Our Felonious Ex-President

Well I sure didn’t see that coming.

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Gallagher was demoted by the Navy after his trial earlier this year but Mr Trump reversed the decision.

In doing so, the president contradicted the Navy’s most senior leaders.

Mr Trump recently hosted Gallagher and his wife at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida, and described the soldier at a rally as one of the country’s “great fighters”.

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The Kremlin said the information came via intelligence services, but it provided no further details.

Russian media is reporting the discovery of a plot to attack St Petersburg over the new year period.

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OK, so I know that IQ tests are bullshit, and racist / class-ist bullshit at that, but also… there is no way in fuck that his IQ was ever 156, even before his cognitive decline.

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It depends on what you conclude from IQ tests. As a measure of someone’s innate abilities, let alone something to extrapolate to multiple people, no. But we know they’re a pretty good indication of practice with the sort of problems that show up on IQ tests! And for that, yeah, there is no way Dear Leader has ever practiced hard enough to be in the top 1% of anything.

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“Mr. Trump was a student at Wharton when it was possible to derive *and* accurate IQ test scores from known SAT scores,” the website claims.

[emphasis added]
picard%20facepalm

Ignoring that blatant grammar stupidity… IIRC, trying to estimate IQ based on SAT scores above 1300 becomes problematic. And then you have to factor in that the SAT really isn’t testing the same things…

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The problem that I had with IQ tests isn’t the logic part. That seems reasonable.

As an adult I went to a university for sliding scale counseling, and part of that whole thing was that I needed to take an IQ test. The cheap therapy was provided by PhD students, and this was part of their education. Fine, it was very helpful to me overall, once we got past the test.

There were questions on the test like “Who wrote Faust?”. That’s not a measure of intelligence, it’s a measure of a liberal arts education, maybe, or just memory. There were other questions I felt similarly about, but that one has stuck in my head all these years. I’m not smart because I know it was Goethe, I just have that fact floating in my brain, that’s all and it is basically meaningless trivia. That was the day I decided IQ testing was bunk, for measuring how smart a person is. It does measure some things, though, like spatial reasoning and logic, but that’s kind of narrow compared to how it’s perceived generally (higher number == smarter person).

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The only IQ test I ever took as an adult I cheated on. I told the administrator afterward that I had cheated, wouldn’t tell them how, and would not voluntarily withdraw it. I never got my score and didn’t get accepted to the organization that cared.

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Would you be willing to tell us?

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Previewed the email that had the link to the website containing the test. Wrote a script to log into it under throwaway emails until I had most of the questions. Looked up the answers I didn’t know. Opened the original email, used the link to log in, answered all the questions correctly. Published the questions on a popular IRC channel, and shortly after, they stopped doing that.

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But, but… how can you possibly be considered intelligent if you aren’t able to pretentiously mention or quote classical literature on cue??

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Gee, sounds smart to me :wink:

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Well, it’s way better than cultural trivia, but in the end logic really is a practiced skill too. Let me give you an example: Whenever it rains at night the grass is wet the next day. One morning Cindy sees the grass is wet. Is that enough for her to know it was raining last night?

I think you can fairly say anybody should be able to reason that out. But here’s the thing: I wouldn’t. Not only do I not need to take a moment to think that other things might wet grass or that Cindy can’t be trusted to have other information, I don’t even really go through the logic. It reads as one of those cases where you need the converse, so I know it’s no, without much more thought than it took to put the letters into words.

And that shortcut is going to let me solve logic problems faster and more reliably than someone who has to think them through, even if they are brilliant at doing so. I mean, ancient philosophers would spend days talking about these kinds of questions, and I don’t believe it’s because they were incapable. It’s well known that without adjustment IQ test scores should have been rising steadily; I’d say the main reason is that we’re simply getting more practiced at the kind of questions they ask, even for things like this.

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“At the direction of the President, the US military has taken decisive defensive action to protect US personnel abroad by killing Qasem Soleimani,” a Pentagon statement said.

US President Donald Trump tweeted an image of the American flag after the news broke.

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image

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Mr Trump wrote on Twitter that Iran “is talking very boldly about targeting certain USA assets” in response to the general’s death.

He said the US had identified 52 Iranian sites, some “at a very high level & important to Iran & the Iranian culture, and those targets, and Iran itself, WILL BE HIT VERY FAST AND VERY HARD” if Tehran strikes at the US.

“The USA wants no more threats!” Trump added.

The president said the 52 targets represented the 52 Americans held hostage in Iran for more than a year from late 1979, after they were seized at the US embassy in Tehran.

Shortly after Mr Trump’s tweets, the website of a US government agency appeared to have been hacked by a group calling itself “Iran Cyber Security Group Hackers”.

Oh I hope they hack his Twitter account.

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A little factoid about the last one-term Resident.

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I remember the controversy about Clinton supposedly wanting to become a British citizen to avoid the draft. And who did we elect 8 years later, but the draft-dodging republican Shrub, followed 16 years later by the draft-dodging republican Dump – two of the worst presidents the US has suffered through.

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There’s a difference between draft-dodging due to political/philosophical beliefs and draft-dodging due to being a snowflake.

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And Trump, realizing that the Iraqi people want continued occupation /s, threatens sanctions if the Iraqi parliament demands withdrawal.

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