifesto calling for a race war. This is probably good grounds for rounding up everyone who helped to publicize the last killer who wrote a manifesto calling for a race war, and give them a stern talking-to about how, yes, their carelessness has real consequences. It is certainly good grounds for not giving his political opinions any publicity, since that's quite obviously what he wanted here.

Remember, terrorists lose when you forget about them. Killers who share videos of themselves killing and espouse political agendas that they want discussed more broadly lose when you don't give them the satisfaction of watching their videos, or paying their political agendas any mind. They're deranged and wrong; what good are you doing by enabling them?

Zeynep Tufekci, in the Atlantic:

You might not have noticed, but the mass media rarely reports on suicides, particularly teen suicides. When it does, the coverage is careful, understated, and dampened. This

(1)

Our grandfather, Man-Hyong Yoo, died about a week ago, two months after his eightieth birthday.

He had been diagnosed with colon cancer, which, since March, had progressed rapidly from Stage II to Stage IV. On August 11th, he was admitted to surgery. His post-operative condition was nominal at first, but degenerated over the next day. When his kidneys failed and he was no longer breathing independently, my grandmother made the decision to withdraw life support, in accordance with his expressed wishes. He did not suffer, as so many do. He ended a life of eighty years with a few months of terrible sickness, but he died under anesthesia before he had begun to lose his mental facilities, and that was no small mercy.

Family and friends gathered for a funeral on Saturday; he was cremated on Tuesday. I was with my family in Philadelphia until Thursday.

I haven't told many of my friends until now, because I haven't yet figured out what to say. I've made efforts to write, but they haven't been very good. I've been reading a lot, trying to make sense of things, and that helped more. In particular, I've been reading some about the horrors of death in the modern medical system, from those who know more of it than I:

• Who By Very Slow Decay, Scott Alexander
• How Doctors Die, Ken Murray
• I Hope My Father Dies Soon, Scott Adams
• You Can't Save Them All, Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg

...and some philosophy, from some people I

(1)

Political betting site PredictIt offers everyone the ability to (legally) bet (real money) on the outcome of political events. For example:

You can pay 39¢ for a Yes share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $1 if Jeb Bush wins the Republican nomination, and $0 if he does not. Similarly, you can pay 63¢ for a No share in BUSH.RNOM16, which will be worth $0 if he wins and $1 otherwise. (Another way to think about this is that you can sell a Yes share for 37¢ or buy one for 39¢. These numbers are different for pretty much the same reason that you can't sell your used textbooks back to Amazon for the full price you paid.)

If you have a strong information that Bush is, say, 50% likely to win, then you might buy a lot of Yes shares, and therefore drive the price up. In this way, the market records a sort of weighted-vote among the people willing to bet on the site -- the fact that it's stabilized at 37¢–39¢ should mean, in an efficient market, that all participants agree that the probability that he wins is above 37% and below 39%. If they disagreed, they could make money in expectation by betting their beliefs, which would move (or at least widen) the market.

(0)

Leah Libresco asks: Is "Kindness-Adjacent" a Useful Category?, riffing off their previous post Avoiding Rape-Adjacent Sex. The latter (which came first):

I do believe them that there's plenty of sex happening now, that isn't experienced as rape by either partner, that doesn't meet the affirmative consent standards proposed. That could include sex where both partners kind of just leapt into the act, not checking in with each other, but not hitting any snags. Sex where one or both partners was somewhere past tipsy and within sight of "too impaired to consent" but no one pulled out a breathalyzer and both parties felt ok in the morning (aside from the headache). Sex with coercion/pressure, where one partner didn't back down after an initial "No" or "I'd rather not" but the reluctant party felt more like someone who's been guilted into going to a boring party they would have preferred to skip, rather than someone who was violated...

The goal of the Yes-Means-Yes law in California is to kibosh a lot of this gray area, rape-adjacent sex.

Rape-adjacent sex means that one partner can think ze is behaving appropriately, having sex as they've done it before, while zer partner experiences it as rape.

Rape-adjacent sex gives cover to serial predators, who are believed to be the main driver of sexual assaults on campus, since the kind of sex they're trying to have doesn't look very different from the sex everyone else is already having.

The proposed law is one way to engineer a retreat from the

(a)

Open borders? No, that's a ... proposal ... which says essentially there is no United States...

It would make everybody in America poorer -- you're doing away with the concept of a nation state, and I don't think there's any country in the world that believes in that. If you believe in a nation state or in a country called the United States or UK or Denmark or any other country, you have an obligation in my view to do everything we can to help [our] poor people. What some people in this country would love is an open-border policy. Bring in all kinds of people, work for $2 or $3 an hour, that would be great for them. I don't believe in that. I think we have to raise wages in this country, I think we have to do everything we can to create millions of jobs...

I think from a moral responsibility we've got to work with the rest of the industrialized world to address the problems of international poverty, but you don't do that by making people in this country even poorer.

(b)

"I want people taken care of in the country, okay? You can call it anything you want, but I want -- including people that don’t have anything," he told radio host John Fredericks in an interview Wednesday. "We gotta do that."

(1)

Now: of (A) and (B), which was said by Donald Trump, and which was said by Bernie Sanders?

Well, if you pattern-matched "liberal" to "nice guy" and "conservative" to "evil", you were wrong (as I'm sure you found out when

(0)

Walking through the Yard yesterday, I commented to a friend that if I met myself of three years ago, I wouldn't know where to begin to explain how the past three years have gone, except to say one thing: "Ross, you'll make the most wonderful friends you've ever known."

But today, as I've been reminded a few times via Facebook, is another important anniversary of a time my life took an unforeseen turn for the better, which deserves a few words, I guess. I really don't know what I'd say to myself of eight years ago, but here's something of an attempt.

(1)

Eight years ago today, my parents drove me to Carlisle, Pennsylvania to drop me off for three weeks at the Center for Talented Youth summer program. It was the first time that I'd be sleeping away from family for more than a few days, and I didn't know it then, but it would change my life. I'd spend a total of four summers at CTY, learning things that -- in the long run -- weren't that important, and making friendships which would prove utterly crucial to the person I became.

I had a few friends in middle school, but not many, and not any that were actually at my school. I wasn't picked on, but I was an outcast. It probably would have hurt, if I'd noticed. But mostly I kept to myself, and was okay with the fact that I kept to myself.

And then, one summer Sunday, my parents dropped me off at CTY, at Dickinson College, ostensibly to learn Latin for three weeks. And I made friends. It was

On the shore dimly seen through the mists of the deep (where the foe's haughty host in dread silence reposes), what is that which the breeze, o'er the towering steep -- as it fitfully blows -- half conceals, half discloses?

Now it catches the gleam of the morning's first beam; in full glory reflected now shines in the stream: ’tis the star-spangled banner, O! long may it wave o'er the land of the free and the home of the brave.

As a friend reminded me recently, the better-remembered verse is a question, which is almost always left unanswered.

But today, what is our answer to the question "O! say, does that star-spangled banner yet wave?"