Suicide? What happened to looking forward to the immortality singularity?
Not possible.
Humans are always on the brink of discovering immortality, which is just beyond the cutting edge of current science. Now, with Big Data, it’s brain uploading. Recently it was the human genome project, earlier still, transplants, pharmaceutics. During the Conquista, with the Fountain of Youth, it was cartography.
100% of people who were born will die on this planet.
*reads description to the side of it* “It says here the artist meant X.”
Alternately: “I think/Perhaps it means X.”
Do you get the same response as if you were bloviating? If so, stage exit left.
It’s hilarious because the cartoon by itself reads as an insult to the woman, who is offering bait and switch conversational tactics. It’s super easy to imagine this exact cartoon being written by some anti-feminist, critiquing the conversational traps men have to deal with.
(Not to mention the heuristic that “if only one person is speaking in a cartoon, they are usually the punchline.”)
But, because of the context (a high profile cosmopolitan yet very bland and conformist magazine), audiences assume it must be criticizing the silent male, and that it is also doing so unfairly. So they both presume the nature of the joke, then criticize it for delivering it badly.
is it really so weird? As e.g. agoodcartoon illustrates, political cartoons can often be read two ways and you need to use information about where it was published to pin down how many layers of irony it was on. If this one was explicitly targetting the woman, presumably (a different subset of) people would still hate it. Either way, it seems the artist is just trolling us.
I did not mean the cartoon was weird, so much as the reaction, which as you say seems to depend on the idea that the cartoon is “trolling” us.
What’s weird is to see a cartoon, and rather than read the message that is there, to do a two step process whereby you assume there is another message (hating men) and complain that it is delivered badly. (And indeed, it does not read as a convincing denunciation of mansplaining at all.)
Had the joke more effectively critiqued mansplaining (”When I said the picture had multiple possible meanings, I wasn’t asking you to tell me which was the right one,”) then their would have been less offense taken, which is really quite ironic.
People who dislike cars and want more public transit:
I sometimes prefer public transit to driving because I hate parking and navigation, and I can multitask on public transit. But I also prefer driving to public transit because public transit is loud, smelly, dirty, crowded, expensive, and slow, with no air conditioning or heating, uncomfortable seats or only standing room, delays and breakdowns, long wait times in general, no availability late at night, tunnels that plug my ears painfully, and other passengers being loud/rude/annoying, blaring music, scamming, panhandling, stealing things, fighting, spitting, urinating, harassing people (transphobia cw), and sometimes being actually threatening or dangerous.
What solutions have people come up with to these problems? (My experiences are mostly with BART, AC Transit, and Caltrain.)
Same question for my own followers.
My experiences of transit have been buses in [Redacted]; the underground in London, New Castle (UK), Frankfurt (Germany), and Washington DC; the Northern Rail (UK);
Berlin’s buses;
the BART and the Caltrain; and buses in Toronto, the Bay Area (USA), and North Bay (Ontario, Canada).
Those are listed from best to worst by my personal experiences of them. They’re mostly Subway > Overground train > Buses, except for [Redacted]’s weird capitalist buses. I’ve also preferred [Redacted] over Europe, and Europe over North America.
What makes some public transit systems better than others? And how would you make something like the BART more like that? And are they really a substitute for being able to insulate yourself and your family in a personal vehicle?
You’re not gonna like this, but…
A number of the problems stem from the culture of the population at large, its level of disorder, and its level of criminality. If you want Japan-tier respectful train passengers, you are going to have to take Japan-tier measures towards, essentially, the entire rest of society, and this will not be very Libertarian.
Which is fine by me since I’m not an atomic individualist and am fairly Statist and even Nationalist, but that isn’t where you are in the political spectrum.
Basically don’t call people “cucks“. Don’t be surprised when people react badly to being called “cucks“. Don’t try to reclaim “cuck“ by telling other people that being cuckolded is a good thing.
That sounds suspiciously like something a cuck would say.
I find it increasingly difficult to justify my own continued existence, really.
There are so many ~~inspirational~~ posts floating around and I’m reading through them thinking “well, that doesn’t apply either, actually”.
Somebody’s not a CEO but they help people save money on airplane tickets, and I am not even useful for that.
“but pets”.
I have a bird.
1) Someone else can take care of him. My mother, for example.
2) Or he’ll starve to death. So? Logically speaking, there are probably millions of budgies. They’re not going extinct or anything. It’d be awful, but I’m one of the sole people in the world who thinks he has any value, so it’s basically a net gain.
“but your blog”
Now you’re just lying.
Well, technically, unfollowing you is as easy as clicking a button, so surely the people saying they like your blog are telling the truth about that, since otherwise who are they signalling to and why didn’t they just unfollow? If you mean it isn’t enough in the grand scheme of things then I suppose I can’t argue that, though I am left to wonder if there isn’t some high-risk activity you could take that you could use to push yourself into what you consider the positive, though perhaps you don’t have enough energy for that.
We are hitting woke levels that shouldn’t've been possible
They even have dedicated operatives supporting Liberalism online, attempting to undermine American Antifas in their glorious struggle against the illegitimate Fascist President and his Fascist voters. Why, they could be right here among us even now!
Truly, Putin’s insidious plotting knows no bounds.
Ideally, food stamps would be restricted to food that isn’t refined poison. But here in America we have the freedom to buy and eat refined poison.
But it isn’t advertised as refined poison. It’s advertised as a healthy part of a balanced breakfast (which is a deceptive way to say “we are legally required to ask that you dilute this poison before consumption, even tho we know you won’t”). But here in America we have the freedom to lie to the poor so that they’ll buy our cheap poison.
The simplest solution might be to get the FDA to look at contemporary inflammation rates from foods they already approved back in the Leave it to Beaver days. Once they realize the gluten hipsters aren’t making it all up, hopefully we’ll be able to roll back the industrial agro insanity a bit before things get worse.
> when you’re a gluten hipster because your body is the original gluten hipster and you’ve been known to give in to peer pressure from gut neurons, and you’re also an artificial color hipster, and an artificial flavor hipster, and an MSG hipster, and so on, until you eventually just distrust any product with indecipherable ingredients on general principle, avoiding the majority of all junk food unintentionally with the exception of tortilla chips
This is my last political piece for a while ‘cause I can’t take anymore.
Some months back– during the heat of the primaries, I think– one of Slate’s soapbox columnists produced an liberal outrage-of-the-day piece on an issue so ephemeral it escapes me now but which drew unmitigated scorn from even the left-wing members of the comment section. One poor soul went so far as to post, “My God, please stop. This is what gets you Trump. Do you want Trump?”
We got way too little of “Trump has no idea what the fuck he’s doing and the bullshit he’s selling you is not going to fucking work” during this campaign. That was the single most compelling issue, as far as I’m concerned… having someone who knows what the fuck they’re doing in the Oval Office.
And now we’re all in for it.
Maybe that wouldn’t have even worked. Maybe 47% of the electorate simply don’t care if the system keeps working or not. Maybe they’re just fine with bringing it all crashing down on our heads. Because for them, it wasn’t working.
Now what?
You sell them on a plan that will actually work.
Low minimum wage + direct-to-employee wage subsidies - creates massive jobs, cuts out a lot of anxiety for the lower classes, breaks the welfare trap. Fix the trade balance. Rebalance immigration and quit talking like it’s a plan to demographically replace them.
Unfortunately that won’t happen because both the party leadership and the party base are too ideological and clueless. That’s why they failed to buy off the Rust Belt in the first place, even though doing so should have been hypothetically ideologically compatible if you aren’t Globalist.
And, of course, if they were competent, they would have fixed the welfare trap already. But they aren’t competent. F’in politics m8.
Or to put it another way, those Rust Belt voters don’t believe the party that professes to hate them has their best interests at heart, so something expensive will have to be sacrificed to signal that they’re willing to go to bat for them for real. Obama was given a pass on hope and change. It won’t work a second time. It’s going to be tough.
Coal is estimated to kill 161 people per TWh (Terawatt hour). Electricity costs about 12 cents per KWh (Kilowatt hour). That means approximately every $750,000 spent on electricity through coal also costs a human life. Given that the FDA puts the value of a human life at about 8 million, that is somewhat problematic-even very generously assuming that all of that $750,000 goes to compensating for the death toll (and none to, for example, digging up coal or developing the power plants), that is $750,000 out of $8,000,000-leaving about 90% unpaid. That means more than 90% of coal power’s costs is being stolen in the form of people’s deaths to a first approximation. Details of those who are vulnerable probably decrease it some, but it is unlikely to go below 50%.
Stop and think about that for a moment. I’m pretty sure that goes well past what massive violent crime syndicates do.
What is their secret? Well, it is hard to impossible to point to any specific death and say ‘this death was caused by coal’ outside of things like mining accidents, and mining accidents are hard to distinguish from each other-‘mining accident mining coal’ and ‘mining accident mining copper’-do you know of a difference?
Nuclear power is estimated to kill 0.04 people per TWh-less than rooftop solar (0.44), European hydro (0.10, which is lower than world hydro at 1.4), or wind (0.10). Nuclear power is also more portable-while the middle of the desert is great for solar power, storing and transporting the power from one location to another is extremely difficult. Transporting nuclear fuel, while still somewhat difficult and has its risks, is of negligible difficulty in comparison.
One might wonder how it is that nuclear power can achieve such a low death toll, being approximately a tenth of even rooftop solar. It probably has something to do with this:
People do occasionally fall off roofs, and you have to setup quite a lot of solar panels before you get close to the power of uranium.
So why is nuclear viewed with such suspicion? Well, for one thing it got off to a rough start-‘Atomic bomb’ and ‘Nuclear War’ are phrases that easily come to mind, while no similar phrases come to mind for ‘coal’. Nuclear power accidents are local (in both time and space)-they happen in very specific locations and times, which makes it far easier to associate damages with the reactor itself, where as coal power plants disperse their harm over time and space. While evacuation has proven effective for keeping the cancer rate increases even in the case of disasters at less than 1%, 12% of people generally die of cancer regardless, and associations are likely to spring to mind whenever someone in that 12% dies after being near a nuclear accident.
Early mysteriousness (green glow!) of radiation means that a lot of people are at least somewhat uncertain of what precisely radiation does-while people are often ignorant of the exact effects of pollution from coal-for example the fact that you actually get MORE radiation exposure from living near a coal power plant than a nuclear power plant, they are far less likely to experience uncertainty unless directly asked. Uncertainty breeds fear as well.
None of these however form an actual argument against nuclear power-an easier time identifying deaths? Why should we care about that, even moreso as a downside. Showing up as a green glow in cartoons? Why would that make nuclear power unwise?
There are some risks associated with malfunctions and transport of nuclear material, but the numbers simply do no bare out-the strongest objection to nuclear power is as far as I can tell simple prejudice.
The problem is that normal people are sick of beep-boop bullshitters damaging their kids by ignoring continuum dynamics (e.g. the “carcinogenic threshold”):
It is my understanding that in normal operation Coal power plants release much more radiation into the environment than Nuclear power plants.
Nuclear power plants face some bad economics. They cost a lot to run, even after built. Many nuclear plants in the US that are shutting down in the next 5-10 years are because the economics of continuing to have a permit to run then doesn’t work. Nuclear power plants are also very costly from a regulatory perspective to build.
Natural gas has provided about half of the progress in carbon reduction for power production in the US. Solar and Wind continue to get cheaper and have popular political support with both conservative and liberal politics.
The doses from nuclear plants are mostly sporadic. It’s not a fallacy to argue that fossil fuels are less removed from the states of matter that we’re already adapted to.
People’s suspicions also factor into the economics of running a plant. We don’t know if the tech to get rid of all that fuel is gonna be available soon. At the moment, most plants wouldn’t fail safely if society collapsed (even just for a few years). So they’re a gun to the temple of every prepper-personality.
The tech to reduce the problem from thousands of years of storage to a few centuries of storage sort-of exists already in the form of breeder reactors.
But since we aren’t accounting for carbon costs, or that fossil fuels will run out, or that renewables don’t actually provide power at the times of market demand and thus LCOE is inaccurate, good luck getting past the coordination issues short of another oil crisis.
At least the good news is that there’s enough uranium in seawater to run industrial civilization for thousands of years if it comes to that.
I really really really want to see mission work on North Sentinel Island in my lifetime. Maybe carried out via spying on them long enough with drones disguised as insects to learn their language, and then using further very sturdy drones to communicate with them.
Maybe! Any kind of dealings with the Sentinelese will have to be pretty cautious if we want them to be able to maintain their autonomy at all, though.
> in which the supposed conservative trads use transhuman technology to create a world with only men and traps, sending the low-IQ plebs to perform simulated coal mining in augmented reality while Victorian aesthetics are maintained
I really really really want to see mission work on North Sentinel Island in my lifetime. Maybe carried out via spying on them long enough with drones disguised as insects to learn their language, and then using further very sturdy drones to communicate with them.
Maybe! Any kind of dealings with the Sentinelese will have to be pretty cautious if we want them to be able to maintain their autonomy at all, though.
The resource problem is solved in 2038. By time travel. But every new time jump forks off a new timeline/universe. You can’t change the past. You can only change a copy.
“Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.””—Zizek citing Stephen Marche (via slavoj–zizek)
Cannibus, a demon that gets you really high while you sleep. 666 blaze it!
Omnibus, a demon that does all the above and more.
Autobus, a form of public transportation.
Catbus, a Ghibli form of transportation
Superbus, the legendary seventh and final king of Rome, reigning from 535 BC until the popular uprising in 509 that led to the establishment of the Roman Republic. He is commonly known as Tarquin the Proud, from his cognomen Superbus (Latin for “proud, arrogant, lofty”).
what.
Syllabus, a demon that promises you all the knowledge of the world but ends up trapping you in a system of standardized tests.
Omegabus, one of a class of all-knowing demons that uses acausal blackmail to extract services and resources.
Altabus, one of a class of low-status wizards known for their fringe politics, responsible for the creation of the Lesser Cuckubus and unleashing it upon the Aethernet.
@evolution-is-just-a-theorem about the strikes. Doesn’t sound exactly positive, but that narrative would have a much lower probability of nuclear war.
The general lesson here is of course that, whenever Trump distracts you with some new outrageous shit, you check what was on the news just beforehand.
“military strikes just an expensive political stunt” is the default position, and definitely more reassuring than actual military action, at least to people who weren’t hit by the missiles in question.
I get that, but there are multiple pieces of evidence given towards the default position, so I don’t think being the default position hurts it that much here. Also they did minimize the people hit, so…
“putin being able to respond sanely to provocation is the only reason we’re not in WWIII right now,” certainly sounds a little less reasonable when Trump asked for his permission before launching the strike.
Left now alternates between thinking the Drunken Master is a Master vs just thinking he’s Really Really Drunk. Anyhow, a big Russian oil deal could reduce American reliance on the middle east, lowering the likelihood of getting into dumb wars there. Chew on that, haha.
I understand that having your field constantly mocked for being arcane and boring is unpleasant, but can you please not do the same to other people? For the love of every fucking god ever to walk this blighted earth, you’d think it’d be obvious that the weirdoes need to stick together.
but nooooooo, clearly anyone who can Do Maths is superior and anyone who says “art is very important to most people” in slightly imprecise terms is Wrong.
Unless you want to live in a fucking stone cube with no decoration and eat soylent for every meal, art is fucking essential.
Also, that article was about art’s role in CHALLENGING AUTHORITARIAN REGIMES and why authoritarian regimes always crack down on it. I get why the quote might hit a nerve with someone, but the broad point about how when authoritarianism is increasing, that is EXACTLY THE WRONG TIME to decide art is frivolous or harass creators for not making exactly what you want, is not just a correct one but a vital one.
There was a great YouTube video I watched earlier about why political satire is vitally important, along similar lines. I wasn’t sure if I should bother to link it.
…I’ll be looking that up again now.
The presumption that anyone who values the arts clearly can’t do math was incredible, as well.
Like, I can. Not particularly high-level math, but when I was actually doing it in school on a regular basis, I could actually more than handle math.
My belief in the value of art and my decision to make a career and a life in it has nothing whatsoever to do with my ability or lack thereof to do math.
I noticed that too.
Art vs Math is a false dichotomy.
Also… A lot of mathematicians spend a lot of time thinking about the aesthetics and beauty of the math they’re doing! Math *itself* is arguably the art of logic.
Yes!
My reaction to “I am Mathy, unlike you Art Weirdo” is “Dude, have you ever SEEN a fractal?”
Huh, I’m surprised that I didn’t know this wiki article existed. But like, 300% on topic.
OP clearly started with the “Art vs. Math“ meme. The nerd faction (bpd-anon, promethea, nuclearspacetheater, me) was pushing the “High Art vs. Low Art vs. Kitsch vs Gebrauchskunst” meme.
People who are “Arty” in the notes, as opposed to “Nerdy“, are pushing this math meme. People who think they are are good at math see no contradiction, which may or may not be ironic.
There is nothing recent in art museums nearly as good as what’s being made on Deviantart tbh
That sentiment is not anti-art or pro-math. It’s anti state funding and anti bullshit signalling games.
Maybe the counterfactual you need to understand this would be: Imagine the budget of the NEA’ was fixed, and every year every citizen of your country could vote via approval voting for one big project being funded. For the last three years, the grant went to a joint movie grant proposal by Seth Rogen, Michael Bay and Tyler Perry. The produced movies can be streamed for free by citizens.
Would you vote for your favourite high art proposal, or would you campaign to abolish the NEA’? Would you expect Michael Bay to win again? Is it the will of the people? If you abolished this NEA’, would Michael Bay be out of a job?
I actually like this new trend of holding the president accountable for his actions. I hope this new trend continues after the unpopular president leaves.
I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.
I’m really curious what I’m unintentionally selecting for here.
I follow dozens of people online ranging from centrists to communists to alt-right to libertarians, and I haven’t seen a single person who supports the latest strikes on Syria. But all of them have been posting articles about how worrying it is that “the mainstream” supports the strikes.
Who is this mainstream and what are they doing?
Brian Williams waxing poetic about American destroyers launching missiles into Syria on national television. Hillary Clinton supporting airstrikes on Syrian airbases before they happened.
I understand that having your field constantly mocked for being arcane and boring is unpleasant, but can you please not do the same to other people? For the love of every fucking god ever to walk this blighted earth, you’d think it’d be obvious that the weirdoes need to stick together.
but nooooooo, clearly anyone who can Do Maths is superior and anyone who says “art is very important to most people” in slightly imprecise terms is Wrong.
Unless you want to live in a fucking stone cube with no decoration and eat soylent for every meal, art is fucking essential.
@ me next time.
I have no problem with people who can’t do math. But I don’t feel bad about holding people to unreasonable standards of well-roundedness when they assert that their favorite corner of human experience is equivalent to humanity itself. I suppose a true polymath may indeed call me out on this, but I strongly doubt that any true polymath would be running around asserting the superior human-ness of a single specific field in the first place.
In any case, the original article isn’t even about “art”, in the sense of what most people would consider to be missing from a stone cube, and which does include, as pointed out, such diverse works as fashion, music, movies, video games, furniture design,
international technical symbols, the patterns on shampoo bottles,
cooking, typography, and hentai doujins. (And not just because many of the actual stone cubes we have today are entirely the fault of artists, and the governments and large institutions that backed brutalist architecture.) It’s about “the arts” and cutting the funding they get from the United States government.
While it should be obvious that there’s a pretty hard limit on just how subversive anything that gets funding from the United States government can actually be, the author doesn’t want to admit that it’s in service of a power-that-is that they happen to side with, and so equivocates the defunding of a government arts program with the active suppression of art (by, for example, mass executions) that people would otherwise create on their own, state funding or not.
And indeed, people do create a lot of art on their own, without state funding. Every form of art you mention to emphasis the importance of art only argues against the National Endowment for the Arts, because if people can create all of that without government funding, then how important can the NEA possibly be? Not important at all, unless you want to protect art from influence of the regime, in which case, getting government money out of the arts should be something you’re entirely on board with.
Much of the “subversive” art is highly overrated, buying into existing boring narratives already approved by factions that have existed for a long time, and I’m beginning to wonder about an Alt Righter’s claim that modern art is actually some kind of tax avoidance scheme.
If the government is going to fund art, it should be art that people actually LIKE and as such benefit the nation, not deliberately insulting and confusing pretentiousness. The other suitable role is to preserve elements of our cultural heritage, such as historic buildings. This isn’t like materials science where pushing the cutting edge improves our standard of living.
In other words, government-funded art should be unironically pleasant.
Why are you so sure airstrikes in Syria are bad? I personally don't like them either, but I can see the logic - that threatening to hit anyone who crosses a line may make Assad/ISIS wary of crossing that line - and while I don't *think* that works that well (e.g. Libya), I also think Hillary Clinton knows more than me about geopolitics and wouldn't be very confident about disagreeing with her.
See, that’s the whole thing: every single time we’re contemplating an entanglement in the Middle East, it looks like there’s a humanitarian justification and a really good reason. I supported involvement in Libya, because it looked like a clear-cut case where a little involvement could do a lot of good. And instead what happened is that Libya is in an unstable state of ongoing conflict and much worse off than before. This happens every time. I no longer trust ‘I can see the logic”. Even when I can see the logic, this happens. Even when I find the logic really convincing, this happens.
Every time we bomb places in the Middle East without a long term plan, it ends up worse than if we had just not done that. Every time. When do we just internalize the lesson ‘don’t bomb places hoping it’ll make things better, even when you have a good reason?’ Because that’s the lesson it’ll take to end the foreign interventions.
I think Clinton values the lives of people in poor countries less than me; she might be rational given her goals. Though she was an architect of the Libya mess, so maybe she’s not even that.
I’m reading testosterone rex and it is making me think about EVOLUTIONARY PSYCHOLOGY
I have not read much of any real evopsych so I don’t know how much it does, but I feel like to be good evolutionary psychology needs to engage with the following things:
(1) Humans are an intensely cultural species. One of the things we have evolved is the ability to adopt different social and sexual practices based on what culture we’re part of: this is, for instance, part of why our childhoods are so long. We see an astonishing amount of sexual diversity in different cultures. Probably some amount of it is Adaptive and some amount of it is Using Evolved Drives For Purposes That Would Make Evolution Tear Its Hair Out.
(2) Humans are very K-selected! Probably the MOST K-selected species! Fine does a good job of showing that human males do not behave in the way we’d expect males to behave in a more r-selected species but why would anyone think humans are r-selected in the first place. but like human babies require the efforts of like three adults to be raised to adulthood and if your theory of human sexual selection leaves aside where the investment to raise the child is going to come from it is a Bad Theory imo. this is why I like the “human women live past menopause to help provide care to their grandchildren” hypothesis
(3) Concealed????? ovulation????????
> when you get caught concealed ovulating without a license
so what’s the general point of the latest bout of cuckscourse, anyway? ojst talks about cuck fetishim in a cringey way it’s easy to make fun of? ojst gets cuck fetishim wrong or oversimplified? ojst is actively harmful by not giving due attention to the racial aspects of cuck fetishim?
all of the above depending on who you talk to, plus the fact that most people find the concept of cucks intrinsically hilarious for reasons that are actually way more problematic than any sex positive comic; y’all should be ashamed of yourselves.
Intuitively I let furries, various shippers, BDSM, certain Tumblr users you may know, etc etc slide partly from tolerance and partly from Mutually Assured Kink Destruction. (LGBT fine too but doesn’t qualify as kink, etc etc.)
Cuckldry though, makes me feel like they have no self-respect at all? Which maybe isn’t true, but I don’t feel that way about male BDSM submissive types which is the closest analogue I can think of.
So yeah I’m probably a little bit problematic, but you already knew that.
The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
I can actually see a possible argument here:
“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”
Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.
Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.
Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.
Can someone please give Bannon a magical shield to protect Trump from the NeoCons
Clearly he isn’t powerful enough to turn Trump into the Fuhrer, so technically this will count as your good deed for the next 100 years or so for lowering the probability of WW3.
The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
it’s just two-dimensional chess, played for position
This makes sense if you assume the goal was to establish the credibility of future military threats, which is reasonable 2D international relations chess. Previous Trump strategies (gambits?) have involved relatively extreme opening offers followed by negotiating down to something more in line with the original plan.
Yeah, I’m gonna blame meritoracy for this. He won, therefore he must be brilliant. Why, if brilliance doesn’t always win, maybe it’s not possible to build a super-intelligent AI that can save the world.
Russian forces were notified in advance of the strike using the
established deconfliction line. U.S. military planners took precautions
to minimize risk to Russian or Syrian personnel located at the
airfield.
We are assessing the results of the strike. Initial indications are
that this strike has severely damaged or destroyed Syrian aircraft and
support infrastructure and equipment at Shayrat Airfield, reducing the
Syrian Government’s ability to deliver chemical weapons. The use of
chemical weapons against innocent people will not be tolerated.
Hmn…
In her first interview since her stunning presidential election defeat by Republican rival Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton on Thursday called for the United States to bomb Syrian air fields.
…
Asked whether she now believes that failing to take a tougher stand against Syria was her worst foreign policy mistake as secretary of state under President Barack Obama, Clinton said she favored more aggressive action against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
“I think we should have been more willing to confront Assad,” Clinton said in the interview, conducted by New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof.
“I really believe we should have and still should take out his air fields and prevent him from being able to use them to bomb innocent people and drop sarin gas on them.”
Clinton noted that she had advocated for a no-fly zone in Syria after leaving government, something that Obama opposed.
So, which timeline doesn’t result in this attack? And did we perhaps luck out on this one, in that Trump merely picked vehicles located at only one facility to strike?
Although based on Russian reactions my temporary spike in estimated risk of nuclear war has subsided.
<bambamramfan discussing lackluster enthusiasm among people for Liberalism vs harder ideologies>
I think part of the challenge here is that Liberalism has to ignore certain truths, which, like the careful balance of an immune system, is okay when an animal is healthy, but becomes a serious problem when it becomes unhealthy. So yes, there are ideological contradictions, but those only come out when the system is under stress.
Genes matter. Even just the difference in lactose tolerance can make a difference in some cases (though not much in the developed world), even if the other stuff is heavily confounded and is probably more driven by the environment than by genetics.
Culture matters. Not everything that is bad is outside the realm of culture. FGM is cultural. Cultural tolerance as a virtue is cultural.
Religion matters. The content of the instructions in a religion has an effect on the behavior of religious adherents, much like the content of the Communist Manifesto has an effect on the behavior of Communists.
Atomic Individualism is not what humans are “designed” for. We actually have to live in societies and cannot all hole up into libertarian autarchic fortresses which are immune to changes in the broader society’s culture and ideology.
When the various groups under Liberalism are sufficiently close, this can all be glossed over, and generally is in order to suppress racism, xenophobia, and so on. The typical example of violence driven by fighting about genes/culture/religion attacks someone who hasn’t done anything personally.
However, the same ideological tools used to suppress this bad behavior also prevent dealing with larger risks that loom on the horizon. You cannot have someone saying “Liberalism, except for Islam” - though I’ve seen someone say it quietly - even though the rise of various Ethnonationalists and Nationalists in Europe would probably not be happening if Europe had taken this stance.
Is there any legit reason for my toothpaste to have triclosan (an antibiotic) in it? My understanding is that that usually harms rather than helps at reducing the population of “bad” mouth flora.
I am not a doctor, and this does not constitute medical advice:
As far as I am aware of, no. I would recommend against any use of antibiotics outside of an illness as well.
Personally, I import Sensodyne from the UK, as it contains an ingredient (Novamin) which apparently occludes the dentin and reduces sensitivity (I’ve found it effective in practice). (The US version apparently merely desensitizes the nerves even though it’s sold under the same branding.)
Alcohol will also kill bacteria without the effects of antibiotics, but it’s said to dry out the mouth.
honestly if you call trump anything other than his actual name I immediately start discounting your opinion no matter how much I otherwise agree with you. calling him “drumpf” or “45” or whatever other bullshit you’ve come up with doesn’t like, hurt the trump brand or hurt his feelings in any meaningful way. you’re just being an idiot.
Orange Capitalism Man. The Orange Man. Our First Meme-American President.
- neutral on Trump, calls him other things so left/libs panicking he’ll become the next Fuhrer don’t immediately stop listening
people who are very angry about the phrase “toxic masculinity”: what does the phrase “toxic masculinity” mean to you?
(I would very much appreciate not being super angry/offended in your answer, because the reason I’m confused is that a lot of the times when you guys talk about it I get that you’re really mad but it’s hard to understand why)
Toxic masculinity can be divided into two distinct things:
If you bite a guy and you die, that’s poisonous masculinity.
If a guy bites you and you die, that’s venomous masculinity.
I wouldn’t say I’m very angry, but it annoys me.
I understand it as meaning “being violent, being macho, having an honor culture where you have to avenge slights, being protective/jealous about women, thinking being a sissy is the worst thing in the world, etc”
A small part of my objection is that it can have a bailey of “in various ways that stereotypically-masculine behaviors/norms differ from stereotypically-feminine behaviors/norms, the stereotypically masculine ones are toxic and the stereotypically feminine ones are good.” It seems to me that there are dichotomies like individualism rather than communalism, stoicism rather than emotion, nonconformism rather than conformism, assertiveness rather than submissiveness, dignity rather than not-caring-about-dignity, a feeling of responsibility to protect others versus looking out for yourself - that it would be really easy to map onto toxic masculinity if you wanted. I’m not saying that if I phrase it as “assertiveness rather than submissiveness” anyone would read that phrase and so “oh, that’s bad, it’s toxic masculinity”. I’m saying that in real life there are ambiguous behaviors which, if you’re being assertive when someone else wants you to be submissive, they can round it off to “macho aggressiveness” and accuse you of toxic masculinity, and so have a social superweapon behind them..
But a bigger part is just that the whole phrase seems calculated to maximally offend and marginalize men. Imagine that everyone used the phrase “toxic femininity” to refer to causing drama,
being overly emotional,
gossiping, being weak, insisting other people take care of you, and other stereotypically feminine-coded bad behaviors - but there was no such phrase as “toxic masculinity” and people would get horribly offended if you tried to invent it. To me this would seem obviously calculated to pathologize women and identify the whole essence of being feminine with extreme versions of negative stereotypes. Well….
I get this, and I can see why the hypocrisy is galling, but actually instead of less context (swapping masculinity for femininity and seeing if we still like the logic), I reach my conclusion by adding more context.
Toxic masculinity really is worse than toxic femininity. Violence is worse than gossip. Like on one hand we have the evil of Abigail from the Crucible, but on the other hand we have… war.
I’m extremely anti-masculine because even as a man I can step back and say “masculinity has caused way, way too many deaths.” Aggression is bad for the self and very bad for the people who get stepped on, and yet it’s a degenerate and dominant strategy in our social and economic model.
Unfortunately, because “acting like a cliche man” is so advantageous, the real risk is an ideology that latches onto to the particulars of “being a man” as the problem and copies the behavior, thinking it can be purified if done by someone else.
So what you get is people harassing men in a confrontational manner, using all the tools of masculine aggression, but thinking it’s not toxic masculinity because it’s done by a woman (or by a group of people including some men, but who say they are doing it on behalf of women.)
And at it’s worse, the phrase “toxic masculinity” seems part of that memeplex, whereby we take the worst behaviors of man-world and legitimize them so long as they are being done by people we are calling not-masculine.
It must be acknowledged the role that straight neurotypical women have in reinforcing these behaviors. If they weren’t successful in the dating scene, if cishet nt women did not flock to currently high status men and shun currently low status men, regardless of how that status was obtained, if fewer of them fled at vulnerability and other feminine-coded behaviors, then the behavior of straight neurotypical men would change in response.
Instead straight men often seem to hold the idea that if they are not strong, if they are not masculine, if they are not successful, they will not be loved.
And realistically we know it isn’t going to happen. The real thing that undermines it will be the total gender meltdown under Transhumanism as millions of men and women flee their roles or carve out new ones more suited to themselves.
If the current attraction model and sexual liberalism are to be kept, then people have to acknowledge the consequences instead of heaping it all on one gender.
